Dr. Julius B. Fleming, Jr., a scholar of Afro-diasporic literatures and cultures, will give the keynote address at the sixth annual Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium, to be held at Johns Hopkins University from March 20-22, 2025.
His talk, entitled “Black Performance, Activism, and the Persistence of Crisis,” will draw on his award-winning book, Black Patience (NYU Press, 2022), which reexamines the Civil Rights Movement through the lens of Black theater, revealing how Black artists and activists used theater to expose, critique, and repurpose structures of white supremacy. Illuminating the vibrant culture of embodied political performance that ranged from marches and sit-ins to jail-ins and speeches, Fleming’s talk will demonstrate the ways in which theater was not only a crucial site of Black artistic and cultural production, but also a critical tool in the urgent pursuit of liberation.
Dr. Fleming is Associate Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. He holds a B.A. in English Language and Literature from Tougaloo College, and a Ph.D. in English and a graduate certificate in Africana studies from the University of Pennsylvania.
In Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation, Fleming argues that Black theatrical performance was a vital technology of civil rights activism, and he demonstrates how it was used to unsettle a violent racial project that he refers to as “Black patience.” From slave castles to the hold of the slave ship, from the auction block to commands to “go slow” in fighting segregation, Black patience has aimed to deny Black freedom, to delay Black citizenship, and to cement the uneven distributions of power at the heart of modernity’s racial order. During the Civil Rights Movement, however, Black people’s demands for “freedom now” posed a radical challenge to Black patience. Analyzing a largely underexplored, transnational archive of black theater, this book shows that theater was central to these efforts.
Black Patience received the 2024 College Language Association Book Prize and the 2022 Hooks National Book Award. It also received Honorable Mentions for the John W. Frick Book Award and the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize, and was a Finalist for the ATHE Outstanding Book Award, the George Freedley Memorial Award, and the ASTR Barnard Hewitt Award.
Fleming’s work appears in journals like American Literature, American Literary History, South Atlantic Quarterly, Callaloo, and The James Baldwin Review. Having served as Associate Editor of both Callaloo and Black Perspectives—the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society—Fleming has been awarded fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute. He now serves on the Editorial Board of Southern Cultures.
Dr. Fleming is currently at work on two new book projects: one that explores the relationship between the speculative and the new geographies of empire and colonialism and the other that examines the history of black nightlife.
The Macksey Symposium keynote address will be held on Friday, March 21, from 5:00 to 6:15 pm on the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus, and will be open to the public.
Dr. Fleming will also sign books for conference attendees on Saturday, March 22, from 9:00 to 10:00 am in the Gilman Atrium.
Please see the symposium website for a full schedule of events.
Undergraduate students currently enrolled in any two- or four-year college or university in the U.S. are invited to apply to present their humanities research at the Macksey Symposium. Submissions are open through December 9, 2024. See the application instructions here.