Introduction. Black Beings, Black Embodyings: Notes on Contemporary Artistic Performances and their Cultural Interpretations; Jean-Paul Rocchi, Anne Crémieux, and Xavier Lemoine PART I: BLACK BEING, BLACK EMBODYING: THE POWER OF AUTO-ETHNOGRAPHY 1. Each Taking Risk, Performing Self: Theorizing (Dis)Narratives; Myron Beasley 2. Transformative Womanist Rhetorical Strategies: Contextualizing Discourse and the Performance of Black Bodies of Desire; Toniesha L. Taylor 3. 'Is Anybody Walkin'?': the Black Body on the Runway as a Performance of the Politics of Desire; Gayle Baldwin PART II: SHATTERED FRAMES AND THE ONLOOKER: STRATEGIES AND SIGNIFICATIONS 4. Transgressive (Re)presentations: Black Women, Vaudeville and the Politics of Performance in Early Trans-Atlantic Theatre; Zakiya R. Adair 5. Kara Walker's War on Racism: Mining (Mis)Representations of Blackness; Vanina Géré 6. Between Mumblecore and Post-Black Aesthetics: Barry Jenkins's Medicine for Melancholy; Simon Dickel 7. From Book to Film: Desire in Precious (Lee Daniels, 2009), adapted from Push by Sapphire (1995); Anne Crémieux PART III: THROUGH PERFORMANCE: DESIRE AND THE BLACK SUBJECT 8. Black Queer Studies, Freedom and Other Human Possibilities; Rinaldo Walcott 9. About Face, or, What Is This 'Back' in B(l)ack Popular Culture?: From Venus Hottentot to Video Hottie; Mae G. Henderson 10. Margin Me: Intentional Marginality in the Queered Borderlands of Hiphop; Stephany Spaulding PART IV: SHIFTING PARADIGMS OF IDENTITIES 11. Sculpting Black Queer Bodies and Desires: The Case of Richmond Barthé; James Smalls 12. I Am Not a Race Man: Racial Uplift and the Post-Black Aesthetic in Percival Everett's I Am Not Sidney Poitier; Kristin Leigh Moriah 13. Embodying Hybridity: Anna Deavere Smith's Identity Cross-Overs; Xavier Lemoine