Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity historical fiction and the idea of the

and the idea of the nation-state itself as problems that must be transcended and key sites for a liberatory re-envisioning of struggle

This is a modern classic

Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother

A lyrical road trip through the Mississippi Delta

Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity historical fiction and the idea of thePerformance artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnsons provocative study examines how blackness is appropriated and performedtoward widely divergent endsboth within and outside African American culture. Appropriating Blackness develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identityavowed and disavowed, attractive and repellent, fixed and malleable. Drawing on performance theory, queer studies, literary