Black Movements

SOYICA DIGGS COLBERT is an associate professor of African American studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She is the coeditor of The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture (Rutgers University Press).

• Acknowledgments  Introduction: Webs of Affiliation1 Flying Africans in Spaceships2 Entrapping and Ensnaring Entanglements3 Prophesying in Octavia Butler’s Parable Series4 MarchingEpilogue: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”: Locating the Future of Black Studies  NotesBibliographyIndex

"Colbert engages with cultural narratives that cross disciplinary boundaries; Black Movements will influence the field because it offers a unique way to think about processes and products of black artistic thought." - Anita Gonzalez (University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and co-author of Black Performance Theory) "With rigor and creativity, Soyica Diggs Colbert weaves together debates in performance studies, black studies, and American studies. Black Movements offers a new way to think about race, time, history, and performance in the contemporary moment and will have a lasting influence." - Shane Vogel (author of The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance) "It is a significant book, one that should be read alongside the scholarship of Saidiya Hartman, Daphne Brooks, Amber Jamilla Musser and other black feminist thinkers. Like BeyoncÉ reflecting back on Josephine Baker, Black Movements’s looks to the legacies of black performance in order to imagine and build black futures." (Journal of American Drama and Theatre) "Colbert’s 2017 book is especially exigent because it challenges the fixity of black death in a contemporary moment where black life is continuously expected to end abruptly. Whether this anticipation comes from video circulations of encounters with police or the Sate’s neglect of a predominantly black city’s contaminated water system, Colbert challenges this anticipated permanence to black death in Black Movements via analyses of literature, popular culture, and history. In doing so, she presents freedom as a multimodal phenomenon – through performance, film, literature, music, and prophecy." (Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal)