Description
Book SynopsisArgues that from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, black transatlantic entertainers often transformed the alienating conditions of social and political marginalization into modes of self-actualization through performance
Trade Review“Daphne A. Brooks has developed a truly wonderful way of matching up odd couples, such as Ada Isaacs Menken and Sojourner Truth, and finding the kinship marks of ‘overlapping diasporas’ in their improbable but richly informative union.”—Joseph Roach, author of
Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance“Daphne A. Brooks is a brilliant, creative, and original thinker. Because Brooks so adeptly crosses the disciplinary boundaries of fields as diverse as performance studies, nineteenth-century American literature, and black studies,
Bodies in Dissent is an extraordinary model of interdisciplinary scholarship. Brooks’s original archival work coupled with her engagement with recent scholarship in cultural studies and studies of the black Atlantic provides us with a beautifully written exploration and theory of black performance practices.”—Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of
If You Can’t Be Free, Be A Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday “Most powerful and original in [Brooks’s] study is her emphasis on Victorian spectacular culture: spiritualism, mesmerism and magic, and its influence on expressive and literary forms. Brooks’ wide-ranging choice of texts and subjects and her unexpected juxtapositions give her analysis a blessedly nonlinear rhythm.” -- Jayna Brown * TDR: The Drama Review *
“Vividly detailed and rewarding in its complexity,
Bodies in Dissent travels between the cultural landscape of the antebellum and post-Reconstruction United States and the British stage to make a strong case for African American spectacle as a means of achieving freedom in the transatlantic world.” -- Lori Harrison-Kahan * Modern Drama *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements ix
1. Our Bodies, Our/Selves 14
Racial Phantasmagoria and Cultural Struggle 2. The Escape Artist 66
Henry Box Brown, Black Abolitionist Performance, and Moving Panoramas of Slavery 3. “The Deeds Done in My Body” 131
Performance, Black(ened) Women, and Adah Isaacs Menken in the Racial Imaginary 4. Alien/Nation 207
Re-Imagining the Black Body (Politic) in Williams and Walker’s In Dahomey 5. Divas and Diasporic Consciousness 281
Song, Dance, and New Negro Womanhood in the Veil Epilogue 343
Theatre, Black Women, and Change Notes 349
Bibliography 417
Index 455
