African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity 9781684481569

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AFRIC AN A MERIC AN ARTS

THE GRIOT PROJECT Series Editor: Carmen Gillespie, Bucknell University This book series, associated with the Griot Project at Bucknell University, publishes monographs, collections of essays, poetry, and prose exploring the aesthetics, art, history, and culture of African America and the African diaspora. The Griot is a central figure in many West African cultures. Historically, the Griot had many functions, including as a community historian, cultural critic, indigenous artist, and collective spokesperson. Borrowing from this rich tradition, the Griot Project Book Series defines the Griot as a metaphor for the academic and creative interdisciplinary exploration of the arts, literatures, and cultures of African America, Africa, and the African diaspora. Expansive and inclusive in its appeal and significance, works in the Griot Project Book Series will appeal to academics, artists, and lay readers and thinkers alike. Titles in the Series Sharrell D. Luckett, ed., African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity Frieda Ekotto, Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella Vincent Stephens and Anthony Stewart, eds., Postracial America? An Interdisciplinary Study James Braxton Peterson, ed., In Media Res: Race, Identity, and Pop Culture in the Twenty-­First Century Angèle Kingué, Venus of Khala-Kanti Carmen Gillespie, ed., Toni Morrison: Forty Years in the Clearing Myron Hardy, Catastrophic Bliss

AFRICAN AMERICAN ARTS Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity

Edi t ed by

Sh a r r ell D. Luck e t t

Lewisburg, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Luckett, Sharrell D., editor. | African-American Arts : Activism and Aesthetics (Conference) (2016 : Bucknell University) Title: African American arts : activism, aesthetics, and futurity / edited by Sharrell D. Luckett. Description: Lewisburg, Pennsylvania : Bucknell University Press, 2019. | Series: The Griot project | Essays and presentations primarily prepared for The Griot Institute for Africana Studies’ convening on African-American art, activism, and aesthetics held in fall 2016 at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019005251 | ISBN 9781684481521 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781684481538 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: African American arts—Political aspects. | Arts and society—United States. | United States—Civilization—21st century—Forecasting. Classification: LCC NX512.3.A35 A35 2019 | DDC 700.89/96073—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005251 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2020 by Bucknell University Press Individual chapters copyright © 2020 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837-2005. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www.bucknell.edu/UniversityPress Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press Manufactured in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to Carmen Gillespie and Ntozake Shange. Rest in power and peace.

CONTENTS



List of Illustrations

ix

Series Editor Foreword Ca r m e n Gi l l e spi e

xi

Visual Foreword Ca r r i e M a e W e e ms

xiii

Introduction: African American Arts in Action Sh a r r e l l D. Luck et t

1

Part I: Bodies of Activism  1

Trans Identity as Embodied Afrofuturism A m ber Joh nson

 2

Designing Our Freedom: Toward a New Discourse on Fashion as a Strategy for Self-Liberation R i k k i By r d

15

29

 3

Pearl Primus’s Choreo-Activism: 1943–1949 Dor i a E. Ch a r l son

 4

Performing New Nationalism/Performing a Living Culture: Josefina Báez’s Dominicanish 51 Fl or enci a V. Cor n et

 5

Ethnicity, Ethicalness, Excellence: Armond White’s All-American Humanism Da n i e l McN ei l

 6

41

69

Race and History on the Operatic Stage: Caterina Jarboro Sings Aida 89 Luc y Ca pl a n

Part II: Music and Visual Art as Activism  7

 8

“I Am Basquiat”: Tracing Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Alterity and Activism in Paint and Performance Gen e v i e v e H yaci n t h e

105

“I Luh God”: Erica Campbell, Trap Gospel, and the Moral Mask of Language Discrimination Sa m m a n t h a McCa l l a

127

vii

viii Contents

 9

10

11

The Hidden Code of the Kongo Cosmogram in African American Art and Culture N et t r ice R . Ga sk i ns

139

From Baldwin to Beyoncé: Exploring the Responsibility of the Artist in Society—Re-envisioning the Black Female Sonic Artist as Citizen A bby Dobson

152

Slaying “Formation”: A Queering of Black Radical Tradition J. M ich a e l K i nse y

174

Part III: Institutions of Activism 12

Centering Blackness through Performance in Every 28 Hours 191 Shon dr i k a Moss-Bou l di n

13

Dancing for Justice Philadelphia: Embodiment, Dance, and Social Change J u li e B. Joh nson

201

A Conversation with Freddie Hendricks of the Freddie Hendricks Youth Ensemble of Atlanta Sh a r r e l l D. Luck et t

214

The Conciliation Project as a Social Experiment: Behind the Mask of Uncle Tom-ism and the Performance of Blackness Ja sm i n e Col e s a n d Taw n ya Pet t i for d-Wat e s

220

14

15



Afterword: Blackballin’ 237 A pl ay by R ick er by H i n ds Acknowledgments 307 About the Contributors

309

Index 313

ILLUSTR ATIONS

Figure 0.1. Untitled (Anointed) by Carrie Mae Weems, 2017.

xiii

Figure 0.2. The Blues Grid by Carrie Mae Weems, 2017.

xiv

Figure 0.3. Untitled (Mary J. Blige) by Carrie Mae Weems, 2017.

xv

Figure 0.4. Untitled (Mary J. Blige) by Carrie Mae Weems, 2017.

xvi

Figure 0.5. Untitled (Mary J. Blige) by Carrie Mae Weems, 2017.

xvii

Figure 1.1. Nova by Amber Johnson and Wriply Bennet, 2017.

23

Figure 1.2. Valor by Amber Johnson and Wriply Bennet, 2017.

24

Figure 1.3. Maasai by Amber Johnson and Wriply Bennet, 2017.

25

Figure 5.1. Front page, The South End, January 23, 1969. Headline: “DRUM—Vanguard of the Black Revolution.”

73

Figure 7.1. Untitled (Fallen Angel) by Jean Michel Basquiat, 1981.

107

Figure 7.2. Equestrian Oba and Attendants, 1550–1680.

108

Figure 7.3. The Origin of the Milky Way by Jacopo Tintoretto, 1575.

110

Figure 7.4. Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart) by Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1983.

117

Figure 9.1. “Cosmogram with Kalunga line and cross” by Nettrice R. Gaskins, 2015.

141

Figure 15.1. Three minstrel caricatures from the play uncle tom: de-constructed by the Conciliation Project. Workhorse Cooney working out for college recruitment as the Coach and Satchmo Whipyaright size him up.

224

Figure 15.2. Five minstrel caricatures from the play uncle tom: de-constructed by the Conciliation Project. Scene: “Put Me on the Black with My Boy.”

225

ix

SERIES EDITOR FOREWORD

The Griot Institute at Bucknell University is most delighted to introduce this latest publication in our Griot Project Book Series, in partnership with Bucknell University Press and Rutgers University. The griot is a central figure in many West African cultures. Historically, the griot held many functions, including as a community historian, cultural critic, indigenous artist, and collective spokesperson. Borrowing from this rich tradition, the Bucknell University Griot Institute for Africana Studies and the Griot Project Book Series define the griot as a metaphor for scholarly and creative interdisciplinary exploration of the arts, literatures, and cultures of African America, Africa, and the African diaspora. Building on that construct, the Griot Project Book Series consists of scholarly monographs and creative works devoted to the interdisciplinary exploration of the aesthetic, artistic, and cultural products and intellectual currents of historical and contemporary African America and of the African diaspora using narrative as a thematic and theoretical framework for the selection and execution of its projects. African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity directly contributes to the mission and the growing list of published titles in the series. This collection originated from two Griot programs. In spring 2016, the Griot Institute held a lecture/conversation series rooted in questions about the intersections of identity, race, gender, sexuality, aesthetics, and activism as they affect and inform a wide range of African American artistic expressions. The series had two main focal points. One was a scholarly conversation showcasing James Baldwin’s astute and uncompromising analysis of institutional forms of racism, heteronormative sexuality, and anti-body sentiments found in dominant religious systems and tenets of his day. The other was an extended conversation with leading African American artists about their creative journeys in light of the contemporary structural realities of the United States, particularly as they concern artistic expression and racism and the intersections of aesthetic, economic, sociological, and psychological inequality. Each of the artists presenting used Baldwin’s legacy as a springboard for conversations about their own work and processes, as well as their intersections with issues of social justice. As a follow-up to the series and its fertile conversations, the Griot Institute sponsored a conference, African-American Arts: Activism and Aesthetics, in the fall of 2016. The conference brought together emerging and leading artists and scholars, including Ntozake Shange and Jimmy Greene to reflect upon the relationship between African American arts, activism, and aesthetics. African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity expands upon and deepens the conversation initiated at the conference. A major highlight of the conference and collection are the photographs included here by MacArthur Award–winning photographer Carrie Mae Weems, one of the most acclaimed and recognized American artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She served as the keynote speaker for the conference and has generously agreed to open the volume with a series of her most recent photographs, in conversation with the wide-ranging essays and critical analyses that comprise the collection. She is the exemplar of the African American artist/activist. In Weems’s keynote address for the conference, she defined herself as an “outlier,” an individual for whom working to making change is not optional, but an indivisible part of her constitution. This status, she remarked, can result in creative and physical isolation. Identifying the xi

xii

Series Editor Foreword

isolation of the activist/artist is an endemic problem. Weems expressed gratitude for those with whom her vision and purpose overlap, those whose work and vision mediate and deconstruct for her the very construct of isolation. Some compatriots she noted as particularly essential to her are Barack Obama, Toni Morrison, Nina Simone, Martin Puryear, and Félix González-­ Torres. Through their intersections, Weems expressed her embrace of a kinship with these artists/activists and others. They have provided what she explained as “a way to understand the terrain that [she] walks on.” She made the point that although artists often work in isolation, they are not creatively alone. They are in each other’s company and influence. Weems referenced her breakthrough Kitchen Table series and alluded to the ways in which it emerged from her engagement with conversations about representation of the black female form as well as critical race theory. In so doing, Weems provides insight into the processes through which activism, artistic practice, and aesthetic engagements are three indistinguishable strands in a braid that cannot be undone. Fundamental to this weaving are the difficult questions that are at the core of Weems’s work, questions whose pondering becomes a mandatory labor for both her and her audience. A central point about Weems and her work was clear: her activism is not formulaic or predictable; neither is her work. She made a critical point about the ways that those writing about her work often remark that it is focused on issues of race and gender. As she noted, that is a too narrow description. For her, the question at the center of her art is about power and its manifestations and consequences, particularly in regard to systems of power. She also demonstrated that her work is not just about making so-called high art but also involves work in her community. Weems has created a community organization for young people in Syracuse, where she lives. The young people who are involved in her organization, called the Institute of Sound and Style, learn about producing art, and a small group of them work directly with her on her projects. Fittingly, then, African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity begins with Weems’s photographs. These photographs are an excerpt from a larger project featuring singer and actor Mary J. Blige and were created by Weems in conjunction with W Magazine’s 2017 Art Issue. In addition to the photographs, which feature Blige as a figure of royalty, the spread in the magazine also consists of a conversation between Weems and Blige about topics as varied as the complexities of black female representation, the challenges of self-reflection, and the costs and freedoms of living and producing as an artist. In this self-reflexive communion between the two, Weems intervenes in the historical legacy of visual denigration of Black women’s physicality, efficacy, value, and dignity. She both literally and figuratively crowns Blige and, in so doing, demonstrates the conjunctions of Black activism with careful, intellectual, astute, and exquisite Black artistry. Through her body of work, Weems’s practice engages and challenges us to consider the complex questions surrounding art, activism, and aesthetics for Black artists and graces this publication with an ideal springboard from which to commence exploration of this collection. Carmen Gillespie Griot Project Book Series Editor August 2019

VISUAL FOREWORD BY C A R R I E M A E W E E M S

Figure 0.1. Carrie Mae Weems. Untitled (Anointed). 2017 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

xiii

Figure 0.2. Carrie Mae Weems. The Blues Grid. 2017 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Figure 0.3. Carrie Mae Weems. Untitled (Mary J. Blige). 2017 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist

and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Figure 0.4. Carrie Mae Weems. Untitled (Mary J. Blige). 2017 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist

and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Figure 0.5. Carrie Mae Weems. Untitled (Mary J. Blige). 2017 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

AFRIC AN A MERIC AN ARTS

INTRODUCTION African American Arts in Action S H A R R E L L D. LU C K E T T

African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity is a culmination of critical essays and presentations primarily prepared for the Griot Institute for Africana Studies’ convening on African American art, activism, and aesthetics held in fall 2016 at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. An ongoing conference series that features scholarship addressing African American art in diverse disciplines, this particular conference served as a module and model of a range of artistic expression in response to the history and triumphs of African American peoples. As a presenter and attendee at these events, I had the pleasure of sharing a space with renowned artists such as the late, venerable Ntozake Shange, saxophonist Jimmy Greene, and celebrated mixed media artist and MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Carrie Mae Weems. Notably, I witnessed a range of entryways and insights from scholars and aesthetes on the importance of African American artists and their global impact. The conference proved to be an inspiration and auspicious gathering orbiting African American arts and activism. Relative to this conference, African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity is an additional platform for the conference attendees and others who are interested in similar discourses to articulate the importance of African American arts and to envision a future with sustained success for African American peoples. This anthology brings together voices and scholarship from various fields, such as fashion, performance studies, dance, visual art, queer studies, theatre, and music to address the role of art in African American culture and Black people’s lived experiences in the United States. The authors of these essays witness the continuation of African American contributions in the United States and abroad while looking to the future to mark substantive possibilities for their research. The contents of this anthology also signal the rich investments that contemporary artists have made to critique the political landscape, and what now seems to be the normalized divestment and disruption of Black ontologies. Interpreting and understanding artistry as critical celebrations, the collection herein evidences the perennial need for art and art-makers to remain central to social justice advocacy. In the United States, 2016 marked the exit of the Obama administration; the grand opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC; and sonic releases from artists such as Solange, claiming, in various ways, their rightful “seat at the table.” Indeed, artists ranging from orators to architects to musicians continue to respond in innovative and audacious ways to celebrate Black culture, while at the same time addressing the attempted expulsion of Black being. In many ways, this anthology serves as a literary 1

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Sh a r r el l D. Luc k e t t

extension of what Christina Sharpe has termed “wake work,” work that is a “theory and praxis of Black being in diaspora.”1 In Chapter 1 of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Sharpe (2016) shares myriad definitions of wake, which she then reads alongside Black resistance, Black death, and Black artistry. In conversation with Sharpe’s work and several other cultural studies scholars, this anthology serves as a critical compilation from artists/scholars who are always-already working in and around acts of freedom-making. Significantly, the work herein investigates various modes of artistry that negate Black exclusion while canonizing (re)readings and articulations of diverse ways in which African Americans have addressed quotidian dangers and unfound grievances toward their blackness and being. In reference to Black identity, it is important to note that in this compendium African American and Black are used interchangeably, though, depending on the context, the words can signal different identities. In Black Performance Theory, Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez (2014) acknowledge this interchangeability of terms as they note that monikers used to “designate black presence,” such as African, Black, or African American, “represents a context for packaging ideas about black people in particular places and during particular historical time periods.”2 They further offer that “Black and African American can represent resistant, dissident self-namings in response to political activism of the latter part of the twentieth century,”3 while acknowledging that “black has stabilized an international identity of diasporan consciousness.”4 Likewise, honing in on the specificity of phenotypical perceptions of blackness, in Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches, Sharrell D. Luckett and Tia M. Shaffer (2017) offer ruminations on what it means to “look” Black, suggesting that “looking” Black is often determined by donning specific hair textures, such as kinky or loosely coiled, to having very dark to olive light skin tones combined with “features of African and white European ancestry.”5 And though this type of racial classification is often problematic, the subjects discussed in this anthology are indeed perceived as Black in a U.S. and global context. In addition, their artistry is/was also cultivated primarily in the United States, though some have indelible African American transnational orientations, as found in the chapters by Florencia V. Cornet, Genevieve Hyacinthe, and Doria Charlson, where they theorize the work of Josefina Báez, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Pearl Primus, respectively. And while the authors of the essays are ethnically and racially diverse, the artistry discussed in this book can be coded and perceived as African American art or Black art since it was borne of individuals identified as Black or African American. With a keen interest in the value and agency of African American art, the essay contributors join a long list of African Americans and African American allies who have walked before them and found voice in a seemingly doomed and desolate environment; while still managing to celebrate African American existence first, and not always in reaction to the “other.” Specifically, the authors here are involved in the work of “blackness.” In writing about blackness and governance, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten offered that blackness still has work to do: to discover the re-routing encoded in the work of art: in the anachoreographic reset of a shoulder, in the quiet extremities that animate a range of social chromaticisms and, especially, in the mutations that drive mute, labored, musicked speech as it moves between an incapacity for reasoned or meaningful self-generated utterance that is, on the one hand, supposed and, on the other hand, imposed, and a critical predisposition to steal (away).6

In other words, this anthology anchors itself in a place that might be betwixt and between the not yet solved and the unsolvable, the never broken and the unbreakable, the dream deferred



Introduction 3

and the daydreamer. Borrowing from Childish Gambino, many of these essays function as a clarion call to not only wake up (upending from an induced, albeit conscious sleep—a state of un(rest)), but to stay woke.7 This anthology is because the United States should continue looking to artistry and artists’ innate abilities to help solve what seem like immutable equations that surface in the American experience related to race and other intersectional factors, such as class, size, and gender. Artistry must be at the forefront of revolution while elevating Black lives and Black material culture, and contemporaneously invoking the doing of activist work. Since the beginning of time, it seems, art has been endemic to African peoples, as they created sculptures, relics, body tattoos, and ritual playscripts, among other things, in relation to religion and ritual in ancient Africa. In the 2017 PBS documentary Africa’s Great Civilizations, Henry Louis Gates Jr. visits the African continent, the birthplace of human civilization according to anthropological scholars. 8 He then speaks with several scientists from around the globe who, based on their research, assert and uphold the belief that the human race began in ancient Africa; artistic expression, confirmed by Gates, was a central part of their culture. It seems that art, in various mediums, was most important in carrying out rituals. Wole Soyinka goes so far as to say one’s existence is inextricably linked to ritual theatre as he offers, “Ritual theatre . . . establishes the spatial medium not merely as a physical area for simulated events but as a manageable contraction of the cosmic envelope within which man—no matter how deeply buried such a consciousness has latterly become—fearfully exists.”9 Though Soyinka is specifically referencing theatre, one must understand that theatre often includes many art forms, such as acting, dance, visual art, mediated art, singing, and dramatic literature, serving as an ideal discipline for these fields to converge. Hence, it is no surprise that during and after the transatlantic slave trade, art (broadly defined) still surfaced as an important part of West African culture in the United States. And as several generations passed, art remained not only critical to African American religion and ritual, but also became a central vehicle for activist activities that advanced the lives of African descendants in America. For instance, activism is found in the writing of William Wells Brown, the first Black man to have a play published in America. Brown’s play, The Escape; or a Leap for Freedom (1858), recounts factual, horrific events of slavery and ends with an enslaved man, who appears dedicated to his White enslaver, escaping to Canada. Activism is prevalent when W.E.B. Du Bois, in his 1926 speech at the NAACP, suggested to African Americans that a turn toward artistry could possibly liberate them. Du Bois offered, “Here [artistry] is a way out. Here [artistry] is the real solution of the color problem. The recognition accorded Cullen, Hughes, Fauset, White and others shows there is no real color line.”10 And though Alain Locke understandably disagreed with Du Bois as to how Black artistry should be audienced, Locke also felt that art should be cultivated and that art, as a form of self-expression, is fundamentally an outgrowth of “vigorous, flourishing living.”11 Locke was acknowledging that the creation of art evidences a propensity toward leading a fulfilling life. Further, post–Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston published the “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” an essay that ties African American being to artistic expression.12 Since then, African American artists have continued to use their artistry as activism throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as seen in the Black Arts and the Black Lives Matter movements. Thus, this anthology continues evidencing ways in which art infused with activism, and vice versa, is endemic to African American culture, as artistic expression has almost always been employed and deployed to advance and sustain the lives of Black peoples.

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Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity This anthology explores and critiques African American artistry in relation to activism, aesthetics, and futurity, three multifaceted notions that resist singularity, though together they make up the subject matter addressed herein. When writing about playwright Charles Fuller’s contributions to the arts, Molefi Kete Asante offered that being both Black and living in the United States can be seen as a paradox.13 Asante noted that the very act of “living” is in contestation with being Black. The living that Asante is referencing correlates with thriving mental and spiritual health and experiencing a true meritocracy, all components that Black people are often denied simply because they are Black. Black people in the United States are only intermittently afforded opportunities and access to resources that might allow them to “live” their best lives. And the unwarranted assaults on Black bodies further diminish their chances to thrive in the United States. Yet, Asante reminds us that African Americans in the past and present have often used artistry to refute, upend, or erase this paradox altogether, as he praised Fuller as an artistic exemplar who “understands this paradox and creates out of it, fusing together the parts of [Black people’s] experiences, contradictions and misgivings, with the hopes and desires in a way that resolves [their] most critical issues.”14 Fuller, like many of the subjects in this anthology, calls upon creativity to address social injustices and perhaps improve the living conditions of African Americans in the United States. Activism is understood as a type of action that has the express intent to address, highlight, and/or curtail actions that are unjustly harming a person or another entity. There are many ways to be involved in activism, including mobilizing bodies and/or creating art to address said grievances. In her essay “Black Artists and Activism: Harlem on My Mind (1969),” Bridget Cooks highlights the community activism of 1969 that occurred in Harlem when Black Harlem artists were excluded from participating in an exhibition about their own community at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Here, Cooks associates activism with community movement and notes how the artists’ mobilization showed “the increasingly powerful role of oppressed communities to organize their voices against blatant omissions, disrespectful treatment, and cultural misrepresentation by art museums in the United States.15 Of course, this type of activist work was not unique to visual artists, as artists practicing in other areas, such as theatre, journalism, or dance, have also organized in various ways to address oppression and persistent marginalization, and are still involved in this type of activist work today. Activism, like the kind Cooks wrote about, also invokes community, or the happening of congregation—a community that serves as a support system and safety net anchored in effecting change. The Cooks essay serves as one example, albeit a notable example, of how Black artists have historically turned to collective activism to address oppression. It can also be argued that activism and social justice in the African American community are inextricably linked because in most instances their forms of activism are to guarantee safety, civil rights, and other forms of equitability. In addition, social justice can be thought of as the effect of acts of conciliation, fair practices, reconciliation, or reparations in some form, eventually impacting public policy, legislation, and juridical matters in favor of the oppressed. And as highlighted in this anthology, Black artists have often used the arts as the mode or vehicle to advocate for social justice or bring social justice issues to the attention of a community. In this way, many of the essays in this anthology have some form of social justice framing or viewpoint, whether it’s advocating for queer communities to receive proper artistic credits as found in J. Michael Kinsey’s chapter or investigating the implications



Introduction 5

and impact of the disapproval of trap gospel music in the Black church, as found in Sammantha McCalla’s chapter. According to Gordon Graham, author of Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics, aesthetics are often concerned with the attributes of what constitutes art and the ways in which art gains value.16 He goes on to say that “philosophy of art (or aesthetics) is directly relevant to the study, appreciation and practice of the arts.”17 Hence, aesthetics is often concerned with the mode or medium a creative is working in and theoretical inquiries into the art, including the guiding methodological principles. Graham also acknowledges that theorists taking up questions of aesthetics come from all sorts of fields, such as musicology and sociology.18 Imbued with this understanding, it makes sense for the essays in this book to address or interrogate the aesthetics of a subject or subject matter. By engaging with the aesthetics of their artistic topics, the authors are acknowledging that the contributions of African Americans, their supporting institutions, and Black theory are invaluable in cultivating powerful sociocultural manifestations writ large; and the essays in this book take up the manifestation of art in several forms. To boot, the chapter contributors address future directions of the studied subject, or they address actions that have already been implemented to ensure continual dissemination of said artistic creation(s). Discussing futurity within these chapters honors the projected and endless contributions of African American arts to society, and might also signal new epistemologies borne of Black thought and theory. The scope of the chapters primarily focus on U.S. reactions and reflections. In total, this anthology serves as an archive of research in African American artistic studies that take up questions involving activism, aesthetic exploration, and new possibilities for African American arts. Though there are several books that focus on the role of the arts as it relates to African American U.S. cultural production, the majority of these books focus solely or primarily on the visual arts. For instance, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (Tate Publishing, 2017) focuses on the years 1963–1983. In this book, American art history is surveyed as it relates to ignored histories of Black artists living in the twentieth century. This book also discusses the role of museums relative to the “debates of the period and visual art’s relation to the Black Arts Movement.”19 Other books, such as African-American Art (Oxford University Press, 1998) by Sharon Patton and African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, The Civil Rights Era, and Beyond (Skira Rizzoli, 2012) by Richard Powell and Virginia Mecklenburg also focus solely on visual art. African American Art and Artists (University of California Press, 1990 and 2003) by Samella Lewis is a valuable but dated book that provides context for Black artists from the eighteenth century up until the end of the twentieth century. And though Black Popular Culture (New Press, 1992), edited by Gina Dent, is a well-known anthology that discusses Blacks and the arts, it was published almost thirty years ago, and of course much has happened in the Black arts community since 1992. To add, Black Popular Culture has a focus on culture, framed by Black joy and Black pleasure, but the chapters are not entirely focused on art in the Black community. One of the more recent books that includes inquiries into African American art is Black Performance Theory (2014), edited by Tommy F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez. Developed out of several annual convenings of Black artists, called the Black Performance Theory Group, the book takes up a vast range of Black artistry, but it does not have an express focus on activism and futurity. This is not to say that activism and futurity isn’t touched upon in DeFrantz and Gonzalez’s volume; however, their primary focus involves Black performance as theory and method. Therefore, African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity positions itself as the most recent anthology to explore a vast range of Black artistry in the twenty-first century

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with a keen focus on activism, aesthetics, and futurity. Here, diverse voices highlight African American art and culture in several fields, such as the staged activist work in concert with the Black Lives Matter movement, the application of Transfuturism as methodology in the arts, and critiques on black fashion as activism, as found in Shondrika Moss-Bouldin, Amber Johnson, and Rikki Byrd’s chapters, respectively. In this anthology, the authors collectively ask: What are the connections between African American arts, the work of social justice, and creative processes? If we conceive of the arts as part of the legacy of Black activism in the United States, how can we use that epistemological construct to inform our understanding of the complicated intersections of African American activism and aesthetics? How might we, as scholars and creatives, employ the arts to envision and shape a verdant society? Offering timely, innovative perspectives on the role of the arts and activism within the context of African American fashion, media, theatre, dance, visual art, music, literature, performance, and other art forms, African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity is a necessary collection that illustrates how one has or how one might approach the use of African American artistry to promote social change, conciliatory moments, and freedom acts.

