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Join scholar Danielle Roper as she discusses her latest publication, Hemispheric Blackface: Impersonation and Nationalist Fictions 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 Leasho Johnson is a visual artist working primarily in painting, installation, and sculpture. He was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and raised in Sheffield, a small town on the outskirts of Negril. Johnson uses his experience growing up Black, gay, and male to explore concepts around identity within the post-colonial condition.Working at the intersection of painting and drawing, Leasho combines charcoal, homemade paints, and dyes, straddling the line between fluidity and chance and precision and improvisation. Johnson creates characters that live on the edge of perception. His works disrupt historical, political, and social expectations of the Black queer experience. Leasho focuses on the post-colonial state, primarily his own experience and relationships in proximity to places, stereotypes, and mythologies from the Caribbean. This inquiry delves into the philosophical mechanisms of survival for queer people, the existential dynamics of fear concerning the ‘other,’ and how that is tied up with perceptions around blackness and people of color. His paintings utilize the effects of Fragmentation as a methodological foil for disruption and coping with a legacy of violence on the black queer body.

Leasho Johnson is being featured in the Liverpool Biennale 2025. He was a fellow of the Jamaica Art Society in 2022 and a Leslie Lohman Museum fellow in 2021. A recipient of the New Artist Society Scholarship from the School of Art Institute Chicago (SAIC) 2018 – 2020. Leasho has shown his work in his home country at several National Gallery of Jamaica exhibitions, including the Jamaica Biennial 2012, 2014, 2017, and 2022. Internationally, Leasho has exhibited in ‘Fragments of Epic Memory’ at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada 2021. Leasho is currently based in Chicago. His work is also part of various notable private collections and museum permanent collections.