This dissertation examines Black epistemologies and identity formations embodied in performance disciplines such as martial arts, jazz, dance within theater, film, and everyday practices from 1945 to the present. This project reveals how Black practitioners have appropriated Asian aesthetic practices in martial arts in order to redefine their own subjectivity and negotiate hegemony; how Asian Americans have appropriated the Black radical tradition through jazz and dance in conjunction with martial arts in order to announce an Asian American political consciousness and a critique of imperialism; how Black performativity emerges within the global circulations of popular culture through representations of Blackness from martial arts cinema to print media; and how performance disciplines are deployed as pedagogical strategies to subvert and reconfigure youth incarceration and the school-to-prison pipeline. The analysis makes visible a constellation of connections amongst Blacks, Asians, and Latinos whose transhistorical cultural praxis has placed them in relationship with each other across time and across space. By examining performance disciplines as moments of transcultural encounters, I uncover how historically marginalized people deploy performance as a tactic for political survival and transformation. Furthermore, I depict how Afro-diasporic experiences circulate internationally through a constellation of practices, histories, and identities offering opportunities for resistance and new epistemologies.