Organization African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity opens with a visual foreword from mixed media artist Carrie Mae Weems. Weems served as the keynote speaker for the African-­ American Art: Activism and Aesthetics 2016 conference; thus, it is apropos for her to catalyze this anthology. Preceding this photography installation is a note from conference planner, book series editor, and Griot Institute director Carmen Gillespie, who introduces Weems’s contribution and shares how Weems’s work and presence blessed a great gathering of artists and scholars at the conference, and now readers of this book. Following Weems’s visual foreword, the chapters in the anthology are arranged in three sections: “Bodies of Activism,” “Music and Visual Art as Activism,” and “Institutions of Activism.” “Bodies of Activism” includes essays that address forms of activism in direct relation to the physical body, and how the physical body manifests as activism itself. “Music and Visual Art as Activism” focuses on representations of sonic and traditional visual art, while “Institutions of Activism” shares the work of organizations and collectives that have social justice agendas that speak to the lived experiences of African Americans in the United States. Just as this anthology opens with the work of Carrie Mae Weems, an artistic offering from another esteemed artist-scholar serves as the Afterword. Blackballin’ is a play written by hip hop theatre pioneer and professor of playwriting Rickerby Hinds. Hinds emigrated from Honduras to Los Angeles at the age of thirteen, and since entering the academy as a student and then professor, his critically acclaimed plays have been read and staged nationally and abroad. Blackballin’ takes a unique look at the lives of black athletes in the United States and their commodification in the sports industry. With this play, Hinds questions the expense of Black performance in sports, taking it directly to the male body, while highlighting the tenuous relationship between the quest for economic mobility and corporeal sacrifice. Bodies of Activism Black bodies and their comportment hold history and unfathomable treasures still unearthed. This section connects directly to the flesh of Black folks and the ways in which they inhabit, negotiate, identify, mark, or carve out safe spaces. At once rooted in the quotidian and magical,



Introduction 7

the bodies discussed in this section take up a range of artistic expression, such as fashion, transformation, and staged musicality. With a focus on weighted bodies of blackness and how they might perform within the context of African Americanness and art, a historicity of African American culture is added to an ever-growing and evolving field of Black art and performance. “Bodies of Activism” opens with “Trans Identity as Embodied Afrofuturism,” wherein Amber Johnson positions Transfuturism as “an aesthetic antidote to systemic oppression.” Suggesting Afrofuturism is an analytic solvent to canonical exception and hyperinvisibility, Johnson offers Transfuturism as an ontological praxis that foregrounds trans identities as shape shifters and boundary breakers with(in) and beyond Afrofuturism. Highlighting Transfuturism’s theoretical implications in artistic practice by sharing their work with photography and media, Johnson expands notions and social codes of trans identities that might serve to anchor a utopian performative of embodied and intersubjective futures. Ultimately, Johnson points toward a future where Transfuturism enables one to “reimagine gender in ways that promote diversity and freedom.” Next, in “Designing Our Freedom: Toward a New Discourse on Fashion as a Strategy for Self-Liberation,” Rikki Byrd focuses our attention on the fashion industry as she highlights how three key African American figures between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries used fashion and body imagery as forms of liberation and subversion of perceived notions of blackness. Deftly marking the work of Elizabeth Keckley, Patrick Kelley, and Kerby Jean-Raymond, Byrd makes an important contribution to fashion studies, African American studies, and American studies as she argues that Black fashion studies is central to the study of Black activism in the United States. She does this by highlighting three figures’ significant contributions to fashion and mapping how they tackled racism and oppression through artistic fashioning of bodies. In Chapter 3, Doria E. Charlson offers an informative look into the work of Pearl Primus, a transcontinental dancer known for her activist work through movement. This chapter shares how Primus’s repertoire helped to catalyze foundations for the civil rights movement and the Black Arts movement. Charlson asserts that Primus’s dance work can be seen as embodied history and that her choreography challenged racial and structural barriers for Black people. By outlining Primus’s activist work in West African and African American movement, Charlson identifies ways in which Primus helped to mobilize racial justice cohorts and highlights her legacy within and beyond the dance world; a legacy that continues to influence art-making and artistry of various mediums. The transnational convergence of Josefina Báez’s identities and their visibility in her solo play Domincanish (2000) are explored in Chapter 4. With in-depth analyses of Báez’s play and her cultural influences, Florencia V. Cornet interrogates the interdependent relationship of African American arts and international Black cultures, specifically focusing on the U.S. (New York) and Caribbean (Dominican Republic) heritages. Cornet considers the vast and complex identities of people of African descent and how investigating their artistic work and transcontinental influences provides modes and functions of self-proclamation, survival tactics, and celebration of an expansive African American identity. She suggests that purposely connecting with transnational histories of blackness could possibly “foster creative new ways of individual and collective liberation and psychic freedom.” In Chapter 5, Daniel McNeil investigates the important work of film critic Armond White, as he discusses how White upheld the highest standards of critique. Drawing a clear picture of Armond White’s career influences and his trajectory to inimitable contrarian writer, McNeil

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unveils how White, through his often unpopular critiques, demanded the utmost quality and analyses of Black representation in the media. McNeil also shows how White was eventually “blackballed” from being hailed as a top critic seemingly due to his searing reflections on the ill-informed, supposedly positive critiques of Black films by top White critics at traditional and online film critiquing platforms. As McNeil ushers the reader through several of White’s controversial critiques of popular films, such as 12 Years a Slave, Moonlight, and Black Panther, he also reveals how Armond White’s work has historically rejected perceived binaries and sussed through human contradiction by documenting the politics of myriad films. Significantly, McNeil’s chapter positions White’s film critiques as complex nuances of legible activism that demand further investigation. Closing out the “Bodies of Activism” section is “Race and History on the Operatic Stage: Caterina Jarboro Sings Aida.” Here, Lucy Caplan traces the operatic career of Caterina Jarboro, while reading Jarboro’s contributions alongside the racial genealogy of the role of Aida. Focusing on Jarboro’s feat as the first Black woman to perform with a major U.S. opera company, Caplan argues that Jarboro’s performance had a lasting impact on the racial politics of opera in the United States. Through a close reading of both Black audience reception and White audience reception, Caplan postulates that Aida eventually served as a groundbreaking opportunity for Black women while simultaneously constraining how and where their performative contributions to opera might be staged. Music and Visual Art as Activism Sonic and artistically embodied vocations have always made space for celebration, liberation, and resistance. As far back as history will allow, music and art have been a part of African diasporic culture, resonating in the minds of many as epistemologies of healing, worship, affirmation, and universal lovemaking. The chapters in this section follow in this tradition by highlighting ways that African American arts and artists have influenced humanity and engendered activism through music and art, broadly construed. In this section, contributors lean in to artistic offerings from artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Messy Mya, and gospel artist Erica Campbell. We begin with Genevieve Hyacinthe’s engagement with the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Through replete analysis of several of Basquiat’s paintings and close readings of how Basquiat’s work undoubtedly influenced (un)gendered presentations of self in the careers of Young Thug and Kanye West, Hyacinthe considers new inquiries into Basquiat’s work, such as the performance of diverse Black masculinities and gender performance in hip hop as tools to tackle injustices. In addition, Hyacinthe draws on the work of other painters, such as Tintoretto, to further outline how Basquiat’s art supports various forms of Black artistic expression in several mediums. Throughout, Hyacinthe strategically maps “Basquiat’s deployment of gender fluidity and black masculine sexual alterity [as] activism—a radical, political act—positioning his heterogenenous black masculinity as a ‘royal’ standard.” The influence of trap gospel and respectability politics of Black churchgoers is discussed in Chapter 8. Sammantha McCalla highlights a railing against respectability politics in gospel music by an analysis of “I Luh God” by Erica Campbell, half of the famed gospel duo Mary, Mary. As McCalla turns our attention to a newer, understudied, and contested form of gospel music, she shows how the criminalization of Black language and vernacular leads to a disowning and disavowal of “I Luh God” by some churchgoers because they are reading the song through a colonial White dominant discourse. Commenting on the lineage of Kirk Franklin,



Introduction 9

one of Campbell’s contemporaries who also took risks in gospel music, McCalla posits that a song encompassing popular hip hop aesthetics and Black southern vernacular, such as “I Luh God,” actually enables the church to welcome diverse blackness and trap gospel music without reservation. McCalla advocates for a dismantling of respectability politics in the church, particularly the ways in which vernacular has historically determined how Black church communities respond to gospel music and vet Black people as incredible or credible citizens. In Chapter 9, Nettrice R. Gaskins shares the historical significance and cultural resonance of the cosmogram, or dikenga, that for centuries has been considered a map of the cosmos. Understood as figures and symbols that are central to the Kongo people in West Central Africa, cosmograms have been employed in Black artistry for hundreds of years. In her (re)readings of contemporary artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Houston Conwill, Gaskins employs cosmograms, read through an Afrofuturist lens, as an analytic to interpret and articulate the work of these Black artists. As she offers ways in which cosmograms signal unending possibilities and manifestations in Black art, Gaskins argues that cosmograms should be used “as a foundation and guide for the exploration and analysis of African American creative expression.” Positioning herself as a performance artist who explores how “sonic based performative art can function as a civic tool for empathy cultivation to promote and model transformative social change” in Chapter 10, Abby Dobson offers substantive examples of the ways in which her compositions employ activism and intersectional analyses of the collective lived experiences of Black women. Here, Dobson reflects upon inspirations, including marching and sharing space with like-minded activists and serving as the artist-in-residence with the African American Policy Forum, that influenced two of her musical compositions. In this essay, one learns about the influences that led Dobson to write “Say Her Name,” a song that supports the Say Her Name movement and specifically complements the Black Lives Matter movement in its relation to fighting state-sanctioned violence against Black people, particularly Black women. In addition, Dobson critiques Beyoncé’s recent turn toward fusing her artistry with activism and politics. Though she applauds Beyonce’s efforts, Dobson offers that Beyonce’s socially conscious artistry fails to offer transformative change because of its insufficient intersectionality. In Chapter 11, J. Michael Kinsey positions “shade” as theory and the act of throwing “shade” as a disidentification. Situating this chapter as a “read” in line with Black radical tradition and drawing primarily upon the work of José Esteban Muñoz and the artistry of Big Freedia and Messy Mya, Kinsey illuminates and critiques queer aesthetics employed in Beyoncé’s “Formation” video. Here, Kinsey highlights the erasure of Black queer artists’ contributions to pop culture, ultimately urging this particular community to claim their artistry and “call out” the perpetual appropriation of their artistic creations in pop culture without due credit or compensation. To that end, Kinsey offers “A Meditation on Shade” as he shares details about his solo show, The Kids, to further articulate the act of “shade” and its intersecting implications in contemporary Black radical tradition. Institutions of Activism In addition to bodies and material as forms of activism, this section turns our attention toward larger bodies which constitute a collective response to the lived experiences of African Americans in the United States. “Institutions of Activism” features several organizations and their social justice work in order to offer exemplars of ways that institutions, collectives, and their leaders can function as viable vehicles of action.

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In “Centering Blackness through Performance in Every 28 Hours,” Shondrika Moss-­ Bouldin details the Every 28 Hours playwriting and performance project. Every 28 Hours, spearheaded by theatre producer and director Claudia Alick, was produced in response to the alarming statistic that every twenty-eight hours a state-sanctioned killing of a Black person occurs. This project also serves as a model of response to support the Black Lives Matter movement and center African Americans in their lived experiences. Throughout the chapter, Moss-Bouldin offers script excerpts and a firsthand experience of the way this project functions in the context of Black liberation and community, as she was also involved in the project as an organizer and director. By detailing the coalition of playwrights, directors, actors, and community members from across the country that galvanized audiences through theatre-­ making via the Every 28 Hours project, Moss-Bouldin provides a reproducible blueprint that can be used to address state-sanctioned violence against Black bodies. “Dancing for Justice Philadelphia: Embodiment, Dance, and Social Change” focuses on Dancing for Justice Philadelphia (DJP), an initiative, in Julie B. Johnson’s words, that is “grounded in the understanding that shared practice of dance as a means to enact individual and collective agency—agency to mourn, heal, and resist—is a transformative act.” In this chapter, Johnson shares her involvement in DJP’s first dance-based solidarity march to mourn Black lives lost to police violence. Johnson provides a thick description of the initiative and her involvement in it, allowing the reader access to her experience. She analyzes the embodiment of African diaspora dance and cultural practices within the march as an entry point for individual activism, and the ways in which this type of movement might bring attention to urgent matters of the collective consciousness. Johnson ultimately encourages an ethos of activist identity-building and social change through and within communities dedicated to using movement in social justice initiatives. In Chapter 14, Freddie Hendricks of the Freddie Hendricks Youth Ensemble of Atlanta (YEA) is interviewed by Sharrell D. Luckett about his creative involvement with the development of YEA’s musical titled Soweto, Soweto, Soweto: A Township is Calling! (1992). The Freddie Hendricks Youth Ensemble of Atlanta, now the Youth Ensemble of Atlanta, is a professional acting program for youth and young adults based in Atlanta, Georgia. The ensemble has been in existence for nearly thirty years and is known for devising full-length musicals that tackle social justice issues, such as school violence and HIV/AIDS. In this interview, Hendricks shares what it was like to create a show with U.S. Black youth that addresses apartheid in South Africa and then travel with the show to perform it for citizens of South Africa. This important reflection from Hendricks highlights the transglobal artistic connections of Black people and the ways in which they creatively address transglobal injustices while celebrating their rich histories of survival. In Chapter 15, Jasmine Coles and Tawnya Pettiford-Wates offer the important history and work of the Conciliation Project, a nonprofit social justice performance troupe founded in Seattle, Washington, and later relocated to Richmond, Virginia. The company focuses on “unpacking the history and the legacy of racial oppression and race performance as recognized in the Confederate South.” Hearing from both the founder (Pettiford-Wates) and an early member of the company (Coles), this chapter serves as an instructive and necessary mapping of how social justice groups might interrogate and remix offensive performative acts, such as minstrelsy, and use them to invoke positive change. The essays in this compendium offer promise to a wide constituency of transdisciplinary thinkers and doers who are seeking to unearth and/or discover myriad ways that



Introduction 11

African American arts have been used to catalyze positive change and promote the liberation of oppressed peoples. African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity can be used and taught in any course that engages with issues of social justice and activism in relation to race and other forms of identity in the United States and abroad. The commentary and critiques not only offer several frameworks where activist work is or was effective, but these essays also operate as activist tools in the form of scholarly and literary tradition.

Notes 1.  Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 19. 2.  Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez, “From “Negro Expression” to “Black Performance,”” in Black

Performance Theory, ed. Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 1. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5.  Sharrell D. Luckett and Tia M. Shaffer, “Introduction: The Affirmation,” in Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches, ed. Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer (London: Routledge, 2017), 5. 6.  Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 50. 7.  Childish Gambino, “Redbone,” #6 on Awaken, My Love! Glassnote Records, 2016. 8.  Africa’s Great Civilizations, “Origins,” Directed by Virginia Quinn, featuring Henry Louis Gates. (PBS, February 2017). 9.  Wole Soyinka, “Drama and the African World-View,” in Theatre in Theory 1900–2000, ed. David Krasner (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 404. 10.  W.E.B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” The Crisis 32 (October 1926): 290–297. The speech was given in June 1926 at an NAACP conference. Full names of the four people mentioned are Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, and Walter White. 11.  Alain Locke, “Art of Propoganda?,” Harlem 1, no. 1 (1928). 12.  Zora Neale Hurston, The Sanctified Church (Berkeley: Turtle Island Publishing, 1983), 49. Original speech published in 1933. 13.  Molefi Kete Asante, The Dramatic Genius of Charles Fuller (New York: Universal Write Publications, 2015), 31. 14. Ibid. 15.  Bridget Cooks, “Black Artists and Activism: Harlem on My Mind (1969),” American Studies 48, no. 1 (2007): 7. 16.  Gordon Graham, Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 1. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19.  Mark Godfrey and Zoé Whitley, eds., Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (London: Tate Publishing, 2017).

Bibliography Asante, Molefi Kete. The Dramatic Genius of Charles Fuller. New York: Universal Write Publications, 2015, 31. Childish Gambino. “Redbone,” #6. Awaken, My Love!, Glassnote Records, 2016. Audio recording. Cooks, Bridget. “Black Artists and Activism: Harlem on My Mind (1969).” American Studies 48, no. 1 (2007): 5–39. DeFrantz, Thomas F., and Anita Gonzalez. “From Negro Expression to Black Performance.” In Black Performance Theory, edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014, 1. Du Bois, W.E.B. “Criteria of Negro Art.” The Crisis 32 (October 1926): 290–297.

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Gates, Henry Louis. Africa’s Great Civilizations. PBS, 2017. Graham, Gordon. Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics, 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2005, 1. Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013, 50. Hurston, Zora Neale. The Sanctified Church. Berkeley: Turtle Island Publishing, 1983, 49. Locke, Alain. “Art of Propoganda?” Harlem 1, no. 1 (1928). Luckett, Sharrell D., and Tia M. Shaffer. “Introduction: The Affirmation.” In Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches, edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. London: Routledge, 2017, 5. Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016, 19. Soyinka, Wole. “Drama and the African World-View.” In Theatre in Theory 1900–2000, edited by David Krasner. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007, 404.

1 • TR ANS IDENTIT Y AS EMBODIED AFROFUTURISM A MBER JOHNSON

Black gyrls, womyn, and bois carry the weight of the world’s oppression in our skin, hair, breath, and gait.1 Our mere existence is an act of invisible labor in a world that treats us as hyperinvisible—where the stereotypes attached to our bodies are so powerful that they inform how others treat us. In a world where canonical exception—or the rules determined by whiteness that dictate which minorities get to be included versus excluded, or deserve justice, love, and humanity versus violence, hatred, and death—we struggle to transgress these stereotypes while loving ourselves, caring for ourselves, and caring for the world that does not care for us. If loving ourselves is a constant struggle, then imagining the body into a future without domination is an even larger one. Afrofuturism—Afrocentric art forms that render a technologically advanced and liberated future for Black people—is the antidote to the canonical exception and hyperinvisibility bequeathed upon the Black body that make imagining futures a revolutionary act. However, I want to take Afrofuturism a step further and look at the embodiment of trans identities as antidotes that push the boundaries of Afrofuturism. I label this critical embodiment Transfuturism. This essay begins with two theoretical frameworks, hyperinvisibility and canonical exception. Then using Afrofuturism as a departure point, I tease out the aesthetic and social constructions of gender and race through Transfuturism, a photography, oral history, and art activism project that serves three goals: (a) render the critical embodiment of trans identity and blackness visible, (b) act as an aesthetic antidote to systemic oppression operating at the intersection of race and gender, and (c) mitigate the discursive and physical violence that haunts the lives of trans women and gender fluid people of color, resulting in twenty-five murders in 2017, the highest number in history. 2 It is time to radically reimagine gender at the intersections of race.

Hyperinvisibility To render something visible is to give our sense of sight an experience. 3 But seeing is only a part of the equation, for how we see, what we see, and the frequency with which we see something matters. It is hard to imagine a time before the Internet when we had to share physical space to see others, or “see the other.”4 We live in a world of mediated seeing, where historical, cultural, political, and personal assumptions chaperone how we understand texts, people, and context. 5 15

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Who we see, how we see them, and how often we see them guide what we decode when we experience an artifact, leading to invisibility, visibility, and hyperinvisibility. Invisibility occurs when there is a lack of mediated representation. Bodies are missing from narratives en masse, or represented in singular ways that deny human complexity.6 Visibility occurs when bodies are represented in media in ways that lead to a fuller understanding of the human experience.7 Representation occurs with a high frequency and complexity, resulting in a lesser likelihood that narratives lead to stereotypes. Hyperinvisibility starts with hypervisibility, or stereotyping the body so much that the stereotypes become more visible, and thus believable.8 When a mediated image becomes hypervisible, that image begins to represent an entire group of people in mediated space or large forums where people do not have time to interact with others at the personal level. However, when we do interact with different others at the personal level, we can forgo these mass-­mediated images and see them as complex individuals. This is not the case for those who buy into hypervisible images at the interpersonal level.9 Bodies that are different become invisible in interpersonal interactions, too, resulting in hyperinvisibility. After 9/11, stereotypes of Muslims became so hypervisible that Americans began treating Muslims, Arabs, or people who could potentially be identified as Muslims in discriminatory ways.10 American media failed to depict Muslims as anything other than terrorists, resulting in systemic oppression, dehumanization, and exclusion. Another example exists in the folds of the Ferguson uprising. Much like Darren Wilson seeing only a superhuman, dangerous thug, Michael Brown’s body was both present (in the flesh) and absent, due to mediated representations of black masculinity, resulting in Wilson only seeing the stereotype.11 Instead of a human with complex emotions, behaviors, needs, and desires within a system of power, Michael Brown became hyperinvisible, and Darren Wilson felt justified in shooting a villainous monster he described as a demonic Hulk Hogan.12 When bodies are marked absent and present simultaneously, it results in hyperinvisibility, or a space where bodies are marked generic and nonhuman.13 When the single story renders bodies both hypervisible (we see the body all the time in its stereotyped form) and invisible (we fail to see the complex human standing before us), it creates a space of hyperinvisibility where the stereotyped body is so visible that we fail to see complexity. The real is replaced with fiction, and the fiction is so powerful it does not allow the real to exist. Hyperinvisibility can explain the skewed representations of hypersexualized or angry Black women’s bodies in media, as well as overly aggressive, toxic images of Black men that result in police brutality and murder, and the explicit connection between stereotypes of trans people and the desire for mass publics to use fear of pedophilia and sexual assault to justify discriminatory bathroom legislation.14 Once bodies are marked hyperinvisible, consumers tend to see those identities as not only true but normal, viable, and expected, resulting in violent mediated and interpersonal interactions.

