Race and Performance After Repetition ed. by Soyica Diggs Colbert et al.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Race and Performance After Repetition ed. by Soyica Diggs Colbert et al. Ariel Nereson Race and Performance After Repetition. Edited by Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., and Shane Vogel. Duke University Press, 2020. Cloth $104.95, Paper $28.95. 344 pages. 34 illustrations. 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. The editors of the collection—Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., and Shane Vogel—first convened a Targeted Research Working Session in Muñoz's name at the 2016 American Society for Theatre Research conference. Race and Performance After Repetition testifies to the ongoing resonance of Muñoz's thought as well as the complexity, energy, and gracefulness of the thinking inspired by three years of these gatherings. Colbert, Jones, and Vogel do tremendous service to the field in their introduction, "Tidying Up After Repetition." I have taught this introduction in seminars on Black performance and historiography, and its offerings are many, including a primer on the centrality of the concept of temporality to theories of performance and the formation of performance studies as a discipline. In describing performance practices that cannot be accounted for by the "grammar of repetition" (4), including Simone Leigh's Free People's Medical Clinic (2014), the editors provide the key insight that we might understand performance "not only as restored behavior, but as behaved restoration" (5). In this understanding, we twice-behave (following Richard Schechner) not in order to repeat but to repair, a stepping aside of repetition that allows for greater nuance in discussion of race, performance, time, and representation. The editors usefully characterize repetition as a "time signature," and curate a collection of essays that answer the question, posed in Muñoz's terms, "what other time signatures organize minoritarian performance?" (15). The [End Page 109] introduction closes with a reading of Theaster Gates's ongoing Dorchester Projects and the artist's performance of sweeping—tidying up—therein. Their reading insists on the necessity for developing "a more nuanced lexicon" for apprehending time, race, and performance, one that does not exclude repetition, but neither does it take repetition as an a priori condition of performance's temporality (24). Refusing this condition leads the collection's authors down much needed paths for understanding minoritarian performance. Three sections comprise the collection: "Toggling Time: Metatheaters of Race," focused on the reimagining of performance genres and their histories; "Choreo-Chronographies," which centers movement beyond the proscenium and its play with temporality; and "Temporal (Im)mobilities: Dwelling Out of Time," a set of offerings on the liberatory potentialities of stillness, silence, and stasis. Space precludes detailed discussion of every author's chapter, each of which, if they appeared in another volume, would likely be the strongest essay in the collection. The first section reads three dramatic forms and the implications of live performance's play with time for genre formation. Tavia Nyong'o turns a critical and measured eye to melodrama in his analysis of Afro-fabulation and dark reparation in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's An Octoroon. Catherine M. Young investigates the concurrent temporalities of the Black musical (transtemporalities across times, gestational time, racial time, and the time signatures of tap dance) in the 2016 Shuffle Along. The section ends fittingly with Patricia Herrera's formulation of the loop in hip hop theatre as a "sonic-temporal strategy" (71) used by Latinx and Black performers and activists to articulate relationships with the historical past that disrupt hegemonic temporal logics in Universes' Party People (2016). Taken as a section, these chapters speak to one another in powerful ways as they demonstrate the necessity of enlarging our critical vocabulary of interpreting minoritarian performance in order to account for its complexities. In the second section, Tina Post's compelling chapter addresses the "glitch" in time performed by boxer Joe Louis's movement archive that resonates with the practices of Louis's contemporary, Earl "Snake Hips" Tucker. Jasmine Johnson also...