Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation By Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; pp. v + 301. $89 cloth, $29 paper, $29 e-book.

Abstract

In the summer of 2022, residents of Jackson, Mississippi had been waiting more than a month to access clean water. Shocking (to some), this easily preventable infrastructural failure took place in Mississippi’s capital and most populous and majority-Black city. In Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation, Julius B. Fleming Jr. theorizes the practice of making Black people wait for progress, full citizenship, and humanity. “This race-based structure of temporal violence,” he conceptualizes in the Introduction, “is black patience” (6). Rather than a virtue, Fleming etymologically excavates the Latin root of patience —“suffering,” a concept rarely theorized with attention to race (9–10)—to frame how from “slave ship” to “auction block” to “those who were inundated by calls to ‘go slow’ in the Civil Rights Movement, waiting has routinely been weaponized as a technology of anti-black violence and civic exclusion” (1). As the early 1960s temporally frame Black Patience, Fleming foregrounds Eisenhower’s 1950s presidency, during which millions of dollars were ushered to birth NASA while, concurrently, Eisenhower promoted waiting for racial progress; one 1958 newspaper headline read “Eisenhower Bids Negroes Be Patient about Rights” (7). Though Black Patience could exist primarily as an exacting work of political and critical theory, it instead flourishes in rich analyses of early 1960s Black theatrical practices that confront Black patience. Theatre artists, including Amiri Baraka, Duke Ellington, and Lorraine Hansberry, “used the theatrical stage to wrest black people from the violent enclosures of black patience” (38). Fleming also uncovers how civil rights activists engaged in dialogues with theatre’s epistemologies, such as Fannie Lou Hamer’s reaction to a 1964 production of Waiting for Godot in Ruleville, Mississippi: “You can’t sit around waiting” she told the audience at intermission (1). Thus, across Black Patience, Fleming deftly argues for what he coins Afro-presentism. This “radical structure of racial time” (26) was variously deployed