Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation

Dr. Julius Fleming visits the Segal Center to discuss his recent book, Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation, which argues that, during the Civil Rights Movement, Black artists and activists used theater to energize this radical refusal to wait. Participating in a vibrant culture of embodied political performance that ranged from marches and sit-ins to jail-ins and speeches, these artists turned to theater to unsettle a violent racial project that Fleming refers to as “Black patience.” This talk will be followed by a conversation with Hillary Miller.

To purchase the book, click here.

Biographies:

Julius Fleming, Jr. is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he also serves as Director of the English Honors Program. Specializing in Afro-Diasporic literatures and cultures, he has 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 (NYU Press, 2022), which won the Hooks National Book Award, received Honorable Mentions for both the John W. Frick and the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prizes, and is a Finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award and the Barnard Hewitt Award.

Hillary Miller teaches twentieth- and twenty-first-century dramatic literature and performance in the English Department at Queens College, City University of New York and is an affiliate faculty member in the Theatre and Performance doctoral program at the Graduate Center (CUNY). She has published essays and reviews on numerous topics related to theater post-World War II in the United States, including performance and urban space; racial, ethnic, and geographic inequalities in the arts; activist theater traditions; and the politics of producing. She is the author of Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York (Northwestern University Press, 2016) and Playwrights on Television: Conversations with Dramatists (Routledge, 2020).