Canonical Exception Canonical exception also stems from rigorous stereotyping and is informed by canonical prejudice. Scholar David Román defines canonical prejudice as an “overinvestment in the cultural forms of the elite” that erases nonnormative experience and cultural production from canonical archives.15 While several scholars use the term canonical prejudice to look at the



Trans Identity as Embodied Afrofuturism 17

ways in which texts become marginalized and erased because they stray from normal conventions in literature, music, or other art genres, Celia Daileader specifically addresses how White supremacy, racism, and female subordination serve as points of erasure for Black literature that could be considered canonical texts.16 Canonical prejudice illuminates the ways in which systemic oppression consistently denies bodies of color the right to live their lives, produce artifacts about those lives, and archive them into the fabric of American history. Instead, canonical prejudice ensures that we are erased, dismissed, and read via very particular modes of framing. Jeffrey McCune, in his working manuscript Read!: An Experiment in Seeing Black, discusses “canonical ways of reading/seeing Blackness that further produce canonical prejudices, which fundamentally sediment a practice of framing Black bodies in nonproductive ways.”17 Canons function at the core of institutions as designators of value, which legitimize the institution and the process of erasure. If canonical prejudice is rooted in erasure, negative framing, and devaluing the lives of marginalized communities, we might consider canonical exception as a critically useful term that pinpoints the ideological system that perpetuates canonical prejudice. Canonical exception serves as a point of departure for interrogating the exceptional bodies that are accepted. Ideological systems like respectability politics grant entry to particular kinds of bodies in dominant spaces, and further ostracize bodies that don’t make the cut, due to embodying stereotypes, and instead are deemed deserving of erasure. Canonical prejudice and canonical exception then work concomitantly by creating the criteria for inclusion and erasure. Providing particular kinds of exceptions directly correlates to demonizing other bodies, resulting in a vicious cycle of aesthetic cleansing. Canonical exception is more than just being accepting of exceptional Black excellence; it is also a frame of accepting the negative stories tied to marginalized groups, as if they are always warranted, always right, and always on time. The perpetual sharing of negative narratives creates an unsafe space that breeds more canonical prejudice and spite. The way the media frames protesters, racially charged incidents, and peaceful demonstrations mimics exactly what we have come to expect, which is why it is a canon of exception. We expect and accept that everything is the protesters’ fault. We accept that protesters are a disgrace as they perceivably go against the very will of the parents of the deceased who call for peace. We expect and accept protesters to disregard U.S. presidents calling for calm and peaceful protests. We accept that protesters are opportunistic looters, capable of burning their own cities. We expect that Black on Black violence is a qualifier for disregarding police brutality until we respect ourselves enough to not kill ourselves because that just makes logical sense. Canonical exception is the root of postracial nonsense that pretends we live in a racially equitable world. We do not. Canonical exception is as much about Black excellence as it is about Black demonization. Dominant society accepts exceptional Black people while accepting the demonization of those thuggish, uncivilized Black people. Thus, canonical exception is the foundation for postracial discourse. Because certain spaces are accessible by some marginalized people—such as someone with my body, an attractive, lighter skinned, articulate, respectable Black professor—others deem those spaces as accepting, inclusive, and without issue. Barack Obama is an exception, which means we live in a postracial America. The fourteen Black actors who have won Academy Awards are exceptions, which means the Academy Awards aren’t racist. Black professors,

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doctors, lawyers, athletes, and entertainers are ALL exceptions. And as we flaunt our exceptions in our career pathways, we watch our Brothers and Sisters dying in the streets, their lives deemed worth little value, their pain obsolete. “They” are the norm. “They” fit into the canon of prejudice that deems their bodies DO NOT MATTER. “Their” bodies are forgotten, erased, undeserving, and tragic. Unfortunately, even for those who are granted access, canonical exception has limits. Our exceptions expire in certain spaces. There is an invisible line that extends along the borders of good and welcome Negro versus bad and dehumanized Negro. For those of us who can traverse that border as it bleeds, because we are at once on both sides, in any given situation, we know how it feels to be respected, adored, and honored in one space, like this space, where I have your eyes, ears, and hopefully listening hearts. But those who are exceptions can also be arrested, beaten, silenced, raped, and/or shattered in any given moment or situation. Consider Imani Perry’s recent incident with the police at Princeton University where she was handcuffed to a table over an unpaid parking ticket.18 Consider Henry Louis Gates’s arrest outside of his own home as he tried to force his front door open when his key failed to work.19 Reflect upon all the Black folks killed in the streets and how they were doing mundane things like walking, waiting for a tow truck, or selling cigarettes. What happens when Black bodies represent the constructed frame of Black bodies “asking for it” by being Black and in any space? What happens when my body is stripped of its accolades and pulled over by a police officer on University Drive in Prairie View, Texas, at my former institution, Prairie View A&M University? I could have been Sandra Bland, as I drove that same street every day on my way to work, having resigned only a month before she was arrested. Parts of me are always death-bound while other parts of me are celebrated, resulting in a constant pushing and pulling of the limbs until they break and bleed. Trying to reveal the dissonance between those parts is a painful work of labor. It is no wonder that so many of our leaders, artists, entertainers, professors, teachers, and truth-seekers suffer from depression. To be loved by some people and disregarded by other people because they don’t know what we can do yet is a painfully sobering thought. Canonical prejudice, canonical exception, and hyperinvisibility work together to erase Black bodies and generate a culture “deserving” of physical and discursive violence. So what is the answer? How do we clap back in a world that consistently and constantly tells us we are not worthy of justice, love, celebration, and humanization? One such answer begins with Afrofuturism.

Afrofuturism Birthed from a nexus of social movement, technology, transnational capital, and artistic expression, Afrofuturism is an aesthetic manifestation of storytelling critically aware of possibility.20 Designed to project the mind and body into a future free from colonialism, Afrofuturistic artists, activists, and scholars look toward the critical embodiment of Afrocentric imagination in art forms such as film, music, visual art, fashion, and literature as a means of replacing presumed whiteness as authority. Afrocentric in practice, “Afrofuturism emerged as a means to understand the transformation of African peoples as they dealt with the oppressive forces of discrimination, and the complexities of modern urban life and postmodernity.”21 “Astroblackness is an Afrofuturistic concept in which a person’s black state of consciousness, released from



Trans Identity as Embodied Afrofuturism 19

the confining and crippling slave or colonial mentality, becomes aware of the multitude and varied possibilities and probabilities within the universe.”22 The precise moment of imagined possibilities wherein the Black body seeks a future that centers its blackness instead of whiteness is Afrofuturism. While the language of Afrofuturism creates a level of unification that renders the critical imagination of blackness visible, the ways in which androgyny has been employed as a technological future create tensions that I want to tease. Genderless and androgynous android narratives create a particular kind of gender freedom, or freedom from gender in futuristic imaginings, but not all bodies want to be genderless, and not all bodies can transgress into genderless embodiment due to various aesthetic, genetic, capitalistic, and/or cultural reasons. I offer Transfuturism as a lived and critical performance of Afrofuturism that exists in the lived body: the trans body is alive in the flesh, and transitions across, between, within, and beyond binaries. Transfuturism is a photography, oral history, and art activism project that I began in 2016. My goals for the project are to render the lives of Black trans folk complex and visible in an effort to mitigate physical and discursive violence aimed at trans women of color specifically. I photograph the bodies and record the narratives and lived experiences of trans and gender nonconforming people of color who are gracious enough to tell their stories and allow me to capture their critical embodiment of future, imagination, and how transgression leads to new forms of identity challenges. I send the photographs and oral histories to Wriply Bennet, a Black trans woman and Afrofuturistic sketch artist. Using their words and photographs, she draws each participant as a superhero. She then sends those sketches to me, and I create largescale paintings. The first three paintings we crafted together to ensure we were in accordance with our vision for the project. The first three paintings are included at the end of this essay and illustrate how works of art push the boundaries of what we know about gender and how we can create gender freedom.

Transfuturism Trans bodies have embraced the critical embodiment of imagination as push back, refusing to accept cisgender performances as normal, natural, and preferred. Not just in art, but in the flesh. The linguistic revelation of trans renders the lived identities more visible, and creates discursive and physical space to live and breathe in the critical body, or the body whose mere presence acts as a form of resistance in a culture predicated on assimilation to and simulation of gender standards. As Kei Williams, one of the participants and interviewees in the art project being discussed, states, “When it comes to trans and gender non-conforming (GNC) folks, most folks are looking for you to pass in some type of way. And if you don’t pass, you are considered a threat. Being able to stand in truth in one’s self is bravery.” Those who inhabit Black bodies are already at once predisposed to a culture of simulation. “The ‘culture of simulation’ is no different from ‘the culture’ for people of color in this country, who have been ‘inventing’ themselves, their multiple selves as they go along, and ‘[construct] the world, too.’” 23 This is a testament to our survival as a mode of invention. Eb Brown, another participant, follows this sentiment: “The thing that makes me feel liberated is the fact that I can actually morph my body into different shapes depending what I am feeling for the day. It makes me feel like I am deconstructing and reconstructing gender on a

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daily basis. I think it challenges my idea of liberation because in that deconstruction and reconstruction, it makes me think about my self in relationship to the world and others everyday.” Eb continues: A liberated future looks like one where people can stand fully in themselves in every moment of the day. The interstellar future is the interlocking of my orbit and your orbit. So all that you are inhabiting and all that I am inhabiting circulate around each other all the time and vibing with each other and learning from each other. But there is no competition because you are fully you and I am fully me. I don’t need to be you and you don’t need to be me. And that is what liberation truly is.

Unfortunately, transgender embodiment has not been centered in the work of Afrofuturist scholars. However, the art form has taken up nonconformity beautifully. For examples, we can visit the work of Octavia Butler, Jimi Hendrix, Prince, and other artists who cross gender norms in their own work and/or personal lives. As scholar Reynaldo Anderson reminds us, “The Black queer futuristic performance of Sylvester James not only demonstrated the ability of the artist to reimagine and influence popular culture and the political sphere, impacting internal and external communities, but simultaneously created new discursive spaces.”24 Ayai Nikos, another participant, speaks volumes when she says, “My pro-black, femme body is a testament to Octavia Butler’s theorizing about a new sun when she writes, ‘There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.’” It is this new discursive and liminal space that I am interested in exploring, specifically as it relates to gender transitions and gender performances in Black communities. Black trans bodies signify a critical resistance toward colonialism and gender-confining rhetoric. Jae Shephard, another participant in the project being discussed, speaks of authenticity and the ruptures of social constructs when they said, “Being my authentic self is liberating because I am able to exist beyond the confines of socially constructed gender binaries.” Black trans bodies use skin as a semistructured, blank canvas, embarking on a journey of rescripting the body as an act of critical imagination. Black trans bodies use voice, hair, fashion, walk, sway, swag, and presence to resurrect possibility. The Black trans body imagines a future self with the aid of external and internal resources without a preexisting model for existence. Every body that transitions becomes their own entity, not a duplication of a trans body that has already transitioned or is transitioning. Therefore, with every iteration, the trans body becomes a new body, or a new sun, thus relying on critical imagination to begin the process, in whatever iteration that may take. The new body then becomes a performative signifier of manifestation. Scholars Kai Green and Treva Ellison speak to this notion of manifestation. They call the Black trans body a tranifesting body. “Tranifesting (transformative manifesting) calls attention to the epistemologies, sites of struggle, rituals, and modes of consciousness, representation, and embodiment that summon into being flexible collectivities . . . capable of operating across normativizing and volatile configurations of race, gender, class, sex, and sexuality.”25 “Tranifesting is a form of radical political and intellectual production that takes place at the crossroads of trauma, injury, and the potential for material transformation and healing.”26 Tranifesting is a futuristic and critical performance of embodied social identity that creates strategic space for transformation. Trans bodies are like transformers for social justice. The very act of disrupting the static gender continuum is an act of critical transformation that creates space for



Trans Identity as Embodied Afrofuturism 21

disrupting various normativities pertaining to a multitude of social identities, including being Black, queer, and/or gender nonconforming. Shifting from ALL disciplinarian regimes requires a summoning of manifested power and imagination. The Black trans body is more than a Black body, it is more than a gendered body, it is more than a trans body. It is a body that meets at specific, fluid, always changing intersections. It is a body that has to constantly navigate those intersections with precise care and critical attention because it is a body that is not always welcomed, appreciated, or loved. It is a body that has to reinvent itself over and over again at the sites of critical embodiment. And it is in the flesh of critical embodiment that trans bodies extend beyond the current scope of Afrofuturism. If Afrofuturism is about the speculation of future and possibility in cultural artistic production, then Transfuturism is the critical, lived embodiment of that production. The Black trans body becomes a physical and live disruptor and builder of social change with regard to intersectional oppression. Black trans bodies live physically in the world artistically crafted by Afrofuturists. And as Kali Tal poignantly posits, “We need, as a culture, to pay attention to the theory and literature of those among us who have long been wrestling with multiplicity.”27 Several scholars have wrestled with technology, gender, and multiplicity as a form of theorizing. Ras Mashramani discusses the power of the Internet to create safe spaces and live beyond the watchful eyes of those who control, violate, and bruise our bodies. In these safe spaces, we are able to experiment with our identities and grow beyond our binaries in a hypermodal setting where we are constantly folding over and into ourselves and others. “We are living in a science-fiction reality, and if science fiction has taught us anything, it’s that a mastery of technology is integral to survival in a plugged-in world . . . [where] our identities hinge on our ability to create and manipulate data in the cybersphere to affect change in real life.” 28 The Internet literally becomes a space “for us freaks and outcasts, whose existences are politicized by overpowering mainstream media that tries its best to distract the masses.” 29 Donna Haraway offers a different account that utilizes the cyborg as a genderless analogy. 30 “Haraway embraces technology as a way of moving away from humanism built on normative binaries and dualisms in order to create a regenerated world without gender.”31 The cyborg uses technology to negate binary systems much like trans bodies use technology to alter the physical characteristics of the body, resulting in a new identity that disrupts binaries. While moving along the continuum might reinforce the binary, the mere ability to move along the continuum serves as a disruptor of the binary, too. If our hope is for a monstrous world without gender, then trans bodies are the growing seedlings of that vision. And while Haraway’s cyborg vision has been met with criticism regarding the intersections of race and class, trans identities have been met with criticism regarding the perpetuation of the gender binary. However, we must remember, “We remake and even exceed language, but we do not escape it.”32 C. Riley Snorton postulates that “as a genre, science fiction offers an important opportunity to account for the past of the future, to reconsider the complex and often contradictory relationships between technology, scientific thought, and ways of life.”33 And like the cyborg Maggie Eighteen reminds us, science fiction is not a simple process of joining science with fiction or humanity and technology; it is extremely fluid, complex, and often contradictory. 34 Nestled within the contradictions, however limiting or creative, is the fact that to attempt to shift across rigid binaries, however reifying, still points to the possibility for disruption. A. Finn Enke reminds us that “gender becomes legible through acts of translation

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that betray disciplinary success and failure simultaneously.”35 One of those failures lies in the inability to escape the language that binds our bodies to binary performances. Enke goes on to suggest that the term and identity “Transgender highlights the labors of translation, inhering an implied ‘before’ and ‘from which.’ The present moment does not tell the story, only that there is one worth telling.”36 And there is a story worth telling here: one replete with future possibility. I offer the term Transfuturism as a theoretical disruption of critical gender binaries within Black communities, while simultaneously disrupting postcolonial and neoliberal thought predicated on identity binaries, denomination, and dehumanization. The term generates visibility for Black trans bodies that separates unique struggles from other bodies that do not carry the weight of these specific intersections, while also highlighting the possibility in critical imagination. Transfuturism also renders visible the multiple ways in which trans bodies have begun laying the groundwork for enfleshed possibilities, or the possibility of performing futurism in the now body, free from speculative fictitious accounts and into lived reality. In thinking about Transfuturism, trans bodies have the ability to transcend gender binaries in multiple ways that inform freedom from gender in the body.

The Project Afrofuturism is a liberatory art form that speculates what freedom from oppression can look like in the technological future for Black people. One of the most common forms of Afrofuturistic production is comic art that features superheroes paving the way to liberation. Within comic and cartoon forms of entertainment culture, gender fluid or visibly trans folks have been painted as antagonists or comedic punch lines, while the heroes are often painted as strong, cisgender, masculine heroes. We chose to capture each participant as an Afrofuturistic comic superhero in order to show the possibility inherent in breaking the gender binary. Rigid gender rules force everyone to conform to toxic ideals of femininity and masculinity. The body that breaks the binary teaches others that they do not have to conform to strict gender rules, and instead can live their life authentically. If people begin to see the value in nonbinary and trans people through this humanizing, narrative-based, act-activism project, it is our hope that gender-based violence aimed at nonbinary people will decrease. To date, we have interviewed eight people and painted three superheroes. The following images include the first paintings crafted after I interviewed and photographed three participants included in this essay—Eb Brown, Ayai Nikos, and Kei Williams. To reiterate, I interview and photograph the participants. Wriply Bennet crafts their superhero persona based on their words and images. Finally, using Wriply’s superhero renderings, I paint the superheroes on 4' × 6' and 4' × 5' canvases. We worked on the first three paintings together to ensure cohesion. Eb Brown’s character is named Nova. Wriply’s drawing was inspired by Eb Brown’s idea of shapeshifting. The painting’s environment was inspired by the idea of orbiting as a potential site for liberation. Kei Williams’s character is named Valor. The illustration was inspired by Kei’s notion that to express one’s gender identity regardless if one passes as cisgender or not is an act of courage and bravery. Kei’s character is surrounded by an eclipse, which shows the beauty and power in darkness, as well as the Ghanaian adinkra symbol for Valor. Finally, Ayai’s illustration is inspired by her use of Octavia Butler’s notion that there is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns. She is named Maasai, after the Kenyan sun god.

Figure 1.1. Amber Johnson and Wriply Bennet. Nova. 2017. © Amber Johnson and Wriply Bennet. Reprinted by permission of Amber Johnson.

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Figure 1.2. Amber Johnson and Wriply Bennet. Valor. 2017. © Amber Johnson and Wriply Bennet.

Reprinted by permission of Amber Johnson.

Conclusion Transfuturism as a concept and project aims to reimagine gender in ways that promote diversity and freedom. Starting with Afrofuturism as a departure point, we locate trans and gender nonbinary people who are willing to share their stories and be photographed. Then, using their interviews and images, Wriply and I reimagine them as superheroes who disrupt Afrofuturism’s tendency to reproduce cisgender, androgynous, or genderless identities. The participants’ words alongside the paintings, photographs, and sketches work in tandem to reimagine the possibility inherent in breaking the gender binary. What I hope to extend beyond this shorter conversation is more engagement with Transfuturism as an aesthetic of possibility, but also an explicit valuing of the work trans bodies do in the flesh. There is freedom in the body that breaks the binary. There is freedom in transgression. There is freedom in transcendence. There is freedom in trans.

Figure 1.3. Amber Johnson and Wriply Bennet, Maasai. 2017. © Amber Johnson and Wriply Bennet.

Reprinted by permission of Amber Johnson.

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Notes 1.  I use the words gyrls, womyn, and bois to be radically inclusive of nonbinary gender identities and expressions. 2.  Human Rights Campaign, Violence against the Transgender Community in 2017, February 19, 2018, https://

www.hrc.org/resources/violence-against-the-transgender-community-in-2018.

3.  Andrea M. Brighenti, Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan,

2010). 4.  John B. Thompson, “The New Visibility,” Theory, Culture & Society 22, no. 6 (2005): 31–51, doi:10.1177 /0263276405059413. 5. Ibid. 6.  Amber Johnson and Robin Boylorn, “Digital Media and the Politics of Intersectional Queer Hyper/In/ Visibility in Between Women,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 11, no. 1 (2015): 1–26. 7.  Ibid., 20. 8.  Jade D. Petermon, “Hyper (in)Visibility: Reading Race and Representation in the Neoliberal Era” (PhD dissertation, University of Santa Barbara, 2014). 9.  Johnson and Boylorn, “Digital Media,” 23. 10.  Desiree Yomtoob, “Caught in Code: Arab American Identity, Image, and Lived Reality,” in Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life, ed. Robin Boylorn and Mark Orbe (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013): 144–158. 11.  Amber Johnson, “From Academe, to the Theatre, to the Streets: My Autocritography of Canonical Exception and Aesthetic Cleansing in the Wake of Ferguson,” Qualitative Inquiry (January 9, 2017): 1–13. 12.  State of Missouri v. Darren Wilson, Grand Jury Volume V (Testimony of D. Wilson, September 16, 2014), https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1371222-wilson-testimony.html. 13.  Amber Johnson, “From Academe,” 7. 14.  See Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); and Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2001). 15.  David Román, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), xxvi. 16.  Celia Daileader, Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-Racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 17.  Jeffrey McCune, “The Queerness of Blackness,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 2, no. 2 (2015): 176. 18.  Susan Svrluga, “A Black Princeton Professor Says She Was Handcuffed to a Table for Her Unpaid Parking Ticket,” Washington Post, March 3, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016 /02/08/a-black-princeton-professor-says-she-was-handcuffed-to-a-table-for-her-unpaid-parking-ticket/?utm _term=.68c16d4bed7f 19.  Krissah Thompson, “Harvard Scholar Henry Louis Gates Arrested,” Washington Post, July 21, 2009. 20.  Reynaldo Anderson and John Jennings, “Afrofuturism: The Digital Turn and the Visual Art of Kanye West,” in The Cultural Impact of Kanye West, ed. Julius Bailey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 35. 21.  Ibid., 35. 22.  Andrew Rollins, “Afrofuturism and Our Old Ship of Zion: The Black Church in Post Modernity,” in Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, ed. Reynaldo Anderson and Charles Jones (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 127. 23.  Kali Tal, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: African American Critical Theory and Cyberculture,” Wired Magazine 4, no. 10 (1996): n.p. 24.  Reynaldo Anderson, “Fabulous: Sylvester James, Black Queer Afrofuturism and the Blackfantastic,” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5, no. 2 (2013): n.p. 25.  Kai Green and Treva Ellison, “Tranifest,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, nos. 1–2 (2014): 222. 26.  Ibid., 223. 27.  Tal, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Being,” n.p. 28.  Ras Mashramani, “Science Fiction, the Political, Metropolarity Crew,” Journal of Speculative Vision & Critical Liberation Technologies: Future Now Edition 1, no. 1 (2013): 6. 29. Ibid.



Trans Identity as Embodied Afrofuturism 27

30.  Donna Jean Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late

Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, ed. Donna Haraway (Abingon, UK: Routledge, 1991), 149–182. 31.  Tiffany Barber, “Cyborg Grammar? Reading Wangechi Mutu’s Non je ne regrette rien through Kindred,” in Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, 5. 32.  A. Finn Enke, “Translation,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, nos. 1–2 (2014): 242. 33.  C. Riley Snorton, “An Ambiguous Heterotopia: On the Past of Black Studies’ Future,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 29–36. 34.  Maggie Eighteen, “Science Fiction, the Political, Metropolarity Crew,” Journal of Speculative Vision & Critical Liberation Technologies: Future Now Edition 1, no. 1 (2013): 5. 35.  Enke, “Translation,” 242. 36.  Ibid., 243.

