Performative Intergenerational Dialogues of a Black Quartet: Qualitative Inquiries on Race, Gender, Sexualities, and Culture

Performative Intergenerational Dialogues of a Black Quartet promotes the importance of intergenerational Black dialogue as a collaborative spirit-making across race, genders, sexualities, and cultures to bridge time and space.

The authors enter this dialogue in a crisis moment: a crisis moment at the confluence of a pandemic, the national political transition of leadership in the United States, the necessary rise of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color activism―in the face of the continued murders of unarmed Black and queer people by police. And as each author mourns the loss of loved ones who have left us through illness, the contiguity of time, or murder, we all hold tight to each other and to memory as an act of keeping them alive in our hearts and actions, remembrance as an act of resistance so that the circle will be unbroken. But they also come together in the spirit of hope, the hope that bleeds the borders between generations of Black teacher-artist-scholars, the hope that we find in each other’s joy and laughter, and the hope that comes when we hear both stories of struggle and strife and stories of celebration and smile that lead to possibilities and potentialities of our collective being and becoming―as a people.

So, the authors offer stories of witness, resistance, and gettin’ ovah, stories that serve as a road map from Black history and heritage to a Black futurity that is mythic and imagined but that can also be actualized and embodied, now. This book will be of interest to scholars, students, and activists in a wide range of disciplines across the social sciences and performance studies.

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 coauthor of Still Hanging: Using Performance Texts to Deconstrict Racism and Collaborative Spirit-Writing and Performance in Everyday Black Lives.

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. She is coauthor of Still Hanging: Using Performance Texts to Deconstrict Racism and Collaborative Spirit-Writing and Performance in Everyday Black Lives. Weems may be reached at www.maryeweems.org.

Dominque C. Hill, PhD, is a creative and vulnerability guide whose scholarship interrogates Black embodiment with foci in Black girlhood, education, and performance. An artist-scholar, Hill is an assistant professor of Women’s Studies at Colgate University and is the coauthor of Who look at me?!: Shifting the Gaze of Education Through Blackness, Queerness, and the Body.

Durell M. Callier, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University. An artist-scholar, he researches and interrogates the lived experience of Black youth and the racialized queer dynamics of power within educative spaces. He is coauthor of Who look at me?!: Shifting the Gaze of Education Through Blackness, Queerness, and the Body.