Julius Fleming
Education
Ph.D., , University of Pennsyslvania
B.A., , Tougaloo College
Research Expertise
African American/African Diaspora
American
Julius B. Fleming, Jr. earned a doctorate 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. Professor Fleming is the author of Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation (NYU Press, 2022; shortlisted for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present 2023 Book Prize, Finalist for the Hooks National Book Award, and Honorable Mention for the 2023 John W. Frick Book Award). This book reconsiders the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of black theatre, while examining the importance of time and affect to the making of the modern racial order. Analyzing a largely underexplored, transnational archive of black theatre, it demonstrates how black artists and activists used theatre and performance to unsettle the demands of a violent racial project that he calls “black patience.” From the slave castle to the hold of the slave ship, from the auction block to commands to “go slow” in fighting segregation, black people have historically been forced to wait, coerced into performing patience. This book argues that during the Civil Rights Movement, black people’s cries for “freedom now”—at the lunch counter, in the streets, and importantly on the theatrical stage—disturbed the historical praxis of using black patience to manufacture and preserve anti-blackness and white supremacy.
Professor Fleming is also beginning work on a second book project that explores the new geographies of colonial expansion and their impact on Afro-diasporic literary and cultural production.
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.
Publications
Black Patience
"Black Patience" by Julius B. Fleming Jr. reexamines the Civil Rights Movement through the lens of Black theater, revealing how artists and activists used performance to reject the oppressive demand for “patience.”
Author/Lead: Julius FlemingA bold rethinking of the Civil Rights Movement through the lens of Black theater.
“Freedom, Now!” This rallying cry became the most iconic phrase of the Civil Rights Movement, challenging the persistent command that Black people wait—in the holds of slave ships and on auction blocks, in segregated bus stops and schoolyards—for their long-deferred liberation.
In Black Patience, Julius B. Fleming Jr. argues that, during the Civil Rights Movement, Black artists and activists used theater to energize this radical refusal to wait. Participating in a vibrant culture of embodied political performance that ranged from marches and sit-ins to jail-ins and speeches, these artists turned to theater to unsettle a violent racial project that Fleming refers to as “Black patience.” Inviting the likes of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Douglas Turner Ward, Duke Ellington, and Oscar Brown Jr. to the stage, Black Patience illuminates how Black artists and activists of the Civil Rights era used theater to expose, critique, and repurpose structures of white supremacy. In this bold rethinking of the Civil Rights Movement, Fleming contends that Black theatrical performance was a vital technology of civil rights activism, and a crucial site of Black artistic and cultural production.