The Boundaries of Blackness

This chapter explores the role that African-American performance culture played in the construction of a Black public sphere in late nineteenth-century colonial South Africa. The ‘Black public sphere” has been defined as

a transnational space whose violent birth and diasporic conditions of life provide a counter narrative to the exclusionary national narratives of Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. The black public sphere is one critical space where new democratic forms and emergent diasporic movements can enrich and question one another. ¹