Theorizing the Performance of Blackness: Relations, Processes, and Possibilities

Abstract:Through a summation of representative critical works that challenge us to think of new ways of imagining performing bodies and racial performance, this essay gestures towards a process-oriented approach for theorizing the performance of blackness. The essay argues that understanding performance-as-relation and performance-as-process allows us not only to extend our conception of performance to capture traces of its more evanescent elements in material objects and immaterial behaviors, but also to bring together new forms of historical evidence to give weight to our analyses of the performance of blackness across time and space, opening new avenues for a liberatory critique.