In Bodies in Dissent Daphne A. Brooks argues that from the
mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, black transatlantic
activists, actors, singers, and other entertainers frequently
transformed the alienating conditions of social and political
marginalization into modes of self-actualization through
performance. Brooks considers the work of African American, Anglo,
and racially ambiguous performers in a range of popular
entertainment, including racial melodrama, spectacular theatre,
moving panorama exhibitions, Pan-Africanist musicals, Victorian
magic shows, religious and secular song, spiritualism, and dance.
She describes how these entertainers experimented with different
ways of presenting their bodies in public-through dress, movement,
and theatrical technologies-to defamiliarize the spectacle of
"blackness" in the transatlantic imaginary.Brooks pieces together
reviews, letters, playbills, fiction, and biography in order to
reconstruct not only the contexts of African American performance
but also the reception of the stagings of "bodily insurgency" which
she examines. Throughout the book, she juxtaposes unlikely texts
and entertainers in order to illuminate the complicated
transatlantic cultural landscape in which black performers
intervened. She places Adah Isaacs Menken, a star of spectacular
theatre, next to Sojourner Truth, showing how both used similar
strategies of physical gesture to complicate one-dimensional
notions of race and gender. She also considers Henry Box Brown's
public re-enactments of his escape from slavery, the Pan-Africanist
discourse of Bert Williams's and George Walker's musical In Dahomey
(1902-04), and the relationship between gender politics,
performance, and New Negro activism in the fiction of the novelist
and playwright Pauline Hopkins and the postbellum stage work of the
cakewalk dancer and choreographer Aida Overton Walker. Highlighting
the integral connections between performance and the construction
of racial identities, Brooks provides a nuanced understanding of
the vitality, complexity, and influence of black performance in the
United States and throughout the black Atlantic.
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