Appropriating BlacknessPerformance artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnsons provocative study examines how blackness is appropriated and performedtoward widely divergent endsboth within and outside African American culture. Appropriating Blackness develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identityavowed and disavowed, attractive and repellent, fixed and malleable. Drawing on performance theory, queer studies, literary