Description
Book Synopsis2024 College Language Association Book Award Winner
2023 Hooks National Book Award Winner (Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change)
Honorable Mention, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present 2023 Book Prize
Honorable Mention, 2023 John W. Frick Book Award (American Theatre and Drama Society)
Finalist, 2022 George Freedley Memorial Award of the Theatre Library Association.
Finalist, Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History (ASTR)
Finalist, ATHE Outstanding Book Award
A bold rethinking of the Civil Rights Movement through the lens of Black theater
Freedom, Now! This rallying cry became the most iconic phrase of the Civil Rights Movement, challenging the persistent command that Black people waitin the holds of slave ships and on auction blocks, in segregated bus stops and schoolyardsfor their long-deferred liberation.
In Black Patience, Julius B. Fleming Jr.
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Demonstrates how temporality as an analytic helps us understand the dynamics of antiblack racism within a political economy of black subjugation. By uncovering little-known plays or unexpected black spaces where plays were produced, Julius Fleming expands the Civil Rights Movement’s literary canon and indexes the multiple registers of ‘patience’ mobilized by blacks and whites within white supremacy and black resistance. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, Black Patience is a tour de force. * E. Patrick Johnson, author of Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women *
Offers crucial insight into debates about black political action by carefully and convincingly locating progress in the ephemerality of the now. Adding a distinctive and powerful addition to the history and critical understanding of the Civil Rights Movement, Julius Fleming details the impact of direct action in the present to establish the importance of black theatre to black freedom. * Soyica Diggs Colbert, Georgetown University *
Creating a new framework to understand the classical phase of the civil rights movement is no easy task given the number of published books on the topic. However, through his focus on temporality and the links between time and affect—patience is, definitionally, about time—Fleming has done just that. * Journal of Southern History *
Fleming successfully accomplishes what he describes as a key purpose of the book: “to map a new cultural and political history of the Civil Rights Movement” (41). * American Literary History *
