Thomas F. DeFrantz, co-editor of Black Performance Theory, has long been at the forefront of theorizing about black dance.Footnote ¹ With this new volume, co-edited by theater scholar Anita Gonzalez, DeFrantz signals a move beyond dance to think of performance in broader terms. Several books about black performance already exist in the fields of dance, theater, and performance studies, but this edited volume is an important addition. As D. Soyini Madison asserts in the Foreword, it “honors the charge to theorize outside the expected and to say something new” (ix). Globalization, the digital information revolution, new expressions of gender and sexuality, challenges to essentialized identity categories, and the turn to diaspora as a “meta-discourse” (10) require new thinking about blackness and performance. Black Performance Theory fulfills that mandate with its rich and varied essays.

The Introduction lays out the goal of the book, which is to build upon earlier scholarly efforts “to establish black expressive culture as an area of serious academic inquiry” (1). Together, the editors tackle head-on the contradiction that black performance is not a stable signifier, and yet to write a book called Black Performance Theory requires some type of grounding. DeFrantz finds such grounding in Africanist aesthetic traits that “endure and confirm,” such as moving with “percussive attack” and a participatory performance practice (5). At the same time, Gonzalez recognizes that the social construction of the category “black” does not exist solely within an Africanist context, but rather emerges as a “response” to what others have imagined about black identity (6). Their two claims sit in productive tension with one another, giving the book nuance and complexity from the very outset.

Another productive tension emerges around the question of opposition. Madison asserts in the Foreword that Black Performance Theory is fundamentally oppositional (viii), but DeFrantz and Gonzalez note that black performance is more varied; it “may underscore oppositional aesthetics or collude with creative practices far removed from the lives of black people” (10). The discrepancy raises an interesting question. If black performance theory is always already oppositional, then how does it engage with black performance practices that are not always already oppositional? My question presupposes a division between theory and practice that this book challenges, but the challenge raises yet another question: is there still a distinction between theorizing about performance and performance as theorization? Black Performance Theory is an exciting book for raising such questions.

Turning from the Introduction to the essays, the one that offers the most intriguing new theorization is by Nadine George-Graves. George-Graves introduces the concept of “diasporic spidering” as a way to understand contemporary black identities (33). She argues that an “individual searcher,” rather than the continent of Africa, lies at the center of diaspora. From that individual, “spidering” enables diaspora to be a “contemporary active process,” a “performative,” that allows for new information to enter, rather than tying black identity solely to an idea of a rooted, African past. While that past is still important, diasporic spidering does not “lock” the individual to it, instead allowing for identity to expand in the present and into the future (37–8). George-Graves's conceptualization offers a way forward through the complex social construction of contemporary black identity.

Koritha Mitchell's essay, “Black-Authored Lynching Drama's Challenge to Theater History,” best brings together the material and the theoretical. Mitchell discusses how African-American playwrights of the early twentieth century wrote one-act lynching dramas focused on the repercussions of such violence on black households. She argues, “It was particularly important to place in the archive evidence of devastated households and the pain experienced by lynch victims’ loved ones because society denied that these stable households ever existed” (90). The plays challenged white American society's myths about black families while refusing to reproduce the performative, spectacular violence of lynching. Mitchell's broader theoretical contribution about black performance emerges organically out of this materialist analysis. Via her examples, she articulates a theory about the political importance of black performance: unlike more traditional modes of political activism, which have as their ends changing laws and macrostructures of dominant society, performance aims to assert in-group “self-worth” and to “safeguard community perspectives” (88). Performance becomes a way to preserve rituals in the face of slavery, Jim Crow, and the prison-industrial complex's assault on black life, providing the foundation for other types of political engagement.

