Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity | 
 enlarge | Author: E. Johnson
Publisher: Duke University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 265339
Media: Paperback
Pages: 384
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 1
ISBN: 0822331918
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.896073
EAN: 9780822331919
ASIN: 0822331918
Publication Date: 2003
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Product Description
Performance artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnson s provocative study examines how blackness is appropriated and performed toward widely divergent ends both within and outside African American culture. Appropriating Blackness develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identity avowed and disavowed, attractive and repellent, fixed and malleable. Drawing on performance theory, queer studies, literary analysis, film criticism, and ethnographic fieldwork, Johnson describes how diverse constituencies persistently try to prescribe the boundaries of "authentic" blackness and how performance highlights the futility of such enterprises. PJohnson looks at various sites of performed blackness, including Marlon Riggs s influential documentary Black Is . . . Black Ain t and comedic routines by Eddie Murphy, David Alan Grier, and Damon Wayans. He analyzes nationalist writings by Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver, the vernacular of black gay culture, an oral history of his grandmother s experience as a domestic worker in the South, gospel music as performed by a white Australian choir, and pedagogy in a performance studies classroom. By exploring the divergent aims and effects of these performances ranging from resisting racism, sexism, and homophobia to excluding sexual dissidents from the black community Johnson deftly analyzes the multiple significations of blackness and their myriad political implications. His reflexive account considers his own complicity, as ethnographer and teacher, in authenticating narratives of blackness.
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Smart, Readable and Extremely Important June 24, 2004
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
APPROPRIATING BLACKNESS demonstrates a mastery of the field of performance studies and of the shifts and turns it has taken in its evolution. This fact makes Johnson's own observations about "performance" as trope all the more convincing and authoritative. This is the through-line that unites these essays into what a strong, rich, and important book to scholars working in performance studies, cultural studies, gender studies, American studies, and African American studies to name but a few areas. This broad appeal and significance represents Johnson's real success as an inter-disciplinarian where so many authors published today with such aspirations fall short. This is a very timely and impressively readable book presented with the air and authority of a scholar's expertise, but written in a style that is extremely approachable by general readers.
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