Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation
Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation (2022) reconsiders the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of black theatre. It argues that theatre—like television and photography—was a vital tool of civil rights activism and a crucial site of black artistic and cultural production. During this historical moment, black artists and activists turned to the stages of Broadway. They produced plays in the Netherlands, and in U.S. prisons. They performed in the cotton fields of Mississippi, once dodging a bomb tossed from the audience to the stage. Analyzing a largely underexplored, transnational archive of black theatre, this book charts a new cultural and political history of the Civil Rights Movement, and offers new routes to perennial questions about race, gender, sexuality, performance, and black political modernity.