Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of AuthenticityPerformance artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnson's provocative study examines how blackness is appropriated and performed toward widely divergent ends both within and outside African American culture. Appropriating Blackness develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identity avowed and disavowed, attractive and repellent, fixed and malleable. Drawing on performance theory, queer studies, literary