Understanding Blackness through Performance (PDF)

Zakiya R. Adair, University of Missouri, USA
Gayle Baldwin, University of North Dakota, USA
Myron M. Beasley, Bates College, USA
Simon Dickel, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany
Vanina Géré, University Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, France
Mae G. Henderson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
Kristin Leigh Moriah, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA
James Smalls, University of Maryland, USA
Stephany Spaulding, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, USA
Toniesha L. Taylor, Prairie View A & M University, USA
Rinaldo Walcott, University of Toronto, Canada

"I applaud the authors for theorizing black performance and embodiment away from the centrality of the written texts, specifically traditional literary texts. It is highly significant in that it moves the discipline forward in both its approach and structure." - Myron M. Beasley, PhD, Associate Professor, American Cultural Studies and African American Studies, Bates College, USA

"This provocative collection brings together a creative community of scholars, artists, artist-scholars, and more to probe, reconfigure, and challenge the underlying presuppositions of blackness premised on fixedness and the erasure of agency. Always critical and reflective, it offers theoretical considerations, matched by ample historical and contemporary evidence, of the implications of what is involved in performing an identity, especially in cases where one is already enmeshed, whether socially or corporeally, in it. Art, in this case, goes beyond the world of fetish and voyeur into the realm of interrelatedness. A must-read not only for those of us interested in African Diasporic studies and the formation of identity but also for anyone interested in the relationship of performance to the poetics of what it means 'to be' as a form of 'not to be', paradoxically, through the zone of nonbeing." - Lewis R. Gordon, University of Connecticut, USA; Europhilosophy Visiting Professor, Toulouse University, France; and Nelson Mandela Professor, Rhodes University, South Africa

"Understanding Blackness through Performance illuminates the field of black performance scholarship by focusing an international lens on ethnic cultural phenonmena." Anita Gonzales, Theatre Study