Bibliography Anderson, Reynaldo. “Fabulous: Sylvester James, Black Queer Afrofuturism and the Blackfantastic.” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5, no. 2 (2013): n.p. Anderson, Reynaldo, and John Jennings. “Afrofuturism: The Digital Turn and the Visual Art of Kanye West.” In The Cultural Impact of Kanye West, edited by Julius Bailey, 35. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Barber, Tiffany. “Cyborg Grammar? Reading Wangechi Mutu’s Non je ne regrette rien through Kindred.” In Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles Jones. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015, 5. Brighenti, Andrea M. Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Byrd, Rudolph P., and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2000. Daileader, Celia. Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-Racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Eighteen, Maggie. “Science Fiction, the Political, Metropolarity Crew.” Journal of Speculative Vision & Critical Liberation Technologies: Future Now Edition 1, no. 1 (2013): 5. Enke, A. Finn. “Translation.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, nos. 1–2 (2014): 242. Green, Kai, and Treva Ellison. “Tranifest.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, nos. 1–2 (2014): 222. Haraway, Donna Jean. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, edited by Donna Haraway. Abingon, UK: Routledge, 1991, 149–182. Johnson, Amber. “From Academe, to the Theatre, to the Streets: My Autocritography of Canonical Exception and Aesthetic Cleansing in the Wake of Ferguson.” Qualitative Inquiry (January 9, 2017): 1–13. Johnson, Amber, and Robin Boylorn. “Digital Media and the Politics of Intersectional Queer Hyper/In/ Visibility in Between Women.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 11, no. 1 (2015): 1–26. Mashramani, Ras. “Science Fiction, the Political, Metropolarity Crew.” Journal of Speculative Vision & Critical Liberation Technologies: Future Now Edition 1, no. 1 (2013): 6. McCune, Jeffrey. “The Queerness of Blackness.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 2, no. 2 (2015): 173–176. Petermon, Jade D. “Hyper (in)Visibility: Reading Race and Representation in the Neoliberal Era.” PhD dissertation, University of Santa Barbara, 2014. Rollins, Andrew. “Afrofuturism and Our Old Ship of Zion: The Black Church in Post Modernity.” In Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, 127. Román, David. Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Snorton, Riley C. “An Ambiguous Heterotopia: On the Past of Black Studies’ Future.” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 29–36.

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Svrluga, Susan. (2016). “A Black Princeton Professor Says She Was Handcuffed to a Table for Her Unpaid Parking Ticket.” Washington Post. March 3, 2016. Tal, Kali. “The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: African American Critical Theory and Cyberculture.” Wired Magazine 4, no. 10 (1996): n.p. Thompson, John B. “The New Visibility.” Theory, Culture & Society 22, no. 6 (2005): 31–51. doi:10.1177 /0263276405059413. Thompson, K. (2009). “Harvard Scholar Henry Louis Gates Arrested.” The Washington Post. July 21, 2009. Yomtoob, Desiree. “Caught in Code: Arab American Identity, Image, and Lived Reality.” In Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life, edited by Robin Boylorn and Mark Orbe. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013.

2 • DESIGNING OUR FREEDOM Toward a New Discourse on Fashion as a Strategy for Self-Liberation R I K K I BY R D

In an essay titled “Clothes for the People,” curator and textile historian Linda Baumgarten1 briefly mentions David Walker, a free Black man “born in North Carolina to an enslaved father and a free mother, [who] set up a successful used-clothing business after he moved to Boston, Massachusetts around 1827.” 2 Although he was a free man, Walker was still afflicted by the social ills of American slavery, and thus joined abolitionist efforts in the North. In 1829, he wrote Appeal to Coloured Citizens of the World—a pamphlet in which Walker encouraged enslaved men and women in the South to rise above their masters and self-emancipate. Because of the obvious dangers of disseminating abolitionist literature in the South, Walker developed a covert strategy. Relying on seamen who were customers of his thrift store, he, according to historian Clement Eaton, would place his appeal in the pockets of the garments sold in his store, “which he reasoned would reach Southern ports and pass through the hands of other used-clothes dealers who would know what to do with them. He also used sympathetic Black seamen to distribute pamphlets directly.”3 Albeit the history of Walker’s store is scarce (and fashion is certainly not at the forefront of historical accounts on Walker), it has piqued my research curiosity in unpacking the ways in which Black entrepreneurs have used clothing to advocate for their liberation. In this chapter, I will look to the work of Elizabeth Keckley and fashion designers Patrick Kelly and Kerby Jean-Raymond to explore the ways in which African Americans have used clothing and entrepreneurship for self-liberation, to subvert the ways in which they have been seen in the mainstream, and to emphasize the ways in which they use their creative practices to advocate for the freedom of other Black lives. The histories of Keckley, Kelly, and Jean-Raymond are used as case studies to exemplify how they reclaim their narratives in spaces that sought to enslave, oppress, marginalize, and/or exclude them, respectively and collectively as people within the African diaspora. Their stories intersect with considerations surrounding gender and sexuality, feminism, and global identities, offering tangential and interdisciplinary research possibilities that involve situating fashion in African American studies. This chapter begins with an analysis of Elizabeth Keckley, who was born into slavery and later purchased her freedom due to her work as an enslaved dressmaker. Through her established skill set, she went on to become a prominent dressmaker, philanthropist, and activist. 29

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I then move into an analysis of Patrick Kelly, who rose to much fame in the 1980s as a famous fashion designer in Paris. His use of derogatory imagery of African Americans is most talked about in discourses surrounding his brand. I unpack the use of these images and consider whether or not they can be read as a self-liberating strategy established within his creative practice or whether the use of this imagery has been overcontextualized. I also consider Kelly’s connection to the South and the proliferation of the civil rights and Black power era to consider Kelly’s subjectivity in the industry. I conclude with an analysis of Kerby Jean-Raymond, who is currently working in the fashion industry as a designer, and I analyze his impact on the fashion industry as an activist, aligning himself with the Black Lives Matter movement. I consider Jean-Raymond’s position within the fashion industry like I do Keckley and Kelly’s, as he, too, has enjoyed much success amid his entrepreneurship and creative practice, yet he is still affected by the injustices waged against African Americans. It is my aim that this chapter will provide a new way of using the study of fashion as a reliable tool to investigate activism strategies of African American people. These three narratives are not comprehensive and should be read instead, as aforementioned, as case studies that elucidate new research inquiries. In what ways can we read historical and contemporaneous fashion/clothing narratives about Black life to reimagine the study of liberation in African American history? What messages about the liberation of Black lives can be communicated through entrepreneurship and clothing? How does analyzing the creative practices within the fashion industry and dressing the Black body as a more serious research discipline enrich African American history? In her book Slaves to Fashion, literature historian Monica Miller (2009) argues that Black style “and all it might reveal has received little serious attention.” Some scholars have sought to close this gap, including Miller with her dynamic text on Black dandyism,4 Tanisha Ford’s Liberated Threads, 5 Carol Tulloch’s The Birth of Cool,6 and Graham White and Shane White’s Stylin’.7 Nka Journal titled its 2015 spring issue “Black Fashion: Art. Pleasure. Politics”8 and invited scholars from various disciplines to write on the topic. The International Journal of Fashion Studies invited me to edit a special section on Black fashion studies for its spring 2017 issue. Moreover, I launched the Fashion and Race Syllabus9 online in fall 2016 with my colleague Kimberly Jenkins. This syllabus compiled a robust list of scholarly work and digital platforms that touch on the intersections of fashion and race. Nevertheless, echoing Miller’s sentiments, not only has Black style been widely understudied across academia, but also little research has been committed to analyzing African American entrepreneurial activity within the fashion industry (though some scholars have selected a handful of Black designers to memorialize). In considerations surrounding using fashion as a lens to study the African diaspora, I have used two frameworks. The first considers the act of embodiment through African Americans’ styling practices and use of clothing to enhance their visibility and worth. This framework engages theories of representation and how African Americans seek to transform narratives and claim ownership of their bodies through various styling mechanisms. Projects by scholars, such as Monica Miller’s on Black dandyism, can be analyzed within this framework as she seeks to unpack the shift from the Black dandy as a costumed object in slavery to the self-styling of free men to announce “controversial presence.”10 Furthermore, through analyzing style narratives within the African diaspora, Carol Tulloch in her book The Birth of Cool, uses “the aesthetic of presence” in each chapter to “counter the aesthetics of invisibility that people of the African Diaspora have had to overcome since slavery.”11 The second framework considers African Americans’ participation within the fashion system socially and economically as dressmakers,



Designing Our Freedom 31

designers, entrepreneurs, models, photographers, and more. While the first framework on representation considers the cultural capital of the Black body and the ways in which it navigates and permeates the mainstream, in this chapter I seek to engage the latter framework to unpack the social and economic capital that evolves from Black entrepreneurship in fashion. This chapter makes distinctions between fashion as a system and the act of dressing the body. I argue that the fashion system is a site within which Black people are operating by pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors that rely on the design and/or selling and marketing of clothing and presenting those clothes to work toward self-liberation.

Elizabeth Keckley (1818–1907; Dressmaker c.1855–1892) In her memoir Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, Elizabeth Keckley writes of her emancipation: Free, free! What a glorious ring to the word. Free! The bitter heart-struggle was over. Free! the soul should go out to heaven and to God with no chains to clog its flight or pull it down. Free! the earth wore a brighten look and the very stars seemed to sing with joy. Yes, free! free by the laws of man and the smile of God—and Heaven bless them who made me so!12 (Behind the Scenes, 55)

Keckley was born into slavery in 1818 in Virginia. As a teenager, she was sent to North Carolina, only to return to Virginia and then moved, as a slave, to St. Louis, Missouri, where the Garland family enslaved and owned her until her manumission. In Behind the Scenes, Keckley’s words read as a poetic autobiography. Her memories from childhood to adulthood are vivid, although she sometimes chooses to omit fragments of stories in an effort to save her from reliving the pain (she briefly mentions being raped while in North Carolina by a White man who becomes the father of her son George, but fails to continue the story to escape the disturbing details). During her enslavement in St. Louis, a man she refers to as Mr. Garland, who she writes was very poor, owned Keckley, who was often referred to as “Garland’s Lizzie,” and her son as “Garland’s George.” The Garlands permitted Keckley to find work to support the Garland family financially so she obtained employment as a seamstress and dressmaker—a skill she had acquired from her mother, as she draws on a memory early on in her memoir of her mother sewing clothes for the family that enslaved and owned them. Keckley writes, “With my needle I kept bread in the mouths of seventeen persons for two years and five months.” When she received a marriage proposal from Mr. Keckley, she began to inquire about her and her son’s freedom. Mr. Garland required $1,200 for her emancipation, which Keckley failed to raise on her own due to the payment from her work as a dressmaker going to Mr. Garland. Eventually, one of her patrons raised the funds and Keckley and her son were emancipated in 1855. She and her son relocated to Washington, DC, among a growing community of free African Americans. Much like her time in St. Louis, Keckley’s dressmaking skills became coveted among White society women in the North, which led to her position as a dressmaker for Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of Abraham Lincoln.13 The oddities of the memoir lie in her sentiments about slavery. In one passage about her uncle’s suicide, she remarks, “Slavery had its dark side, as well as its bright side.”14 What can be inferred as an example of Keckley’s perception of slavery’s bright side is closely tied to her emancipation, as she gives credit to White patrons. Nevertheless, it should not be negated that

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Keckley’s courage to both ask for her freedom, consider an escape, and to become an activist for the emancipation of other slaves is an example of the ways in which she, too, is responsible for her liberation. Keckley is situated in society through a triple consciousness: as an American, as Black, and as a woman. This trifecta matters to her biography, as well as what it lends to the analytical approach of self-liberation among African Americans. Although much of her career relied on her using her Black bodily labor to make clothing for White bodies, she took ownership of her body, subverting tropes and situating herself as a person to be taken seriously as a businesswoman. Although this chapter does not seek to elucidate the styling of the Black body for self-emancipatory purposes, I do believe that it is necessary within this framework to make note of the clothing produced by Black bodies in comparison to the clothing worn by Black bodies. Clothing is crucial to this story because Keckley gained her freedom and success from designing, but also because of the history of the clothed and unclothed Black body in history. Beyond the chains and shackles that wreathed the bodies of enslaved Africans, clothing played a significant role in their oppression, and arguably in their emancipation. Noliwe Rooks writes in her book Ladies Pages: When African women were brought to American colonies they were given nothing more than rags. Compared to their white female mistresses the tears in clothes presented African women as scantily clad, situating images of them as lewd and oversexed. Thus, clothes began to work as a marker of difference even though it was not situated in any truth concerning the African woman or the African American woman which would become after the Emancipation Proclamation.15

Furthermore, Linda Baumgarten further necessitates the study of clothing among enslaved Africans and writes in her essay “Clothes for the People”: Considering the wrenching experience these people had just experienced, being given clothes that were to them foreign in style and feel may have been among the least of their concerns, but clothing and ornaments are a powerful symbol of cultural and personal identity, and the new clothes were perhaps one more reminder of the transition in their lives.16

As Keckley made clothing predominantly for White patrons—society women, Mary Todd Lincoln, and others—she used the production of clothing as a tool to achieve economic and social mobility, as well as for activism. Karol Weaver writes about this economic and social mobility in her essay “Fashioning Freedom” and argues that the history of enslaved seamstresses “highlights how gendered responsibilities assisted some women in obtaining their freedom, a concept that complicates our understanding of women, slavery and freedom.”17 Although her analysis focuses on French colonies in the eighteenth century—specifically Saint Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Martinique—it elucidates the vastly understudied ways in which enslaved seamstresses used their skills to gain their freedom. Weaver notes that slaves who were of a lighter complexion were more likely to pass and could claim their freedom by running away. Enslaved seamstresses also had more mobility by having the opportunity to apprentice and live away from their masters, and were thus in contact with more free people who could teach them how to read and write and develop ways to rebel, sue, or steal their freedom. Complementary to these strategies to



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“fashioning freedom” was the developed skill set of sewing that Weaver argues allowed enslaved seamstresses to survive economically once their freedom was achieved. Beyond her own emancipation, Keckley’s life’s work includes her participation in abolitionist efforts. In 1862, she worked with others to create the Ladies’ Contraband Relief Association, which assisted African American freedmen and women who had made their way to the nation’s capital—fleeing the atrocities of the South. Keckley also employed twenty women in her sewing shop, where they worked as seamstresses and dressmakers. By 1892, Keckley was appointed the head of the Department of Sewing and Domestic Science Arts at Ohio’s Wilberforce University.18 Keckley’s narrative contributes to both African American and fashion history as it not only develops considerations on other dressmakers that used the same tools to free themselves, but also the ways in which her work “paved the way for late twentieth and early twenty-first century black fashion designers to find success in mainstream culture.”19 Through her entrepreneurship, philanthropy, and activism, Keckley’s life initiates how African Americans have used the fashion industry as a site to activate their activism for their liberation and that of other Black lives.

Patrick Kelly (1954–1990; Fashion Designer c.1984–1990) While Keckley’s freedom necessitated her skills as a seamstress and dressmaker, Patrick Kelly chose fashion as a space to critique his racial history in an effort to own his narrative as a Black American gay man. Kelly rose to fame as one of the most popular Black designers in the 1980s, primarily gaining traction in Paris after being unable to find success in the New York fashion industry due to racism. He, like Keckley, moved from the South to the North to begin his career. He was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and attended Jackson State University, studying art history and Black history for a brief stint before relocating to New York to attend Parsons School of Design. Much like Keckley credits her knowledge of sewing to her mother, Kelly credits his grandmother for introducing him to fashion and sewing, as he recalled her bringing home fashion publications from the homes where she worked as a maid and repairing his clothing with mismatched buttons—which he would pay homage to in his own designs in his namesake brand. Kelly reached stardom when moving to Paris and in 1988 became the first American designer and Black person voted into the Chambre syndicale du prêt-à-porter des couturiers et des créateurs de mode (French Federation of Fashion and of Ready-to-Wear Couturiers and Fashion Designers)—the governing body for the French fashion industry. What many people remember about him, however, is the way he used derogatory Black imagery that had been historically employed to stereotype African Americans as his brand’s marketing strategy. The designer collected more than 8,000 items of racially charged memorabilia during his career. Images such as Aunt Jemima, golliwogs, and the pick-a-ninny were at the forefront of his brand. In 1985, Kelly designed an off-white cotton knit woman’s minidress with fourteen pins made out of plastic discs that were tacked onto the front that bore a darkly hued caricature with bright red lips and large gold earrings. The designer also made large circular earrings with the same image to complement the dress.20 In another dress designed in 1985 made of cotton and nylon knit, Kelly printed the caricature—this time with a brown complexion instead of a stark black—onto a white dress that was accompanied by matching elbow-length gloves, golliwog shoes, and a mask of the caricature made of paper and hemp twine. 21 The designer also made pins of little black dolls and passed them out to women of all races—a reminder to

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his customers, fashion scholar Van Dyk Lewis argues, “that the issue of race and the origin of African-­A mericans had become a permanent fixture in his collections.”22 Kelly’s fame within the fashion industry should not be overlooked, as it offers a more critical analysis of the ways he specifically used race in his brand. Historically, the industry and system of fashion has tiptoed around conversations of race, but has sought to exploit Black imagery and culture when it recognizes its marketability and often adopts “marginalization as a brand of cool.”23 Both blackness and fashion are cultural phenomena, drawn on often as a mode of performance, assimilation, and resistance. Fashion can be read as a system that reifies the social construct of race by perpetuating stereotypes, exclusion of racial representation, and codifying race when it is thumbed a trend. In his essay on African diaspora fashion and designers, Lewis writes that mainstream and subsectional fashion have become part of the social consciousness that subscribes to the idea of fashion becoming the foremost visual delineator of social, economic and political truths. . . . Fashion provides wearers and creators with the opportunity to reinvent quite specific elements of identity.24

It can be argued that Kelly, within his position in the fashion industry that few other Black designers had reached, reclaimed the narratives of Black culture that popular culture often exploits. While such a strategy can come at a cost for a host of Black designers and other professionals who place race at the forefront of their careers, Kelly’s persistence in exploring and contextualizing his racial identity through fashion design is special in that it did not weaken his success. In his prime, the designer received major investments, his clothing was sold in top retailers, and his creations were shown on Parisian runways. Significantly, Kelly embraced his identity as a Black, gay male. Like many other Black creators, his history as an African American became a part of his creative practice. As Van Dyk Lewis and Keith Fraley write in their analysis of Kelly: The experience of living as a black male member of arguably the most terrorized group of people in history provides the perspective for Patrick Kelly to create himself as a symbol maker—a creator of the liturgy of visualized inequalities reconfigured from those worn by blacks that slaved and laboured in the fields and homes of whites and their institutions. 25

Thus, Kelly’s career in the fashion industry not only expands considerations of African Americans’ activism for self-liberation through the very position that he held within the industry but also the ways in which he subverted what it meant to be Black in a mainstream space. While the French press called him “le mignon petit noir Americain” (cute little Black American), Kelly referred to himself as a Black male Lucille Ball because he liked to make people laugh—with his personality, as well as with his satirical designs. 26 Nevertheless, his humorous antics were rooted in his personal experiences steeped in racism. In elementary school when Black students received books from the White elementary school, Kelly recalled “they’d color in the faces of Dick and Sally so they’d be black when they got to us.”27 Thus, with his southern upbringing, maternal fashionable influences, and his personal experiences with race in America, Kelly developed a Parisian clothing brand that not only gave him the freedom to grapple with the intersections of his identity but also subvert degradations of Black Americans and fashion them into a heightened sartorial sensibility that became sought after by celebrities and



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department stores. Although he did not consider himself the savior of his race, he admitted, “You use what you got to get what you want.”28 In observing his career, scholars, writers, and fashion industry professionals often grapple with how best to analyze the designer’s use of stereotypical and racial caricatures that were at the center of his brand. It has been noted that poet and author Maya Angelou—who had prepared a book proposal on Kelly’s life29—disliked Kelly’s use of racist caricatures and told him that “poison no matter what kind of crystal bottle you wrap it in, it’s still poison.”30 His partner, Bjorn Amelan, stated that the designer once said, “White people are not offended by Mickey Mouse. Why should we be afraid of Aunt Jemima?,”31 which unveils a wider consideration of the ways in which imagery of Black bodies has historically constructed how Black people have come to be seen in the mainstream. Aside from quotes, however, taking a closer look one can begin to elucidate the subversive techniques underlying Kelly’s position within fashion and his use of these images. Washington Post fashion critic Robin Givhan writes of the racial undertones of Kelly’s brand: Other designers depicted a sanitized version of their past—or one in which the rough edges were exaggerated for a surrealistic effect or the slights were romanticized into character-building hurdles. They focused on geography, class, perhaps religion. Kelly presented an ugly and discomforting look at race and did it without flinching. 32

Van Dyk Lewis and Keith Fraley specifically analyze Kelly’s space within the Parisian fashion system as a Black, gay male from the South, and how that might have allowed him the comfort to situate race in his brand: A cursory reading of the phases and qualities of Kelly’s life shows he was devoted to a cause and chose fashion as the medium for self-expression. For Kelly, design was a catharsis, a way of conciliating his Mississippian trauma with fashion’s hypermodern spectacle. 33

Kelly’s business partner, Bjorn Amelan, said of the late designer: He, in his typical manner, chose to appropriate it [black imagery] and enhance it rather than hiding it. There’s an empowerment in an act of ownership—not physical but mental ownership. 34

Ownership is at the core of Kelly’s contribution to the history of using fashion as a site for self-liberation—owning one’s body, history, and image. As he operated as one of fashion’s great designers, he took control of his narrative by putting his own meaning to these images. Through this, he found freedom in transforming the narratives of Black life, creatively exploring and expressing his history on his own accord, regardless of mainstream assumptions. Overall, his career carried the torch of his predecessors by continuing to lay the path for future fashion designers to muster the courage and challenge themselves creatively as entrepreneurs to advocate for equal rights and representations of Black life.

