Author: Thomas F. DeFrantz Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 0822377012 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 478
Book Description
Black performance theory is a rich interdisciplinary area of study and critical method. This collection of new essays by some of its pioneering thinkers—many of whom are performers—demonstrates the breadth, depth, innovation, and critical value of black performance theory. Considering how blackness is imagined in and through performance, the contributors address topics including flight as a persistent theme in African American aesthetics, the circulation of minstrel tropes in Liverpool and in Afro-Mexican settlements in Oaxaca, and the reach of hip-hop politics as people around the world embrace the music and dance. They examine the work of contemporary choreographers Ronald K. Brown and Reggie Wilson, the ways that African American playwrights translated the theatricality of lynching to the stage, the ecstatic music of Little Richard, and Michael Jackson's performance in the documentary This Is It. The collection includes several essays that exemplify the performative capacity of writing, as well as discussion of a project that re-creates seminal hip-hop album covers through tableaux vivants. Whether deliberating on the tragic mulatta, the trickster figure Anansi, or the sonic futurism of Nina Simone and Adrienne Kennedy, the essays in this collection signal the vast untapped critical and creative resources of black performance theory. Contributors. Melissa Blanco Borelli, Daphne A. Brooks, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Nadine George-Graves, Anita Gonzalez, Rickerby Hinds, Jason King, D. Soyini Madison, Koritha Mitchell, Tavia Nyong'o, Carl Paris, Anna B. Scott, Wendy S. Walters, Hershini Bhana Young
Author: Nicole R. Fleetwood Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226253031 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 297
Book Description
Nicole R. Fleetwood explores how blackness is seen as a troubling presence in the field of vision and the black body is persistently seen as a problem. She examines a wide range of materials from visual and media art, documentary photography theatre, performance and more.
Author: Tavia Nyong'o Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 1479856274 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 275
Book Description
Winner, 2019 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History, given by the American Society for Theatre Research Honorable Mention, 2021 Errol Hill Award, given by the American Society for Theatre Research Argues for a conception of black cultural life that exceeds post-blackness and conditions of loss In Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, cultural critic and historian Tavia Nyong’o surveys the conditions of contemporary black artistic production in the era of post-blackness. Moving fluidly between the insurgent art of the 1960’s and the intersectional activism of the present day, Afro-Fabulations challenges genealogies of blackness that ignore its creative capacity to exceed conditions of traumatic loss, social death, and archival erasure. If black survival in an anti-black world often feels like a race against time, Afro-Fabulations looks to the modes of memory and imagination through which a queer and black polytemporality is invented and sustained. Moving past the antirelational debates in queer theory, Nyong’o posits queerness as “angular sociality,” drawing upon queer of color critique in order to name the gate and rhythm of black social life as it moves in and out of step with itself. He takes up a broad range of sites of analysis, from speculative fiction to performance art, from artificial intelligence to Blaxploitation cinema. Reading the archive of violence and trauma against the grain, Afro-Fabulations summons the poetic powers of queer world-making that have always been immanent to the fight and play of black life.
Author: Kathy A. Perkins Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351751433 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 566
Book Description
The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance is an outstanding collection of specially written essays that charts the emergence, development, and diversity of African American Theatre and Performance—from the nineteenth-century African Grove Theatre to Afrofuturism. Alongside chapters from scholars are contributions from theatre makers, including producers, theatre managers, choreographers, directors, designers, and critics. This ambitious Companion includes: A "Timeline of African American theatre and performance." Part I "Seeing ourselves onstage" explores the important experience of Black theatrical self-representation. Analyses of diverse topics including historical dramas, Broadway musicals, and experimental theatre allow readers to discover expansive articulations of Blackness. Part II "Institution building" highlights institutions that have nurtured Black people both on stage and behind the scenes. Topics include Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), festivals, and black actor training. Part III "Theatre and social change" surveys key moments when Black people harnessed the power of theatre to affirm community realities and posit new representations for themselves and the nation as a whole. Topics include Du Bois and African Muslims, women of the Black Arts Movement, Afro-Latinx theatre, youth theatre, and operatic sustenance for an Afro future. Part IV "Expanding the traditional stage" examines Black performance traditions that privilege Black worldviews, sense-making, rituals, and innovation in everyday life. This section explores performances that prefer the space of the kitchen, classroom, club, or field. This book engages a wide audience of scholars, students, and theatre practitioners with its unprecedented breadth. More than anything, these invaluable insights not only offer a window onto the processes of producing work, but also the labour and economic issues that have shaped and enabled African American theatre. Chapter 20 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Author: Victor Peterson II Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000540693 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 182
Book Description
This book uncovers a logical fallacy underlying Afro-Pessimism and provides a formal theory of Articulation, teasing out new reflections on race and Blackness. Afro-Pessimism maintains that Blacks, subject to a subordinate position in society, suffer a cultural death. In this monograph, Victor Peterson rejects this theory, demonstrating that Black subjectivity is inherently multiple, articulating identities appropriate to the contexts in which it finds itself and yet remaining continuous across its individual but not mutually exclusive instantiations. Peterson argues that we should consider the mechanisms that produce the conditions under which individuals obtain positions of either dominance or subordination. By providing a working logical foundation for Articulation theory within cultural studies, Peterson encourages us to rethink the politics of racial identity and subjectivity in contemporary social life. Encouraging critical thought about the arbitrarily determined but instrumentally objective of our global racial order, this book will be of great interest to scholars of Black Studies, sociology, cultural studies, and philosophy.
Author: Thomas F. Defrantz Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press ISBN: 0299173135 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 382
Book Description
Few will dispute the profound influence that African American music and movement has had in American and world culture. Dancing Many Drums explores that influence through a groundbreaking collection of essays on African American dance history, theory, and practice. In so doing, it reevaluates "black" and "African American " as both racial and dance categories. Abundantly illustrated, the volume includes images of a wide variety of dance forms and performers, from ring shouts, vaudeville, and social dances to professional dance companies and Hollywood movie dancing. Bringing together issues of race, gender, politics, history, and dance, Dancing Many Drums ranges widely, including discussions of dance instruction songs, the blues aesthetic, and Katherine Dunham’s controversial ballet about lynching, Southland. In addition, there are two photo essays: the first on African dance in New York by noted dance photographer Mansa Mussa, and another on the 1934 "African opera," Kykunkor, or the Witch Woman.
Author: Omi Osun Joni L. Jones Publisher: Black Performance and Cultural ISBN: 9780814252079 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
The first full-length study of the theatrical jazz aesthetic, that draws on the jazz principles of ensemble--the break, the bridge, and the blue note.
Author: Achille Mbembe Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 0822373238 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 228
Book Description
In Critique of Black Reason eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness—from the Atlantic slave trade to the present—to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity while mapping the relations among colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital. Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black reason as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Mbembe powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion. With Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe offers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future.
Author: Thomas F. DeFrantz
Author: Harvey Young
Author: Nicole R. Fleetwood
Author: Tavia Nyong'o
Author: Kathy A. Perkins
Author: Victor Peterson II
Author: Thomas F. Defrantz
Author: Richard Schechner
Author: Omi Osun Joni L. Jones
Author: Achille Mbembe