Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation by Julius B. Fleming Jr

Abstract

Reviewed by: Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation by Julius B. Fleming Jr Mary Rizzo Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. By Julius B. Fleming Jr. Performance and American Cultures. (New York: New York University Press, 2022. Pp. [vi], 301. Paper, $29.00, ISBN 978-1-4798-0684-3; cloth, $89.00, ISBN 978-1-4798-0682-9.) What was the affective register of the civil rights movement? From the joyful singing of freedom songs to the palpable anger of Anne Moody’s memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), civil rights activists felt their movement as much as they intellectualized or strategized about it. In the ambitious and generative Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation, Julius B. Fleming Jr. asserts that scholars have ignored a key affect of the civil rights movement—patience. As he argues, historically when Black Americans have been told to be patient—defined as bearing suffering with equanimity—it has supported white supremacy. Time becomes a key framework through which to understand a movement defined by competing calls for “freedom now” and, as Nina Simone contemptuously sang, “go slow” (pp. 9, 114). Fleming suggests that we can apprehend the workings of Black patience through Black performance, particularly the time-based medium of theater. Focusing on the “‘classical’ phase” of the civil rights movement (1954–1965), he suggests that “black theatre in the Civil Rights Movement forwarded and energized the Black Radical Tradition—not by attaching itself to communism per se, but by working to disassemble the modern structures of racial time and racial affect that energize the violent cultures of black patience” (pp. 22, 24). Through analysis of theater and performance in the civil rights movement, we see not only the functioning of Black patience but also the depiction of its other, a “fugitive affect” that “strain[s] against the affective protocols of black patience” (p. 33). Fleming examines these ideas through chapters on famous and forgotten cultural productions. Chapter 1 focuses on the little-remembered centennial [End Page 389] commemoration of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963, which included a revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun, an exhibition in Chicago, and a performance of a musical drama by Duke Ellington. The temporal and geographic meanings of the Free Southern Theater’s performances throughout the rural South are the subject of chapter 2. Amiri Baraka’s “black queer trilogy” of plays is the core of the next chapter, which examines the meaning of queerness and an eroticized Black body in the movement (p. 171). Chapter 4 turns to the performance of fugitive affect in Black plays that center “white impatience” rather than Black patience (p. 183). The book concludes with a chapter that parallels the public civil rights performances of sit-ins and jail-ins with theater pieces that depict these movement tactics on stage, a kind of doubled performance. Creating a new framework to understand the classical phase of the civil rights movement is no easy task given the number of published books on the topic. However, through his focus on temporality and the links between time and affect—patience is, definitionally, about time—Fleming has done just that. Black patience is a tool of racial oppression by forever putting freedom in the future (Fleming offers a critique of Afro-futurism as counterintuitively functioning similarly). His work urges historians to think about time beyond our usual mantra of change over time to consider how time structured how activists saw themselves and their movement. Some historians may be troubled by Fleming’s definition of radicalism. While scholars like Robin D. G. Kelley, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, and Peniel E. Joseph argue that radicalism in the movement was related to labor organizing and leftist political movements, Fleming sees radicalism in theatrical and other performances that “fostered different ways of seeing, feeling, and ultimately of being black, posing a formidable challenge to the violent enterprise of black patience” (p. 24). There is little discussion here of the direct outcomes of these performances on policy. Instead, the emphasis is on how performance reveals counterhegemonic ideas within the Black artistic community...