Kerby Jean-Raymond (b. 1987; Designer 2013–present) In 2014, Kerby Jean-Raymond, designer of the New York–based luxury streetwear label Pyer Moss, wore a T-shirt listing the names of unarmed Black men who had been killed by police officers to his autumn/winter 2015 fashion show during New York Fashion Week. Shortly after,

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Jean-Raymond sold the shirt online, donating a portion of the proceeds to the American Civil Liberties Union. The next season, during his spring/summer 2016 runway show, Jean-­R aymond screened a video featuring footage of Black men and women who had been killed or brutalized by police and interviews with journalists, designers, and fashion industry professionals who discussed the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement and gave their sentiments on the current racial climate. 35 Following the video was a brief runway show that included an army of models, some of whom donned boots that bore the names of men and women killed by police and clothing that featured the words “I Can’t Breathe”—the final words spoken by Eric Garner before he was killed by police in 2015 in Staten Island, New York. I had the pleasure of attending the spring/summer 2016 show, conducting research and working as a reporter for an online media outlet. I stood among a room full of individuals who had read the several headlines online prior to the show that exclaimed that Jean-Raymond was mounting a show about police brutality. I sat in the second row at the show and watched the video in pain, seeing the footage that had become embedded in both the American psyche and countless social media timelines, and was centralized within the global Black Lives Matter movement. After the show, I, along with other reporters, was invited to interview Jean-­R aymond backstage. When I asked him how he felt, he remarked, “I feel a little bit freer after this.”36 Jean-Raymond’s participation in the fashion industry cannot quickly be read as an obvious paradox to the predecessors that I have mentioned in this chapter. He was not born enslaved like Elizabeth Keckley. He is also not a gay Black man from the South. Prior to his 2015 show, he was not actively inserting critiques on race into his designs or in his brand. Yet, contemporaneously, he is linked to these stories of self-liberation, activism, and entrepreneurship. His brand and fashion show production act as an “aide memoire of the black experience—a coping strategy against modernist agendas.”37 Similar to Patrick Kelly, he reclaimed the stories of Black degradation, integrating them into his brand, shifting how these images and narratives are intended to be consumed when under the helm of a Black cultural producer. The invitation to Jean-Raymond’s show in fall 2015 read, “Ota, Meet Saartjie,” an allusion to the introduction of womenswear into his predominantly menswear brand, and an homage to Saartjie “Sara” Baartman and Ota Benga, enslaved Africans who were put on display in the 1800s and 1906, respectively. Baartman—also known as Venus Hottentot—was kidnapped from South Africa and brought to Europe for exhibition onstage like a circus animal, as people ogled over her large posterior. After her death, her remains were placed on exhibit for over a century and a half in France. Benga was taken from the Congo and exhibited at the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition in St. Louis, Missouri, and then at the Bronx Zoo. By including the histories of Baartman and Benga, Jean-­ Raymond elucidated the caging, oppression, and viewing of the Black body that was to be likened to the display of contemporary Black bodies such as Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and several others whose bodies were consistently being shared on televisions, during marches, and on social media timelines, as African Americans reckoned with the harsh realities that their lives were still considered worthless. One ensemble from his collection included a white shirt with cropped white pants with an overlay of netting that represented the cages that Baartman and Benga were held in, the designer told reporters backstage. Other features of the ensembles featured in the designer’s collection were tight collars and straps that were intended to intimate the “entrapments that hold the black body.”38 Jean-Raymond’s approach to design was considered radical. Unlike Kelly, whose use of degrading imagery as a marketing strategy teetered on the line between humor and offense, Jean-Raymond was explicit in his activism, which, in the contemporary fashion industry, was



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both refreshing and revolutionary. For so long, the industry obscured conversations about race, but Jean-Raymond held it accountable for both perpetuating a dark racial past through tonedeaf editorials and cultural appropriation as well as remaining silent on political issues that had become difficult to ignore. Prior to Jean-Raymond’s show, fashion was not often used as a platform for politics and certainly not race because doing so caused consequences. Jean-Raymond lost investors, retailers, and money by producing his spring/summer 2016 fashion show; however, he understood that fashion and particularly New York Fashion Week are a powerful and impactful system and site. Following in Jean-Raymond’s footsteps were designers, models, magazines, and more, who began to join in the Black Lives Matter movement by protesting, highlighting stories of Black men and women who were being killed by police officers and releasing statements. While Jean-Raymond freed himself via his creative practice, he in turn worked to free others. He used fashion as a method of “self-expression, identity and self-authorship in attempts of reclamation.”39 By the next season, in February 2016, Jean-Raymond produced a collection and show on mental illness and dedicated it to MarShawn McCarrell II—a Black Lives Matter activist who committed suicide on the steps of the Ohio State House that same month. I was able to attend that show as well, and was again invited backstage to speak with Jean-Raymond. That season, his show was about depression, as he again, wished to use his platform to have a difficult conversation that often exists at the margins. Although he stated that the show was not necessarily about race, the final model in the runway show’s lineup held a sign that read, “My Demons Won Today”—words that McCarrell posted to his Facebook page before taking his life.40 At that show, Jean-Raymond told me, “It’s not like I’m making something that I don’t understand— that I didn’t live through. Every time that I am able to talk about something or get it off my chest, it’s always a freer feeling.”41 While Jean-Raymond’s creative practice is indeed an homage and memorialization for Black life and struggle, it is also a way for him to reckon with his own experiences of racial injustice. By the age of eighteen, Jean-Raymond had been stopped and frisked twelve times. An incident with police officers one month before his spring/summer 2015 show prompted him to screen the video on police brutality. He told me that he had recently injured his finger and it was bandaged with black tape. While talking on the phone, the two fingers were jutting upward. He turned around and police officers were pointing guns at him, arguing that his bandaged fingers resembled a gun. He said he knew he could have easily been one of the innumerable Black men who had been shot and killed by police. The fashion show would be his platform for activism. It would become the place that he liberated himself and others.42

Conclusion In conclusion, when thinking about the freedom of African Americans one might often think of someone being freed by someone else and dismiss the ways in which this particular group of people has freed themselves.43 However, African Americans should not be read as “passive recipients of the gift of freedom.”44 Activism takes on many forms in the fight for the freedom of Black lives in America and across the globe. We consider rebellions, movements for civil rights, Black power and Black life, and even the creation of Black art—visually, theatrically, musically—as ideal examples of the ways in which African Americans have advocated for equality. In this chapter, I have widened the canon of self-liberation by considering activism

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for Black life in fashion in an effort to challenge the reader to think about the ways in which fashion can be read as a site in which the politics of liberation can also take form. This chapter not only propels the aforementioned scholarly considerations that situate fashion within African American studies, but also expands how we can critically consider liberation among African Americans from their enslavement to the present day. I am arguing for a consideration not only of literal self-liberating strategies, which involves freedom from a system of oppression, but also contemporary narratives that consider how African Americans free themselves by drawing on history, through their creative practices, as an act, not only of subverting marginalized narratives and racial discrimination, but also owning their narratives and ultimately themselves. There is, indeed, a lack of recognition of the agency that African Americans exhibited in their fight for freedom; however the stories of Elizabeth Keckley, Patrick Kelly, and Kerby Jean-Raymond display both courage and heroism, and are an example of the “undeniable power of the human spirit.”45 This chapter serves as a solid thread that begins to unravel and reveal the history of African Americans’ fight for liberation through their entrepreneurship within the fashion industry. Certainly, activism takes various forms in the arts, but I encourage scholars to challenge the research of self-liberation to include the work of those who have used fashion as a platform and strategy for social and economic mobility and for activism.

Notes 1.  Linda Baumgarten, “Clothes for the People: Slave Clothing in Early Virginia,” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts 14, no. 2 (1988): 27–61. 2.  Ibid, 61. 3.  “David Walker: American Abolitionist,” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography /David-Walker. 4.  Monica Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham, NC: Duke, 2009). 5.  Tanisha Ford, Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2015). 6.  Carol Tulloch, The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 7.  Shane White, Stylin’: African-American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 8.  Nka Journal: Journal of Contemporary African Art, no. 37 (2015). 9.  Rikki Byrd and Kimberly Jenkins, Fashion and Race Syllabus, 2016, https://fashionandrace.wordpress.com 10. Miller, Slaves to Fashion, 1. 11. Tulloch, The Birth of Cool, 3. 12.  Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, or Thirty years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 55. 13.  Jordan Grant, “Elizabeth Keckley: Businesswoman and Philanthropist,” March 22, 2016, http://american history.si.edu/blog/elizabeth-keckley-businesswoman-and-philanthropist. 14. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 30. 15.  Noliwe Rooks, Ladies Pages: African American Women’s Magazines and the Culture That Made Them (Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 11. 16.  Baumgarten, “Clothes for the People,” 28. 17.  Karol Weaver, “Fashioning Freedom: Slave Seamstresses in the Atlantic World,” Journal of Women’s History 24, no. 1 (2012): 55. 18.  Grant, “Elizabeth Keckley.” 19.  Elizabeth Way, “Elizabeth Keckley and Ann Lowe: Recovering an African American Fashion Legacy,” Fashion Theory 19, no. 1 (2015): 120.



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20.  Philadelphia Museum of Art, Online Collections, https://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent /317743.html?mulR=1238117896|46. 21.  Philadelphia Museum of Art, Online Collections, https://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent /329505.html?mulR=1374842911|62. 22.  Van Dyk Lewis, “Dilemmas in African Diaspora Fashion,” Fashion Theory 7, no. 2 (2003): 181. 23.  Van Dyk Lewis and Keith A. Fraley, “Patrick Kelly: Fashion’s Great Black Hope,” Fashion, Style and Popular Culture 2, no. 3 (2015): 334. 24.  Lewis, “Dilemmas in African Diaspora Fashion,” 178. 25.  Lewis and Fraley, “Patrick Kelly,” 340. 26.  Margot Hornblower, “An Original American in Paris: Patrick Kelly, Mississippi’s Smash Hit in the Tough World of High Fashion, Prefers to Think of Himself as a ‘Black Male Lucille Ball,’” Time 133, no. 14 (April 3, 1989): 66. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29.  The book proposal is available in the Patrick Kelly archives at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. 30.  Antwaun Sargent, “Patrick Kelly Was the Jackie Robinson of High Fashion,” Vice, September 25, 2017, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kz77yv/patrick-kelly-was-the-jackie-robinson-of-high-fashion. 31.  Robin Givhan, “Patrick Kelly’s Radical Cheek: In New York, a Designer’s Guise and Dolls,” Washington Post, May 31, 2004, C1. 32. Ibid. 33.  Lewis and Fraley, “Patrick Kelly,” 342. 34.  Givhan, “Patrick Kelly’s Radical Cheek,” C1. 35.  The Black Lives Matter movement began as a hashtag in 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who killed unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. See https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/herstory/. 36.  Rikki Byrd, “This Designer Stopped Everyone in Their Tracks with a Fashion Show on Police Brutality,” Mic, September 11, 2015, https://mic.com/articles/125193/this-designer-stopped-everyone-in-their-tracks -with-a-fashion-show-about-police-brutality#.x1YKQMKYH. 37.  Lewis, “Dilemmas in African Diaspora Fashion,” 173. 38.  Byrd, “This Designer Stopped Everyone in Their Tracks With a Fashion Show on Police Brutality.” 39.  Lewis, “Dilemmas in African Diaspora Fashion,” 164. 40.  Mike Pearl, “Black Lives Matter Activist MarShawn McCarrel Ended His Life Monday on the Steps of the Ohio Statehouse,” Vice, February 9, 2016, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9bgj9p/black-lives-matter -activist-marshawn-mccarrel-ended-his-life-on-the-steps-of-the-ohio-statehouse. 41.  Rikki Byrd, “How One Designer Is Getting Us to Talk about Mental Illness at New York Fashion Week,” Mic, February 14, 2016, https://www.mic.com/articles/135254/how-one-designer-is-getting-us-to-talk-about -mental-illness-at-new-york-fashion-week. 42.  Kerby Jean-Raymond, interview with author, February 2016. 43.  See Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, “Freed but Not Free,” Creative Time, September 17, 2014, http://creativetime reports.org/2014/09/17/sharifa-rhodes-pitts-freed-but-not-free-black-radical-brooklyn/. 44.  Manisha Sinha, “Architects of Their Own Liberation: African Americans, Emancipation, and the Civil War,” Organization of American Historians Magazine of History 27, no. 2 (2013): 5–10. 45.  Anthony Mitchell, “Self-Emancipation and Slavery: An Examination of the African American’s Quest for Literacy and Freedom,” The Journal of Pan African Studies 2, no. 5 (2008): 86.

Bibliography Baumgarten, Linda. “Clothes for the People: Slave Clothing in Early Virginia.” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts 14, no. 2 (1988). Byrd, Rikki. “This Designer Stopped Everyone in Their Tracks with a Fashion Show on Police Brutality.” Mic. September 11, 2015, https://mic.com/articles/125193/this-designer-stopped-everyone-in-their-tracks-with -a-fashion-show-about-police-brutality#.x1YKQMKYH.

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“David Walker: American Abolitionist.” Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography /David-Walker. Eaton, Clement. “A Dangerous Pamphlet in the Old South.” The Journal of Southern History 2, no. 3 (1936): 323–334. Ford, Tanisha. Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2015. Givhan, Robin. “Patrick Kelly’s Radical Cheek: In New York, a Designer’s Guise and Dolls.” Washington Post, May 31, 2004. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2004/05/31/patrick-kellys-radical -cheek/7f404cd3-6f4d-4f28-8a24-6a0b398dba45/?utm_term=.89b00f623d52. Grant, Jordan. “Elizabeth Keckley: Businesswoman and Philanthropist.” Smithsonian National Museum of American History. March 22, 2016, http://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/elizabeth-keckley-businesswoman -and-philanthropist. Hornblower, Margot. “An Original American in Paris: Patrick Kelly, Mississippi’s Smash Hit in the Tough World of High Fashion, Prefers to Think of Himself as a ‘Black Male Lucille Ball.’” Time. April 1989, 66. Jean-Raymond, Kerby. Interview with author. February 2016. Keckley, Elizabeth. Behind the Scenes, or Thirty years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Lewis, Van Dyk. “Dilemmas in African Diaspora Fashion.” Fashion Theory 7, no. 2 (2003): 163–190. Lewis, Van Dyk, and Keith A. Fraley. “Patrick Kelly: Fashion’s Great Black Hope.” Fashion, Style and Popular Culture 2, no. 3 (2015): 333–350. Miller, Monica. Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Mitchell, Anthony. “Self-Emancipation and Slavery: An Examination of the African American’s Quest for Literacy and Freedom.” The Journal of Pan African Studies 2, no. 5 (2008): 78–98. Nka Journal: Journal of Contemporary African Art, no. 37 (2015). Philadelphia Museum of Art. Online Collections. https://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/31 7743.html?mulR=1238117896|46. Rooks, Noliwe. Ladies Pages: African American Women’s Magazines and the Culture That Made Them. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Sargent, Antwaun. “Patrick Kelly Was the Jackie Robinson of High Fashion.” Vice. September 25, 2017, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kz77yv/patrick-kelly-was-the-jackie-robinson-of-high-fashion. Sinha, Manisha. “Architects of Their Own Liberation: African Americans, Emancipation, and the Civil War.” Organization of American Historians Magazine of History 27, no. 2 (2013): 5–10. Tulloch, Carol. The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Way, Elizabeth. “Elizabeth Keckley and Ann Lowe: Recovering an African American Fashion Legacy.” Fashion Theory 19, no. 1 (2015): 115–142. Weaver, Karol. “Fashioning Freedom: Slave Seamstresses in the Atlantic World.” Journal of Women’s History 24, no. 1 (2012): 44–59.

3 • PEARL PRIMUS’S CHOREO-ACTIVISM 1943–1949 DORIA E. CHARLSON

Over 7,000 people watched in anticipation as Pearl Primus (1919–1994) took the stage of the Watergate Theatre in Washington, DC, on the evening of June 16, 1944.1 A relative newcomer to the world of dance, Primus enthralled audiences not only with her athleticism and captivating artistry, but also with the ways in which she incorporated social activism into her choreography. On the program for that June night was “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” a solo that Primus created to the poem by Langston Hughes of the same name. Set against a dramatic reading of Hughes’s poem, Primus’s body contrasts to the sharp articulation of the words and undulates in deep, heavy contractions of the back, shoulders, and spine.2 A piece of powerful juxtapositions, Primus’s work had her shift from moments of great extension (a triumphant x-shape pose) to moments of collapse onto the floor in defeat, only to jump up again, and again, into circular stag leaps across the stage. Primus’s energy seemed to be boundless as she used rhythmic floor patterns to accentuate certain poetic phrases in the score. The piece, a mixture of modern dance vocabulary, Black vernacular dance, and Afro-Caribbean movement (Primus’s family was from Trinidad) created a new genre that excited and captured audiences’ attention, particularly among the Black American community. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is tremendously physical and, watching the piece, the audience seemed to feel some of the exhaustion of the performer, which reads as a metaphor for the exhausting struggle for racial equality—a cause that Primus fiercely championed in her works. However, in a recurring and powerful motif throughout the piece—Primus in a deep second position with one arm outreached to the heavens, the other stretched outward to the audience, her eyes and head gazing upward—she seemed to signal hope for something positive that is yet to come; she opened the possibility for social change through her movements. Memorialized as a “pioneer of modern dance” and as a social activist, Pearl Primus’s career as a dancer, choreographer, ethnographer, scholar, and educator spanned almost five decades. 3 Born in Trinidad and raised in New York, Primus’s early life was informed by her family’s strong connection to the Caribbean and to Africa and also by the artistic movements sweeping through New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, including the Harlem Renaissance. Primus’s early training and performance reflect the sociopolitical trends of the times: racial inequality, political instability abroad and the onset of World War II, and new cultural trends such as jazz, the blues, and modern dance. In some ways, Primus’s career parallels that of internationally renowned dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham. Dunham, whose career began just 41

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under a decade before Primus’s, was a trained anthropologist whose innovative choreography blended European-influenced concert dance styles with Afro-diasporic traditions that she learned while conducting fieldwork in Haiti. Like Primus, Dunham worked commercially in the 1930s and 1940s—performing and choreographing on Broadway—and established a name for herself as a performer, choreographer, and educator who aimed to establish Afro-diasporic movement as a rigorous technique that could be codified and taught to future generations of students, much like ballet.4 Unlike Dunham, though, Primus’s works from the 1940s are explicitly political. Actively performing works in which the choreography was a mixture of African– African diasporic movement traditions and based upon the painful history of discrimination and violence against Black Americans, Primus pushed the boundaries of what was considered concert dance and helped to shift the conception of African arts practices away from the “primitive”—backward, anachronistic, and inherent to all Black people—toward an aesthetic of Black concert dance appreciated for its history and demanding technique. “Choreo-activism” refers to the process of advocating for the change or dismantling of policy and conventions through choreography, dance, and performance. Choreo-activism connects, too, to André Lepecki’s understanding of the choreopolitical, which he defines as a relationship between freedom, movement, and the political. He notes that choreopolitics “reveal that the dancer’s task is particularly pressing in our current moment, when the overwhelming and omnipresent implementation of ‘control’ has redefined the entire social-political field in regards to the question of moving freely, and of imagining and enacting a politics of movement as a choreopolitics of freedom.”5 Primus was forced to operate under varying layers of sociopolitical control, from explicit racism to pressure regarding the aesthetic value of her dances, particularly ones she learned abroad during her multiple trips to Western and Central Africa, primarily Nigeria, the Belgian Congo, and the Gold Coast. At every turn, Primus’s choreography—and, therefore, her activism—not only felt the constraints of external standards of dance and beauty, but she also had to constantly push the limits of the opportunities she was offered as a woman of color in mid-twentieth-century America. This chapter aims to explore Pearl Primus’s choreo-activism, particularly through her works from the 1940s. While Primus continued to be a driving force in the dance world until her death in the 1990s, the 1940s mark the period of Primus’s original choreography that is more specifically focused on the liberation of Black Americans. 6 Beginning in 1949, the bulk of Primus’s choreographic contributions involved the meticulous transmission of dances she learned in West and Central Africa and teaching them to students around the world, primarily in the United States. As such, this essay focuses on how Primus’s work from the 1940s functions in three realms: first, as a mode of embodied history through circum-Atlantic performance traditions; second, as acts of solidarity with Black Americans and resistance to the status quo of White domination in the United States; and third, as a tool for promoting social change while opening up the possibility for a future of racial equality. From an early age, Primus was taught that history and art meld in African diasporic culture and that dance, in particular, is more than aesthetics, and is part of a nonverbal cultural practice that encompasses history, spirituality, and a relationship to place and nature. Primus’s early years in Trinidad and, later, her family’s identity as Afro-Caribbeans in New York (as opposed to Black Americans) fundamentally shaped the way that she related to the world. As historian and cultural theorist Tammy L. Brown notes, Primus’s life in the Caribbean not only influenced her work artistically—many of the choreographic motifs in her works are inspired by nature found in Trinidad, such as snakes and water—but also molded her worldview, which was one



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that had a distinctly “alternative, non-European vision of civilization and progress.” 7 Primus’s grandfather, for example, was a medicinal healer and often invoked Orishas (ancestor spirits) as part of his work as an herbalist. A hallmark of Primus’s childhood included an understanding of the connection between the earth, spirits, and the present. Indeed, as Brown writes: Primus’s sense of space and time was fundamentally non-linear. History was always present as she sculpted her family folklore, travel experiences, and anthropological studies of West and Central Africa and Caribbean dance styles into performance pieces and lectures. . . . Her definition of “progress” was also non-linear as it resembles the adinkra West African symbol sankofa—a bird craning her neck backwards until her body becomes a full circle. Likewise, Primus proposed a historical and metaphysical return to one’s African roots in order to move forward into a brighter and more confident future. Going backward meant revising narratives of American history that omitted the accomplishments of peoples of African descent. 8

Primus’s choreography, therefore, encompassed the idea that history is nonlinear and that part of a historical tradition involves the embodiment of nonverbal traditional practices. Through her study and performance of African and African diasporic movement, Primus began to create concert dance pieces that embodied aspects of her family’s history and also the history of Blacks in the United States. Before delving into a choreographic analysis of some of Primus’s works, it is necessary to unpack the concept of embodying history. Performance theorist Diana Taylor’s (2003) work The Archive and the Repertoire helps to frame the ways in which the archive, historically situated as a place for storing written/textual records, is deeply tied to state institutions and has a particular relationship to power and authority. As such, the archive generally excludes minoritarian histories and does not have a place for knowledge that is immaterial or ephemeral. Using the concept of the repertoire in opposition to that of the textually based archive, Diana Taylor writes that repertoire “enacts embodied memory” and encompasses aspects of performance that were previously excluded from the archive and considered “nonreproducible knowledge.”9 In brief, embodiment poses a challenge to the traditional archive. In her work Performing Remains, performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider lessens the discreteness of the archive as oppositional to repertoire, suggesting that history is porous and that the present is in constant negotiation with the past.10 Furthermore, Schneider suggests that performance be considered an archival practice because of the ways in which the body comes into contact with remnants (“traces”) of history through embodied knowledge and practices. Reorienting the conception of the archive from a text-based, linear progression of history to include the ways in which time presents itself circularly and re-presents itself within the body allows us to understand the ways in which Primus’s choreography not only embodied West and Central African and African diasporic movement traditions, but also served as a method of knowledge production and transmission: an in-body archive. Primus used choreography to archive pieces of African and African diasporic history within the dancing body. Primus’s dances of social protest (1943–1944), including “Strange Fruit,” “Hard Time Blues,” “Jim Crow Train,” “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and “African Ceremonial,” and her later pieces such as “Fanga,” which was performed after Primus returned from her first trip to Africa—she was the recipient of a grant from the Rosenwald Foundation and traveled to Nigeria, the Belgian Congo, and the Gold Coast in 194911—engaged with what André Lepecki conceptualizes as the “will to archive.” Lepecki notes that the will to archive is a

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will to re-enact, thus indicating the body as the privileged archival site. In its constitutive precariousness, perpetual blind-spots, linguistic indeterminations, muscular tremors, memory lapses, bleedings, rages, and passions, the body as archive re-places and diverts notions of archive away from a documental deposit or bureaucratic agency dedicated to the (mis)management of the past.12

Lepecki’s theorization is particularly fascinating and apt in the context of a past that involves the ultimate act of disempowerment and submission: chattel slavery. For Primus, choreography and dance allowed her to remove Black history from the hands of the system that enslaved and segregated and place it into the domain of her own body where it could be guarded, preserved, and honored. Despite the fact that Primus was born in Trinidad and lived in the Northern United States for the rest of her life, she understood that her blackness was connected to the history of enslaved African Americans in the southern United States. In 1944, she went on a study trip to live and work alongside sharecroppers in order to study their movements in quotidian life. “Hard Times Blues” and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” were particularly influenced by her research in the South. As Tammy L. Brown writes, the trip to the South was a “‘roots pilgrimage’ to uncover hitherto unknown history, as most black Americans could not trace their lineage beyond three generations given the chaos and destruction of familial bonds wrought by slavery.”13 The pieces Primus created showcase low, sweeping movement; tremendous flexibility of the spine, neck, and torso; and a quickness of footfalls with percussive rhythms.14 “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is highly symbolic. In an interview for a later staging of the piece inspired by Hughes, Primus explains: What I did was find certain symbols, for instance, the symbol of one hand going up to the heaven and the other hand going out, this was strong in the cultural history of black people. Then I went in movement to the Nile, to the pyramids, where those strong movements of contractions would come in and where the movement of those who brought the big stones, then. After that, to the Mississippi, but the Mississippi was a matter of the sadness, the torture, the loneliness, the fear of the people of black ancestry. But when Langston Hughes’ poem said, “and I saw its muddy bosom grow golden in the sunset,” that is the hope. The hope for today, the hope for tomorrow.15

