Black Performance Theory ed. by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez (review)

Thomas F. DeFrantz, co-editor of Black Performance Theory, has long been at the forefront of theorizing about black dance.¹ With this new volume, co-edited by theater scholar Anita Gonzalez, DeFrantz signals a move beyond dance to think of performance in broader terms. Several books about black performance already exist in the fields of dance, theater, and performance studies, but this edited volume is an important addition. As D. Soyini Madison asserts in the Foreword, it “honors the charge to theorize outside the expected and to say something new” (ix). Globalization, the digital information revolution, new expressions of gender and sexuality, challenges to essentialized identity categories, and the turn to diaspora as a “meta-discourse” (10) require new thinking about blackness and performance. Black Performance Theory fulfills that mandate with its rich and varied essays.

The Introduction lays out the goal of the book, which is to build upon earlier scholarly efforts “to establish black expressive culture as an area of serious academic inquiry” (1). Together, the editors tackle head-on the contradiction that black performance is not a stable signifier, and yet to write a book called Black Performance Theory requires some type of grounding. DeFrantz finds such grounding in Africanist aesthetic traits that “endure and confirm,” such as moving with “percussive attack” and a participatory performance practice (5). At the same time, Gonzalez recognizes that the social construction of the category “black” does not exist solely within an Africanist context, but rather emerges as a “response” to what others have imagined about black identity (6). Their two claims sit in productive tension with one another, giving the book nuance and complexity from the very outset.

Another productive tension emerges around the question of opposition. Madison asserts in the Foreword that Black Performance Theory is fundamentally oppositional (viii), but DeFrantz and Gonzalez note that black performance is more varied; it “may underscore oppositional aesthetics or collude with creative practices far removed from the lives of black people” (10). The discrepancy raises an interesting question. If black performance theory is always already oppositional, then how does it engage with black performance practices that are not always already oppositional? My question presupposes a division between theory and practice that this book challenges, but the challenge raises yet another question: is there still a distinction between theorizing about performance and performance as theorization? Black Performance Theory is an exciting book for raising such questions.

Turning from the Introduction to the essays, the one that offers the most intriguing new theorization is by Nadine George-Graves. George-Graves introduces the concept of “diasporic spidering” as a way to understand contemporary black identities (33). She argues that an “individual searcher,” rather than the continent of Africa, lies at the center of diaspora. From that individual, “spidering” enables diaspora to be a “contemporary active process,” a “performative,” that allows for new information to enter, rather than tying black identity solely to an idea of a rooted, African past. While that past is still important, diasporic spidering does not “lock” the individual to it, instead allowing for identity to expand in the present and into the future (37–8). George-Graves’s conceptualization offers a way forward through the complex social construction of contemporary black identity.

Koritha Mitchell’s essay, “Black-Authored Lynching Drama’s Challenge to Theater History,” best brings together the material and the theoretical. Mitchell discusses how African-American playwrights of the early twentieth century wrote one-act lynching dramas focused on the repercussions of such violence on black households. She argues, “It was particularly important to place in the archive evidence of devastated households and the pain experienced by lynch victims’ loved ones because society denied that these stable households ever existed” (90). The plays challenged white American society’s myths about black families while refusing to reproduce the performative, spectacular violence of lynching. Mitchell’s broader theoretical...