Embodying Black Experience: How the history of the diasporic black body in American art, athleticism, and performance resonates in daily life (Theater: Theory/Text/Performance) - Tapa blanda

"Embodying Black Experience is performance studies scholarship at its engaged and engaging best." --Theatre Journal "Performance studies scholarship at its engaged and engaging best. Harvey Young's book contributes valuable detailed local readings of several sites of academic debate... a very significant contribution to our understanding of the performance of race, the performance of memory, and the phenomenology of the body." --Theatre Journal -- (03/01/2011) "The innovative approaches to the Agassiz daguerrotypes... speak to important points of similarity and difference in current studies of early African American photography." --American Studies-- (07/03/2013) "Providing singularly fresh new readings of some of the ur-texts of African American studies ... Harvey Young's Embodying Black Experience also forge[s] new ground by placing these works in conversation with offerings that have as yet garnered scant scholarly attention." --American Literature--Suzanne Schneider, Bryn Mawr College "American Literature " "Young provides an excellent rendering of the "black body" as screen for racializing projection, demonstrating how contemporary Americans "continue to share in the experiences of their ancestors who were viewed as 'other, ' unjustly incarcerated, and subjected to limitless violence." --Choice, T. F. DeFrantz, Duke University (Highly Recommended) -- (11/01/2011)

Embodying Black Experience places a spotlight on spectacular acts of racial violence--from police stops (racial profiling) to lynching campaigns--and shows how African American men and women have employed performance to respond to the intrusion of such events within their daily lives. Masterfully blending biography, archival history, performance theory, and phenomenology, Harvey Young centers selected artistic and athletic performances--photography, boxing, theatre/performance art, and museum display--as lenses through which to gain access to the lived experiences of a variety of individuals. The photographs of Joseph Zealy, Richard Roberts, and Walker Evans; the boxing performances of Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali; the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks, Robbie McCauley, and Dael Orlandersmith; and the tragic performances of Bootjack McDaniels and James Cameron offer insight into the lives of black folk across the previous two centuries and reveal the similar ways in which black artists/performers/athletes have acted to challenge the racist (and racializing) assumptions of the societies they lived in.