×


 x 

Shopping cart
Harvey Young - Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Theater: Theory/Text/Performance) - 9780472051113 - V9780472051113
Stock image for illustration purposes only - book cover, edition or condition may vary.

Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Theater: Theory/Text/Performance)

€ 45.65
FREE Delivery in Ireland
Description for Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Theater: Theory/Text/Performance) Paperback. Spotlights spectacular acts of racial violence--from police stops (racial profiling) to lynching campaigns--and shows how African American men and women have employed performance to respond to the intrusion of such events within their daily lives. Masterful Series: Theater: Theory/Text/Performance. Num Pages: 264 pages, 16 b&w illustrations. BIC Classification: 1KBB; AFKP; JFSL3. Category: (G) General (US: Trade); (P) Professional & Vocational; (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly. Dimension: 228 x 153 x 22. Weight in Grams: 430.

"Young's linkage between critical race theory, historical inquiry, and performance studies is a necessary intersection. Innovative, creative, and provocative."
---Davarian Baldwin, Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies, Trinity College

In 1901, George Ward, a lynching victim, was attacked, murdered, and dismembered by a mob of white men, women, and children. As his lifeless body burned in a fire, enterprising white youth cut off his toes and, later, his fingers and sold them as souvenirs. In Embodying Black Experience, Harvey Young masterfully blends biography, archival history, performance theory, and phenomenology to relay the experiences of black men and women who, like Ward, were profoundly affected by the spectacular intrusion of racial violence within their lives. Looking back over the past two hundred years---from the exhibition of boxer Tom Molineaux and Saartjie Baartman (the "Hottentot Venus") in 1810 to twenty-first century experiences of racial profiling and incarceration---Young chronicles a set of black experiences, or what he calls, "phenomenal blackness," that developed not only from the experience of abuse but also from a variety of performances of resistance that were devised to respond to the highly predictable and anticipated arrival of racial violence within a person's lifetime.

Embodying Black Experience pinpoints selected artistic and athletic performances---photography, boxing, theater/performance art, and museum display---as portals through which to gain access to the lived experiences of a variety of individuals. The photographs of Joseph Zealy, Richard Roberts, and Walker Evans; the boxing performances of Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali; the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks, Robbie McCauley, and Dael Orlandersmith; and the tragic performances of Bootjack McDaniels and James Cameron offer insight into the lives of black folk across two centuries and the ways that black artists, performers, and athletes challenged the racist (and racializing) assumptions of the societies in which they lived.

Blending humanistic and social science perspectives, Embodying Black Experience explains the ways in which societal ideas of "the black body," an imagined myth of blackness, get projected across the bodies of actual black folk and, in turn, render them targets of abuse. However, the emphasis on the performances of select artists and athletes also spotlights moments of resistance and, indeed, strength within these most harrowing settings.

Harvey Young is Associate Professor of Theatre, Performance Studies, and Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University.

A volume in the series Theater: Theory/Text/Performance

Product Details

Format
Paperback
Publication date
2010
Publisher
University of Michigan Press
Condition
New
Series
Theater: Theory/Text/Performance
Number of Pages
272
Place of Publication
Ann Arbor, United States
ISBN
9780472051113
SKU
V9780472051113
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-50

About Harvey Young
Harvey Young is Associate Professor of Theatre, Performance Studies, and Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University.

Reviews for Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Theater: Theory/Text/Performance)
“Embodying Black Experience is performance studies scholarship at its engaged and engaging best.”
Theatre Journal "Embodying Black Experience is performance studies scholarship at its engaged and engaging best." —Theatre Journal "Performance studies scholarship at its engaged and engaging best. Harvey Young’s book contributes valuable detailed local readings of several sites of academic debate… a very significant contribution to our understanding of the performance of race, the performance of memory, and the phenomenology of the body." —Theatre Journal
Ric Knowles
Theatre Journal
"Young provides an excellent rendering of the "black body" as screen for racializing projection, demonstrating how contemporary Americans "continue to share in the experiences of their ancestors who were viewed as 'other,' unjustly incarcerated, and subjected to limitless violence." —Choice, T. F. DeFrantz, Duke University (Highly Recommended)
T. F. DeFrantz
Choice
"Providing singularly fresh new readings of some of the ur-texts of African American studies ... Harvey Young’s Embodying Black Experience also forge[s] new ground by placing these works in conversation with offerings that have as yet garnered scant scholarly attention."
American Literature
Suzanne Schneider, Bryn Mawr College
American Literature
"The innovative approaches to the Agassiz daguerrotypes... speak to important points of similarity and difference in current studies of early African American photography." —American Studies
Tanya Sheehan
American Studies

Goodreads reviews for Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Theater: Theory/Text/Performance)


Subscribe to our newsletter

News on special offers, signed editions & more!