Description
Johnson looks at various sites of performed blackness, including Marlon Riggs's influential documentary Black Is . . . Black Ain't and comedic routines by Eddie Murphy, David Alan Grier, and Damon Wayans. He analyzes nationalist writings by Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver, the vernacular of black gay culture, an oral history of his grandmother's experience as a domestic worker in the South, gospel music as performed by a white Australian choir, and pedagogy in a performance studies classroom. By exploring the divergent aims and effects of these performances-ranging from resisting racism, sexism, and homophobia to excluding sexual dissidents from the black community-Johnson deftly analyzes the multiple significations of blackness and their myriad political implications. His reflexive account considers his own complicity, as ethnographer and teacher, in authenticating narratives of blackness.
A consideration of the performance of Blackness and race in general, in relation to sexuality and critiques of authenticity
About the Author
E. Patrick Johnson is a performance artist and Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.
Reviews
"With Appropriating Blackness, E. Patrick Johnson has given us a book worthy of the breadth its title signals. It is written in an excellent and refreshingly clear prose style which sacrifices nothing in the way of complexity of the ideas being presented. Johnson makes his observations about the relatedness of performance and blackness more compelling with each successive case study."-Dwight A. McBride, coeditor of Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Fiction
"Appropriating Blackness is a wonderful study that makes important and timely contributions across many fields. E. Patrick Johnson is a skilled reader of texts and offers useful introductions to complex theories of race, sexuality, and culture."-David Roman, author of Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS
Book Information
ISBN 9780822331919
Author E. Patrick Johnson
Format Paperback
Page Count 384
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 522g