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*
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