Overview

Performing Female Blackness examines race, gender, and nation in Black life using critical race, feminist and performance studies methodologies. This book examines what private and public performances of female blackness reveal about race, gender, and nation and considers how Canada shapes these performances. Naila Keleta-Mae proposes that performance is part of the ontology of female blackness in the public and private spaces that constitute everyday life because people who are female and Black are constantly expected to perform fantasies - be it their own or, far more commonly, those insisted on by dominant culture. By exploring Black expressive culture in familial, literary, and performance settings, the author demonstrates how people who are read as female and Black in private and public settings, are figuratively on stage regardless of the cultural, political, or historical contexts in which they find themselves. Written in poetry, prose and journal-form and drawing from the author's own life and artistic works, Performing Female Blackness is ideal for scholars, educators, and students of race, gender, performance, and Black expressive culture.

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9781771124805

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"""What I love most about this book is that even as a non-Canadian I can see myself in it. I would argue that even other minoritized people can relate to the idea of having to 'perpetually perform'--to shift between being and being read by society. Like the best of DJs, Naila Keleta-Mae mixes and spins a deft, poetic, fluid, and moving collaged narrative of theory, lived experience, literary and performance analysis, and multiple performances to tell her own story. In the process, she also illustrates a diverse, global journey of female blackness borne out of the chattel slave trade.""--Rashida K. Braggs, Williams College, author of Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post-World War II Paris ""With elegant depth and breadth Naila Keleta-Mae brings together the most influential Black feminist thinkers as she masterfully adds her own distinctive and groundbreaking conceptualizations of performance, political economy, and metaphysics under past and present resonances of colonialism and chattel slavery. The insightful and theoretical depth of this book offers an elegant and absorbing exegesis on female blackness that is new, different, and profoundly relevant across multiple disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and fine arts. The author's conceptualization of 'perpetual performance' is brilliantly illuminated against machinations of modernity, forced labor, and advanced capitalism as well as the generative strategies of language, silence, and performance.""--D. Soyini Madison, Professor Emeritus, Northwestern University, author of Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance"

Author Information

Naila Keleta-Mae is an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo with expertise in race, gender, theatre and performance and research projects funded by SSHRC and CCA. She has commentated for the BBC, CBC, Business News Network, and The Canadian Press, among others, and written for The Globe and Mail, VICE and Today's Parent.

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