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  • Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body by Harvey Young
  • Koritha Mitchell
Harvey Young . Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010. 259 pp. $80 cloth/$29.95 paper.

Black studies has always been an interdisciplinary enterprise, and in recent decades, black performance theory has flourished within it. Gaining momentum as a respected set of methodologies, black performance theory attends to the meaning-making power not only of words, but also of social practices and rituals as well as gestures, tones of voice, and so forth. Employing tools from performance studies, theater historiography, and literary criticism, it accounts for the influence of "blackness" throughout modernity. Harvey Young's Embodying Black Experience contributes to black performance theory in ways that demonstrate the continued interpretive value of biography and autobiography.

Young begins, in chapter one, by identifying connections between his experiences and those of Frantz Fanon, whose presence inspired "Look, a Negro!" from a frightened child. Fanon famously explained the implications of his being hailed in this way, with racial difference treated as his most meaningful feature. Similarly, Young recalls taking a walk only to be assaulted with the label "Nigger." This experience resonated with the events of a year earlier, when Young was jailed for "Driving while Black" (2). Fanon's understanding of his experiences in Martinique and Young's discussion of racial profiling in the U. S. illustrate "phenomenal blackness" (2). In Western societies, the black body carries tremendous signifying power; it is often allowed to stand in for individuals, thus overshadowing the actual person. As Young puts it, "projections of the black body across recognizable African American bodies create similar embodied experiences" (15). [End Page 263]

In other words, blacks can land in strikingly similar situations, even when they have little in common and are separated by decades or centuries, miles or oceans. Chapter two of Young's book substantiates this insight by focusing on the concept of "standing still." In this process, Young complicates "conceptualizations of the Black Diaspora as pure movement" (27-28). He emphasizes that before captives were loaded onto ships, they were held for months. Aboard the ships, their movement was restricted. Then, in the New World, they often stood still on auction blocks. These experiences, Young insists, set the stage for future performances of stillness, such as when Joseph Zealy's now famous daguerreotypes captured the likenesses of slaves in the 1850s. Young suggests that because cultural memory resides in black bodies, it helped these men and women perform stillness for a full minute, as required by daguerreotype technology (43). Young then discusses the work of a black photographer, Richard Samuel Roberts, whose subjects performed stillness in the 1920s. The chapter closely reads a number of images, including two that are not reproduced. Ultimately, the black subjects in these images do not simply sit or stand; they return the gaze and perform an ideal image of themselves (50-63). For Young, then, the representation of their bodies must be read anew, and recognized as a source of individual biography.

Young's biographical investment continues in chapter three, "Between the Ropes," which examines the lives of black professional boxers Tom Molineaux, Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali. Young demonstrates that the sport's popularity on slave plantations shaped blacks' participation in it for generations. Nevertheless, he uncovers moments when his subjects resist being "the black body exhibited for others" and instead become "a black body that has chosen to perform itself as an exhibit for itself " (91). Jack Johnson succeeded at precisely this for a time; then, federal authorities used the seldom-enforced Mann Act to criminalize him. Once inside the "justice system," he "consented" to prison exhibition matches that were filmed for others' profit (99-100). Johnson's life story (and much of Young's study) shows that U. S. law is geared toward black confinement, not justice, but Young's wording also contradicts this insight when he identifies Johnson's "stereotypical excesses" to be "gold teeth, white women, lawbreaking, and so on" (103; emphasis added). Still, the chapter's momentum derives from its emphasis on Muhammad Ali's...

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