The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage by Soyica Diggs Colbert (review)

By what means can a black performer move from being the object of an oppressive gaze to being an expressive agent of her own self-fashioning? Soyica Diggs Colbert offers insightful answers to this complex question with the publication of The African American Theatrical Body, an imaginative, richly textured, and intellectually provocative excavation of black dramatic literature of the twentieth century. With the publication of this book, Colbert builds on the work of an esteemed cadre of scholars in black performance studies (including Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Daphne Brooks, Harvey Young, and Jayna Brown) who, over the last fifteen years or so, have explored the tensions between invisibility and hypervisibility, between object and subject, that have historically governed black performance in the United States.

In her exploration of a black literary and theatrical tradition, Colbert argues that black performance exerts a significant reparative force on the psychic traumas experienced by black communities torn asunder by the Middle Passage, enslavement, and Jim Crow. These "rites of repair" are not reparations in the legal or monetary sense, but rather work to revise and reclaim historical narratives, cast off debilitating shame, and collaboratively come to terms with the past and envision possibilities for the future. The theatre, Colbert argues, is a particularly rich site for such acts of redress because of its haunted, ghostly qualities. The theatre's capacity to simultaneously summon both "then" and "now" make it particularly well-suited to exploring a central aesthetic of the black literary tradition: the persistence of the past in the present. By means of what Colbert calls the "repetition/reproduction dyad," black performance offers "an ongoing opportunity to redo the past" (14). Locating and analyzing the appearance of black performance traditions within the dramatic works she excavates, Colbert demonstrates how song, dance, preaching, and hustling stage cultural memory, invite audience participation (and, at times, complicity), and signify on histories of black displacement.

The book boldly engages a broad swath of literary and performance history, stretching from W. E. B. Du Bois's The Star of Ethiopia (1915) to Tarell Alvin McCraney's In the Red and Brown Water (2009). Colbert draws connections across the twentieth century while simultaneously remaining vigilant about the literary historical model she constructs. Her insistence on viewing Amiri Baraka and August Wilson's relationship as one of "reciprocity" rather than "influence" is just one example of the book's attentive disruption of linear models of past and present. Bookended by explorations of Suzan-Lori Parks's The America Play in the book's introductory "overture" and Topdog/Underdog in chapter 7, the book itself embodies a cyclical form, one that undergirds not only black performance, but also theories of trauma.

Chapter 1 explores what Colbert calls the "urtext of African American drama," Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun (12). Colbert thus begins her assessment of twentieth-century black drama in medias res—a surprising choice, but one that serves well the argument of the book. Demonstrating how Hansberry's play "makes evident the ontology of black performance: repetition/reproduction," Colbert explores the moments of performance within the play, from Walter Lee's minstrel groveling to Beneatha's sartorial display of black international consciousness, to show how such repetitions and reproductions offer opportunities to challenge the supposed representational stability of "the black body," onstage and off (25).

The staging of black diasporic history is the subject of chapter 2, which examines Du Bois's The Star of Ethiopia. A useful corrective to the dearth of scholarship on his theatrical activity, this chapter links the historiographic project of Star to that of Du Bois's most well-known text, The Souls of Black Folk. Colbert's exploration of the figure of Ethiopia illuminates Du Bois's interjection of gender into the constitution of a global black-revolutionary spirit. By casting the pageant's savior figure as female, Du Bois uses Ethiopia's sacrifice and subsequent resurrection to "reposition...