On 15th November we discussed the introduction to Noémie Ndiaye’s Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (2022) suggested by Lily Freeman-Jones.

Prompts:

1. What do you make of Ndiaye’s opening to this introduction, which includes personal anecdote and centres memories of affective experience? Should scholarship do this more?
   
2. This book centres three performance strands – kinetic (dance), acoustic (speak), and cosmetic (face and skin) – the first two of which are far less studied in performance than spectacle. How does your work seek to engage sensory modes outside of the mainstream of verbal speech and vision?
   
3. Ndiaye defines “scripts of blackness” as “the performative mechanisms that brought blackness into the world as a racial category”. How far do you agree with this definition, and do you see any uses of this concept in your own work?
   
4. What other ‘scripts’, if any, might be at work in your own research – and how might they engage non-visual modes of performativity?

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