Black Patience

Abstract

Black Patience reconsiders the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of black theatre. It argues that black theatrical performance—like television and photography—was a vital technology of civil rights activism, and a crucial site of black artistic and cultural production. More specifically, it demonstrates how black artists and activists used theatrical performance to unsettle a violent racial project that this book refers to as black patience: a historical regulation of black time and black affect through the performance of waiting and long-suffering. From slave castles to the hold of the slave ship, from the auction block to commands to “go slow” in fighting segregation, black patience has aimed to deny black freedom, to delay black citizenship, and to cement the uneven distributions of power at the heart of modernity’s racial order. During the Civil Rights Movement, however, black people’s demands for “freedom now” posed a radical challenge to black patience. Theatre was central to these efforts. Analyzing a largely underexplored, transnational archive of black theatre, this books shows how artists and activists like James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Douglas Turner Ward, the Free Southern Theater, Alice Childress, Oscar Brown Jr., and Paul Carter Harrison used theatre to stage innovative aesthetic and political experiments that challenged and redeployed the violent cultures of black patience. Ultimately, Black Patience charts a new cultural and political history of the Civil Rights Movement, and provides new routes to perennial questions about race, gender, sexuality, performance, politics, and the making of modernity.