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Performing the black epistle and transmission of racial embodied knowledge: Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s Word Becomes Flesh

ABSTRACT What can a letter teach an unborn child about what it means to be a black boy? Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s Word Becomes Flesh answers this question as his narrator pens a series of letters to his son outlining his hopes and fears. In this essay, I meditate on the performance and text of Word Becomes Flesh as a way of identifying how a black identity is performed, taught, and constituted through the epistolary form and its efficacy in a cultural product. I argue that through bodies, hip-hop, and the epistle, Joseph invokes an Afro-optimistic black cultural memory to consider and teach black masculinities to an absent child figure. In doing so, I hope to acknowledge the ways in which Joseph utilizes hip-hop theatre to explore the pervasive legacies of oppression, exhaustion, and the threat of hope embedded in black survival that is offered by a future generation.