Njoki McElroy’s Radical Oral Interpretation of Literature

In fall 1970, Njoki McElroy taught the first university-level “Interpretation of Black Drama” course in the United States, which she designed and offered as a graduate student earning her doctorate in the Department of Interpretation at Northwestern University (NU). Her course curricularized epistemic commitments and selections from the Black Arts Movement (BAM) repertoire, bringing its theoretico-aesthetic project and its plays to a unit that was trying to reimagine itself beyond performance conventions resembling those of nineteenth-century platform reading and a pernicious lacuna in its analytical infrastructure. By braiding BAM commitments and texts together with the practices and purposes of oral interpretation in her teaching, McElroy expanded the “intellectual geographies”¹ of the former to include the classroom and the intellectual genealogies of the latter into what would ultimately become performance studies.