Understanding Blackness through Performance illuminates the field of black performance scholarship by focusing an international lens on ethnic cultural phenomena. The project minimizes its analysis of stage and concert performance and, instead, uses blackness as a theoretical lens for discussions about identity formations across disciplines. The volume's subtitle, Contemporary Arts and the Representation of Identity, supports the editors' interests in utilizing contemporary arts, broadly defined, as a springboard for discussion of representations. All three of the editors teach in European American Studies departments and, consequently, the artists and theorists they illuminate span language boundaries and national borders.

The contributing authors explore how issues of class, gender, and sexuality impact articulations of blackness. Performance and film aesthetics provide springboards for some authors' discussions of shifting representations of black identities, whereas other authors deconstruct popular music (in particular, hip-hop), complicating prevailing perceptions of the genre as a way of inscribing blackness. Several of the authors theorize queerness in art and performance practice, offering new perspectives on traditional art forms. The volume is divided into four parts loosely representing differing approaches to theorizing identity.

Part I, “Being Black, Black Embodying: The Power of Auto-ethnography,” discusses how embodiment and auto-ethnography inform the study of black subjects. Myron Beasley tracks a theoretical biography of his self-development as a scholar and the (dis)narratives he encounters as he comes to realize how public performance of his own identity situates him. Toniesha L. Taylor offers a series of open questions recounting memories of her early encounters with drag performance. Finally, Gayle Baldwin recognizes both her dislocation and her queer commonality with curious bodies when she immerses herself as a white ethnographer within the black drag community of Newark, New Jersey. Each of the essays in this part situates the scholar as a cocreator in the ethnographic experience.

Signifiers provide a theoretical model for Part II of the book, “Shattered Frames and the Onlooker: Strategies and Significations.” This part most directly addresses live performance practice by examining how genre frames interact with artist intentions. For example, Zakiya R. Adair, writing about transgressive black women, turns fresh eyes toward the careers of Josephine Baker and Adelaide Hall. She explains how vaudeville allowed black women to escape from oppression through liberating performances on transatlantic stages. The essay is an engaging read, but it offers few new theoretical paradigms. Vanina Géré, however, provides an in-depth and nuanced analysis of Kara Walker's work that breaks new ground in its reconsideration of multiple critical frames for this visual artist's body of work. Géré illuminates the rationale behind Walker's visual choices, exploring how her work transforms imagery, viewers, and the gaze. Two essays in Part II comment on black film and its ability to alter temporal and spatial frames for dissecting blackness. Simon Dickel examines postblack expressivity in black Mumblecore films, yet I was unclear about how his limited discussions of postblack aesthetics intended to connect his three diverse case studies. However, Anne Crémieux, one of the book's three editors, writes a fine essay about Lee Daniel's adaptation of Sapphire's novel Push into the film Precious, looking at networks of desire constructed around the central character of both stories. She writes that “the screen functions as a mirror for the spectator to identify with the camera as an omnipotent ego” (126) and then demonstrates how the camera transforms the gaze of negativity into a positive transformation away from self-hatred. Both the book and the film artfully present the central character's misplaced desires as a quest for psychological survival.

Part III, “Through Performance: Desire and the Black Subject,” opens up dialogues about queer narratives. Rinaldo Walcott writes about death, asserting, “black people die differently” (143). I found his argument hauntingly convincing as he explains how blackness can be defined by slavery and HIV/AIDS epidemics that bring an undercurrent of death to black lives in the present. Walcott specifically examines homopoetic death tropes in Marlon Riggs's films and the forensics of black bodies in the photography of Édouard Glissant. Although the case studies wander and discussion of the artists' work is not fully developed, the project's thesis is strong, and the exploration of visual images as a new embodiment of death is enticing. Mae G. Henderson explores the black butt in an essay that builds upon previous writings on this topic by such scholars as Brenda Dixon Gottschild. She adds to the discourse by describing the way in which video vixens perform a commoditized butt within hip-hop culture. Henderson writes that scholars “must bear witness to the misperformance of the video vixen and to the history imprinted on black female bodily performance” (174). This well written and thoughtful essay brings excellent historical and analytical scholarship to butt poetics. Part III ends with Stephany Spaulding writing about hip-hop as a queer borderland genre that reifies a center built on white mainstream culture.

Part IV of the book, “Shifting Paradigms of Identity,” begins with James Smalls's informative essay about homoeroticism in Harlem Renaissance art, which explores the aesthetics of the New Negro movement through the work of Richmond Barthé. His enlightening discussion of Barthé's negotiation of queer identity within the context of African classicist aesthetics breaks new ground. Next, Kristin Leigh Moriah looks at postsoul and postblackness through the lens of the protagonist of I Am Not Sidney Poitier, arguing that Percival Everett's novel “establishes a dialectic between the past and the present, between black politics and the representation of blackness” (234). The last essay of the volume, by Xavier Lemoine, considers Anna Deveare Smith's ability to inhabit liminal spaces in her performance works. Her mirroring of identity rearranges the embodiment of hybridity.

Overall, essays in Understanding Blackness through Performance shift paradigms for identity, desire, and representation by turning a theoretical lens to performance, loosely defined. The book effectively demonstrates “representational practices that have fleshed out political struggles” (1).