SOURCE: Wood, Jacqueline. “Sambo Subjects: ‘Declining the Stereotype’ in Suzan-Lori Parks's The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.” Studies in the Humanities 28, nos. 1 & 2 (June-December 2001): 109-20.

In the following essay, Wood examines Parks's use of characterization and speech in The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World to destabilize and refute black stereotypes.

The focal presence of stereotyped characters in Suzan-Lori Parks's second play¹ The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World causes discomfiture as well as a sense of alienation in its readers/spectators. And this is not a surprising response. The grotesquerie of stereotype can be both debilitating and destructive, creating, as Frantz Fanon argues, an individual who is an “object in the midst of other objects[,] sealed into that crushing objecthood” where “consciousness of the body” could be nothing else but “an amputation...