In Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics, Soyica Diggs Colbert has sought to “analyze … how artists and activists of recent decades reference earlier freedom movements in order to imagine and produce a more expansive and inclusive democracy” (blurb). With this commendable purpose, Colbert has contributed a superlative and vitally important work to the compelling tradition of black performance theory. Spanning genres, disciplines and ways of knowing, Black Movements offers a powerful intellectual work and a handbook for activism.

The “past is never dead and gone but a continual site of excavation and interpretation” (61), writes Colbert, and Black Movements constitutes an invaluable engagement with that process. Colbert introduces the concept of “webs of affiliation,” which, she explains, “connect performances in the present to those enacted in the past but not through a direct line.” That is, the past works in “counterpoint rather than linearly,” and this allows artists to “actively engage with certain pasts and jettison others to remember, revive, and reimagine political movements that seem to have stalled” (7). This powerful concept shapes the explorations of Black Movements and generates the framework in which Colbert encourages her readers to engage with the subject. With no simple recitation of facts, Colbert coaxes the reader to work with the artists and activists within their webs of affiliation, appreciating new ways of thinking, knowing and understanding performance and cultural politics.

Black Movements is concise and approachable without ever surrendering its intellectual brilliance or radical potential. Colbert develops her ideas clearly, always with an eye on the applications of the work and what it means as a philosophy of thought and action. Colbert's analyses offer a refutation of the neoliberal coopting of black radical emancipatory thought and artistic production, offering a revolutionary understanding of these processes beyond the strictures of liberal humanism.

The work is divided into five chapters, each providing a skilful selection of black artists and artistic production in support of Colbert's philosophy. In “Flying Africans in Spaceships,” Colbert expands on her idea of webs of affiliation by applying it to the specific narrative of “The Flying African,” a story originally told by enslaved African peoples within the context of US slavery that “recurs across time and space” (26) in the black artistic and performative imagination. By tracing this narrative free from the constraints of neoliberal thought, Colbert can powerfully argue how “we can understand performance as occupying a liminal position between the material and the immaterial – as embodied yet ephemeral” (26).

In “Trapping Entanglements,” Colbert acknowledges the danger of cooption of black performance, as such acts “are not immune to appropriation by the forces of capitalism that have historically worked in concert with social desires to objectify black people” (58). These issues are explored through a variety of black women performers across time, who “work within spaces of entrapment to challenge the mechanisms through which black female bodies are objectified … to find loopholes that allow black women to reorganize systems of misidentification that have historically facilitated their exploitation” (68). In “Prophesying in Octavia Butler's Parable Series,” Colbert takes as her departure the black feminist science fiction author Octavia Butler to address the prospects of prophecy. Imagining the prophetic as a site of radical and critical intelligence free from the constraints of replication or imitation, Colbert argues that the “prophetic emerges at the margins, from a site of unreason when understood within the contexts of liberal rationality” (120).

“Marching” focusses on the act of marching as protest and performance. Colbert's analysis is particularly powerful in using choreography to further undermine the separation of politics and aesthetics, noting that choreography, “an organizational structure often associated with dance, becomes the mechanism to transform space through the use of bodies. Harnessing comportment in the service of social reorganization clarifies how imagination and embodied action work together to shape political spheres as political locations and ideologies” (154).

Finally, Colbert asks the valuable question of the future of black studies. In “‘Why Do You Look for the Living among the Dead?’ Locating the Future of Black Studies,” Colbert seeks to envision a future for black studies in the face of “the limitations of perception when fenced in by the singular logic of liberal progressivism” (177). Colbert's commitment to the expansion of radical consciousness, and to artistic and political engagement, remains foregrounded in this conclusion, and while the discussion of how we think beyond the dictates of a neoliberal ideology will likely continue for some time, Colbert, through numerous artists and activists, has made a persuasive and powerful argument in Black Movements as to how we could envision such a movement.