ABOUT THIS BOOK

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

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Soyica Diggs Colbert is Idol Family Professor of the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown University and author of Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics.

Douglas A. Jones Jr. is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University and author of The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North.

Shane Vogel is Ruth N. Halls Professor of English at Indiana University and author of Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze.

REVIEWS

“Offering a groundbreaking take on one of the most central premises of performance studies, this innovative volume advances theoretical and interpretive articulations of time that expand upon and challenge long-held assumptions about performance as repetition. It significantly expands performance theory and promises to animate conversations about performance, race, and time going forward. This collection is truly a breath of fresh air.”

-- Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, coeditor of Blacktino Queer Performance

“‘What time is it?!’ Race and Performance after Repetition offers a pathbreaking and long overdue intervention in performance studies by posing this sly and urgent question from a multiplicity of critical vantage points. This brilliant and inspired collection of essays unsettles the very foundations of the field by tracing, interrogating, and ultimately questioning the dominant logic of repetition as a foundational theoretical axiom in performance studies scholarship by way of calling attention to the difference that race makes. As this anthology demonstrates, the material historical conditions of race demand a wider, deeper, and more robust critical lexicon that moves beyond the grammar of temporal repetition. It is a volume that heralds new times in the field.”

-- Daphne A. Brooks, author of Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910

“Race and Performance After Repetition is worth reading from cover to cover, both for the engaging and diverse methodologies on offer and for its overarching interest in what scholars of performance studies miss if they adhere too closely to the conventions of the field.”

-- Christina Knight American Literary History

“The new collection Race and Performance After Repetition moves several fields forward, among them theatre, dance, and performance studies, Black studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and American studies. That it does so is a testament to the richness and interdisciplinarity of the animating impulse behind the collection, the thought of José Esteban Muñoz.”

-- Ariel Nereson Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism

“Colbert, Jones, and Vogel have assembled a truly excellent collection of new work . . . of some of the most exciting performance theorists working in the field today. . . . The editors and contributors alike have collectively produced something magnificent.”

-- Takeo Rivera Modern Drama

“As a collection [Race and Performance after Repetition] pushes on how repetition takes shape; it offers enlightening albeit disparate interventions in thinking about how race, time and performance produce meaning as an ensemble. . . . I finished the book and wanted to start it again.”

-- Sean Metzger Performance Research

TABLE OF CONTENTS

An Octoroon

Shuffle Along

Party People

The House That Herman Built

Lougawou

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