As Primus makes clear, the movements in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” are meant to signify both present and past, to connect audiences to an embodied history through choreography and to instill, too, the possibility of hope and change. In addition to the way Primus archived a history of African Americans within her choreography, she also imbued her choreography with African diasporic folklore and tradition. For example, in a radio interview in the 1950s, Primus explains how she transmits the technical aspects of her choreography through an understanding of African spirituals and folklore. She explains of a dance piece that she learned from Watusi people of the Belgian Congo: This particular part of the dance deals with Imana, which is the great God so tremendous . . . that we seem like dwarves in his sight. As a matter of fact, he’s so busy with this world and other worlds. . . . In the beginning when Imana made earth, the land was soft . . . when his foot goes on the earth his head was in the heavens. When he stepped, he lifted up his foot . . . and where he stepped valleys went down. And the in-between parts were where it went up, [these] became



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the mountains. As he walks, he creates. His walking upon the earth he has created, proud and strong. The dancer imitates the great Imana and it’s actually technical. If you have the technique of the lift of Imana, if [the dancers] are aware of it, that they are creating mountains, I don’t see how you could shuffle into it. You have to lift yourself out of it, it’s that lifting out and stepping out of it that makes it.16

From her detailed description, we can see how Primus uses African diasporic folklore and dance as the primary mode of teaching dance technique and as a crucial element of her choreo-­ activism. Brown adds that Primus’s focus on the understanding and embodiment of technical specificity in African diasporic performance “rebutted the claims of black American cultural paucity or erasure at a time when historians were suggesting that black Americans had been stripped of their cultural history . . . [which was thought to be] irrevocably devastated by the psychic rupture of racialized slavery.”17 As Primus shows, inherent to her choreography and her dance technique is an understanding of the ways in which the body can hold and perform West and Central African and African diasporic history. In her embodiment of West and Central African diasporic history through performance, Primus’s choreography also engages with the circum-Atlantic history of Blacks in the United States—a traumatic history whose effects extended into Primus’s present moment. Following performance theorist Joseph Roach, the circum-Atlantic world, in contrast to a transatlantic model, “insists on the centrality of the diasporic and genocidal histories of Africa and the Americas, North and South, in the creation of the culture of modernity.”18 By placing trauma at the core of the creation of modern culture, Roach begs us to consider how the legacies of painful histories stemming from violent colonialism have developed through genealogies of performance. Primus’s dances of social protest—“The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Strange Fruit,” and “Jim Crow Train,” in particular—spoke to the cross-generational trauma of slavery and the systemic discrimination and violence endured by African Americans in the twentieth century. Farah Jasmine Griffin, a scholar of African American literature and culture, notes in her work Harlem Nocturne that Primus’s emergence as an artist occurred during a rare moment in American history. Situating Primus’s debut as an artist just after the Harlem Renaissance, during World War II, and in the midst of the Double V campaign—a movement that connected the fight for freedom from fascism abroad with the fight for equal rights for African Americans—Griffin notes, “Pearl Primus created a dance narrative that highlighted the struggle against segregation and racial violence. As such, she made the plight of black Americans, particularly black southerners, a central concern in the fight for American democracy.”19 Primus’s works in 1943–1944 utilized dance as a medium to “bear witness” to the legacy of slavery that continued to negatively impact the lives of Black Americans.20 Primus’s choreography functions as an act of racial solidarity, as she showcases for audiences in the North the struggles of African Americans who faced rampant and visible White supremacy and discrimination. Through her powerful movements characterized by leaps that seemed to “defy the laws of gravity,” Primus expressed a longing for freedom in a system that limited and confined bodies of color and performed this movement for mixed (if not primarily White) audiences in New York.21 As Griffin explains, “Primus was able to portray the challenges and restrictions of segregation, and in her performance of ‘Jim Crow Train,’ she limned the walls of the Jim Crow car, made palpable its confining nature, and then resisted its constraints by leaping out of it, by flying rather than riding.”22 Primus’s choreography, therefore, not only physically expressed how racial discrimination impacted African Americans, but also aimed to educate audiences about Black history and advocate for equality through performance.

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Primus’s appeals for racial equality through choreography, I argue, were particularly well received by audiences because she had a unique understanding of the ways in which nonverbal performance could elicit emotional responses from spectators. Here I refer to dance scholar Thomas DeFrantz’s notion of “black performativity,” which he defines as “gestures of black expressive culture, including music and dance, that perform actionable assertions. In terms of black social dance, these performative assertions do not ‘describe’ dancing; rather, they are the physical building blocks of a system of communication we may term corporeal orature.”23 DeFrantz not only links the body to sound, but also establishes the relationality of Black performativity. It is a system of communication in which spectators and players engage in multisensory calls and responses. One must also think of Black performativity in terms of motion and circulation, which includes the physical and the embodied, but also encompasses spiritual, emotional, and political engagement, shifts, and hybridity. Primus’s works, particularly the dances of social protest, typify the relational understanding of Black performativity that DeFrantz describes, which is inherent in African diasporic practice. For Primus, dance always already had the ability to create social change because it was connected to “social, political, religious and esthetic life. . . . [Dance] expressed the very pulse of communal living and was an accurate mirror of the psychology of the people.” 24 Furthermore, Primus seemed to have an understanding of what would later be termed by dance theorist Susan Leigh Foster as “kinesthetic empathy,” which “theorizes the potential of one body’s kinesthetic organization to infer the experience of another.”25 In a recorded 1953 interview, Primus explains: I’m mostly interested in a kinesthetic response. I feel that, when one is speaking, it’s the ear that hears the sound, the tones, the rhythm of the voice. With the body, which is our voice as dancers, we have to get over muscular feelings to our audience and that is called kinesthetic response, but it takes a little more than that. For instance, if you have . . . your rhythm is very important because it dictates your heartbeat for the audience. . . . If you can project your own heartbeat out to your audience, they will catch on—maybe not so strong but they will catch on—and in that interruption of that beat will give some rapport between the performer and the audience. 26

Primus’s relationship to dance as a method of communication, as opposed to a purely aesthetic endeavor, helped to create in audiences of all races a deep, emotional connection to the material, which helped to further her message of racial equality. As Susan Leigh Foster explains, in the 1920s and 1930s, with the growth of modern dance, “choreography began to specify the unique process through which an artist not only arranged and invented movement, but also melded motion and emotion to produce a danced statement of universal significance.”27 For Primus, the “statement of universal significance”—the ways in which she highlighted grief, sorrow, fear, torment, and pain in her dances of social protest—was rooted in a history of racial domination. By presenting traumatic histories through dance, Primus found she could speak in a more “universal” language while still retaining her political goals of eliminating White supremacy and achieving equality for Black Americans. In addition to the ways in which Pearl Primus’s choreography incorporated African American history and the contemporary political situation for Black Americans, her works also shifted conceptions of concert dance, which opened up space for new ideas of Black aesthetics. In an interview in 1994 for the Los Angeles Times, Primus reflects on her dances of social protest and explains:



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It was like a mandate. . . . It was something I had to do. . . . I was given a body strong enough, I was given the schooling, I was given the people (to help me) and the dreams. And this is the work I was meant to do: to show the dignity, beauty and strength in the heritage of peoples of African ancestry. I didn’t choose to dance about a flower or a running brook or something. I chose to answer the ills of society with the language of dance.28

Primus’s exploration of the “ills of society” through African diasporic movement was a radical act in and of itself. While there were prominent female scholar-artists, such as Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston, who were creating dances based on anthropological research in Haiti and the American South, respectively, Pearl Primus’s work was unique in that her movement vocabulary and the techniques and methodology she taught were decidedly rooted in circum-Caribbean and West African movement. Primus’s choreography presented a new understanding of the ways in which African diasporic aesthetics could mix with a political objective. Additionally, as Griffin explains, “for Primus, traditional African dance and contemporary black vernacular were more than mere inspirations for modernist choreography; they were equal participants in helping to create a modern dance vocabulary.”29 Through her work as an artist-scholar and educator, Primus helped to change the conception that African dance training was less demanding than White European dance traditions, like ballet. Primus, who herself trained with Martha Graham and Charles Weidman, “emphasized intense training and technical precision required to successfully execute African diasporic dance forms,” which helped to elevate the status of dance to that of a concert art in the Black community. 30 Through her dedication to rigorous technical training, her insistence on learning dance holistically (e.g., understanding the traditions and stories behind the movements), and her self-presentation as a proud Black woman who wore her hair in an afro, often tied with colorful headscarves, and dressed in African patterns and fabrics, Primus helped to inspire generations of African American artists to embrace their blackness. 31 Her works from the 1940s were well known by artists, dance students, and enthusiasts. Importantly, too, Primus was an educator; over the course of her life, she taught students at all levels and through various institutions. Among Primus’s many pedagogical appointments, she held a residency in East Harlem public schools, was an assistant professor at SUNY Binghamton, held classes in community centers and studios across New York, and taught in extended stays at performing arts centers in Liberia. 32 Primus also toured often, visiting educational institutes across the United States, speaking about the importance of African history and culture for Black Americans. Audre Lorde and Maya Angelou are among the most prominent of Primus’s students, and both were deeply influenced by Primus’s work and her persona, noting that Primus was a “pivotal” figure in their lives. 33 Today, there are countless students of Primus who continue to work at the intersection of arts and social change, including Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the founding artistic director of Urban Bush Women, whose work centers on the African American and Afro-diasporic experience and who brings dance to thousands of children in New York each year. In many ways, Primus was ahead of her time. Predating the “Black is beautiful” campaign and the civil rights movement, Primus’s works widened the field of what could be considered “Black” and “concert” dance in the mid-twentieth century, thereby opening up possibilities of self-expression for African Americans and a more nuanced understanding of Black history by White audiences. Her choreographic works, her Afro-centric and circum-Atlantic scholarship, and her self-presentation as a Black woman in the United States in the mid-twentieth century laid the foundations for seismic shifts in American cultural and political systems and politics.

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Pearl Primus’s choreo-activism was particularly resonant with audiences because of the ways in which she collapsed temporality in her dances of social protest from the 1940s. As an artist-scholar, Primus choreographed dances that not only reflected the political situation of Black Americans, but also were deeply invested in corporeal and spiritual traditions of the past, while also opening up the possibility for Black futurity in the United States. She enabled generations of students to create artistic worlds in which blackness could be celebrated and Black history honored. As Griffin argues, much of Primus’s work in the 1940s can be read retroactively as aligned with Black radical tradition, serving to critique White supremacy and champion not only the cause of civil rights (particularly in regard to economic justice and social equity) but also the beauty, rigor, and traditions of African-diasporic performance. 34 Through her study, performance, and teaching of West/Central African traditions and practices, Primus embodied Black history, while also employing African diasporic understandings of performance to connect with audiences in the twentieth century to mobilize them in the fight for a future of racial equality. Furthermore, Primus’s choreography and her African-centered research contributed to a legacy of Black performance aesthetics that influenced generations of artists to the present day.

Notes 1.  “7,000 See Pearl Primus in Dance,” Afro-American, June 17, 1944, http://search.proquest.com/docview /531447466?accountid=9758. 2.  This description is taken from the performance of Kim Y. Bears (under direction of Pearl Primus), in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” The New Dance Group Gala Concert: A Historic Retrospective of New Dance Group’s Presentations 1930s–1970s, directed by Johannes Holub, video: 43:45, New York Public Library Performing Arts Research Collection. 3.  Jennifer Dunning, “Pearl Primus Is Dead at 74: A Pioneer of Modern Dance,” New York Times, October 31, 1994, http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/31/obituaries/pearl-primus-is-dead-at-74-a-pioneer-of-modern -dance.html. 4.  See Joanna Dee Das, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Dee Das outlines the strategic ways in which Dunham’s work engaged in political struggles of Black Americans and the ways in which Dunham’s financial, commercial, and artistic success were always already embedded in racial politics. 5.  André Lepecki, “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics, or the Task of the Dancer,” TDR: The Drama Review 57, no. 4 (2013): 15. 6.  It should be noted that original choreography here refers to Primus’s creation of new dances and her dances of social protest, with the acknowledgment that her movement vocabulary is based in multiple historical traditions and performance genealogies. 7.  Tammy L. Brown, City Islands: Caribbean Intellectuals in New York (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2015), 107. 8.  Ibid., 106. 9.  Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 20. 10.  Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains (London: Routledge, 2011). 11.  Peggy Schwartz and Murray Schwartz, The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). The Belgian Congo, formerly also Zaire, is now the Democratic Republic of Congo; the Gold Coast is now Ghana. 12.  André Lepecki, “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances,” Dance Research Journal (2010): 34. 13. Brown, City Islands, 119. 14.  Unfortunately, there is very little footage of Pearl Primus’s performances at all, let alone from the 1940s. This description is from a staging of Primus’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” for the New Dance Group’s Gala. See “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”



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15.  Interview with Primus in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” 40:30. 16.  Pearl Primus, interview with Walter Terry, Dance Laboratory Series at the 92nd St YMHA-YWHA, Feb-

ruary 15, 1953, New York. Note the Belgian Congo is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. 17. Brown, City Islands, 120. 18.  Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 4. 19.  Farah Jasmine Griffin, Harlem Nocturne (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2013), 64. 20.  Ibid., 57. 21.  John O. Perpener III, African-American Concert Dance: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 161. 22. Griffin, Harlem Nocturne, 30. 23.  Thomas DeFrantz, “The Black Beat Made Visible: Hip Hop Dance and Body Power,” in Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory, ed. Andre Lepecki (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 67. 24.  Pearl Primus, “Primitive African Dance,” in The Dance Encyclopedia, ed. Anatole Chujoy (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1949), 387. 25.  Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (New York: Routledge, 2011), 175. 26.  Primus, “Interview.” 27. Foster, Choreographing Empathy, 44. 28.  David Gere, “Dances of Sorrow, Dances of Hope: The Work of Pearl Primus Finds a Natural Place in a Special Program of Historic Modern Dances for Women,” Los Angeles Times, April 24, 1994, http://articles .latimes.com/1994-04-24/entertainment/ca-49822_1_modern-dance/2. 29. Griffin, Harlem Nocturne, 29. 30. Brown, City Islands, 125. 31.  It is somewhat beyond the scope of this chapter to address how Primus’s darker complexion shaped her public persona. It would be interesting to think more about how Primus is often described as more authentically Black or “intensely negro,” as Margaret Lloyd did in The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance, than, say, Katherine Dunham. The characterization of Primus as putatively “more Black” than other Black American choreographers and dancers might be due to her skin tone, but also seems related to Primus’s self-styling (hair style, clothing, etc.). Margaret Lloyd, The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance (New York: Dance Horizons, 1949), 266. 32. Michael Robertson, “Pearl Primus, PhD Returns,” New York Times, March 18, 1979, http://www .nytimes.com/1979/03/18/archives/pearl-primus-phd-returns-pearl-primus-phd-returns.html. 33.  Richard C. Green, “(Up)Staging the Primitive: Pearl Primus and the ‘Negro Problem’ in American Dance,” in Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance, ed. Thomas DeFrantz (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 129. 34.  Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Pearl Primus and the Idea of a Black Radical Tradition,” Small Axe 17, no. 1 (2013): 45.

Bibliography “7,000 See Pearl Primus in Dance.” Afro-American. June 17, 1944, http://search.proquest.com/docview /531447466?accountid=9758. Brown, Tammy L. City of Islands: Caribbean Intellectuals in New York. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2015. Dee Das, Joanna. Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. DeFrantz, Thomas F. “The Black Beat Made Visible: Hip Hop Dance and Body Power.” In Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory, edited by Andre Lepecki. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. Dunning, Jennifer. “Pearl Primus Is Dead at 74: A Pioneer of Modern Dance.” New York Times. October 31, 1994, http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/31/obituaries/pearl-primus-is-dead-at-74-a-pioneer-of-modern -dance.html. Foster, Susan Leigh. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. New York: Routledge, 2010.

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Gere, David. “Dances of Sorrow, Dances of Hope: The Work of Pearl Primus Finds a Natural Place in a Special Program of Historic Modern Dances for Women.” Los Angeles Times. April 24, 1994, http://articles .latimes.com/1994-04-24/entertainment/ca-49822_1_modern-dance/2. Green, Richard C. “(Up)Staging the Primitive: Pearl Primus and the ‘Negro Problem’ in American Dance.” In Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance, edited by Thomas DeFrantz. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, 105–143. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics during World War II. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2013. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “Pearl Primus and the Idea of a Black Radical Tradition.” Small Axe 17, no. 1 (2013): 40–49. Holub, Johannes, video director. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” In The New Dance Group Gala Concert: A Retrospective 1930s–1970s, June 11, 1991. Video. New York Public Library Performing Arts Research Collection. Kraut, Anthea. “Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The Dance Performances of Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Katherine Dunham.” Theatre Journal 55, no. 3 (2003): 433–450. Lepecki, André. “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances.” Dance Research Journal (2010): 28–47. Lepecki, André. “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics, or The Task of the Dancer.” TDR: The Drama Review 57, no. 4 (2013): 13–27. Lloyd, Margaret. The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance. New York: Dance Horizons, 1949. Lowe, Ramona. “Pearl Primus, New Dance Sensation at Cafe Society Portrays Social Protest, Spirituals, and ‘Jim Crow.’” New York Amsterdam News. May 1, 1943, http://search.proquest.com/docview/226087 791?accountid=9758. Perpener, John O. African-American Concert Dance: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Primus, Pearl E. “Primitive African Dance.” In The Dance Encyclopedia, edited by Anatole Chujoy. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1949. Primus, Pearl. Interview with Walter Terry. Dance Laboratory Series at the 92nd St. YMHA-YWHA, February 15, 1953. Audio Recording. New York Public Library Performing Arts Research Collection. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Robertson, Michael. “Pearl Primus, PhD Returns.” New York Times. March 18, 1979, http://www.nytimes .com/1979/03/18/archives/pearl-primus-phd-returns-pearl-primus-phd-returns.html. Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains. London: Routledge, 2011. Schwartz, Peggy, and Murray Schwartz. The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

4 • PERFORMING NEW NATIONALISM/ PERFORMING A LIVING CULTURE Josefina Báez’s Dominicanish

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Positioning Josefina Báez in African American Women’s Arts Tradition One of the highlights of the African American Arts: Activism and Aesthetics Conference, held at Bucknell University in the fall of 2016, was the performative poetic delivery by famed playwright and poet from the Neo-Black Arts movement era, Ntozake Shange. I was pleasantly surprised by the selection of poems that Shange chose to perform. I was reminded of how she has always woven the African diaspora experience of New York City into her poems. One of the poems performed by Ntozake Shange acknowledged Hector Lavoe, a Puerto Rican singer and musician from the 1970s, who along with Nuyorican Willie Colón and Panamanian American Rubén Blades, produced salsa music that at times included songs for social justice. 2 Ntozake’s embrace of the cultural plurality of New York City in her work is evident throughout her extensive artistic career over the years. An analysis of her work clearly indicates an acceptance of cross-national cultural aesthetics in her presentation of an African American blackness. Vanessa Valdes, author of the article “‘There Is No Incongruence Here’: Hispanic Notes in the Works of Ntozake Shange,” brilliantly reminds us that Ntozake showcases a cosmopolitan outlook in her African American poetic aesthetics. 3 Her Black experience includes multiple and nuanced performativities of blackness that reinforce the macramé formed from the Latin American and Caribbean hybridities that are so much a part of the Black experience in multiple New York City circles. Ntozake’s poetic choice at the conference affirmed my own introduction of Josefina Báez’s performance text as part of the celebration of African American activism and artistic aesthetics. Báez’s work highlights what I see as a continuation of the Afro-Caribbean and Latinx influence on the design of Black art and the struggle for equality and social justice for people of African descent in the United States. This holds true particularly in the case of New York City, where Afro-Caribbean artists and activists have undoubtedly contributed in shaping African American culture.4 Among these were those of Afro-Latino descent such as Arturo Schomburg from the Harlem Renaissance era. However, there were also the activists, artists, and writers from the 1960s and 1970s onward, such as Jesús Colón, Thomas Piri, Pedro Pietri, Miguel 51

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Algarín, Denise Oliver, Felipe Luciano, Iris Morales, and Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman, who have affirmed the parallels of the multiple racial and gender struggles for equality in the United States during that time. There are also the more contemporary artists from the 1990s onward, such as Maria “Mariposa” Teresa Fernández, who continues to shape New York City Africana aesthetics by highlighting her transnational and transcultural understanding of Black Latinx and American identities and experiences through poetry and spoken word. Because of these hybrid and parallel Black experiences in the United States, I find it imperative to explore an American blackness that forgoes any attempt at essentializing African Americanness as an isolated development loose from multiple syncretisms. African American blackness evolved from and continues to be shaped by the Africana experience in the Americas, the Caribbean, and beyond. Moreover, the United States has known its share of Afro-­ Caribbean contributions to the direct and indirect evolution of African American artistic aesthetics. 5 I argue that Báez’s performance and poetic arts lie firmly in the Afro-American artistic syncretism that has been created from the introduction of Black bodies in the Americas since the 1500s. This chapter affirms Báez’s work as an expansion upon the type of African American blackness that Ntozake Shange manages to successfully highlight with her transcultural Black women’s performativity through theatre, poetry, dance, and music.6 I examine Báez’s work with Ntozake Shange’s African American cultural multiplicity in mind, as I believe that Báez’s performances and texts further expand on this notion of cultural multiplicity in the contemporary Black experience of the United States. Báez skews and diffuses the ways in which the Dominican Republic and the United States have historically used race and gender to homogenize and create dominant national culture and identity. I theorize that Báez’s work ultimately reinforces the idea of a “de-territorial cultural nationalism.” By this I mean that the creation of her culture and cultural citizenship is not restricted to assimilation into dominant national cultural portrayals in the United States or the Dominican Republic. Rather, Báez creates her personal culture by pushing back against normative and official cultural interpretations delineated across Caribbean and North American geographical borders, allowing for complete liberation from national cultural restrictions.7 In validating her transcultural nationalism beyond national borders, Báez also guides her audience/reader to do the same. Furthermore, Báez’s work reaffirms that global Black cultures are informed by international migration, which has in turn allowed for a continued hybridization of African American culture in the United States. I therefore reiterate that a full understanding of African American arts can only occur within a transnational and transcultural analytical context. It is important to note that even as Báez chooses to perform de-territorial cultural nationalism, she is also practicing a “strategic essentialism” as described by postcolonial literary scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.8 Strategic essentialism emphasizes the occasional necessity for groups to come together based on their alignment to achieve a tactical goal. In the case of Báez’s Dominicanish, it seems she embraces her locational race and gender affiliations in calculated ways so as to call for liberation, social justice, and equality for marginalized Black women and men in the United States and, by extension, the Dominican Republic. Hers is also clearly a Black woman’s project that associates with the tradition of African American women’s performance and poetic aesthetics in the United States. Both bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins assert that sexism and racism are experienced in similar ways by women of the African diaspora across the globe. This could in part explain how Báez’s artistic project for liberation and self-determination of the individual self and the community line up with the advocacy struggles of African American women.



