Synopses & Reviews
Performance artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnsonandrsquo;s provocative study examines how blackness is appropriated and performedandmdash;toward widely divergent endsandmdash;both within and outside African American culture.
Appropriating Blackness develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identityandmdash;avowed and disavowed, attractive and repellent, fixed and malleable. Drawing on performance theory, queer studies, literary analysis, film criticism, and ethnographic fieldwork, Johnson describes how diverse constituencies persistently try to prescribe the boundaries of andquot;authenticandquot; blackness and how performance highlights the futility of such enterprises.
Johnson looks at various sites of performed blackness, including Marlon Riggsandrsquo;s influential documentary Black Is . . . Black Ainandrsquo;t and comedic routines by Eddie Murphy, David Alan Grier, and Damon Wayans. He analyzes nationalist writings by Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver, the vernacular of black gay culture, an oral history of his grandmotherandrsquo;s experience as a domestic worker in the South, gospel music as performed by a white Australian choir, and pedagogy in a performance studies classroom. By exploring the divergent aims and effects of these performancesandmdash;ranging from resisting racism, sexism, and homophobia to excluding sexual dissidents from the black communityandmdash;Johnson deftly analyzes the multiple significations of blackness and their myriad political implications. His reflexive account considers his own complicity, as ethnographer and teacher, in authenticating narratives of blackness.
Review
andquot;With Appropriating Blackness, E. Patrick Johnson has given us a book worthy of the breadth its title signals. It is written in an excellent and refreshingly clear prose style which sacrifices nothing in the way of complexity of the ideas being presented. Johnson makes his observations about the relatedness of performance and blackness more compelling with each successive case study.andquot;andmdash;Dwight A. McBride, coeditor of Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Fiction
Review
andquot;Appropriating Blackness is a wonderful study that makes important and timely contributions across many fields. E. Patrick Johnson is a skilled reader of texts and offers useful introductions to complex theories of race, sexuality, and culture.andrdquo;andmdash;David Romandaacute;n, author of Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS
Synopsis
A consideration of the performance of Blackness and race in general, in relation to sexuality and critiques of authenticity.
About the Author
E. Patrick Johnson is a performance artist and Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.