Julius B. Fleming, Jr.
Julius B. Fleming, Jr. earned a PhD in English, and a graduate certificate in Africana studies, from the University of Pennsylvania. Specializing in Afro-diasporic literatures and cultures, he has particular interests in performance studies, black political culture, diaspora, and colonialism, especially where they intersect with race, gender, and sexuality. Fleming is the author of Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation (NYU Press 2022). This book reconsiders the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of black theatre. It argues that black theatrical performance—much like television and photography—was a vital technology of civil rights activism, and a crucial site of black artistic and cultural production. More specifically, it demonstrates how black artists and activists used theatrical performance to unsettle a violent racial project that Fleming 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 theatre, this book shows that theatre 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.
Professor 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.