Complicit Participation The Liberal Audience for Theater of Racial Justice

In this incisive critique of the ways performances of allyship can further entrench white privilege, author Carrie J. Preston analyses her own complicit participation and that of other audience members and theater professionals, deftly examining the prevailing framework through which white liberals participate in antiracist theater and institutional “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives. The book addresses immersive, documentary, site-specific, experimental, street, and popular theatre in chapters on Jean Genet's The Blacks, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's An Octoroon, George C. Wolfe's Shuffle Along, Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, Anna Deavere Smith's Notes from the Field, and Claudia Rankine's The White Card. Far from abandoning the work to dismantle institutionalized racism, Preston seeks to reveal the contradictions and complicities at the heart of allyship as a crucial step toward full and radical participation in antiracist efforts.

Carrie J. Preston is the Arvind and Chandan Nandlal Kilachand Professor and Director of Kilachand Honors College, Professor of English and Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and the founding Associate Director of the Center on Forced Displacement at Boston University. She is the author of Modernism's Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, & Solo Performance and Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, & Journeys in Teaching.

Part I. The Troubling Pleasures of Complicit Participation
Introduction to Complicit Participation
Chapter 1. Blackfaced at The Blacks: Complicit Participation in Jean Genet's Lessons on Race

Part II. The Melodramatics of American Racism: Boucicault's and Jacobs-Jenkins's Octoroons
Introduction to Part II
Chapter 2. Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon and the Loudly Immersed Audiences of Nineteenth-Century Melodramas
Chapter 3. Hissing, Bidding, and Lynching at Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's An Octoroon

Part III. Dueling on Broadway
Introduction to Part III
Chapter 4. Shuffle Along… the Campaign Trail
Chapter 5. Hamilton ParticiNation in Diversity and its Discontents

Part IV. Act II or Just Another Talkback?
Introduction to Part IV
Ch. 6. Doing Time in Anna Deavere Smith's Act II
Ch. 7. Playing The White Card with Claudia Rankine
Coda to Complicit Participation