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  • Black Performance Studies in the New Millennium
  • Harvey Young (bio)
Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression-Era African American Performance. By Stephanie Leigh Batiste. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011; pp. 352.
Paul Robeson and the Cold War Performance Complex: Race, Madness, Activism. By Tony Perucci. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012; pp. 232.
The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium. By Michele Elam. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011; pp. 308.

Since 2000, the field of black performance studies has not only emerged, but also flourished, stimulating a vibrant interdisciplinary conversation. An increasing number of books appears each year, demonstrating a growing interest in nuanced critical readings of and savvy theoretical engagements with the enactment and experience of race. Over the past two years, for example, no fewer than ten books in this area have been published by a range of scholars with varying disciplinary appointments, including Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman (Against the Closet, 2012), Robin Bernstein (Racial Innocence, 2011), Soyica Diggs Colbert (The African American Theatrical Body, 2011), Koritha Mitchell (Living with Lynching, 2011), Cherise Smith (Enacting Others, 2011), Salamishah Tillet (Sites of Slavery, 2012), and Kyla Wazana Tompkins (Racial Indigestion, 2012), as well as Tony Perucci, Stephanie Leigh Batiste, and Michele Elam, whose books are reviewed here. This increase in scholarship can be attributed to several interrelated factors.

First, the end of the twentieth century no doubt prompted explorations into whether "the problem of the color line," W. E. B. Du Bois's diagnosis of that century's most pressing ailment (The Souls of Black Folk, 1903), would persist into the new century. Among the early texts to engage the "problem," Paul Gilroy's Against Race (2000) addressed the history and legacy of past racial formations from a fin-de-siècle perspective and cautioned against [End Page 289] allowing the racial logic of prior generations to enter a new millennium uncontested. In particular, Gilroy's explicit request to consider the internal differences that exist within racially labeled minority communities invited a new generation of scholars to further consider the performance of blackness within and alongside enactments of political, gender, and class identities. Although this invitation to think about intersectional identities certainly anchored itself in earlier critical modes, such as the womanist criticism of the 1970s and '80s, it was nevertheless timely in reminding us to attend to these overlapping identifications in crafting a new millennial scholarship.

Second, this critical trend can be attributed to the increasingly wide acceptance of performance studies methodologies across a range of disciplines, including African American studies, communication studies, English, and theatre. Performance studies, which has gained a foothold in the academy in recent decades, is obviously not a new millennial invention. Once widely considered to be an "anti-discipline," performance studies today might best be described as more of a friend or ally (rather than rival) to existing traditional disciplines. Its methods, ranging from critical ethnography to theoretical accounts of embodied experience, have helped to expand the purview of the social sciences and humanities by promoting the embrace of a newfound performance sensibility within them. Few disciplines have been as transformed by performance studies as theatre has been. Although many performance scholars once dreamed—and probably still dream—about the creation of new departments within universities around the globe, the recent trend has been to create a space for the interventions of performance studies not in stand-alone departments—as they exist (and excel) at Northwestern and NYU—but rather by incorporating them within theatre studies. With increasing frequency, "theatre" departments and programs have been renamed to better reflect the new presence of performance studies approaches. This has happened at Cal-Berkeley, Brown, Stanford, and, most recently, Cornell. Although some theatre scholars claim that the interdisciplinary ambitions of performance studies have always been embedded in theatre studies and that the topic of race has long been engaged, the inclusion of performance studies methodologies has helped the discipline to better read the experience, legacy, and operations of race in everyday life.

Third, the increasing number of books in black performance studies can be attributed to the arrival of a new generation of academics who...

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