The contributors to Race and Performance after Repetition explore how theater and performance studies account for the complex relationship between race and time. Pointing out that repetition has been the primary point of reference for understanding both the complex temporality of theater and the historical persistence of race, they identify and pursue critical alternatives to the conceptualization, organization, measurement, and politics of race in performance. The contributors examine theater, performance art, music, sports, dance, photography, and other forms of performance in topics that range from the movement of boxer Joe Louis to George C. Wolfe's 2016 reimagining of the 1921 all-black musical comedy Shuffle Along to the relationship between dance, mourning, and black adolescence in Flying Lotus's music video “Never Catch Me.” Proposing a spectrum of coexisting racial temporalities that are not tethered to repetition, this collection reconsiders central theories in performance studies in order to find new understandings of race.
Contributors. Joshua Chambers-Letson, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Nicholas Fesette, Patricia Herrera, Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson, Douglas A. Jones Jr., Mario LaMothe, Daphne P. Lei, Jisha Menon, Tavia Nyong’o, Tina Post, Elizabeth W. Son, Shane Vogel, Catherine M. Young, Katherine Zien
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Tidying Up after Repetition / Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones JR., and Shane Vogel
- Part I: Toggling Time: Metatheaters of Race
- 1. So Far Down You Can’t See the Light: Afro-Fabulationin Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon / Tavia Nyong’o
- 2. The Performance and Politics of Concurrent Temporalities in George C. Wolfe’s Shuffle Along / Catherine M. Young
- 3. A Sonic Treatise of Futurity: Universes’ Party People / Patricia Herrera
- Part II: Choreo-Chronographies
- 4. Joe Louis’s Utopic Glitch / Tina Post
- 5. Sorrow’s Swing / Jasmine Johnson
- 6. Parabolic Moves: Time, Narrative, and Difference in New Circus / Katherine Zien
- 7. Choreographing Time Travel: Rethinking Ritual through Korean Diasporic Performance / Elizabeth W. Son
- Part III: Temporal (Im)mobilites: Dwelling Out of Time
- 8. Carceral Space-Times and The House That Herman Built / Nicholas Fesette
- 9. Performance Interventions: Natality and Carceral Feminism in Contemporary India / Jisha Menon
- 10. Witnessing Queer Flights: Josué Azor’s Lougawou Images and Antihomosexual Unrest in Haiti / Mario Lamothe
- 11. The Body Is Never Given, nor Do We Actually See It / Joshua Chambers-Letson
- Bibliography
- Contributors
- Index