Exploding Black Patience
Afro-presentism and Fugitive Affect in Lynn Nottage’s POOF!
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2025.i26.1622Keywords:
American studies, Black time studies, Signifyin(g), Lynn Nottage, POOF!Abstract
Lynn Nottage’s one-act play POOF! (1993) centers on Loureen, a black woman who causes her abusive husband to combust by the power of her voice. In this essay, I employ a critical methodology informed by black time studies, Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s theory of Signifyin(g), and black feminist thought in order to interpret Loureen’s vocal revolt against intimate partner violence as a response to the demands of black patience, a race-based disciplinary device that functions as an antiblack instrument of white supremacy and as the conceptual framework to Julius B. Fleming Jr.’s Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Like the theatre artists and activists of the Civil Rights Movement to whom Fleming devotes his critical attention, Loureen enacts an urgent demand for ‘freedom now’, refusing to perpetuate a performance of patience that conforms to the patriarchal demands for docility and deference rooted in US slavery. In doing so, she follows in the footsteps of Janie and Celie, the protagonists of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), respectively. By Signifyin(g) upon Hurston and Walker, Nottage situates her playwriting within the “web of filiation” (Gates 1988, xxii) that constitutes the African American literary tradition, and the “webs of affiliation” (Colbert 2017, 7) that link post-civil rights enactments of black freedom to those of earlier periods. Furthermore, she allows for the expansion of black time studies in an intersectional direction informed by black feminist thought, favoring an alternative deployment of the concepts of Afro-presentism and fugitive affect as advanced by Fleming in his study of performative acts of civil disobedience.
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