Julius Fleming

In the process, he advances a methodological approach to black patience (and to other useful notions, including time and timing more generally) that should deeply inform scholarship in African American culture, political organizing, and performance. This essay is a feat of original research, syncretic analysis, and inventive theorization.”

The award is granted to ten “emerging faculty leaders who represent both research excellence and an extraordinary commitment to mentoring students and serving their campuses and professions,” said Stephanie J. Hull, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Julius has also received a second “Emerging Scholar” award from Comparative and International Education Society.

The CIES Emerging Scholar of the African Diaspora Award is given annually to exceptional scholars and artists whose work has positively impacted the educational, economic and artistic lives of African descendants across the African diaspora.

Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2023 John W. Frick Book Award by the American Theatre and Drama Society.

Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation is a Finalist for the 2023 Hooks National Book Award (Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change).

Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation is shortlisted for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present 2023 Book Prize.

“Freedom, Now!” This rallying cry became the most iconic phrase of the Civil Rights Movement, challenging the persistent command that Black people wait―in the holds of slave ships and on auction blocks, in segregated bus stops and schoolyards―for their long-deferred liberation.

In Black Patience, Julius B. Fleming Jr. argues that, during the Civil Rights Movement, Black artists and activists used theater to energize this radical refusal to wait. Participating in a vibrant culture of embodied political performance that ranged from marches and sit-ins to jail-ins and speeches, these artists turned to theater to unsettle a violent racial project that Fleming refers to as “Black patience.” Inviting the likes of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Douglas Turner Ward, Duke Ellington, and Oscar Brown Jr. to the stage, Black Patience illuminates how Black artists and activists of the Civil Rights era used theater to expose, critique, and repurpose structures of white supremacy. In this bold rethinking of the Civil Rights Movement, Fleming contends that Black theatrical performance was a vital technology of civil rights activism, and a crucial site of Black artistic and cultural production.

It takes as its point of departure the field-changing call to think more critically about the enduring legacies of chattel slavery, particularly how this imperative has cultivated an anticipatory logic that helps to forecast the conditions of blackness and to analyze the nature of black ontology. It argues that alongside the large-scale, transhistorical modes of structural analysis that characterize this approach, attention to the more local, everyday experiences of black people—particularly their feelings—is critical to understanding the ontological conditions of blackness. Examining plays and performances by black artists and civil rights activists Lorraine Hansberry and Nina Simone, it proposes that, while fleeting and ephemeral, these feelings not only inflect black existence but also are rife with epistemic value that is as crucial to understanding black ontology as the social, political, economic, and discursive structures that underwrite the modern racial order. Critically analyzing the shifting interrelation of time, feeling, and black ontology renders the act of proclaiming who is dead or alive, free or not, a more complex and reflexive enterprise. It shows that no singular structure or network of structural relations can fully anticipate or explain away black ontology. This calculation is always and everywhere a question of time.

Staging plays like Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot for black southern audiences, the theater challenged a violent structure of time at the heart of global modernity that I call black patience. By this I mean an abiding historical demand for black people to wait: whether in the hold of the slave ship, on the auction block, or for emancipation from slavery. Focusing on the centrality of the plantation to the spatializing logics of black patience, I consider how the Free Southern Theater used performance to demand “freedom now” and to revise the oppressive histories of time rooted in the material geographies of the US South. Mounting time-conscious plays, the theater used temporal aesthetics to transform the region’s historical geographies of black time (e.g., the labor time of black slaves and sharecroppers working in cotton fields) into radical sites of black political action, aesthetic innovation, and embodied performance. Engaging and reinvesting the meanings of the South’s plantation geographies, the theater revealed how one hundred years after emancipation, time remained essential to procuring the afterlives of slavery and colonialism and to shoring up the region’s necropolitical attachments. Examining these aesthetic and political experiments illuminates the importance of time to the emerging field of black geographies and to the field of black studies more broadly.

It takes as its starting point age-old demands for scholars to maintain a critical distance from their objects of study. I demonstrate how the assumption of choice in calls for critical distance ignores the unruly character of trauma, history, and memory; ignores how, on occasion, they inflect black writing over and against the will of the author. To do so, I retrace the psychic routes of one of my own attempts to craft black intellectual writing in the age of Ferguson. Using personal storytelling as a critical narrative praxis, I argue that in the face of contemporary antiblack violence, and on the heels of New World slavery, injunctions against proximity are often futile—in so far as they aim to mediate relationalities routinely beyond the control of the writer. I conclude by advocating for multiple forms and platforms of black writing in the age of Ferguson. Black writers, I argue, must prevent social media—themselves technologies of neoliberal capitalism and promoters of its racial logics—from regulating what constitutes “authentic” grammars of black intellectual writing and political expression.

Both losses dealt a forceful blow to audiences who have absorbed and wrestled with the word art of these two phenomenal writers whose love of blackness cut across any of their obvious differences. While Baraka was a canonized literary giant, a certain critical amnesia has enshrouded Aubert, who is, without a doubt, one of our great cultural workers. But in the wake of the unfortunate proximity of these two artists’ deaths, we are fortunate to have the opportunity to wrest Aubert from the grip of obscurity, and to better incorporate the richness of his life, his thought, and his creative production into the annals of our literary histories.

Covering a wide range of genres and offering provocative readings of both familiar and lesser known texts, Living Legacies demonstrates how literature can be used not only to challenge the master narrative of the civil rights movement but also to inform and inspire the next generation of freedom fighters.