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>> So my research primarily focuses
on African-American theater performance and culture.
My first book project is on Twentieth Century African-American theater and performance.
And in my current work, I'm working on a project that's more expansive so it spans
from the Nineteenth Century to the present and it's more --
it's transatlantic so it looks at performances in the Caribbean
and Africa, as well as in the United States.
The new book's title is The African-American Theatrical Body,
Performance Reception and the Stage.
I looked at how over the Twentieth Century,
African-American theater artists used different mechanisms to change the way
in which their audiences looked at block bodies on stages.
I think about how the authors used the stage to call into question some
of our presumptions about the black body.
So in a few of the chapters of the book, I looked at authors who are primarily not known
as playwrights, but who write plays and consider why they turn to plays and Du Bois is one
of these characters, one of the figures, W. E. B. Du Bois, he writes a pageant The Star
of Ethiopia and part of what he's invested in in turning to drama is thinking about how not only
to change the way in which we're looking at the people on stage but also incorporate people
in this theater into thinking about how they participate in certain types of gazes.
So it was something that preoccupied him for over a decade and something that he put a lot
of personal financial resources into staging.
And one of the reasons why Du Bois is so invested in the pageant as a form is
because he was preoccupied with recuperating black history and teaching other black folk
about their history and placing black people in history.
And so what's unique about Du Bois' pageant is that it's a transnational history
that he's really telling the history of the black world
and he poses it as a revolutionary history.
And then it also incorporated hundreds of black people.
So he not only -- black and white people
and so he not only was teaching the actors a certain history
but he was also performing this history for his audience.