Performance Research Volume 12 Issue 3

On Blackness/Diaspora

Issue editors: Myron M. Beasley

ISBN: 978-0-415-44160

On Blackness/Diaspora contemplates, what does it mean to 'perform' blackness? How might performance be the link (conceptually, theoretically, and even perhaps literally) in the African Diaspora? Situating the concept of Diaspora as it pertains to the grammar of lineage, fragmented histories, ontological movement, dispersion of bodies, and cultural/ geo-politics --this issue will highlight the vastness of blackness. Locating the African Diaspora as the site of discourse, we explore race through modalities of performance. Appreciating the transnational and the deterritorializing nature of the African Diaspora, we critically engage in the multiplicity of thought, the fluidity of identity, language, representation, space, and gender, as derived in narrative, memory, popular culture and intellectual histories. This issue is a pastiche of what or how we conceive the performance of Blackness/ Diaspora.

Editorial

Myron M. Beasley

pp. 1 - 3

Notes Towards a Performance Theory of Orature

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

pp. 4 - 7

When I Was There, It Was Not: On secretions once lost in the night

Lewis R. Gordon

pp. 8 - 15

Performing Ethnography: The political economy of water

D. Soyini Madison

pp. 16 - 27

Rewriting Historical Narratives: Adrienne Kennedy's historic interventions

Chewen-Woan Kuan, Lisa M. Anderson

pp. 28 - 35

Excerpts from Jungaeyé: An opera

Douglas Kearney

pp. 36 - 41

I've Got You Under My Skin': Queer assemblages, lyrical nostalgia and the African diaspora

Tavia Nyong'o

pp. 42 - 54

The Quilt: Towards a twenty-first century black feminist ethnography

Renée Alexander Craft, Media McNeal, Mshaï S. Mwangola

pp. 55 - 73

Speaking Fluent 'Joke': Pushing the racial envelope through comedic performance on Chappelle's Show

Katrina E. Bell-Jordan

pp. 74 - 90

When Did You Discover You Are African?': MoAD and the universal, diasporic subject

Brandi Wilkins Catanese

pp. 91 - 102

Nice and Rough: The promise of privacy in Tina Turner's 'What's Love Got To Do With It' and I, Tina

Francesca T. Royster

pp. 103 - 113

Performing Blackness: Transversal diasporas criss-crossing the Atlantic

Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren

pp. 114 - 123

Locating Tulsa in the Souls of Black Women Folk: Performing memory as survival

Olga Idriss Davis

pp. 124 - 136

Kissing Ass and Other Performative Acts of Resistance: Austin, Fanon and New Orleans tourism

Lynnell Thomas

pp. 137 - 145

Reviews

Caroline Ewing, Jane Anna Gordon

pp. 146 - 155

Notes on Contributors

pp. 156 - 157