Performing Blackness

<p><em>Performing Blackness</em> offers a challenging interpretation of black cultural expression since the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Exploring drama, music, poetry, sermons, and criticism, Benston offers an exciting meditation on modern black performance's role in realising African-American aspirations for autonomy and authority.<br> Artists covered include:<br> * John Coltrane<br>* Ntozake Shange<br> * Ed Bullins<br> * Amiri Baraka<br> * Adrienne Kennedy<br> * Michael Harper.<br><em>Performing Blackness</em> is an exciting contribution to the ongoing debate about the vitality and importance of black culture.</p> Prologue 1. Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Drama and the Quest for Community 2. Blow into the Freezing Night: Expressive Agency in Coltrane and the Coltrane poem 3. Find the Self, Then Kill it: Scripts and Scores of Self-Enactment 4. I Was Myself Within the Circle: Vernacular and Critical Paradigms of Expressive Agency Epilogue