Black Patience : : Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation / / Julius B. Fleming Jr.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE Arts 2022
• VerfasserIn: Fleming Jr., Julius B.,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Performance and American Cultures
• Physical Description: 1 online resource :; 12 b/w illustrations

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 wait—in the holds of slave ships and on auction blocks, in segregated bus stops and schoolyards—for their long-deferred liberation. In Black Patience, Julius B. Fleming Jr. argues that, during the Civil Rights Movement, Black artists and activists used theater to energize this radical refusal to wait. Participating in a vibrant culture of embodied political performance that ranged from marches and sit-ins to jail-ins and speeches, these artists turned to theater to unsettle a violent racial project that Fleming refers to as “Black patience.” Inviting the likes of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Douglas Turner Ward, Duke Ellington, and Oscar Brown Jr. to the stage, Black Patience illuminates how Black artists and activists of the Civil Rights era used theater to expose, critique, and repurpose structures of white supremacy. In this bold rethinking of the Civil Rights Movement, Fleming contends that Black theatrical performance was a vital technology of civil rights activism, and a crucial site of Black artistic and cultural production.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: Impatient to Be Free -- 1. One Hundred Years Later: The Unfinished Project of Emancipation -- 2. Black Time, Black Geography: The Free Southern Theater -- 3. Black Queer Time and the Erotics of the Civil Rights Body -- 4. Picturing White Impatience: Theatre and Visual Culture 181 -- 5. Lunch Counters, Prisons, and the Radical Potential of Black Patience -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index -- About the Author