Staging Black Feminisms by Lynette Goddard

review

Counter-stories are stories of self-definition. Positioned against master narratives, they enable oppressed people to refuse the identities imposed upon them by their oppressors and to re-identify themselves in more respect worthy terms. Lynette Goddard's book expertly articulates a counter-story of black women's performance practice in order to wrest it from the clutches of white feminist discourse and its attribution of an ‘automatic feminist disposition’ (11) – an intentionality ascribed through the double marginalization by sex-gender and race that black women must overcome in order to stage their work in the white male-dominated British theatre industry.