Collaborative Spirit-Writing and Performance in Everyday Black Lives

Collaborative Spirit-Writing and Performance in Everyday Black Lives is about the interconnectedness between collaboration, spirit, and writing. It is also about a dialogic engagement that draws upon shared lived experiences, hopes, and fears of two Black persons: male/female, straight/gay.

This book is structured around a series of textual performances, poems, plays, dialogues, calls and responses, and mediations that serve as claim, ground, warrant, qualifier, rebuttal, and backing in an argument about collaborative spirit-writing for social justice. Each entry provides evidence of encounters of possibility, collated between the authors, for ourselves, for readers, and society from a standpoint of individual and collective struggle. The entries in this Black performance diary are at times independent and interdependent, interspliced and interrogative, interanimating and interstitial. They build arguments about collaboration but always emanate from a place of discontent in a caste system, designed through slavery and maintained until today, that positions Black people in relation to white superiority, terror, and perpetual struggle.

With particular emphasis on the confluence of Race, Racism, Antiracism, Black Lives Matter, the Trump administration, and the Coronavirus pandemic, this book will appeal to students and scholars in Race studies, performance studies, and those who practice qualitative methods as a new way of seeking Black social justice.

Bryant Keith Alexander is a professor and Dean in the College of Communication and Fine Arts, and an Interim Dean in the School of Film and Television at Loyola Marymount University, USA. He is author or co-editor of five previous books.

Mary E. Weems is a poet, playwright, scholar, and author of 14 books including Blackeyed: Plays and Monologues, and five chapbooks. Weems was awarded a 2015 Cleveland Arts Prize for her full-length drama MEAT and has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Weems may be reached at www.maryeweems.org.