Malcolm X – 3 aprile 1964Cleveland (Ohio)

I am one who doesn’t believe in deluding myself. I’m not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what’s on the plate. Being here in America doesn’t make you an American. Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American. Why, if birth made you an American, you wouldn’t need any legislation, you wouldn’t need any amendments to the Constitution, you wouldn’t be faced with civil-rights filibustering in Washington D.C., right now.[…] No, I am not an American. I am one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised democracy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver – no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of the American system. And I see Americathrough the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.

• Allen J. Frantzen, “Prior to the Normans: The Anglosaxons in Angels in America”, in Deborah R. Geis; Steven F. Kruger, Approaching the Millennium: Essays on ‘Angels in America’, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997, pp. 134-50 (prestito interbibliotecario).

• Stefano Asperti, “Angels Have Landed: American Identity in the New Millennium in the HBO production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America”, paper inedito, estratti disponibilionline nella bacheca del corso.

Angels in America (2003)di Mike Nichols

• Testo teatrale di Tony Kushner intitolato Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes

• Due parti: Millennium Approaches (1990-91) e Perestroika(1992).

• Nel 2003 realizzata una miniserie diretta da Mike Nichols e interpretata da Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Marie Louise Parker, Justin Kirk, Patrick Wilson, JeffreyWright, Ben Shenkman (cfr. Wikipedia e www.imdb.com).

Angels in America – T. KushnerIl testo di Kushner è diventato in brevissimo tempo un testo canonico e il nome dell’autore è stato accostato ai grandi nomi del teatro USA: Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), Arthur Miller (The Crucible, Death of a Salesman), Edward Albee (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) e Eugene O’Neill (Mourning Becomes Electra, etc.).

Oltre agli autori citati, in particolare Williams e Albee, le maggiori influenze derivano a Kushner da altri drammaturghi, soprattutto da Thornton Wilder (The Angel that Troubled the Waters (1928), Our Town (1938)), William Inge (Come Back Little Sheba, The Tiny Closet, The Boy in the Basement) e dal teatro epico di BertoltBrecht. Infine, uno dei riferimenti è certamente il filosofo Walter Benjamin.

Angels in America (HBO)

Manifest Destiny• “.... the right of our manifest destiny to over spread and

to possess the whole of the continent which Providencehas given us for the development of the greatexperiment of liberty and federaltive development of self government entrusted to us. It is right such as thatof the tree to the space of air and the earth suitable forthe full expansion of its principle and destiny of growth.” John L. O'Sullivan (1845)

• Eccezionalismo americano• Superiorità WASP

San Beda il Venerabile (672 – 735 d.C.)

Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum (731 d.C.)

William the Conqueror

• Guglielmo il Conquistatore sconfigge gli anglosassoni ad Hastings nel 1066 d.C.

• Diviene William I d’Inghilterra.

Arazzo di Bayeux

Oddone di Bayeux – Fatti della conquista d’Inghilterra

Realizzato tra il 1066 e il 1082 a Canterbury

John Gast, American Progress (1872)

Il tempio mormone di Salt Lake City