Black Cracker’s “Chasing Rainbows”

Abstract

This chapter critically analyzes the work of contemporary transgender spoken word poet, performance artist, and musician Ellison Glenn. Specifically, it focuses on how Glenn forges a critique of the current political, social, and economic conditions of African Americans in the United States and abroad. Glenn’s early days of participating in poetry slam competitions and his reappropriation of minstrelsy are documented alongside his critique of hip-hop masculinity and his adoption of the performance persona Black Cracker. Black Cracker enables Glenn to move his work beyond the US-based spoken word circuit, resulting in his imagining and performing a multiplicity of trans and queer racial identities in a mode defined as trans-Afrofuturism.