In the summer of 2022, residents of Jackson, Mississippi had been waiting more than a month to access clean water. Shocking (to some), this easily preventable infrastructural failure took place in Mississippi's capital and most populous and majority-Black city. In Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation, Julius B. Fleming Jr. theorizes the practice of making Black people wait for progress, full citizenship, and humanity. “This race-based structure of temporal violence,” he conceptualizes in the Introduction, “is black patience” (6).

Rather than a virtue, Fleming etymologically excavates the Latin root of patience—“suffering,” a concept rarely theorized with attention to race (9–10)—to frame how from “slave ship” to “auction block” to “those who were inundated by calls to ‘go slow’ in the Civil Rights Movement, waiting has routinely been weaponized as a technology of anti-black violence and civic exclusion” (1). As the early 1960s temporally frame Black Patience, Fleming foregrounds Eisenhower's 1950s presidency, during which millions of dollars were ushered to birth NASA while, concurrently, Eisenhower promoted waiting for racial progress; one 1958 newspaper headline read “Eisenhower Bids Negroes Be Patient about Rights” (7).

Though Black Patience could exist primarily as an exacting work of political and critical theory, it instead flourishes in rich analyses of early 1960s Black theatrical practices that confront Black patience. Theatre artists, including Amiri Baraka, Duke Ellington, and Lorraine Hansberry, “used the theatrical stage to wrest black people from the violent enclosures of black patience” (38). Fleming also uncovers how civil rights activists engaged in dialogues with theatre's epistemologies, such as Fannie Lou Hamer's reaction to a 1964 production of Waiting for Godot in Ruleville, Mississippi: “You can't sit around waiting” she told the audience at intermission (1).

Thus, across Black Patience, Fleming deftly argues for what he coins Afro-presentism. This “radical structure of racial time” (26) was variously deployed in theatrical practices that aesthetically championed the civil rights movement's calls for “freedom now” (3), from early 1960s work of the Free Southern Theater in Mississippi (Chapter 2) to how Black theatre artists including James Baldwin, Alice Childress, and Douglas Turner Ward illustrated white impatience (Chapter 4). Afro-presentism is Fleming's most exceptional contribution, so I want to pause here on his nuanced theorization. “Afro-presentism is a mode of doing time otherwise because its insistence on the ‘now’ disrupts black patience and challenges its gross manipulations of black futures” (27) he writes, careful not to malign Afrofuturist strategies but rather to characterize how unstable promises of futurity and calls to wait for progress have long oppressed Black people. “Recognizing the precarity of black futures,” Fleming continues, “Afro-presentism imagines, crafts, and accounts for the aesthetic, experiential, and political strategies that black people use to embrace the possibilities of the present while continuing to engage in the necessary practice of black freedom dreaming; of spying the horizon; of pursuing the not-yet-here” (28). In dialogue with Peggy Phelan's ontology of performance as disappearance, Fleming further nuances his argument about the tactics of Afro-presentism, which centralizes the political “now” and the ephemeral time of the theatrical stage, while recognizing the centrality of disappearance to anti-Black and racial formation strategies.

In Chapter 1, “One Hundred Years Later: The Unfinished Project of Emancipation,” Fleming looks at 1963 Emancipation Proclamation Centennial events in Indiana, including a production of A Raisin in the Sun, and in Illinois, where Duke Ellington's musical drama My People as well as the documentary theatre work Dred Scott to the Present were staged at the Century of Negro Progress Exposition in Chicago. Theorizing “racial time” in Raisin as the “asynchrony between the quick time of modernity and the slow time of black social and political change” (42), Fleming reads the entanglement of the theatrical and political as offering “a new cultural and political history of the Civil Rights Movement” (41).

In Chapter 2, “Black Time, Black Geography: The Free Southern Theater,” Fleming focuses on The Free Southern Theater's inaugural year. Founded by Doris Derby, Gilbert Moses, and John O'Neal in 1963, FST launched from Tougaloo College in Jackson before moving to New Orleans in 1964. Rich archival work anchors an overview of FST's tours throughout Mississippi, a state Fleming argues is “haunted by legacies of slowness and anti-blackness, one that exists as the US nation-state's iconic geography of black patience” (104) and where nevertheless FST “used embodied performance to unsettle the authority of these scripts, and to encourage black southerners to forge new and more radical relationships to Mississippi's plantation geographies” (107).

Central to the whole book, the concept of Afro-presentism particularly pierces Chapter 3, “Black Queer Time and the Erotics of the Civil Rights Body” and Chapter 4, “Picturing White Impatience: Theatre and Visual Culture.” In addition to detailing work by the playwright Paul Carter Harrison and the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin in Chapter 3, Fleming skillfully inspects both Amiri Baraka's homophobia and his Black queer erotics in his queer trilogy of plays, The Eighth Ditch, The Toilet, and The Baptism. Critically, Fleming articulates a productive and respectful tension with Jose Muñoz's queer futurity to offer instead the “black queer present” (134), which maps “a theory and a racial history of the present that recognize the here and now as a critical temporality for black people and a vital structure of queer time” (152). In Chapter 4, Fleming scrutinizes formal contradictions between civil rights visual culture and live theatre. Works interpreted include Douglas Turner Ward's Day of Absence, a play inspired by 1950s bus boycott images that features a sci-fi plot about a white town amid the major emergency of Black disappearance. Fleming conceptualizes “white impatience” as central to the making of whiteness and Black patience and proposes that the ephemeral, multiperceptual form of theatre “disrupt[s] the racial conventions of visual modernity” (183).

Fleming's Black Patience is a magnificent, much-needed inquiry of civil-rights-era theatrical history. Engaging in depth with scripts, letters, maps, photographs, and newspapers, Fleming rigorously works across fields of theatre history (including African American theatre), performance studies, Black studies, and theatre for social change. Fleming reminds us to center Afro-presentism—on- and offstage—to unearth forms that confront Black patience and champion freedom for Black people now.