Eleanor W. Traylor's Two Afro-American Contributions To Dramatic Form

Two Afro- American Contributions to Dramatic Form was an argumentative essay written by Dr. Eleanor W. Traylor as an analysis and criticism of the minstrel show and the slave narrative. These forms have been recognized by historians as two of the original foundations of American theatre, both of which have histories directly intertwined with slavery.
Dr. Eleanor W. Traylor is currently employed at Howard University as a graduate professor of English and has been published many times over, writing on different aspects of black culture and history in America. She is also involved with several different theatre groups, so it only makes sense that she would write an essay combining, analyzing, and criticizing the two topics as they exist together.

According to Traylor, the minstrel show is defined as "performance by white actors in corked-black-face, burlesquing what they perceived as the speech, behavior, artifacts, and masking rituals of Afro-American slaves from whom they burgled all aspects of the form they enacted" (49). In short, Traylor's argument is that white people attempted to mimic the lifestyles they observed around the cabins of slaves in the form of racist performances on stage. These white performers adopted what they perceived to be the amusing aspects of the slaves' performances—improvisation and masks. Unfortunately, although not surprisingly, these white performers merely created several caricatures of the slaves around them. Despite the oppression interwoven within this dramatic form, the minstrel show is, to this day, recognized as one of the original truly American theatrical