Theater is an essential theoretical and practical site for forging Black radical thought, Africana feminisms, and womanism. Nicosia M. Shakes draws on ethnographic research in Jamaica and South Africa to analyze the vital relationship between activism and theater production. Concentrating on four performance events, Shakes situates the work of theater groups and projects within a trajectory of women-led social justice movements established in Jamaica, South Africa, and globally from the early 2000s to the present. Her analysis reveals movements driven by Black women’s artistic, intellectual, and organizational labor and focused on issues that range from sexual violence to reproductive justice to the spatial manifestations of racial, gender, and economic oppression. Shakes shows how theater’s political and pedagogical roles become entangled with histories and geographies of oppression and resistance; the identities and connections created by movements of people in the context of colonial and settler colonial histories; and ideas of womanism and feminism.

Nicosia M. Shakes is an assistant professor of history and critical race and ethnic studies at the University of California, Merced.

Acknowledgments

A Note on Terms and Concepts

Introduction: Race, Gender, Space

1. “Mek Wi Choose fi Wiself”: Performing a Discourse of Justice in A Slice of Reality
2. “The Wound is Still There”: Walk: South Africa and the Ontological Violence of Rape
3. “Mi a go try release yu”: Mourning, Memory, and Violence in A Vigil for Roxie.
4. “Alternative Spaces”: Black Self-Making, Space-Making, and the Work of Olive Tree Theatre
Coda: Performing Activism across Space and Time

Notes

Bibliography

Index