Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left

Malik Gaines is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and a member of the performance group My Barbarian.

"Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left provides an impressive account of embodied tactics, affects, and experiments that launched provisional challenges to hegemonic systems of order and charted energetic paths for future radical acts to follow. Constructing a genealogy that defies generic, national, and gendered bounds, Gaines supplies black performance studies with an expansive and heterogeneous approach to the history of radicalism, to performance, and to blackness itself." - The Drama Review "Every reader interested in the sexual and revolutionary politics of black feminist and queer performance needs to read Malik Gaines's Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left. This examination of 1960s music, theater, film, and experimental performance scenes is detail-rich, sophisticated, and sharp. One emerges from this text inspired while we must look to the margins to find these black, queer, and feminist artists who have navigated difficult revolutionary and post-revolutionary waters, in moving toward them we move in the direction that the left needs to go." - Jennifer Doyle, author of Hold It against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art "Malik Gaines's artistry and intellection is so important to me that I can scarcely remember a time now when both didn't influence my own. Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left is alive with what is essential to Gaines's way of seeing and thinking: politics, race, sexuality, and the theater of being. An important contribution on any number of levels, including man's further understanding of man, with and without masks. A wonderful achievement." - Hilton Als, Pulitzer Prize Winner for Criticism and theater critic for the New Yorker "Malik Gaines's position as both a practitioner and a scholar lend a unique depth to this study... reveals a striking sensitivity to the subtle frequencies on which black performance operates and is an important addition to the expanding black performance studies canon." (The Journal of American Drama and Theatre) "Rhetorically and structurally, this [book] provides a fascinating coda. Histories and theatrical legacies of black expressivity ... do not exist solely on the page or in the brick-and-mortar archive but are embodied and reexamined through live performance." (PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art)