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

"I applaud the authors for theorizing black performance and embodiment away from the centrality of the written texts, specifically traditional literary texts. It is highly significant in that it moves the discipline forward in both its approach and structure." - Myron M. Beasley, PhD, Associate Professor, American Cultural Studies and African American Studies, Bates College, USA

"This provocative collection brings together a creative community of scholars, artists, artist-scholars, and more to probe, reconfigure, and challenge the underlying presuppositions of blackness premised on fixedness and the erasure of agency. Always critical and reflective, it offers theoretical considerations, matched by ample historical and contemporary evidence, of the implications of what is involved in performing an identity, especially in cases where one is already enmeshed, whether socially or corporeally, in it. Art, in this case, goes beyond the world of fetish and voyeur into the realm of interrelatedness. A must-read not only for those of us interested in African Diasporic studies and the formation of identity but also for anyone interested in the relationship of performance to the poetics of what it means 'to be' as a form of 'not to be', paradoxically, through the zone of nonbeing." - Lewis R. Gordon, University of Connecticut, USA; Europhilosophy Visiting Professor, Toulouse University, France; and Nelson Mandela Professor, Rhodes University, South Africa

"Understanding Blackness through Performance illuminates the field of black performance scholarship by focusing an international lens on ethnic cultural phenonmena." Anita Gonzales, Theatre Study