More Books

Paul Robeson and the Cold War Performance Complex: Race, Madness, Activism. By Tony Perucci. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012; 232 pp.; illustrations. $75.00 cloth, $28.95 paper, e-book available.

Looking specifically at two of Paul Robeson’s performances—his 1949 concerts in Peekskill, New York, and his 1956 appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee—Perucci analyzes how Robeson was vilified and discredited using, among other things, antitheatrical discourse. Robeson, whose international fame as an actor and singer gave him a wide platform, became an outspoken critic of US policies toward Russia and a supporter of organized labor and civil rights. Perucci argues that Cold War culture linked race, madness, and communism, casting Robeson’s activism as both insane and unpatriotic. Performances by the state (such as HUAC) and performances of citizenship mobilized to support anticommunist attitudes (such as surveillance and naming names) produced what Perucci calls the Cold War Performance Complex. Deployed to support the US postwar, militarized, and racialized hegemony of global capitalism, the Cold War Performance Complex operates in four ways: (1) it is enacted by the state to enforce the political economic order of Cold War culture; (2) it articulates treason as black, Communist, and mad; (3) it enables the state to repress spectacles of resistance; and (4) it becomes a site of struggle, wherein performance can organize ruptures of the political economic order. The book is not a biography of Robeson, although it contains rich biographical detail where necessary. Scholarship regarding Robeson, according to Perucci, focuses on his early career and eschews his more contested, complicated performances of activism, along with the state and media’s response to those performances. Perucci squarely tackles the time period in which Robeson’s performances were at their most radical, demonstrating how Robeson imagined collective organization and resistance.

The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage. By Soyica Diggs Colbert. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011; 344 pp.; illustrations. $103.00 cloth, e-book available.

Drawing from Suzan Lori-Parks’s “Rep and Rev” (Repetition and Revision), Colbert undertakes an analysis of literary and theatrical works addressing black subjectivity and materiality. Colbert finds that performance offers a method for repairing some of the historical trauma endured by African Americans. By continually revising history, works ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Star of Ethiopia (1915) to Tarell Alvin McCraney’s In the Red and Brown Water (2008) demonstrate how preaching, dance, music, and theatre provide sites of reparation for the black body. In between these texts, Colbert analyzes Zora Neale Hurston’s Color Struck (1925), Langston Hughes’s Tambourines to Glory (1958), James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship (1967), August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1986), and Parks’s Topdog/Underdog (2001), finding that African American dramatists have transformed “absence into ways of being present, homelessness into modes of finding a home, and loss into mechanisms of mourning” (8). Rather than approaching these texts as individual works, she reads them as part of a rich tradition, and, by incorporating scholarship on blackness and performance, generates through her book the kind of reparative work she attributes to this body of performance.

Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics. Ramón H. Rivera-Servera. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012; 272 pp.; illustrations. $75.00 cloth, $32.50 paper, e-book available.

In this book, Rivera-Servera traces the connections between performance and the formation of queer latinidad publics. During the 1990s and early 2000s, a time variously called the “Latin Boom” and the “Latin Explosion” when mainstream culture and commercial media popularized Latin superstars such as Ricky Martin, Jennifer Lopez, and Shakira, queer Latino/a cultures used local and everyday performance to generate social networks that resisted commodification. Rivera-Servera argues that collectively, the concepts of home, hope, utopia, and friction combine to create a theory of queer latinidad. His case studies, Arthur Aviles’s choreography in New York, the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio, club dancing across the US in the 1990s, and club dancing in Phoenix 10 years later...