Understanding Blackness through Performance: Contemporary Arts and the Representation of Identity

Front Matter....Pages i-vii
Introduction....Pages 1-22
Front Matter....Pages 23-23
Each Taking Risk, Performing Self: Theorizing (Dis) Narratives....Pages 25-40
Transformative Womanist Rhetorical Strategies: Contextualizing Discourse and the Performance of Black Bodies of Desire....Pages 41-55
“Is Anybody Walkin’?”: The Black Body on the Runway as a Performance of the Politics of Desire....Pages 57-71
Front Matter....Pages 73-73
Transgressive (Re)presentations: Black Women, Vaudeville, and the Politics of Performance in Early Transatlantic Theater....Pages 75-90
Kara Walker’s War on Racism: Mining (Mis)Representations of Blackness....Pages 91-107
Between Mumblecore and Post-Black Aesthetics: Barry Jenkins’s Medicine for Melancholy....Pages 109-123
From Book to Film: Desire in Precious (Lee Daniels, 2009), adapted from Push by Sapphire (1996)....Pages 125-140
Front Matter....Pages 141-141
Black Queer Studies, Freedom, and Other Human Possibilities....Pages 143-157
About Face, or, What Is This “Back” in B(l)ack Popular Culture? From Venus Hottentot to Video Hottie....Pages 159-179
Margin Me: Intentional Marginality in the Queered Borderlands of Hip-hop....Pages 181-195
Front Matter....Pages 197-197
Sculpting Black Queer Bodies and Desires: The Case of Richmond Barthé....Pages 199-220
I Am Not a Race Man: Racial Uplift and the Post-Black Aesthetic in Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier....Pages 221-236
Embodying Hybridity: Anna Deavere Smith’s Identity Cross-Overs....Pages 237-261
Back Matter....Pages 263-282