Understanding Blackness through Performance: Contemporary Arts and the Representation of Identity

International audience ; How does the performance of blackness reframe issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality? Resistance and redeployment strategies inform the world of black theatre, performance, and theory, generating a multiplicity of positions from an intersectional perspective. Here, the contributors look into representational practices in film, music, literature, sculpture, video, vaudeville, fashion, and theatre and explore how they have fleshed out political struggles, while recognizing that they have sometimes maintained the mechanisms of violence against blacks. These practices have opened up new territories that require scrutiny today.Contents :- Introduction. Black Beings, Black Embodyings: Notes on Contemporary Artistic Performances and their Cultural InterpretationsJean-Paul Rocchi (Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, France) with Anne Crémieux (Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre, France) and Xavier Lemoine (Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, France)Part I. Black Being, Black Embodying: the Power of Auto-ethnography- Each Taking Risk, Performing Self: Theorizing (Dis)NarrativesMyron Beasley (Bates College, USA)- Transformative Womanist Rhetorical Strategies: Contextualizing Discourse and the Performance of Black Bodies of DesireToniesha L. Taylor (Communication Prairie View A & M University, USA)- “Is Anybody Walkin’?”: the Black Body on the Runway as a Performance of the Politics of DesireGayle Baldwin (University of North Dakota, USA)Part II. Shattered Frames and the Onlooker: Strategies and Significations- Transgressive (Re)presentations: Black Women, Vaudeville and the Politics of Performance in Early Trans-Atlantic TheatreZakiya R. Adair (University of Missouri, USA)- Kara Walker’s War on Racism: Mining (Mis)Representations of Blackness Vanina Géré (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, France)- Between Mumblecore and Post-Black Aesthetics: Barry Jenkins’s Medicine for MelancholySimon Dickel (Ruhr-University, Germany)- From Book to Film: Desire in Precious (Lee Daniels, 2009), ...