Author's Keywords: Theater, Post-black culture, Anti-essentialism, Rock Music, Racial Passing, Humor/Comedy, Contemporary Popular Culture	Convention All Academic Convention can solve the abstract management needs for any association's annual meeting. Submission - Custom fields, multiple submission types, tracks, audio visual, multiple upload formats, automatic conversion to pdf. Review - Peer Review, Bulk reviewer assignment, bulk emails, ranking, z-score statistics, and multiple worksheets! Reports - Many standard and custom reports generated while you wait. Print programs with participant indexes, event grids, and more! Scheduling - Flexible and convenient grid scheduling within rooms and buildings. Conflict checking and advanced filtering. Communication - Bulk email tools to help your administrators send reminders and responses. Use form letters, a message center, and much more! Management - Search tools, duplicate people management, editing tools, submission transfers, many tools to manage a variety of conference management headaches! Click here for more information.
Association: Name: Association for the Study of African American Life and History URL: http://www.asalh.org
Citation: URL: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p208425_index.html Direct Link: HTML Code:

Dorman, Jacob. "“Black Folks Passing for Black Folks": Anti-Essentialism and Post-Blackness in STEW’s 2007 Rock Musical, "Passing Strange"" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Atlanta Hilton, Charlotte, NC, Oct 02, 2007 <Not Available>. 2008-12-11 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p208425_index.html>

Dorman, J. S. , 2007-10-02 "“Black Folks Passing for Black Folks": Anti-Essentialism and Post-Blackness in STEW’s 2007 Rock Musical, "Passing Strange"" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Atlanta Hilton, Charlotte, NC <Not Available>. 2008-12-11 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p208425_index.html

Publication Type: Individual Paper Abstract: My paper will discuss the theoretical insights and possible cultural impact of a new off-Broadway musical, Passing Strange, an uproarious, irreverent, and insightful meditation on the predicaments of middle class black life and “post-black” culture. Mark Stewart, aka “STEW,” is the front man for the band “The Negro Problem,” and the narrator, bandleader, and co-creator of the new musical. The play is a semi-autobiographical song cycle dramatized by a cast of six young black actors surrounded by a rock band of four white, mostly-middle aged musicians. STEW takes his place on stage as a kind of ring master in the story of how a youth, called Youth, rebels at the spiritual vapidity of his bourgeois Los Angeles Baptist church, smokes pot with the closeted choir director, becomes a punk rocker and sets out to find the ever-elusive “real” in the pot-drenched fleshpots of 1980’s Amsterdam and the speed-fueled and surface-obsessed electronica of Berlin’s anarchist art-squats. Referencing the paths of black artists before him who went to Europe to find themselves and fulfill their desires, Passing Strange meditates on the strangeness of “black folks passing for black folks,” adding a novel twist to the much more common treatments of traditional racial passing. The play’s anti-essentialism is fresh, hilarious, and thought provoking, filled with wry and generous observations about human character and human life. Only time will tell if Passing Strange represents a watershed moment in American culture by humorously loosening the straightjacket of racial essentialism.

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