Performing Blackness Transversal diasporas criss-crossing the Atlantic

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Notes

¹The Emmett Till case was reopened in 2004. See Clenora Hudson-Weems's Emmet Till: The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movment (2000).

²There are several extremely important bus stories, in addition to the Parks example, for the development of democracy in the twentieth century and beyond. These stories include the original Freedom Rides of the 1960s (Greyhound treks made by multi-racial groups into the South to test (or who tested) the racial segregation on buses and at bus terminals), the use of Freedom Riders in Australia and South Africa, disability activists' interventions in the 1970s and 1980s demanding accessible public transportation and, in the name of rights for immigrants, the Migrant Worker Freedom Rides in 2003 (which occurred on the fortieth anniversary of Martin Luther King's famous speech ‘I Have a Dream’). From the cultural and political stories to stories collected about people's everyday lives, whether on the city bus or the Greyhound, buses have come to be a site for contesting and reinstating democracy as well as getting democracy to stay ‘on the move’.

³For more on the archive and the repertoire, see Diana Taylor's The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003). For more on memory transmitted through text and through the body, see Paul Connerton's How Societies Remember (1989).

⁴For more on the term ‘me, not me’, see Richard Schechner's Between Theater and Anthropology (1985).

⁵I explore this company's work at greater depth in relation to various approaches to listening in Hearing Difference. Here I focus on tracking performing Blackness.