"With "Appropriating Blackness," E. Patrick Johnson has given us a book worthy of the breadth its title signals. It is written in an excellent and refreshingly clear prose style which sacrifices nothing in the way of complexity of the ideas being presented. Johnson makes his observations about the relatedness of performance and blackness more compelling with each successive case study."--Dwight A. McBride, coeditor of "Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Fiction"