Black lives matter. While I compose this review, protests have erupted across the country over the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, unarmed black men who were killed by police officers.
Black Performance Theory offers an important and timely reminder of how the performing and literary arts offer access to the experiences – the lived realities – of black folk around the globe. The volume emerges from the BPT working group, a collective of historians, theorists and critics of black performance led by Thomas F. DeFrantz, which has met biannually since 1998. The editors, referring to BPT as a think tank, note that it developed ‘at a moment when blackness had been successfully deconstructed as a social and literary category without fixed contents. And yet black performance remained a palpable aspect of being in the world’ (p. 7). It came into being to assert that black performance matters even within a new millennial and allegedly post-racial moment.
The collection does not aim to offer a singular theory or framework with which to think about a range of black performances, from literary interventions to embodied enactments. Instead, it spotlights multiple approaches and analyses blackness through a variety of lenses in order to demonstrate the disciplinary depth of black performance studies. As DeFrantz and Gonzalez observe, ‘Black performance theory emerges now as we are convinced of the endurance of black performance even in a world that daily realigns the implications of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, location, ability, age, and class’ (p. 1).
Rather than attempt to offer a chronology, a history of the development of black performance thought as shaped by the BPT working group over sixteen years, the book privileges relatively recent and new work by prominent scholars of black performance, including Koritha Mitchell, Tavia Nyong’o, Hershini Bhana Young, Soyica Diggs Colbert and Melissa Blanco Borello, to name only a few of the collection's dynamic authors. Each chapter offers a rich meditation on blackness, black identity and enactments of race. For example, Nadine George-Graves privileges the Africanist figure of Anansi to craft a theory of ‘spidering’, which ‘articulates the complex matrix of networks that maps individual diasporic performativity’ (p. 43). Anna B. Scott calls attention to the embodied nature of everyday being: ‘Through the way in which we “carry” our bodies in space, mincing steps, strolling, staggering, waddling, gliding, switching, and so forth, we communicate our emotions, our sense of belonging, cultural history, ethnic identity, and gender identity’ (p. 162).
The enduring value of Black Performance Theory is its open-endedness. It is a book that invites continual engagement and offers multiple strategies to consider the ongoing (and lasting) significance of black performance everywhere.
