Black Movements
232 pages, 6 x 9
19 photographs
Paperback
Release Date:28 Apr 2017
ISBN:9780813588513
Hardcover
Release Date:28 Apr 2017
ISBN:9780813588520
Received the 2018 Honorable Mention for the Joe A. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theatre
Black Movements analyzes how artists and activists of recent decades reference earlier freedom movements in order to imagine and produce a more expansive and inclusive democracy. The post–Jim Crow, post–apartheid, postcolonial era has ushered in a purportedly color blind society and along with it an assault on race-based forms of knowledge production and coalition formation. Soyica Diggs Colbert argues that in the late twentieth century race went “underground,” and by the twenty-first century race no longer functioned as an explicit marker of second-class citizenship.
The subterranean nature of race manifests itself in discussions of the Trayvon Martin shooting that focus on his hoodie, an object of clothing that anyone can choose to wear, rather than focusing on structural racism; in discussions of the epidemic proportions of incarcerated black and brown people that highlight the individual’s poor decision making rather than the criminalization of blackness; in evaluations of black independence struggles in the Caribbean and Africa that allege these movements have accomplished little more than creating a black ruling class that mirrors the politics of its former white counterpart. Black Movements intervenes in these discussions by highlighting the ways in which artists draw from the past to create coherence about blackness in present and future worlds.
Through an exploration of the way that black movements create circuits connecting people across space and time, Black Movements offers important interventions into performance, literary, diaspora, and African American studies.
Black Movements analyzes how artists and activists of recent decades reference earlier freedom movements in order to imagine and produce a more expansive and inclusive democracy. The post–Jim Crow, post–apartheid, postcolonial era has ushered in a purportedly color blind society and along with it an assault on race-based forms of knowledge production and coalition formation. Soyica Diggs Colbert argues that in the late twentieth century race went “underground,” and by the twenty-first century race no longer functioned as an explicit marker of second-class citizenship.
The subterranean nature of race manifests itself in discussions of the Trayvon Martin shooting that focus on his hoodie, an object of clothing that anyone can choose to wear, rather than focusing on structural racism; in discussions of the epidemic proportions of incarcerated black and brown people that highlight the individual’s poor decision making rather than the criminalization of blackness; in evaluations of black independence struggles in the Caribbean and Africa that allege these movements have accomplished little more than creating a black ruling class that mirrors the politics of its former white counterpart. Black Movements intervenes in these discussions by highlighting the ways in which artists draw from the past to create coherence about blackness in present and future worlds.
Through an exploration of the way that black movements create circuits connecting people across space and time, Black Movements offers important interventions into performance, literary, diaspora, and African American studies.
Colbert engages with cultural narratives that cross disciplinary boundaries; Black Movements will influence the field because it offers a unique way to think about processes and products of black artistic thought.
With rigor and creativity, Soyica Diggs Colbert weaves together debates in performance studies, black studies, and American studies. Black Movements offers a new way to think about race, time, history, and performance in the contemporary moment and will have a lasting influence.
It is a significant book, one that should be read alongside the scholarship of Saidiya Hartman, Daphne Brooks, Amber Jamilla Musser and other black feminist thinkers. Like Beyoncé reflecting back on Josephine Baker, Black Movements’s looks to the legacies of black performance in order to imagine and build black futures.
Colbert’s 2017 book is especially exigent because it challenges the fixity of black death in a contemporary moment where black life is continuously expected to end abruptly. Whether this anticipation comes from video circulations of encounters with police or the Sate’s neglect of a predominantly black city’s contaminated water system, Colbert challenges this anticipated permanence to black death in Black Movements via analyses of literature, popular culture, and history. In doing so, she presents freedom as a multimodal phenomenon – through performance, film, literature, music, and prophecy.
SOYICA DIGGS COLBERT is an associate professor of African American studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She is the coeditor of The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture (Rutgers University Press).
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Webs of Affiliation
1 Flying Africans in Spaceships
2 Entrapping and Ensnaring Entanglements
3 Prophesying in Octavia Butler’s Parable Series
4 Marching
Epilogue: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”: Locating the Future of Black Studies
Notes
Bibliography
IndexRelated Titles
Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance
By Jeffrey B. Ferguson; Edited by Werner Sollors; Afterword by George B. Hutchinson
The Psychic Hold of Slavery
Legacies in American Expressive Culture
Edited by Soyica Diggs Colbert, Robert J. Patterson, and Aida Levy-Hussen
The Psychic Hold of Slavery
Legacies in American Expressive Culture
Edited by Soyica Diggs Colbert, Robert J. Patterson, and Aida Levy-Hussen
