Bodies in Dissent

“Bodies in Dissent offers a complex, fascinating, and theoretically rich account of how African Americans used performance strategies to construct resistant bodies and identities during slavery and in the years following. . . . This broadly interdisciplinary study draws on performance theory, feminist theory, literature, and the history of the theater. . . . Brooks provides a theoretical scaffolding that is sensitive and nuanced. Her approach is particularly interesting when she is examining the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and other categories of identity. In fact, the more complex the performance, the better Brooks’s reading.” - Alison Piepmeier, Legacy

“A very rich, meticulously researched and carefully detailed analysis of the lives and times of her chosen subjects. . . . Placing performance within the politics of the day, the corporeal within the cultural inscriptions of gendered and racialised bodies, and complex texts within equally complex contexts, Bodies in Dissent is a fine example of cultural analysis at its most worthy and its most compelling.” - Vivian Muller, M/C Reviews

“[A]n extraordinarily erudite work that will make a lasting contribution to American theatre scholarship.” - Heather S. Nathans, Theatre History Studies

“[Brooks makes] unique and engaging insights . . . and Bodies in Dissent is a considerable contribution to the fields of performance and African American studies.” - Sinead Moynihan, Journal of American Studies

“[T]he case studies in Brooks’ Bodies in Dissent articulate an historically and culturally grounded case for specific and purposeful (black) theatricalities against formalist abstraction and modernist appropriation.” - Ric Knowles, South Central Review

“Brooks . . . shows how the once enslaved recast the future self through performance, putting together the shattered pieces of a yesterday edging toward wholeness. In connecting a puzzle of driven, sometimes tragic personalities using the interstices of shifting times to link to the future, Brooks produces a work layered in surprising insights and ancestries.” - Barbara Lewis, Theatre Survey

“Most powerful and original in [Brooks’s] study is her emphasis on Victorian spectacular culture: spiritualism, mesmerism and magic, and its influence on expressive and literary forms. Brooks’ wide-ranging choice of texts and subjects and her unexpected juxtapositions give her analysis a blessedly nonlinear rhythm.” - Jayna Brown, TDR: The Drama Review

“This book will be an instant classic in the field of performance studies. . . . Essential.” - G.R. Butters Jr., Choice

“Vividly detailed and rewarding in its complexity, Bodies in Dissent travels between the cultural landscape of the antebellum and post-Reconstruction United States and the British stage to make a strong case for African American spectacle as a means of achieving freedom in the transatlantic world.” - Lori Harrison-Kahan, Modern Drama

“Daphne A. Brooks has developed a truly wonderful way of matching up odd couples, such as Ada Isaacs Menken and Sojourner Truth, and finding the kinship marks of ‘overlapping diasporas’ in their improbable but richly informative union.” - Joseph Roach, author of Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance

“Daphne A. Brooks is a brilliant, creative, and original thinker. Because Brooks so adeptly crosses the disciplinary boundaries of fields as diverse as performance studies, nineteenth-century American literature, and black studies, Bodies in Dissent is an extraordinary model of interdisciplinary scholarship. Brooks’s original archival work coupled with her engagement with recent scholarship in cultural studies and studies of the black Atlantic provides us with a beautifully written exploration and theory of black performance practices.” - Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of If You Can’t Be Free, Be A Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday