Carrying All before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689–1800 By Chelsea Phillips. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2022; pp. xiv + 287. $120.00 cloth, $34.95 paper, $38.95 e-book.

Abstract

ture and live theatre. Works interpreted include Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence, a play inspired by 1950s bus boycott images that features a sci-fi plot about a white town amid the major emergency of Black disappearance. Fleming conceptualizes “white impatience” as central to the making of whiteness and Black patience and proposes that the ephemeral, multiperceptual form of theatre “disrupt [s] the racial conventions of visual modernity” (183). Fleming’s Black Patience is a magnificent, much-needed inquiry of civil-rights-era theatrical history. Engaging in depth with scripts, letters, maps, photographs, and newspapers, Fleming rigorously works across fields of theatre history (including African American theatre), performance studies, Black studies, and theatre for social change. Fleming reminds us to center Afro-presentism—onand offstage—to unearth forms that confront Black patience and champion freedom for Black people now.