Deleuzean Reading of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Concept of Time in Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1,2&3

Subject Areas : Comparative Literature Studies

سارا فریام راد ¹ , Hassan Shahabi ² , Shahram Raeisi Sistani ³

1 - Ph.D. student, Department of Humanities, College of English Language and Literature, Kerman Branch, Islamic Azad University, Kerman, Iran.
2 - گروه زبان انگلیسی دانشکده ادبیات و علوم انسانی دانشگاه آزاد اسلامی واحد کرمان
3 - Assistant Professor, Department of Foreign Languages, Shahid Bahonar University, Kerman, Iran.

Received: 2024-09-12 Accepted : 2024-10-05 Published : 2025-02-14

Keywords: Ambivalency, Becoming, Deleuze, Parks, The Father, Time,

Abstract :

The present study has aimed to read one of Suzan-Lori Parks’s recent plays, Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1,2&3, from new aspects borrowing Deleuzean notions about time. Parks, as a postmodern female black playwright, depicts her main concern about the ambivalent condition of black characters, caused by the dominant power, while the relationship between their ambivalency and the meaning of time is palpable; however, the reality of time and the historical past events are put into question as well. Besides, Parksean structure of the play illustrates different layers and an amalgamation of actual and virtual, history, fantasy and mythology, representing Deleuzean multi-layered and multi-dimensional crystallized structure. In this regard, Deleuze’s accounts, mainly focused on exploring time and their relation to image in the cinematic world, are utilized to read the theatrical images dramatized in Parks’s play. The article concludes that, by finding traces of Deleuzean philosophical notions, Parksean dramatization of the black characters has been shaped by Deleuzean becoming different as a way of resisting the dominant power. The Bodies without Organs, created by the ambivalency imposed by the hierarchical system, now enquir about the reality of the White historical and mythological events to mark the black place in Western historiography.

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