Appropriating blackness : performance and the politics of authenticity

E. Johnson

Performance artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnson's provocative study examines the various ways that blackness is appropriated and performed-toward widely divergent ends-both within and outside African American culture. Appropriating Blackness develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identity trope-avowed and disavowed, attractive and repellant, fixed and malleable. Drawing on performance theory, queer studies, literary analysis, film criticism, and ethnographic fieldwork, he describes how diverse constituencies persistently try to prescribe the boundaries of "authentic" blackness and how performance highlights the futility of such enterprises.