In Bodies in Dissent Daphne A. Brooks argues that from the
mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, black transatlantic
activists, actors, singers, and other entertainers frequently
transformed the alienating conditions of social and political
marginalization into modes of self-actualization through performance.
Brooks considers the work of African American, Anglo, and racially
ambiguous performers in a range of popular entertainment, including
racial melodrama, spectacular theatre, moving panorama exhibitions,
Pan-Africanist musicals, Victorian magic shows, religious and secular
song, spiritualism, and dance. She describes how these entertainers
experimented with different ways of presenting their bodies in
public--through dress, movement, and theatrical technologies--to
defamiliarize the spectacle of "blackness" in the transatlantic
imaginary.
Brooks pieces together reviews, letters, playbills, fiction, and
biography in order to reconstruct not only the contexts of African
American performance but also the reception of the stagings of "bodily
insurgency" which she examines. Throughout the book, she juxtaposes
unlikely texts and entertainers in order to illuminate the complicated
transatlantic cultural landscape in which black performers intervened.
She places Adah Isaacs Menken, a star of spectacular theatre, next to
Sojourner Truth, showing how both used similar strategies of physical
gesture to complicate one-dimensional notions of race and gender. She
also considers Henry Box Brown's public re-enactments of his escape from
slavery, the Pan-Africanist discourse of Bert Williams's and George
Walker's musical In Dahomey (1902-04), and the relationship between
gender politics, performance, and New Negro activism in the fiction of
the novelist and playwright Pauline Hopkins and the postbellum stage
work of the cakewalk dancer and choreographer Aida Overton Walker.
Highlighting the integral connections between performance and the
construction of racial identities, Brooks provides a nuanced
understanding of the vitality, complexity, and influence of black
performance in the United States and throughout the black Atlantic.
