1st Edition

Performing Blackness Enactments of African-American Modernism

By Kimberley W. Benston Copyright 2000
    404 Pages
    by Routledge

    400 Pages
    by Routledge

    Performing Blackness offers a challenging interpretation of black cultural expression since the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Exploring drama, music, poetry, sermons, and criticism, Benston offers an exciting meditation on modern black performance's role in realising African-American aspirations for autonomy and authority.
    Artists covered include:
    * John Coltrane
    * Ntozake Shange
    * Ed Bullins
    * Amiri Baraka
    * Adrienne Kennedy
    * Michael Harper.
    Performing Blackness is an exciting contribution to the ongoing debate about the vitality and importance of black culture.

    Prologue 1. Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Drama and the Quest for Community 2. Blow into the Freezing Night: Expressive Agency in Coltrane and the Coltrane poem 3. Find the Self, Then Kill it: Scripts and Scores of Self-Enactment 4. I Was Myself Within the Circle: Vernacular and Critical Paradigms of Expressive Agency Epilogue

    Biography

    Kimberley Benston is Kenan Professor of English at Haverford College. He is the author of Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask and editor of Speaking of You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison.