Medals and Metals: Speculating Freedom in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Father Comes Home from the Wars

Abstract

This article argues that Suzan-Lori Parks situates metal discursively in Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) (2015) to highlight speculation’s emancipatory potential. Throughout American history, essentializing logics of value have connected metal, money, and racial difference. Critiquing these essentialisms, Wars dramatizes how imagining alternative futures motivates communities to operationalize logics of value that resist racist strictures in the present. A brief coda summarizes how the concluding gesture of this play set in the Civil War period looks to a time where speculative finance’s racialization of homeownership prompts reconsideration of (neo-)liberal multiculturalism’s principles.