Performing New Nationalism/Performing a Living Culture 53

Josefina Báez: The Poet and Performer Josefina Báez lives her existence in a fused transnational and transcultural milieu. She was born and raised in the Dominican Republic in the city of La Romana till the age of twelve.9 She then moved to the United States and gradually made metropolitan New York City her home and theatrical stage. Báez is identified as a U.S. Afro-Latina of Dominican descent. According to sociologist Rubén Rumbaut’s assertions on first- and second-generation citizens in a national context,10 Báez could be considered a one-and-a-half generation American, as she arrived in the United States by the age of twelve. Her generational status possibly speaks to a very early symbiosis in her identity as a Black Dominican in the United States. Consequently, her consciousness as a Black woman seems to have, in part, been informed by existing Black identity constructs in the United States.11 Báez’s hybrid American and Dominican identity is visible as she fuses African American dictum and music, while at the same time philosophically delving into the meaning of the color black and notions of blackness in general. I will expand on Báez’s syncretized ideas on blackness later in this chapter. However, for now, it is important to note that this approach to identity adjustment is typical in the work of many Spanish-­CaribbeanAmerican artists whose understanding of blackness becomes influenced by established racial frameworks in their host countries—in this case, the United States.12 Much like many other artists of African descent who have journeyed to the United States, Báez autographs her experiences as part of her art. In this case, it is her Dominican American experiences on display in the onstage performances and performance texts. It is clear that Báez is following in the footsteps of other Afro-Caribbean immigrants who have over the years migrated to New York City and have influenced the poetic, performance, and literary aesthetics of Black identity in the United States. Josefina Báez, like many Caribbean/African American artists who have preceded her, mixes street and in-home performances to capture the full spectrum of her Black experience in New York City.13 She eventually moves from street performance, starts her AY OMBE theatre in the 1980s, and later expands her popularity with the steady performance of Dominicanish in the 1990s. She gave the final tenth-anniversary performance of Dominicanish on the Harlem Theatre stage in 1999.14 Báez’s artistic popularity in New York City was firmly established with the publication of Dominicanish as a performance text in the year 2000. This text captures Báez’s onstage aesthetic performance moves and her poetry. The text showcases Báez’s ambiguous and contradictory identity politics. As Latino studies scholar Juan Flores notes in The Diaspora Strikes Back, Báez might have just been ahead of her time, as U.S. Dominican performing artists that came on the scene after her adhere to much of her performance and artistic rhetoric in general.15 Báez’s success comes in part from her ability to affirm her difference that stems from her urban city environments—both New York City and La Romana. As best described by Claudio Mir16 in his contribution to Báez’s text, “Dominicanish is Josefina’s journey through the past and future.”17 This voyage includes Báez’s migration from the Dominican Republic to the United States, as she is able to transport her audience to both regions during her onstage performance. As presented in the work of Dominican studies scholar Silvio Torres-Saillant, Dominicans come from a history of state-sanctioned anti-Black terrorism and U.S. political and military interventions that corroborated ideas of Black racial inferiority on the island of the Dominican Republic.18 The Dominican dictator General Rafael Trujillo traumatized Black Dominicans and Haitian-Dominicans from 1930 through 1961.19 Crooked ideologies on race and gender which suggest that an inferior black skin should be rooted out of the Dominican Republic

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and that women’s position should remain relegated to domesticity were strong components of Dominican national ideals of progression and modernization. 20 The Black body, with all its features, regardless of gender, was “othered,” considered inferior, and thus was dispensable and made an invisible part of the national culture. Crimes committed against Black bodies were secretly sanctioned in the Dominican Republic during this time. Trujillo’s demise in 1961 did not come until after the savage killing of the revolutionary Mirabal sisters in 1960. These sisters were central female figures in the movement to overthrow Trujillo and his ideals on race and gender.21 Still, as noted by Torres-Saillant, Dominican culture continues to maintain a position of Black denial. What we see, according to Torres-Saillant, is an appropriation of Black inferiority and backwardness in the psyche of many Dominicans.22 I would add that the position of women in society also continues to be perceived with limitations. With its own sociohistorical and cultural variations these Dominican ideas on race and gender are in many ways similar to those in the United States, where racism and sexism have also shaped American sociology and artistic responses. Like Ntozake Shange’s artistic works that are in part responses against sexism and racism, Josefina Báez’s performances and poetry push back against the cultural memories of state-sanctioned terrorism on Black bodies and normative acceptance of women’s domesticity. This is evident from the ways in which she unapologetically includes her self-established Black Dominican difference onto the geographies of New York City and the Dominican Republic. Her performances liberate the Dominican body from the confines of post-Trujillo cultural productions of race and gender, and equally liberate the U.S. Black/African American gendered body from repressive enactments and appropriations.

African American Women’s Art: A Project of Self-Determination A principal way in which Báez liberates the Black woman from territorial cultural restrictions is through the use of a bilingual fusion consisting of poetic declamations and theatrical performances. Báez molds and brings to life the African American and Afro-Dominican woman through a linguistic verbalism that embraces Dominican York slang, offering thus a sociopolitical literacy to interpret the transcultural conjoins she lives. Her performance of a transcultural Black woman is evident in her Spanish poem entitled “Origen” [Origin].23 The poem speaks of the childhood recollection of a woman who boasts of her confidence when she was a little [Dominican] girl. This gifted little girl is proud and determined to claim her own English vernacular. Though her pronunciation is weak, and while she does not fully articulate the words, “[leaving them] on the first syllable,” 24 she maintains confidence and repeats English words over and over again, while not allowing outside criticism to discourage her. In this poem Báez lays claim to her own vernacular, centering her own linguistic standpoint. Through her self-affirmation and play with words, the little girl in “Origen” (whom I interpret as Báez) values the correctness in incorrectness. For example, the use of the incorrect and unofficial spelling of the word Belle as “Bel”25 in the poem highlights linguistic doubling in the presentation of the Black woman’s experience.26 In so doing, “Origen” embraces a suspension in privileging hierarchal ranks in grammar and spelling of the English language in interpreting the Black woman’s experience. The poem “Origen” is in reality affirming Báez’s English, even if it is tinted with Spanish modulations. The symbiosis of English and Spanish that Báez produces is similar to Shange’s poetic synergies with languages in that these appear to be somewhat carnivalesque to those not familiar



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with the Spanish aphorisms, phrases, and words. But in introducing this Spanglish cuisine, Báez’s work liberates African American blackness from the confines of English, thus welcoming a cross-section of Afro-descendants’ experiences as part of the African American arts project. Báez then belongs to the school of Black women theatrical poets whose work is meant to allow transcultural Black women to feel validated in the incongruences of their American lives. Furthermore, she is creating a pronounced writing of Black women of Latinx descent into the African American theatrical and poetic space of the United States, thus making the realities of their Black American lives visible. Comparable to Ntozake Shange, Báez is affirming a “living culture” in her poetry and onstage performance. Though used somewhat differently, I borrow from Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa’s coined term “living culture”27 to clarify that Báez’s onstage performances and performance texts capture instant and spontaneous experiences of the transcultural Black woman in a specific environment. Her theatre performances and poetry then operate like visual and physical autographs of her lived experiences as a Black Dominican Caribbean transplant in New York City. Báez’s (2000) “living culture” is clearly described in a section of the poem entitled “Pikin epanis” [Speaking Spanish], where she calls her New York condition and “living culture” Dominicanish: Yo soy una Dominican York. Y esta condición me otorga una infinidad de estimulos constantes y variados. Enriqueciendo mi cultura personal en formas inesperadas. El texto, al igual que la puesta en escena de Dominicanish ilustra la creación y estado de mi universo personal. Y viva, cambiante, llena de contradicciones y possibilidades, estoy en camino a la casa de lo constante. Sólo ahí, en lo constante, tengo guarantee. [I am a Dominican York. And this condition grants me an infinity of constant and varied stimuli. Enriching my personal culture in unexpected ways. The texts, similar to the visual scenes in Dominicanish illustrate the creation and state of my personal universe. Alive, constantly changing, full of contradictions and possibilities, I am on my way to the home of constancy. Only there, in constancy, do I have guarantees. (p. 7)

Báez’s description here of her “living culture” reinforces the triad of constancy-contradiction-possibility as central to her personal universe in New York City. Flores notes how it is within this New York City universe that Báez maintains “a view toward [the Dominican Republic] and [remains] in dialogue with the cultural reality [in her Dominican hometown of La Romana].28 Hence, it seems the contradictions afforded in New York City allow Báez to maintain a continuity with her Dominican sense of self. The continued affirmation of a Dominican York identity is then central in her quest for constancy. In fact, her Dominican York identity is a constancy among all contradictions. This syncretized identity is one of the conducting lines that Claudio Mir, the director of Báez’s Dominicanish theatre, writes of in “Vital.”29 Mir interprets Báez’s need for constancy in her performance as the need for una línea conductora [a conducting line].30 Her Dominican York identity or Dominicanish existence is a conducting line that allows her the possibility to navigate through her New York City space in search of her own sense of stability.

Liberatory and Communal Practices in Black Women’s Arts Aesthetics The establishment of conducting lines that facilitate Black people’s navigation through their lives have, in the United States, traditionally included songs, spirituals, oral stories, uplifting

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racial ideologies, specific musical genres, patterned physical motions, and at times, complicity and resistance to dominant racial and gender norms. Ntozake Shange has even acknowledged food as a conducting line in the African diaspora communal experience. 31 Reminiscent of Shange, Báez too uses the said conducting lines in consort to give her access to physical and geographical spaces outside of New York City without necessarily being present in these locations. These conducting lines in Báez’s performance text and in her onstage performances provide her with unlimited access to different spaces, thus allowing her to cross the physical and mental limitations imposed by the city. Báez’s onstage and textual performances provide in this manner sketches of a liberatory practice for women of color in the United States—Báez gives these women examples of how to experience physical, mental, and spiritual freedom. Báez also invites her audience (the community) to experience this liberatory practice for themselves. Báez’s performance entails the use of repetitive tunes, controversial cultural notions from a situated time period, word choices with double and triple meanings, cultural word play, and critical observations of race and gender in society. The onstage performances include Báez’s physical presence in dark regalia accompanied by spoken word and “random” expressions. Through her hybrid cross-national and bilingual onstage declamations accompanied by idiosyncratic body motions and expressive gazes, Báez compels the audience to be fully present in her obscurity. It suddenly becomes possible for her spectator to transcend the theatre and connect with her subjectivity in the moment. It is in this way that Báez’s audience gains access to localized-territorial and cultural Dominican and American spaces without necessarily being physically present in these locations. Hence, they too become a part of the ways in which Báez memorizes the geographical and cultural places and peoples that have strongly demarked the ways in which she has come to understand and see herself as a Black woman in the United States. The audience is in fact introduced to Báez’s exacting version of a Black woman’s experience in a metropolitan U.S. city. In many ways, Báez’s Dominicanish gifts the audience and reader with access to “indefinite spaces”32 without the legal limitations set forth by established national borders. I do believe that in order for readers of her text to embody the full experience of Báez’s “living culture” and performance autology, 33 they must be able to access images of the movements and dances performed by Báez. The text Dominicanish provides the reader with just that— access to her dance aesthetics. Every page in this text provides images of Báez in motion. If one flips through the pages from front to back or vice versa, one will witness a fluid dance scene of asymmetrical upon symmetrical body politics. The dance moves come from kuchipudi, a classical dance from India that easily interprets Báez’s experiential Dominicanish. 34 I see this dance as completely inhabiting alterity. Báez is not only voicing her difference and contradictory subjectivity through a semiotics that locates logic outside the dominant Euro-centered structural frameworks of language, but she also uses her body to simulate non-Western aesthetics to reinforce the fact that she lives and moves in this alterity. Together, both Báez and her audience/reader come to inhabit this space of divergence, thus suggesting that an Other-space only remains on the margin when left unexplored by the majority. Once these marginal spaces are acknowledged, explored, and centered, the realization arises that these spaces are integral parts of the whole—difference is then undistinguishable. Certainly, it appears that Báez is inverting and transcending Western dichotomous modes of thinking in order to highlight her difference as normalcy. By allowing her reality/normalcy to take center stage in her performative public visibility, her audience and reader are invited to experience and live through glimpses of Báez’s Black otherness. At that point, neither skin color nor location produce a divide between her and the audience/reader. Rather, they produce



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a space of inversion, mirroring, transition, and connection. Báez’s onstage performance introduces cyclical visual reminders of Dominican culture that transition into visual reminders of New York City by way of songs, music, physical expressions, and verbal maneuvering of English and Spanish vowels and words. In that way, she is reflecting upon the social and psychological acculturation of her immigrant blackness, and her audience is freely gazing at and coliving with Báez’s de-territorial subjectivity. Báez’s approach here again speaks to an Ntozakian view of understanding Black women’s subjectivity in that she is not only affirming a way of living wherein the Black woman’s body and reality are fully visible and dominant, but she is also giving voice to “the collective in the individual.”35 The collective here however includes the audience that becomes a part of Báez’s multidimensional constructions. In Báez’s onstage performance we see the audience routinely captivated and mesmerized by Báez’s physical, linguistic, and cultural contortions. The pindrop silence in the room is sometimes interrupted by occasional laughter from the audience. This audience reaction happens when they connect with the irregular moments of irony and familiarity in the performance. For example, Báez notes in her onstage performance and text how learning English reluctantly forces one’s mouth to become all twisted, like a baseball glove. She utters this narrative in Spanish: “No me voy a poner la boca así como un guante.”36 This portion of the expression receives chuckles from certain audience members37 as they are able to understand the cultural comedic sentiments that this Spanish expression emits. They too might connect with the psychosocial experience of non-English speaking immigrants who learn English and are forced to contort their mouths in uncomfortable ways to pronounce English words. Regardless of the reasons for the emotional reaction to Báez’s expressions, it is clear that the audience/community is as much a part of her performance as she is. This collective involvement has been ingrained in the history of Báez’s work which, as mentioned earlier, included street performances built into the community. 38 Báez’s epistemological approach then upholds a frame of reference that factors the public into her polyphonic immigrant experiences as a Black woman in America. This suggests that her poetic efforts toward Black and women’s liberation in the United States endorse a community-centered Black immigrant experience which is also a part of the continuity of contemporary Black arts and aesthetic movement in the United States.

Black Women’s Vocality: Interrupting Official National Discourse As already noted, Báez centers her subjective experiences in the Black poetic and theatrical world of the United States by interrupting Western dichotomous and binary thinking. She maneuvers dominant social symbolic realms that are upheld in the sociopolitical, cultural, and economic imaginaries of society—in this case, those upheld in New York City and, by extension, La Romana. This is evident in her claim, “Home is where theatre is.”39 In other words, every day and every instance is a performance and we make ourselves comfortable in these performances. A theatre here refers to multiple presentations of the self in various locations and under various conditions. One’s social and interactive location at any given point in time determines one’s theatrical performance(s).40 In the case of Báez’s performance text, we see descriptions of a versatile and eclectic global city with so many cross-fertilizations in identity and culture, thus suggesting that there are multiple performances upon performances. I liken this to a performance matrix, where doubling and tripling of realities become a natural component of the multidimensional Black woman’s existence.

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Báez’s performance matrix becomes immediately evident in Dominicanish. The entire performance text reads like someone taking mental notes of the signs and advertisements visible in the city topography, producing a critical and reflective experiential visual motion picture of New York City. This is the way in which Báez captures and fuses distinct ethnic, racial, cultural, and linguistic norms as she sees and experiences them. The following excerpt with inserted translation exemplifies the note-taking of the multiples in the city space: Brujo haitiano brujo colombiana [Haitian witchdoctors Colombian witchdoctors] Brujo de las matas [Bush doctor] Rooms for rent GED ESL free classes GED ESL Citizenship classes Smokeshop 24 hours calls 39 cents a minute STD ISD PCO STD ISD PCO Fax to let best of both worlds For hire please sound horn veg. Non veg. Hotel Fresh tickets (Báez, 2000, p. 24)

Ultimately, Báez’s Black female performativity in the text, just as in the onstage performance, shows a blurring of national performances on U.S. soil. Her gendered ethnovisual literacy introduces the reader to the fluidity and proximity of cultural multiplicities in a compact New York City space. The still images of Báez that accompany the poetic literacy on every page of the text replicate what Báez does in the onstage performance of Dominicanish. She performs symmetrical, asymmetrical, and linear kuchipudi dance moves within the spatial limits of her arm and leg spans. Báez’s performance text inscribes in this way the self in the city, all while illustrating the city’s reach to fully capacitate dense identities much like the voluminous and concomitantly abstract shapes and writings that Báez creates. Báez’s ethnovisual literacy also indicates the use of a “parodic subversive strategy.”41 Caribbean literary scholar Evelyn O’Callaghan reflects upon the ways in which women writers of the Caribbean diaspora have used parodic subversive strategies to subvert patriarchal ideas of nationalism. These women writers use a female comic vision in their writing that “[interrupts] the language of official [national] discourse and literature with a women’s vocality.”42 In this excerpt from Dominicanish we see a freestyle applied to some of the font in the text; also, there are satiric and sharp identifications of social contrasts in the commercial landmarks, and there are references to outlandish ads coupled with Báez’s eccentric aesthetic motions. Collectively, these artistic features devise an unconventional performance that does not meet the standards of Western patriarchal or African American patriarchal theatre. However, this is exactly the poetic and theatrical challenge presented by Báez who, like Ntozake Shange, seeks to affirm her experiences and identity, demanding the inclusion of her Black female difference. Nothing about this excerpt from Dominicanish speaks to a typical American landmark.43 However, it is in fact an American neighborhood as seen through the eyes of a transcultural immigrant Black woman. What she sees is the portion of the American Black self often abstracted or discontinued in dominant African American patriarchal artistic discourse. This Black abstraction was done within the Black Arts movement of the 1960s to essentialize a



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concrete African American blackness. This move, unfortunately, flattened some of its rich and complex diasporic connections. As noted already, Báez, similar to Ntozake Shange, disrupts this singular lens of African American cultural production by introducing a more complex gendered Black difference located in multiple connected historicities. The difference here is that Báez has the ability to not only influence the artistic presentation of African American aesthetics but her affirmed Dominican York identity also allows her to directly manipulate transnational Dominican ideas of blackness. Therefore, as a subjective and collective text, Dominicanish is impacting two national fronts at once, thus minimizing the divide in their cultural territorial differences on Black arts and aesthetics.44

Báez’s Ethnic Claims to Blackness I return here to my exploration of Báez’s claims to blackness because, along with her gender assertions, come her complex modes of being Black. Báez claims to be an Afro-Dominican or a Black woman, and though blackness is used as part of her conducting line, her text reflects upon her butterflying into a New York blackness that takes shape in her sensibility to and tripling of language, music, and consciousness of historically situated cultural conditions and ideas. To highlight her thoughts on blackness, I adapt Báez’s words in her poem titled “Spanglish,” with an insertion of English translations for clarity. Báez (2000) writes: Aquí los discos traen cancionero [Here the music brings songs]. Discos del alma con afro [Afro soul music]. Con [With] afro black is beautiful. Black is a color. Black is my color. My cat is black. (p. 26)

Claiming blackness to Báez is not a mark of her affinity to a skin color, for her cat is also black. Claiming blackness entails a sensibility that lies beyond the skin. Thus, she is subverting dominant notions that equate blackness to a skin color. In doing so, she is responding to and unmaking territorial-national Dominican ideas of race that are fixated on skin complexion.45 To her, the affinity to blackness lies in the sensibilities of race in one’s “living culture.” This means that her social experiences in black skin determine her understanding of blackness—this strategic approach is more akin to definitions of ethnicity. Blackness or the act of being Black is a socially constructed sensibility to which she has come to find a connection. Báez references the Isley Brothers,46 their music and records, as her teachers. They become central to Báez in facilitating her learning of English and becoming a Black American: “In a cloud of smoke I found my teachers. In an LP jacket I found my teachers [ . . . ] In that cover I found my teachers.”47 Báez (2000) further writes: Last Saturday my teachers sang in Soul Train Now I don’t care how my mouth look I like what I’m saying Boy girl loves you she does she doesn’t A mor And more (p. 28)

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Here Báez performs an English and a blackness that conflate the linguistic semantics of Spanish and English, as well as the cultural aesthetics of periodized U.S. songs and historically situated Afro-American cultural expressions. It is clear from her text that the songs, with their ability to periodize the moment, function as constancies amid the ever-changing space—these songs operate as conducting lines. In this same breath, the reader learns of Báez’s sensitivity to signs that reflect class differences, injustices, inequalities, and urban New York cultural production of gender norms as she sees them in her surroundings. In her piece entitled “Washington Heights List”48 Báez provides another visual reading of this very Dominican side of New York City. Her reading of the signs and images in Washington Heights provides a mental picture of Dominican culture in the city. Báez’s visual autography, meaning her mental interpretation of that which she sees and experiences in her New York City space, consists of, first, signs that reflect a continued connection to mainland Dominican Republic; second, a cultural transplantation of food, language, and other Dominican modalities; third, the struggles in this part of the city with crime, drugs, and police brutality; and finally, the location of the Dominican and Black woman in the city. Particularly in this section of her autography, I see Báez presenting a complex urban phenomenon that cannot be interpreted without analyzing cultural occurrences as overlapping with multiple linkages. If one wants to find the areas in her visual reading and performance that provide a clear and unambiguous display of resistance to national conformity on race and gender, one should turn to the recurrent themes in Báez’s urbanity,49 poetic diction, and physical contours used to express her “living culture” in Dominicanish. One recurrent theme that remains at the forefront of not only “Washington Heights List” but also throughout Báez’s text is the idea of a corrupted city. Báez evidences her rhetoric of a corrupted city with the analogy of a “crooked city.”50 A crooked city implies a fraudulent, false, or dishonest space wherein the public visibility decenters reality; and so, what we see is an incomplete reality, or a reality that is not concurrent with what is really happening in the city. Báez references the social institutions designed to serve and protect the city as partaking in the efforts of this fraudulent space. She writes of the “city glorifying the finest brutality in blue”;51 she reads the signs visible in the city and chooses to autograph “la maldita policia” [the bad cop]52 and “Marcha en contra de la brutalidad policial” [March against police brutality]53 in her text. The institution of law and order is presented as upholding a fraudulent city space. This juridical system and its umbrella branches are presented as partaking in the socialization of individuals into the dominant material and symbolic orders. 54 I find Báez’s choice to centralize the law and its semiotic meaning in the public signs important because of similar ideas about the institution of law and order circulating within certain circles of African American urbanities in New York City. This similarity of ideas is mainly evident in the urban expressive cultures and performance poetry of New York City (such as hip hop culture) where blackness, Latinidad, and African Americanness merge. 55 Báez herself is an evolving product of this African American and Latina convergence. This is evident throughout her text, but particularly on the pages where she uses seemingly African American aphorisms to produce Dominican eulogies. Báez (2000) provides an entire account about this conjunction. I highlight the following translation of this account: Craqueo chicle como Shameka Brown Hablo como Boricua y me peino como Morena



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[I cracked bubblegum like Shameka Brown I speak like a Puerto Rican and I comb my hair like a Black Girl] (p. 43)

This translation from Báez’s performance text implies a character that is publicly affirming a theatrical urbanity that blends Latinidad and African Americanness with ease—this then is another indication of her ethnic claim to blackness. In these theatrical urban performances are references to the Black woman/the Brown woman/la Morena plastered all over the text. This is Báez’s attempt to manifest a subjectivity and identity to la Morena whose multiplicity can be found in many masks throughout the false city. She is sometimes “Shameka Brown”; other times she is “a Señora seria” [serious lady/professional lady]56 or “la Morenita éste” [that Black girl]57 or just a “muchacha de buena presencia” [a nice looking girl]. 58 Never is the Black woman or the Dominican woman described on her own terms; she is always an act that someone is advertising for, looking for, stereotypically signifying, or publicly performing. Báez tackles this very notion that both “African American women and Latinas, as part of the Afro-diasporic cultural community in New York City,”59 are contained within the symbolic realm by the very institutions that are supposed to facilitate the subjective self to transcend into the real.60

New York City and Black Women’s Artistic Agency for Liberation, Freedom, and Justice Regardless of the restrictive features in the sociology of New York City, Báez simultaneously realizes that this metropolitan space can be used as a realm of critique and resistance to facilitate one’s journey into the real. Beyond Lacanian terms, for whom the real is unattainable, Báez chooses to highlight certain urban signs such as the “crooked city” to subsequently reference modes of subverting social institutions and to enter a journey of self-liberation beyond local or national cultural divisive restrictions. This liberation is a path toward the real: For example you see a rope and think it is a snake. As soon as you realize that the rope is a rope, your false perception of a snake stops, and you are no longer distracted by the fear which it inspired. Therefore, one who wants to liberate herself must know the nature of the real self and the unreal. (Báez, 2000, p. 45)

