The Only Way Out

The Racial and Sexual Performance of Escape

Katherine Brewer Ball

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781478030270
  9781478026044
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478059271
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory

In The Only Way Out, Katherine Brewer Ball explores the American fascination with the escape story. Brewer Ball argues that escape is a key site for exploring American conceptions of freedom and constraint. Stories of escape are never told just once but become mythic in their episodic iterations, revealing the fantasies and desires of society, the storyteller, and the listener. While white escape narratives have typically been laden with Enlightenment fantasies of redemption where freedom is available to any individual willing to seize it, Brewer Ball explores how Black and queer escape offer forms of radical possibility. Drawing on Black studies, queer theory, and performance studies, she examines a range of works, from nineteenth-century American literature to contemporary queer of color art and writing by contemporary American artists including Wilmer Wilson IV, Tourmaline, Tony Kushner, Junot Díaz, Glenn Ligon, Toshi Reagon, and Sharon Hayes. Throughout, escape emerges as a story not of individuality but of collectivity and entanglement.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Escape is Such a Thankful Word: An Introduction
• 1. The Repetitions of Henry “Box” Brown
• 2. Feeling Out of This World: That’s What I Guess These Stories Are About
• 3. The Optics of Escape: Patty Hearst through the Mouth of Sharon Hayes
• 4. This Face Is Not for Us: Grounding Pleasure
• Coda: Less of a Theater Audience
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index