| Description | This talk considers how theatre—like television and photography—was vital to the cultural and political fronts of the Civil Rights Movement. It explores how black artists and activists used theatre to stage a radical challenge to a violent racial project that I call black patience—a project that has historically delayed black freedom as a means of reinforcing anti-blackness and white supremacy. Mounting plays like Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, these cultural workers used theatre to demand “freedom now.” In exploring theatre’s intervention into the violent cultures of black patience, this talk foregrounds the centrality of race to theories of ephemerality and disappearance in performance studies scholarship. Julius Fleming, Jr. is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. Specializing in Afro-Diasporic literatures and cultures, he has particular interests in performance studies, black political culture, diaspora, and colonialism, especially where they intersect with race, gender, and sexuality. Fleming is the author of Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation (2022), published by New York University Press. This event is part of the Minoritarian Performance Research Cluster.
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