I specialize in 20th and 21st– century African American Literature and Literatures of the African Diaspora. My research and writing traverses literary, visual culture, gender and sexuality, race, body and performance studies. I am currently an associate professor of English at Texas Christian University.
My book, Staging Black Fugitivity released in 2019 with The Ohio State University Press in their Black Performance and Cultural Criticism Series argues that contemporary black dramas featuring slavery enhance the neo-slave narrative’s capacity to represent the visual, corporal, and affective dimensions of the “peculiar institution.” Consistent with the development of the neo-slave narrative genre and the innovative ways that artists render slavery for present-day audiences, the dramas analyzed in my book approach slavery from myriad perspectives (Afrofuturist, feminist, and queer) in order to produce new imaginaries that offer more complex depictions of black experience. Through subverting notions of time, race, gender and familiar histories of slavery themselves, the dramas under discussion produce what I label performances of fugitivity, which are subversive, radical, and experimental, performances of black artistic and political freedom at the site of slavery. Staging Black Fugitivity asks and responds to the question: How does drama constitute a unique and an important site for ongoing conversations about slavery’s resonance and its legacies?
I am also the mother to Zoe and Jackson (my joys) and partner to Demetrius, a constant support and friend.
Contact me here.
Stacie McCormick 