Theatre Journal

“Repetition is a God term in performance theory” (7). So say Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., and Shane Vogel, the editors of Race and Performance after Repetition. Surveying the field’s most foundational theoretical frameworks—from Schechner on restored behavior to Schneider on reenactment, from [End Page 412] Derrida on iterability to Butler on performativity— these three performance scholars spend much of their introduction reminding readers of repetition’s hold on how we think about the volume’s titular categories. They lay bare “the field’s axiomatic notion that repetition is constitutive of the ontology of performance” (ibid.). But their aim in doing so is neither to double down on repetition nor to relegate repetition to the past such that some new God term might rise to prominence within racialized theatre and performance scholarship.

The editors pursue instead, as the volume’s title suggests, what comes “after” repetition. This “after” is not merely about “the supersession of something,” but also about that which follows “in the style of or in admiration of” something (15). The volume’s focus is on “performances whose temporal logistics operate beyond or adjacent to the dominant time signature of repetition, even when they still bear its influence” (ibid.). In this spirit, the volume’s introduction provides the field with alternative ways to grasp repetition, temporality, race, and performance. We are invited to consider insights from Gilles Deleuze, Amiri Baraka, Søren Kierkegaard, and Alice Rayner, the last of whom frames time as that which “puts attention on those things that matter most to care or concern” (5). This notion proves influential not just for the editors but among the book’s contributors as well. The result is a volume whose stated investment in racialized matters of time is inseparable from an understated investment in racialized matters of care. This, I argue, is what makes Race and Performance after Repetition so timely.

The body of the volume is separated into three sections. In the first, “Toggling Time: Metatheaters of Race,” Tavia Nyong’o, Catherine Young, and Patricia Herrera attend to temporality in three different works of contemporary Black Broadway and off-Broadway theatre. In the second, “Choreo-Chronographies,” the volume departs from the proscenium stage “in order to consider how gesture, dance, and movement can recalibrate the temporal narratives of racial subjection” (14). This section finds Tina Post turning to the archive for insight on blackness and boxing. It finds Jasmine Johnson writing on Black dance and mourning, Katherine Zien at the intersection of circus and cooking, and Elizabeth Son attending to anti-imperialist Korean diasporic performance. The final section of the volume, “Temporal (Im)mobilities: Dwelling Out of Time,” attends to what the editors call “the arrest of repetition” (14). Nicholas Fesette and Jisha Menon offer invaluable, anti-carceral approaches to performance studies scholarship; Mario Lamothe analyzes a photographic challenge to anti-homosexuality in Haiti; and Joshua Chambers-Letson meditates on Black (non)being as a sociogenic problem to be mitigated through performance in the present.

Readers may notice that the degree to which each of these contributions deals directly with the question of repetition varies. This, however, is less a weakness of the volume than it is a consequence of the way alternative racial-temporal concepts proliferate across it. Post, for example, in one of the collection’s strongest essays, uplifts the “utopic glitch” as a temporal category through which to understand how Joe Louis disrupted a system whose interpretive frames for Black performance could only toggle between a primitive past and a mechanical future (103). Herrera offers “the loop” as “a sonic-temporal strategy” through which the “poetic theater ensemble” universes summoned the radical energies of the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords Party in their musical Party People (71). Nyong’o, skillfully drawing on the psychoanalytic theorist Melanie Klein, theorizes “dark reparation” in relation to Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon in order...