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Join scholar Danielle Roper as she discusses her latest publication, Hemispheric Blackface: Impersonation and Multiculturalism in the Americas (Duke Press, 2025), with Chicago-based artist Leasho Johnson. 

Hemispheric Blackface examines the paradoxes, contradictions, and ambiguities blackface performance occupies in 20th and 21st-century Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Jamaica, Cuba, and Miami. Roper engages with the racial scripts and different renditions of blackness that indigenous, mestizo, and white performers stage to reinforce racial hierarchies and create a sense of belonging across national differences in the Americas. She also looks at how roots theatre in Jamaica, a popular site for intimate gatherings for Jamaica’s Black working class to reflect on their everyday experiences, has carved out a space for Black people to set their own terms of racial enjoyment.

ACCESS INFORMATION: This program is free, and CART captioning will be available. For questions and access accommodations, email gallery400engagement@gmail.com.

ABOUT

Danielle Roper is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Her work on racial and queer performance, feminist activism, and racial formation in contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean has appeared in GLQ, Latin American Research Review, and Small Axe. Her recently published book, Hemispheric Blackface: Impersonation and Multiculturalism in the Americas, examines blackface performance in the aftermath of the turn to multiculturalism in Latin America. Roper is the curator of the digital exhibit, Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive. She is currently completing her second book, Racial Reckoning: Black Performance and Visual Art in the Caribbean and its Diasporas.

Leasho Johnson is a visual artist working primarily in painting, installation, and sculpture. Johnson uses his experience growing up Black, gay, and male in Jamaica to explore concepts around identity within the post-colonial condition. Working at the intersection of painting and drawing, he combines charcoal, homemade paints, and dyes, straddling the line between fluidity and chance and precision and improvisation. He was a fellow of the Jamaica Art Society and the Leslie Lohman Museum. Johnson has exhibited widely, including at the 2025 Liverpool Biennale, Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Western Exhibitions, Tern Gallery, Darlin Foundation, and the National Gallery of Jamaica, among others. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BFA from the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts.