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Black Performance Studies

• Explores the intersection of “black,” “performance,” and “studies” to understand black life, politics, and cultural production.

Key Concepts

• Dialectic of Blackness and Performance:

  • Blackness becomes tangible through performance, shaping racialized cultural production.
  • Performance facilitates self- and cultural-reflexivity, revealing how we understand ourselves.
  • Performance emphasizes that our understanding of who we are is shaped by how we represent and imagine ourselves (Hall, 1992).
  • Blackness can also be effaced by performance because performance may not fully account for the ontology of race.
  • Racial performativity invests bodies with social meaning (Manning, 2001).
  • Blackness is more than just “playful”; it is a lived experience deeply rooted in a white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist, homophobic society (Walcott, 1997).
  • Performance should provide meaningful resistance against oppressive systems.
  • Black performance can both hinder and enable social change.

• Black Performance Studies:

  • Intellectual inquiry into the relationship between blackness and performance.
  • Black performance has been a sustaining force in black culture and a contributor to world culture.
  • It has been marginalized in the academy, similar to the marginalization of black bodies.

Essay Objectives

1. Examine the history of black performance studies within interpretation and performance studies.
2. Discuss how black people have used performance as epistemology and resistance.
3. Analyze political struggles over the definition of black performance, particularly through the artistic contributions of black women and LGBTQ+ individuals.

The Erasure of Black Performance

• Black performative presence has always existed within interpretation and performance studies, but it has often been unacknowledged.
• **Toni Morrison's