Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity

Considering how the politics of authentic identity are appropriated, Johnson looks at six specific sites of performed blackness: Marlon Riggs’s influential documentary Black Is…Black Ain’t ; nationalist writings by Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver and comedic routines by Eddie Murphy, David Alan Grier, and Damon Wayans; the vernacular of black gay culture; an oral history of a domestic worker in the South; gospel music as performed by a white Australian choir; and students in a performance studies classroom. By exploring the divergent aims and effects of these performances - which range from resisting racism, sexism, and homophobia to excluding sexual dissidents from the black community - Johnson deftly analyzes the multiple significations of blackness and their myriad political implications. His reflexive account considers his own complicity, as ethnographer and teacher, in authenticating narratives of blackness.