Michelle Cowin Gibbs

California State University, Long Beach | CSULB · Department of Theatre Arts

This article will examine how preparing soul foods comprised of cultural, social and personal constructions have manifested themselves into a performative representation of Black identities. I will analyze the preparation of popular Black American cuisines such as hot water cornbread and collard greens. Given the popularity of these soul foods, I w...

Zora Neale Hurston is best remembered as a novelist, fiction writer, essayist, and anthropologist but her extensive work as a playwright has been largely overlooked in evaluating her contributions to Black theatre. This is because Hurston’s plays do not to fit into the well-trodden Eurocentric playwriting style that was popular among her contempora...

Staging Faith: Religion and African American Theater from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II. By Craig R. Prentiss. New York and London: New York University Press, 2014; pp. xiv + 233, 8 halftone illustrations. $85 cloth, $27 paper, $21.25 e-book. - Volume 56 Issue 2 - Michelle Cowin-Mensah

Diana Taylor asserts that the discipline of performance studies allows scholars to rethink what constitutes an event as performance. Taylor contends that ethnicity, race, and issues of social justice are rehearsed and performed daily in the public sphere. To understand these events as performance suggests that performance also functions as an epist...

In From Bourgeois to Boojie: Black Middle Class Performances, Vershawn Ashanti Young (with additional assistance provided by Bridget Harris Tsemo) examines performativity central to race and class in the works of contemporary African American writers, scholars, and performing artists. This anthology is a follow-up to E. Franklin Frazier’s 1957 soci...