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How does the performance of blackness reframe issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality? Here, the contributors look into representational practices in film, literature, fashion, and theatre and explore how they have fleshed out political struggles, while recognizing that they have sometimes maintained the mechanisms of violence against blacks.

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Introduction. Black Beings, Black Embodyings: Notes on Contemporary Artistic Performances and their Cultural Interpretations; Jean-Paul Rocchi, Anne Crémieux, and Xavier Lemoine PART I: BLACK BEING, BLACK EMBODYING: THE POWER OF AUTO-ETHNOGRAPHY 1. Each Taking Risk, Performing Self: Theorizing (Dis)Narratives; Myron Beasley 2. Transformative Womanist Rhetorical Strategies: Contextualizing Discourse and the Performance of Black Bodies of Desire; Toniesha L. Taylor 3. ´Is Anybody Walkin´?´: the Black Body on the Runway as a Performance of the Politics of Desire; Gayle Baldwin PART II: SHATTERED FRAMES AND THE ONLOOKER: STRATEGIES AND SIGNIFICATIONS 4. Transgressive (Re)presentations: Black Women, Vaudeville and the Politics of Performance in Early Trans-Atlantic Theatre; Zakiya R. Adair 5. Kara Walker´s War on Racism: Mining (Mis)Representations of Blackness; Vanina Géré 6. Between Mumblecore and Post-Black Aesthetics: Barry Jenkins´s Medicine for Melancholy; Simon Dickel 7. From Book to Film: Desire in Precious (Lee Daniels, 2009), adapted from Push by Sapphire (1995); Anne Crémieux PART III: THROUGH PERFORMANCE: DESIRE AND THE BLACK SUBJECT 8. Black Queer Studies, Freedom and Other Human Possibilities; Rinaldo Walcott 9. About Face, or, What Is This ´Back´ in B(l)ack Popular Culture?: From Venus Hottentot to Video Hottie; Mae G. Henderson 10. Margin Me: Intentional Marginality in the Queered Borderlands of Hiphop; Stephany Spaulding PART IV: SHIFTING PARADIGMS OF IDENTITIES 11. Sculpting Black Queer Bodies and Desires: The Case of Richmond Barthé; James Smalls 12. I Am Not a Race Man: Racial Uplift and the Post-Black Aesthetic in Percival Everett´s I Am Not Sidney Poitier; Kristin Leigh Moriah 13. Embodying Hybridity: Anna Deavere Smith´s Identity Cross-Overs; Xavier Lemoine

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"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

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