In 2011, a banner year in the emerging subfield of black performance studies, a spate of excellent, well-researched and critically savvy books was published. These texts by Stephanie Batiste, Robin Bernstein, Marvin McAllister, Koritha Mitchell, Brandi Wilkins-Catanese and, most recently, Soyica Diggs Colbert similarly interrogate the historical experiences of African Americans as expressed through the dramatic and performing arts. Each author presents a unique, insightful and potentially important approach to critically thinking about representations of blackness and the lived experiences of black folk within (mostly) the twentieth-century United States.
Among Colbert's innovations is her skilful repurposing of the concept of ‘reparation’ and her decision to locate it, as a theoretical concept, within theatre and performance studies. Freeing the word from its common understanding within black cultural communities as compensation for centuries of government-sanctioned abuse and neglect (which allowed the abuse to happen), Colbert privileges its originary meaning – ‘repair’ – in order to theorize how black expressive arts can offer access to history, thus repairing or filling in gaps in the historical record while simultaneously assisting black folk with encountering and dealing with the traumatic racial violence of the past. Colbert writes, ‘This book considers the way African American dramatists flipped the epistemological script, transforming absence into ways of being present, homelessness into modes of finding a home, loss into mechanisms of mourning, and disenfranchisement into rites that render repairing’ (p. 8).
Colbert's concept of reparation or theatrical repair intervenes within and encourages a critical revaluation of well-accepted understandings of ‘the repetition/reproduction double helix that forms the DNA of black expressive culture’ (p. 25). Reparation exists as a repetition and a reproduction (and also a revision) that encourages history to be imaginatively recovered or remembered, restaged and revisited. In staging history, black expressive arts render present the frequently absented and, as recent performance-studies scholars have noted, create opportunities for embodiment, healing and the acquisition of racial knowledge.
An interdisciplinary project, the book intervenes in multiple disciplinary conversations and blends a variety of research methods, including literary analysis, psychoanalytic theory (as applied to literary criticism), theatre history, performance theory and American (African-American) history. For example, Colbert's study of James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie allows her to add to the academic literature on Baldwin by examining his infrequently studied plays, to employ psychoanalytic theory (Freud on trauma and castration anxiety), to engage Fred Moten's theoretical understanding of the performance of sound within historical settings, and to offer an overview of Emmett Till's murder and, more generally, lynching in the United States.
Colbert's book is a text that is sweeping in its disciplinary reach and expansive in its deployment of research methods but, at the same time, focused on its particular case studies: W. E. B. Du Bois's The Star of Ethiopia, Zora Neale Hurston's Color Struck, Langston Hughes's Tambourines to Glory, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Baldwin's Blues, and Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog.
