Following on the heels of her co-edited collection The Psychic Hold of Slavery (2016), Soyica Diggs-Colbert's latest work, Black Movements, extends her examination of the fraught cultural spaces inhabited by black art and artists in the post-civil rights period. Positioned within the debate over the possibility of black subjectivity in African American studies between Afro-optimism and Afro-pessimism, while also engaging in conversation with a broad range of voices in performance studies (including Diana Taylor, Tavia Nyong'o, Joseph Roach and Rebecca Schneider), Black Movements moves from films to theatre, from hip hop performances to literature and protest marching. Its central project, in Colbert's own words, is to ‘mark a resistance to blackness as a death-bound proposition to be overcome through the acquisition of wealth and power or as an ontological impossibility’ (p. 9). Specifically, this involves reconciling individual black agency within the neo-liberal world of post-civil-rights-era America with collective, more radical forms of social consciousness.

Colbert's work is strongest when she is uncovering performance genealogies across genres, specifically in her first two chapters. The first, ‘Flying Africans in Spaceships’, opens with a discussion of antebellum versions of the flying Africans narrative, concerning slaves who could literally fly away out of bondage. Colbert highlights the narrative's performative power, which exceeds the boundaries of the story itself and its text. Using Ngugi wa Thiong'o's concept of orature, which combines textuality with orality and performance, she links later iterations of this story in Toni Morrison's novel Song of Solomon and Edwige Danticat's short story ‘Nineteen Thirty-Seven’ to the otherworldly music and theatrics of Sun-Ra, Patti LaBelle and George Clinton and the Parliament Funkadelic. While the flying-Africans narrative overcame the death-bound existence of slavery via returning to Africa, Colbert argues, George Clinton's arrival in concert on the Mothership, a giant onstage replica of a flying saucer, ‘attempt[ed] to recoup Africa by returning the continent to black Americans through the air’ (p. 52). The chapter concludes with Kanye West's invocation of escape via spaceship on his first album, College Dropout (2006). His song ‘Spaceship’ ‘confronts the misalliance of effort and reward even as it desires that system’, remarks Colbert, highlighting West's engagement with one of the central ideas of her work (p. 56).

Her second chapter, ‘Trapping Entanglements’, examines artists who resist the gendered commodification of the bodies of women of colour, ranging from the Venus Hottentot in Suzan Lori-Parks's play Venus (1996), to the performed personas of Beyoncé Knowles, to the guerilla performance of Coco Fusco in the documentary film The Couple in the Cage (1992). Colbert maintains that each artist ‘harness[es] the audience's desire to frame blackness – to render it legible, recognizable, predictable, uniform, and consistent – so that artists may turn the tables on viewers’ (pp. 58–9). Colbert compares the caged plight of these women to Harriet Jacob's own caging of herself in a small garret to evade sexual assault in Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl (1861). Each artist deploys a web of past affiliations to empower their performances in the present.

In the remaining chapters, the author moves between topics as diverse as dystopian fiction and protest marching, finding common ground in each with regard to collective strategies of resistance to neo-liberal capitalism. Colbert reads Octavia Butler's series of novels The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents as an interrogation of the neo-liberal ideal of heroic, ‘exceptional’ individual (as ascribed to figures such as Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman, or Lauren, the novels’ prophetic protagonist). She suggests that such valorizations may hamper collective change, as they portray ‘activism as something the ordinary person cannot duplicate’ (p. 128). Her final chapter expands on this idea of collective action. Covering a hundred-year period, from the 1918 anti-lynching march in Washington, DC, to the civil rights marches of the 1960s, to a jazz funeral held for Hurricane Katrina, Colbert demonstrates how each march represented a complicated negotiation with the violent past, an act of mourning and affiliation, which placed both the dead and the survivors ‘in a relationship of interdependence’ (p. 166).

In her conclusion, Colbert re-poses the question Black Movements has attempted to address: why ‘continue to affirm a connection to traumatic pasts that no longer seem to serve you?’ (p. 168). For her, forming webs of affiliation with those pasts through embodiment ‘serve[s] as a countercurrent to understandings of black people as death-bound’ (p. 168). Colbert's work represents a critical intervention in contemporary African American performance and should be widely read by scholars in African American theatre, performance studies and American studies.