Description
Book SynopsisExamines the various ways that blackness is appropriated and performed - toward widely divergent ends - both within and outside African American culture. This title develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identity trope - avowed and disavowed, attractive and repellant, fixed and malleable.
Trade Review"With
Appropriating Blackness, E. Patrick Johnson has given us a book worthy of the breadth its title signals. It is written in an excellent and refreshingly clear prose style which sacrifices nothing in the way of complexity of the ideas being presented. Johnson makes his observations about the relatedness of performance and blackness more compelling with each successive case study."—Dwight A. McBride, coeditor of
Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Fiction"Appropriating Blackness is a wonderful study that makes important and timely contributions across many fields. E. Patrick Johnson is a skilled reader of texts and offers useful introductions to complex theories of race, sexuality, and culture.”—David Román, author of
Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDSTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction
"Blackness" and Authenticity: What's Performance Got to Do with It? 1
1. The Pot is Brewing: Marlon Riggs's
Black Is . . . Black Ain't 17
2. Manifest Faggotry: Queering Masculinity in African American Culture 48
3. Mother Knows Best: Blackness and Transgressive Domestic Space 76
4. "Nevah Had uh Cross Word": Mammy and the Trope of Black Womanhood 104
5. Sounds of Blackness Down Under: The Cafe of the Gate of Salvation 160
6. Performance and/as Pedagogy: Performing Blackness in the Classroom 219
Appendix A Mary Rhyne's Narrative 257
Appendix B Interview with Mrs. Smith 311
Notes 315
Bibliography 345
Index 361
