Race and Performance After Repetition

Soyica Diggs Colbert is Idol Family Professor of the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown University and author of Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics.Douglas A. Jones Jr. is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University and author of The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North.Shane Vogel is Ruth N. Halls Professor of English at Indiana University and author of Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze.

“Offering a groundbreaking take on one of the most central premises of performance studies, this innovative volume advances theoretical and interpretive articulations of time that expand upon and challenge long-held assumptions about performance as repetition. It significantly expands performance theory and promises to animate conversations about performance, race, and time going forward. This collection is truly a breath of fresh air.” - Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, coeditor of (Blacktino Queer Performance) “‘What time is it?!’ Race and Performance after Repetition offers a pathbreaking and long overdue intervention in performance studies by posing this sly and urgent question from a multiplicity of critical vantage points. This brilliant and inspired collection of essays unsettles the very foundations of the field by tracing, interrogating, and ultimately questioning the dominant logic of repetition as a foundational theoretical axiom in performance studies scholarship by way of calling attention to the difference that race makes. As this anthology demonstrates, the material historical conditions of race demand a wider, deeper, and more robust critical lexicon that moves beyond the grammar of temporal repetition. It is a volume that heralds new times in the field.” - Daphne A. Brooks, author of (Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910) “Race and Performance After Repetition is worth reading from cover to cover, both for the engaging and diverse methodologies on offer and for its overarching interest in what scholars of performance studies miss if they adhere too closely to the conventions of the field.” - Christina Knight (American Literary History) “The new collection Race and Performance After Repetition moves several fields forward, among them theatre, dance, and performance studies, Black studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and American studies. That it does so is a testament to the richness and interdisciplinarity of the animating impulse behind the collection, the thought of JosÉ Esteban MuÑoz.” - Ariel Nereson (Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism) “Colbert, Jones, and Vogel have assembled a truly excellent collection of new work . . . of some of the most exciting performance theorists working in the field today. . . . The editors and contributors alike have collectively produced something magnificent.” - Takeo Rivera (Modern Drama) “As a collection [Race and Performance after Repetition] pushes on how repetition takes shape; it offers enlightening albeit disparate interventions in thinking about how race, time and performance produce meaning as an ensemble. . . . I finished the book and wanted to start it again.” - Sean Metzger (Performance Research)

• Acknowledgments  viiIntroduction: Tidying Up after Repetition / Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., and Shane Vogel  1Part I. Toggling Time: Metatheaters of Race1. So Far Down You Can't See the Light: Afro-Fabulation in Branden Jacob-Jenkins's An Octoroon /  Tavia Nyong'o  292. The Performance and Politics of Concurrent Temporalities in George C. Wolfe's Shuffle Along / Catherine M. Young  463. A Sonic Treatise of Futurity: Universes' Party People / Patricia Herrera  71Part II. Choreo-Chronographies4. Joe Louis's Utopic Glitch / Tina Post  1035. Sorrow's Swing / Jasmine Johnson  1276. Parabolic Moves: Time, Narrative, and Difference in New Circus / Katherine Zien  1427. Choreographing Time Travel: Rethinking Ritual through Korean Diasporic Performance / Elizabeth W. Son  173Part III. Temporal (Im)mobilities: Dwelling Out of Time8. Carceral Space-Times and The House That Herman Built / Nicholas Fesette  1999. Performance Interventions: Natality and Carceral Feminism in Contemporary India / Jisha Menon  22010. Whitnessing Queer Flights: JosuÉ Azor's Lougawou Images and Antihomosexual Unrest in Haiti / Mario Lamothe  24211. The Body Is Never Given, nor Do We Actually See It / Joshua Chambers-Letson  270Bibliography  293Contributors  317Index  321