Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity

Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity

Johnson, E. Patrick

Paperback

Biographies General

ISBN10: 0822331918
ISBN13: 9780822331919
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: Aug 13 2003
Pages: 384
Weight: 1.10
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.90 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Performance artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnson's provocative study examines how blackness is appropriated and performed-toward widely divergent ends-both within and outside African American culture. Appropriating Blackness develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identity-avowed and disavowed, attractive and repellent, fixed and malleable. Drawing on performance theory, queer studies, literary analysis, film criticism, and ethnographic fieldwork, Johnson describes how diverse constituencies persistently try to prescribe the boundaries of authentic blackness and how performance highlights the futility of such enterprises.

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.

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