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Problem Solved! invites readers into the exhilarating, unpredictable artistic world of The Negro Problem, the genre-defying music and theater collective behind the Tony and Obie Award–winning Passing Strange. Blending previously unpublished song lyrics, playscripts, critical essays, intimate interviews, and performance texts, the collection charts more than three decades of daring experimentation across rock music, musical theater, avant-garde performance, and other interdisciplinary forms of social and artistic critique.

Equal parts archive, mixtape, and critical meditation, the book captures The Negro Problem’s unique ability to move between seriousness and satire, activism and irony, intellectual rigor and irresistible melody. In addition to theatrical texts written and composed by Stew Stewart and Heidi Rodewald, the volume features a contextual essay by historian Scott Kurashige, close readings of The Total Bent by performance studies scholar Tavia Nyong’o, dramaturgical analyses of Passing Strange by volume editor Brandon Woolf, and a long-form interview about the band’s origins from co-leader Heidi Rodewald. The volume explores how the band challenges conventional ideas about race, identity, authenticity, activism, and musical theater through humor, contradiction, experimentation, and joyful disruption. Problem Solved! invites general readers, music enthusiasts, scholars, and theater lovers alike to explore how song can boldly and beautifully rise to meet our fractious cultural moment.

This collection is a contribution to the ongoing examination of race and its relation to class and gender. The essays in the volume start with the premise that although race, like class and gender, is socially constructed, all three categories have been shaped profoundly by their context in a capitalist society. Race, in other words, is a historical category that develops not only in dialectical relation to class and gender but also in relation to the material conditions in which all three are forged.

These assumptions underlie the organization of the volume, which is divided into three parts: "Racial Structures," which explores the problem of how race has historically been structured in modern capitalist societies; "Racial Ideology and Identity," which tackles diverse but interrelated questions regarding the representation of race and racism in dominant ideologies and discourses; and "Struggle," which builds on the insight that resistance to structures and ideologies of racial oppression is always situated in a particular time and place.

In addition to discussing and analyzing various dimensions of the African American experience, contributors also consider the ways in which race plays itself out in the experience of Asian Americans and in the very different geopolitical environments of the British Empire and postcolonial Africa.

Contributors are Pedro Cabán, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, David Crockett, Theodore Koditschek, Scott Kurashige, Clarence Lang, Minkah Makalani, Helen A. Neville, Tola Olu Pearce, David Roediger, Monica M. White, and Jeffrey Williams.