Emancipated Spectatorship in Adrienne Kennedy's Plays

Abstract

This article takes up recent theories of French political theorist Jacques Rancière to reassess the radical nature of Adrienne Kennedy's address to both viewing and reading audiences of her work. According to Rancière, the political promise of art rests in both its unpredictable effects on an always active spectator and its ability to reorder the sensible world, the partitioning of which determines and polices what can and cannot be said, seen, heard, and understood. I argue that Kennedy's radical contribution is located not only in her racially charged subject matter and technical innovations but in the model of spectatorship she presents to her audiences and invites them to take up – a model that breaks down boundaries between watching and acting (reading and writing) in ways that hold liberating promise for her characters, and by extension, the audience as well. Kennedy's audience address is one that does not, in Rancière's words, “anticipate its effects” but rather invites consideration and complicity from a community of equally “emancipated spectators” made all the more aware of their own identity positions in the reception of her work.