Presenting an innovative approach to performance studies and literary history, Soyica Colbert argues for the centrality of black performance traditions to African American literature, including preaching, dancing, blues and gospel, and theatre itself, showing how these performance traditions create the'performative ground' of African American literary texts. Across a century of literary production using the physical space of the theatre and the discursive space of the page, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, August Wilson and others deploy performances to re-situate black people in time and space. The study examines African American plays past and present, including A Raisin in the Sun, Blues for Mister Charlie and Joe Turner's Come and Gone, demonstrating how African American dramatists stage black performances in their plays as acts of recuperation and restoration, creating sites that have the potential to repair the damage caused by slavery and its aftermath.

"Soyica Colbert's exciting new book, The African American Theatrical Body, celebrates as it insightfully explores the power of African American drama. While foregrounding the space and place of drama within the black literary canon, Colbert compellingly argues that black plays and performance have the potential not simply to reproduce but to repair and even to revise history. In making her case, Colbert analyzes seminal texts of African American drama and theater, but also notably turns to earlier African American dramas that have received far too little critical attention. This is a book of amazing historical scope and impressive critical imagination."
-Harry J. Elam, Jr., Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University

"In this bold and rigorous study, Soyica Colbert reveals the crucial reparative work of African American drama as a dynamic, collaborative site for responding to legacies of historical and material trauma. Through a series of lively and illuminating readings of works by Hansberry, Hurston and Hughes as well as Du Bois, Baldwin, Baraka, Wilson, and Parks, The African American Theatrical Body travels across a century of black performance in order to show how, time and again, black theater actively and radically manages and re-imagines space, time and movement for African American communities."
-Daphne A. Brooks, Professor of English & African American Studies, Princeton University

Book Description
Soyica Colbert explores the history and reception of black performance traditions, including preaching, dancing, blues and gospel, and theatre itself. Examining the works of a wide range of twentieth-century dramatists, the study shows how the African American experience is portrayed on stage and how this interpretation has changed over time.