Deploying the trope of “speaking in tongues” to theorize the multivocality of black women’s writing, based on the reconstruction of a fundamentally spiritual practice as critical concept, this book also enlists a second trope, “dancing diaspora,” to theorize the narrativity of black women’s dance, based on the notions of “performing testimony” and “critical witnessing.” Together, these tropes are meant to signify a tradition of black women writing and performing, a tradition privileging the preeminence of voice and narration, along with the roles of listening and witnessing. The book demonstra ... More

Deploying the trope of “speaking in tongues” to theorize the multivocality of black women’s writing, based on the reconstruction of a fundamentally spiritual practice as critical concept, this book also enlists a second trope, “dancing diaspora,” to theorize the narrativity of black women’s dance, based on the notions of “performing testimony” and “critical witnessing.” Together, these tropes are meant to signify a tradition of black women writing and performing, a tradition privileging the preeminence of voice and narration, along with the roles of listening and witnessing. The book demonstrates how the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Sherley Anne Williams, Gayl Jones, and Nella Larsen, along with the performances of Josephine Baker and the contemporary video dancer, work to deconstruct dominant and hegemonic traditions through such acts as disruption and revision, conjuration, narrative insurgency, parody, mimesis, witnessing, and “misperformance.” Central to the book’s critical vision is the notion that discourse and other signifying practices must work to dismantle the demarcation between speech and writing, the cultural and social, literature and performance. Its second critical presumption is that their complex subjectivity uniquely positions black women writers and performers to privilege and give contestatory, testimonial, and diasporic expression to difference and identity. The coda stages an imaginary meeting between Toni Morrison and Josephine Baker—writer and performer separated across time, space, and culture—meeting on common ground in the project of disrupting and dismantling dominant chains of signification by way of “speaking in tongues” and “dancing diaspora.”