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Harvey Young. Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010. 259 pp. $80 cloth/$29.95 paper.
Black studies has always been an interdisciplinary enterprise, and in recent decades, black performance theory has flourished within it. Gaining momentum as a respected set of methodologies, black performance theory attends to the meaningmaking power not only of words, but also of social practices and rituals as well as gestures, tones of voice, and so forth. Employing tools from performance studies, theater historiography, and literary criticism, it accounts for the influence of "blackness" throughout modernity. Harvey Young's Embodying Black Experience contributes to black performance theory in ways that demonstrate the continued interpretive value of biography and autobiography.
Young begins, in chapter one, by identifying connections between his experiences and those of Frantz Fanon, whose presence inspired "Look, a Negro!" from a frightened child. Fanon famously explained the implications of his being hailed in this way, with racial difference treated as his most meaningful feature. Similarly, Young recalls taking a walk only to be assaulted with the label "Nigger." This experience resonated with the events of a year earlier, when Young was jailed for "Driving while Black" (2). Fanon's understanding of his experiences in Martinique and Young's discussion of racial profiling in the U. S. illustrate "phenomenal blackness" (2). In Western societies, the black body carries tremendous signifying power; it is often allowed to stand in for individuals, thus overshadowing the actual person. As Young puts it, "projections of the black body across recognizable African American bodies create similar embodied experiences" (15).
In other words, blacks can land in strikingly similar situations, even when...