For dance studies scholars, Black Performance Theory opens up new possibilities for engaging with sound. Many of the essays utilize sonic theories, which are familiar terrain in African American studies but less so in dance studies.Footnote ² Hershini Bhana Young, in her contribution, “Twenty-First Century Post-Humans: The Rise of the See-J,” declares that sound “decenters the ocularcentrism of Western subject formation” (48). Could paying more attention to sound decenter dance studies in similarly productive ways? Can sonic theories open new modes of understanding dance performance beyond the visual? DeFrantz's essay, “Hip-Hop Habitus v. 2.0,” offers a blueprint for weaving together sound and movement. He invokes “corporeal orature” (229) and asks how hip-hop dance “sound[s] in locations without obvious connections to an Africanist movement legacy” (223).

Other essays, though less directly connected to dance, theorize relationships between sound and embodiment. Soyica Diggs Colbert uses sound “to signify on the embodied movement, the physical display” of stories of flight from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries (130). Daphne Brooks's evocative language in “Afro-Sonic Feminist Praxis: Nina Simone and Adrienne Kennedy in High Fidelity” helped me hear Simone's song “Four Women” differently. Brooks writes of the climax of the song, “Something is breaking, pulling apart, splintering and fragmenting, coming undone here, like the phonographic race of the historically frozen black female body: open, public, and exposed—here disintegrating in the throat of our heroine, who wears and discards an excess of masks” (211). Returning to listen to “Four Women” with Brooks's powerful language in my mind, I had a kinesthetic reaction: my heart raced, goosebumps popped up, and sweat pooled. Embodied reactions to sound form an important part of the power of performance, and I am excited for what these essays could open up for dance studies.

Returning to a subject more familiar to dance scholars, Carl Paris investigates notions of “a black religious/spiritual and culturally inflected spirit” in the choreography of Ronald K. Brown and Reggie Wilson (99). Wilson's work, however, challenges a straightforward reading of spirituality. His goal is not for his dancers to feel a spirit when dancing. Rather, he wants them to “embody … the cultural integrity of the movement” (108). Wilson also defies expectations of how one might expect a black choreographer to incorporate “traditional” black religious practices. Yet Paris persists in reading spirituality—specifically, a black spirituality—in Wilson's piece, Black Burlesque (Revisited) (2003). He argues that Wilson's choreographic practice ultimately “institute[s] a cumulative and imminently potential embodiment of spirit in the performance event” (109). Paris's choice to analyze Black Burlesque (Revisited) instead of something more straightforwardly “spiritual,” like Alvin Ailey's Revelations, exemplifies the new thinking offered by this book.

Finally, there are more performative essays, such as Wendy S. Walters's “Post-Logical Notes on Self-Election” and Anna B. Scott's “Cityscaped: Ethnospheres.” Of the two, Scott's essay is more successful in exploring one of the important tensions in black performance. Scott's story/allegory of the “darky” tap dancing at the dock powerfully exemplifies the “double consciousness” of black dance that DeFrantz noted in his 2004 essay “The Black Beat Made Visible.” Historically, black dance in America has served dual purposes: to foster intraracial community and to perform for outsiders, often whites, where the possibilities of exploitation, appropriation, and misreading run dangerously high (DeFrantz Reference DeFrantz and Lepecki2004, 64). While DeFrantz then challenges the stability of this binary through his analysis of hip-hop dance, in Scott's story, the black tap dancer feels increasing anxiety as he continues to perform for a predominantly white audience at the docks. The tapping is “pure joy” and a “communication device,” in “other realms,” namely, within the protective circle of African American communities (164). At the docks, however, the dancing becomes dangerous labor. Scott bases her analysis on a vaudeville film clip from the early twentieth century, but her writing makes it clear that she is talking about the present moment. Despite the indeterminacy and instability of racial identity in the twenty-first century, the exploitation of black labor and the threat of violence against black bodies are still all too real.

To offer theorizations of black performance without limiting, constricting, or essentializing black identity can be difficult, but the authors in this volume succeed in doing so. The fresh, provocative, smart essays make the book required reading for any dance studies scholars writing not only about black performance, but also about diaspora(s), identity, ocularity/aurality, and the relationship between theory and practice.