Performance, Art, and Politics in the African Diaspora

This book examines necropolitics and performance art, with a particular focus on the black body and the African diaspora. In this book, Myron M. Beasley situates artists as cultural workers and theorists who illuminate the political linkages between their own and others' specific locales. The focus is an interrogation of the political systems that dictate and determine the value of lives (and decide which lives matter) through a lens of performance and art. Beasley highlights how the performances of rupture, which are of artistic, and historical significance, reveal both strategies of survival and promises of possibility. Artists and curators examined include Jelili Atiku, Giscard Bouchotte, Nona Faustine, Vanessa German, Simone Leigh, Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Ebony G. Patterson, and Dianne Smith. The volume is an ideal research and reference book for students and scholars of Contemporary Art, African Studies, and Performance Theory.

Myron M. Beasley is Associate Professor of American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bates College.

1. Performance, Death, Politics 2. Haiti Is Open for Dreaming/Haiti Is Open for Business: Curating Périféeriques against Precarity 3. 9 of 219/A Carnival of Caskets 4. Public Mourning/Performance as Life 5. Geographies of Death Wearing White Shoes 6. On Rituals of Death 7. Harlem/Waste, Death, and Newly Assigned Value 8. The Anti-Museum