This passage expresses a conscious attempt to unlock the real so as to attain liberation. Báez is presenting ways to disrupt the act of doubling and tripling to ultimately see reality and avoid falsity. Báez argues further that “when appearances cannot distract you anymore, then comes knowledge; then comes complete discrimination of the real and the unreal.”61 In this regard, Báez is again suggesting the need to develop a consciousness that can discriminate between what is and what isn’t, for “when our false perception is corrected, our misery ends.”62 What Báez is in essence suggesting is that city dwellers reevaluate their intimacy to the city and that they alter their consciousness in relation to the city. A new spectatorship should be employed in order for a real self to emerge. The city harnesses difference, and thus holds the key for its

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inhabitants to move beyond the cultural restrictions imposed by its institutions. One can in fact move beyond singular representations of African Americanness in New York City. For example, the African American Latina or the African American Caribbean are very real ethnic presences in the city. Báez implies that the true self is thus sustainable in the city, for it is in New York City that she has been able to foster and perform a syncretized and transnational blackness as part of her gender identity. She is in fact fully using New York City to affirm herself in her journey to constancy. As she notes in Dominicanish, once “you are real you are constant.”63 The city gives Báez the ability to find the real. However, she acknowledges throughout her text how the chaotic and fragmented city has the ability to present the marginal side of difference as something fantastic and burlesque. This could obscure the ways in which gendered and racialized city dwellers come to see themselves. The dominant ways of knowing can mask the realities of marginal people to the point of passive acceptance of interpretations made on their Black bodies. What happens as a result is that their existence in the unreal is normalized, and they appropriate the unreal dwellings they subjectively inhabit. The ability to unravel the real or even consider a different existence becomes unfashionable, even if the psyche is destabilized in the present. This unreal vision of the self in the city could prevent urban citizens from attaining authentic subjectivity—meaning they become unable to experience a self that fully capacitates, among other things, the “transcultural black identity.” Ironically, Báez’s Dominicanish is a nonexilic framework in nourishing this transcultural Black identity. She performs entirely in the city. At no time in the text does she physically leave her locale and material New York City environment to (re)turn to a Caribbean space for resignification of the self. Her transnational existence already embraces cultural geographies from the Dominican Republic.64 She presents a search of the soul in “the poetry of the senses, the poetry that leads to acts of love”65 available to the self in the material and chaotic city. Hence, New York City in and of itself contains the conducting lines that lead to alternate and fluid spaces in time, memory, and consciousness. 66 Each subject can “groove to”67 these alternate fluid spaces that, in split seconds, can lead to the unraveling of alternate self-consciousness. I contend that Báez’s presentation of New York City as a significant symbol in the design of a conscious and liberated self can be traced to non-Western spiritual traditions that center the relevance of the self and the environment in the quest for conscious self-affirmation. Also, within this non-Western spiritual tradition, as asserted by Joni L. Jones in her analysis of Diedre Bádéjò’s Osun Seegesi, lies the importance of feminine ways of knowing. Jones notes that “female powers lies in the union with nature and in an understanding of practical knowledge.”68 Thus, maternal interstices of birth, consciousness, knowledge, and renewal are available throughout the environment—in this case, the city. The spiritual realism in which the city and the feminine are embroiled is clearly evident in the poem entitled “Poor, Sick, Dreamers and Fools Exile.” In this poem we see Báez describing the “the city as a woman.”69 An analysis of the complete poem also illustrates Báez’s nonlinear presentation of the Afro-Dominican York reality to undo asymmetrical power relations between genders in the urban space. Her work, which represents the congregation and convergence of difference, illustrates the equal interdependence of males and females in the design of the city. An excerpt of the poem reads as follows: Crooked cupid A woman named City Hips swing male or female



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We swing creating our tale Male or female we swing. (Báez, 2000, p. 41)

What this poem shows is that together, both women and men are equally responsible to uphold the integrity of the city, even in the face of what Báez addresses as a corrupt or “crooked” metropolis. According to Báez both men and women city dwellers choose to ignore the crookedness and corruption around them while they continue to glorify the institutions that maintain the skewed structures that affirm gender, racial, and minority oppression. In referencing the city as woman, Báez entices a feminine urban cosmology. The city is thus regarded as the “mother” or the contour that can absorb multiplicities, and that can create wellrounded men and women. Thus, the city, as the contextual urban ecology, is highly involved in the design of the healthy self. This explains why without any consideration for gender norms “hips swing male or female.” Thus, this city is indifferent to gender customs as both males and females are products of “Woman” (the city). No longer is Báez referring to male or female but to “we swing creating our own tale.” Hence, collectively, both men and women are central to fostering a healthy design of the city. Male and female here are regarded as a unitary part of a broader structure. They are the “we,” the similitude of a marginal city collective. But this collective is crooked and happy in its crookedness, or so it seems. Báez’s poem is placing a mirror in the face of “we” or “the marginal city collective” to reflect upon the ways a corrupt city culture is designed, supported, and normalized by its inhabitants. Like Ntozake Shange, Báez too is asserting the knowledgeable feminine space (symbolized in this case as the city) in the consciousness-raising process of Black women and the collective Black community. As noted by Jones in “Conjuring as Radical Re/Membering in the Works of Shay Youngblood,” the feminine space of wisdom that many African American women artists embrace, motivates social activism.70 This clarifies why Báez’s artistic work is at once a call for resistance against patriarchal gender and racial oppression, and a renewed connection to the city, one that allows for a “just cupid” where crookedness and repression are no longer embraced. As is the case with the entire text, Báez’s performative articulation in this poem operates to further transcend the normativities and restrictions imposed on Black women in the United States and the Dominican Republic. The elasticity of her body motions reflect the struggles that she manages to bypass in order to fit instantaneously in both locations. Her nationalism then is one of multiple identities that she manages to affirm across borders. It is in this way that she performs a de-territorial cultural nationalism that makes democratic liberation and transcendence possible for her. Báez’s performance of her “living culture” speaks to the futurity of the African diaspora in the United States and beyond. African American history is in part a transnational history that can be traced through multiple geographical spaces and cultures. The ability to navigate through local, national, and (inter)national cultural historicities of blackness could re-ignite “forgotten” templates of agency that could foster creative new ways of individual and collective liberation and psychic freedom.

Notes 1.  This chapter is an adaptation of portions of my doctoral dissertation (2012) in which I address the decolonization of racial and gender performativity in Josefina Báez’s performance text Dominicanish. Translations in this chapter come from my adaptations or versions already positioned in the performance text. . 2.  These artists created music under the Fania music label in New York City. Their music spoke to the U.S. Latinx population and to those beyond New York City and the United States borders. These Latinx artists,

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in many ways, autographed the self in the environment as they sang about everything from the New York subway trains to the economic and social disparities in Latin American countries. 3.  Vanessa Valdes, “‘There Is No Incongruence Here’: Hispanic Notes in the Works of Ntozake Shange,” CLA Journal 5, no. 23 (2009): 131–144. 4.  Both Caribbean immigrants and U.S.-born children of Caribbean parents have made their mark in shaping crucial turning points in the development of African American identity. A few of these Caribbean descendants are Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Shirley Chisholm. 5.  Daryl Cumber Dance, “African American Literature by Writers of Caribbean Descent,” in The Cambridge History of African American Literature, ed. Maryemma Graham and Jerry W. Ward Jr. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 377–404. 6.  For an example of Ntozake Shange’s transcultural Black women’s performativity, see her choreopoem “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf: a choreopoem.” New York: Macmillan, 1977. 7.  Though Emilia Durán-Almarza does not define Báez’s performative strategy as “de-territorial cultural nationalism,” she does acknowledge Báez’s ability to circumvent dominant national cultural ways. Durán-­ Almarza, “At Home at the Border: Performing the Transcultural Body in Josefina Báez’s Dominicanish,” in Transnationalism and Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Women’s Writing, ed. Adele Parker and Stephenie Young (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 45–68. 8.  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian American postcolonial literary critic and theorist known for her work in subaltern studies and transnational feminism. 9.  As noted by Camilla Stevens, Báez moved to the United States in 1972. Stevens, “‘Home Is Where Theatre Is’: Performing Dominican Transnationalism,” Latin American Theatre Review 44, no. 1 (2010): 46. 10.  Rubén Rumbaut, “The Crucible Within: Ethnic Identity, Self-Esteem, and Segmented Assimilation among Children of Immigrants,” International Migration Review 28, no. 4 (1994): 748–794. 11.  Báez’s reflections on race, color, language, African American language, and U.S. Black artistic culture in the text Dominicanish provide evidence of her understanding of her situatedness as a Black woman in the United States. 12.  Silvio Torres-Saillant reiterates Jorge Duany’s assertion that international migration influenced Puerto Rican and Dominican understanding of Black identity and negritude. Torres-Saillant, Introduction to Dominican Blackness (Dominican Studies Institute Research Monograph) (New York: CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, 2010). 13.  Ramón Rivera-Servera, “Apartarte/Casarte by Josefina Báez, New York City, 21 May 1999,” Theatre Journal 52, no. 1 (2000): 110–112. 14.  BWW News Desk, “Harlem Stage Presents 10th Anniversary of Dominicanish, 11/6,” Broadway World, November 6, 2009, https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Harlem-Stage-Presents-10th-Anniversary -Performance-of-DOMINICANISH-116-20091105. 15.  Juan Flores, The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning (New York: Routledge, 2009), 193. 16.  Báez asserts in “In Inglis” that Claudio Mir arranged the performance texts and directed the performance piece. Josefina Báez, “In Inglis,” in Dominicanish: A Performance Text (New York: I Ombe Press, 2000), 6. 17.  Claudio Mir, “Orchestrating a Journey,” in Dominicanish: A Performance Text, by Josefina Báez, 11. 18.  Silvio Torres-Saillant, “The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity,” Latin American Perspectives 25, no. 3 (May 1998): 126–146. 19.  Isabel Zakrewski Brown, Culture and Customs of the Dominican Republic (London: Greenwood Press, 1999), 30–37. 20.  Ibid., 30–37, 57–60. Jesse Hoffnung-Garskoff, A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 1–43. 21.  Bernard Diederich, Trujillo: The Death of the Goat (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), 71. 22.  Torres-Saillant, “The Tribulations of Blackness,” 126–146. 23. Báez, Dominicanish, 7. 24.  Ibid. This is a translation of the passage in Spanish from “Origen” in Dominicanish, which reads: “Dejaba las palabras en la primera sílaba.” 25.  The poem pens “American Bel” as opposed to “American Belle” which in and of itself is a transliteration from French to English to Spanish on the characterization of the traditional southern depiction of the American woman. This woman is often White, docile, and dolled up according to traditional standards. As a Black



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Dominican, the little girl in the poem “Origen” is challenging this classical and folkloric representation of the American woman. 26.  Linguistic doubling is a strategy frequently used by Ntozake Shange, who also introduces Spanish cues as a form of doubling in her own poetic and theatrical English language presentations of the Black woman’s experience. 27.  I use the term “living culture” to clarify that Báez’s performances are produced as conditions experienced by her. Her poems express the experiences of herself as a subject in the moment. 28. Flores, The Diaspora Strikes Back, 191. 29.  “Vital” is Mir’s critical analysis of Josefina Báez’s performance philosophy. Claudio Mir, “Vital,” in Dominicanish: A Performance Text, 11. 30.  Ibid., 9. 31.  Ntozake Shange, If I Can Cook/You Know God Can (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). 32. Báez, Dominicanish, 9. 33.  Báez calls her performative style, which combines poetry, music, Dominican York vernacular, and kuchi­ pudi, a performance autology. 34.  Alicia Arrizon, Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 44; Silvio Torres-Saillant, “Frontispiece,” in Dominicanish, 13–14. 35.  The multiple parts that comprise the individual. 36.  Dominicanish (first performance), 1999, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpFY7GM0WGU, video. 37. Ibid. 38.  Rivera-Servera, “Apartarte/Casarte by Josefina Báez,” 110–112. 39. Báez, Dominicanish, 37. 40.  Camilla Stevens also acknowledges Báez’s reference to “Home is where theatre is.” In Stevens’s observation, theatre allows for “participat[ion] in a multi-local public sphere” (p. 43). Stevens, “‘Home Is Where Theatre Is’: Performing Dominican Transnationalism.” Latin American Theatre Review 44, no. 1 (2010): 43. Liamar Almarza Durán conducts an interview with Josefina Báez to acknowledge her interpretation of “Home is where theatre is.” Durán deduces, like Stevens, that “home is a portable site” (p. 53). Durán-­A lmarza, “At Home at the Border: Performing the Transcultural Body in Josefina Báez’s Dominicanish,” in Transnationalism and Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Women’s Writing, 53. 41.  Evelyn O’Callaghan, Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993). 42.  Ibid., 87. 43.  It is not typical to see signs about Colombian and Haitian witchdoctors in Spanish. Neither is it typical to read about bush doctors on signs in the representative American landscape. However, it seems like the autographer in Dominicanish is reading a typical Dominican sight in New York City. 44.  Both Camilla Stevens and Liamar Durán Almarza acknowledge the ways in which Báez fuses and defuses cultural borders through her performances and/or texts. Stevens, “‘Home Is Where Theatre Is’: Performing Dominican Transnationalism.” Latin American Theatre Review 44, no. 1 (2010): 29–48. Durán-Almarza, Liamar. “At Home at the Border: Performing the Transcultural Body in Josefina Báez’s Dominicanish,” in Transnationalism and Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Women’s Writing, 53. 45.  Torres-Saillant, “The Tribulations of Blackness,” 1998. 46.  Popular African American music group from the 1970s. 47. Báez, Dominicanish, 26. 48.  Ibid., 55. 49.  I use the notion of “Báez’s urbanity” to refer to the ways in which she engenders the spirit of the city. She is sharing the common knowledge of the city. I think Báez is presenting this common knowledge through her visual reading by centralizing those aspects in her surroundings that are commonly assumed and understood in her city space. 50. Báez, Dominicanish, 42. 51.  Ibid., 42. 52.  Ibid., 55. 53.  Ibid., 56. 54.  I use Santiago-Irizarry’s chapter to introduce the system of law and order as another institutional structure that is presented by Báez as partaking in the maintenance of symbolic subjects that are complicit in the

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dominant social order, thus maintaining the continued colonization of modern racialized female subjects. Vilma Santiago-Irizarry, “Deceptive Solidity: Public Signs, Civic Inclusion, and Language Rights in New York City (and Beyond),” in Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York, ed. Augustín Laó-Montes and Arlene Dávila (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 473–491. 55.  Raquel Z. Rivera describes the analogous social reality of lower-class urban Latinos and African Americans in the New York City social environment. Rivera, “Hip Hop, Puerto Ricans and Ethno-Racial Identity in New York,” in Mambo Montage, 237. 56. Báez, Dominicanish, 55. 57.  Ibid., 57. 58.  Ibid., 59. 59.  Rivera, “Hip Hop, Puerto Ricans and Ethno-Racial Identity in New York,” 254. 60.  I explain the idea of the real in the following segment of the chapter. It is in essence the ability to experience freedom, equality, justice, and self-expression without institutional marginalization or restriction. 61. Báez, Dominicanish, 46. 62.  Ibid., 46. 63.  Ibid., 46. 64.  Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, “Crossing Hispaniola: Cultural Erotics at the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands,” in Performance in the Borderlands, ed. Ramón H. Severa-Rivera and Harvey Young (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 97–127. 65. Báez, Dominicanish, 32. 66.  Liamar Almarza Durán also contends from her critical analysis of Báez’s Dominicanish with New York City that this city-space allows for unique (re)creations of hybrid cultures that are informed by marginal Spanish Caribbean cultures. Durán-Almarza, “At Home at the Border: Performing the Transcultural Body in Josefina Báez’s Dominicanish,” in Transnationalism and Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Women’s Writing, 50–51. 67. Báez, Dominicanish, 34. In her text, Báez utilizes the cliché “groovin’ with soul,” which was popularized during the 1970s in African American culture. She adopts it through her memories of the Isley Brothers and their music as she references that listening to their music allowed her to groove with soul. Her moments of “groove” nourished her intellect and senses. These moments were not attainable nor supported in other social institutions. Nothing else mattered during these moments. I use Báez’s conceptual understanding of this cliché in the same way, thus to embody Báez’s notion of a “conducting line” and her ability to attain moments of subjective refashioning through the poetics of sensibility oftentimes nourished in and around the very city that hampers these emotional responses. 68.  Joni L. Jones, “Conjuring as Radical Re/Membering in the Works of Shay Youngblood,” in Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora, ed. Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker II, and Gus Edwards (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 229. Author now known as Omi Osun Joni L. Jones. 69. Báez, Dominicanish, 41. 70.  Jones, “Conjuring as Radical Re/Membering,” 228–229.

Bibliography Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Arrizón, Alicia. Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Báez, Josefina. Dominicanish: A Performance Text. New York: I Ombe Press, 2000. Báez, Josefina. La Voz Latina. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011, 171. Benston, Kimberly. Performing Blackness: Enactments of African American Modernism. New York: Routledge, 2000, 8. Brown, Tammy. Caribbean Studies Series: City of Islands: Caribbean Intellectuals in New York. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519–531. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.



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BWW News Desk. “Harlem Stage Presents 10th Anniversary of Dominicanish, 11/6.” Broadway World. November 6, 2009, https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Harlem-Stage-Presents-10th-Anniversary -Performance-of-DOMINICANISH-116-20091105. Collins, Lisa G. “Activists Who Yearn for Art That Transforms: Parallels in the Black Arts and Feminist Art Movements in the United States.” Signs 31, no. 3 (2006): 717–752. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2000. Cornet, Florencia V. “Finding Home: New Women in the City.” Presentation at the Institute for African American Research Colloquium Series, University of South Carolina-Columbia, April 10, 2012 Cornet, Florencia V. “Performing a ‘Living Culture’: Josefina Báez’s Dominicanish.” Presentation at the SAMLA Conference—Sustaining “Home” across Diasporas, Atlanta, Georgia, November 7–9, 2014. Cornet, Florencia V. “Performing Hip Hop, Performing a ‘Living Culture’: Josefina Báez’s Dominicanish.” Presentation at the Hip Hop Literacies Conference: Black Women and Girls’ Lives Matter, Ohio State University, March 30–31, 2016. Cornet, Florencia V. “Performing ‘New Nationalism’: Josefina Báez’s ‘Living Culture’ in Dominicanish.” Presentation at the African American Arts: Activism and Aesthetics Conference, Bucknell University, Pennsylvania, Sept 28–Oct 1, 2016. Cumber Dance, Daryl. “African American Literature by Writers of Caribbean Descent.” In The Cambridge History of African American Literature. Edited by Maryemma Graham and Jerry W. Ward Jr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 377–404. Diederich, Bernard. Trujillo: The Death of the Goat. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978, 71. Dominicanish (first performance). Video. 1999, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpFY7GM0WGU. Durán-Almarza, Emilia María. “Ciguapas in New York: Transcultural Ethnicity and Transracialization in Dominican American Performance.” Journal of American Studies 46, no. 1 (2012): 139–153. Durán-Almarza, Liamar. “Staging Transculturation: Border Crossings in Josefina Báez’s Performance Texts.” In Caribbean without Borders: Literature, Language and Culture. Edited by Smith Dorsia, Raquel Puig, and Ileana Cortés Santiago. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, 161–174. Durán-Almarza, Liamar. “At Home at the Border: Performing the Transcultural Body in Josefina Báez’s Dominicanish.” In Transnationalism and Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Women’s Writing. Edited by Adele Parker and Stephenie Young. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013, 45–68. Flores, Juan. The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning. New York: Routledge, 2009. Flores, Juan, and Miriam Jiménez Román. “Triple Consciousness? Approaches to Afro-Latino Culture in the United States.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 4, no. 3 (2009): 319–328. Garcia-Peña, Lorgia. “Performing Identity, Language, and Resistance: A Study of Josefina Báez’s Dominicanish.” Wadabagei 11, no. 3 (2008): 28–45. Gates, Louis L., and Valerie A. Smith. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 3rd ed., Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, 2014. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Gingrich, Andre. “Conceptualising Identities: Anthropological Alternatives to Essentialising Difference and Moralizing about Othering.” In Grammars of Identity/Alterity: A Structural Approach. Edited by Gerd Baumann and Andre Gingrich. New York: Berghahn Books, 2004, 3–17. Hoffnung-Garskoff, Jesse. A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950. Princeton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 2008. hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1990. Jones, Joni L. “Conjuring as Radical Re/Membering in the Works of Shay Youngblood.” In Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora. Edited by Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker II, and Gus Edwards. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002, 227–235. Lester, Neal A. Ntozake Shange: A Critical Study of the Plays. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995. Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journal. San Francisco: Spinster Ink, 1980. Mir, Claudio. “Orchestrating a Journey.” In Dominicanish A Performance Text, by Josefina Báez. New York: I Ombe Press, 2000, 11. O’Callaghan, Evelyn. Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Olaniyan, Tejumola. Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African-American and Caribbean Drama. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

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Parker, Jason. “‘Capital of the Caribbean’: The African American-West Indian ‘Harlem Nexus’ and the Transnational Drive for Black Freedom, 1940–1948.” The Journal of African American History 89, no. 2 (2004): 98–117. Pessar, Patricia R. A Visa for a Dream: Dominicans in the United States. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995. Rivera, Raquel Z. “Hip Hop, Puerto Ricans and Ethnoracial Identity in New York.” In Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York. Edited by Laó Montes Augustín and Arlene Dávila. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, 235–261. Rivera-Servera, Ramón. “Apartarte/Casarte by Josefina Baez, New York City, 21 May 1999.” Theatre Journal 52, no. 1 (2000): 110–112. Rivera-Servera, Ramón H. “Crossing Hispaniola: Cultural Erotics at the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands.” In Performance in the Borderlands. Edited by Ramón H. Severa-Rivera and Harvey Young. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 97–127. Rumbaut, Ruben G. “The Crucible Within: Ethnic Identity, Self-Esteem, and Segmented Assimilation among Children of Immigrants.” Special Issue: The New Second Generation, International Migration Review 28, no. 4 (1994): 748–794. Santiago-Irizarry, Vilma. “Deceptive Solidity: Public Signs, Civic Inclusion, and Language aRights in New York City (and Beyond).” In Mambo Montage, 473–491. Shange, Ntozake. “My Song for Hector Lavoe.” In Aloud!: Voices. New York: Henry Holt, 1994, 366. Shange Ntozake. If I Can Cook/You Know God Can. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. Shange, Ntozake. “All It Took Was a Road/Surprises of Urban Renewal: From If I Can Cook/You Know God Can.” In Books That Cook: The Making of a Literary Means. Edited by Jennifer Cognard-Black and Melissa A. Goldthwaite. New York: New York University Press, 2014, 135–137. Stevens, Camilla. “‘Home Is Where Theatre Is’: Performing Dominican Transnationalism.” Latin American Theatre Review 44, no. 1 (2010): 29–48. Torres-Saillant, Silvio. “The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity.” Latin American Perspectives 25, no. 3 (1998): 126–146. Torres-Saillant, Silvio. “Frontispiece” to Dominicanish, 2000, 13–14. Torres-Saillant, Silvio. Introduction to Dominican Blackness (Dominican Studies Institute Research Monograph). New York: CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, 2010. Turner, Joyce Moore, and W. Burghardt Turner. Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Valdes, Vanessa K. “‘There Is No Incongruence Here’: Hispanic Notes in the Works of Ntozake Shange.” CLA Journal 53, no. 2 (2009): 131–144. Wolfreys, Julian, Ruth Robbins, and Kenneth Womack. Key Concepts in Literary Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Zakrewski Brown, Isabel. Culture and Customs of the Dominican Republic. London: Greenwood Press, 1999.

5 • ETHNICIT Y, ETHIC ALNESS, EXCELLENCE Armond White’s All-American Humanism DA N I E L M C N E I L

We have become accustomed to national conversations about a “post-civil rights generation.” We have heard the speeches of politicians about the solemn duty of a Joshua generation to fulfil the legacy of a Moses generation that led the struggle for civil rights.1 We have read intellectuals carefully discussing the shifting of the racial architecture in a post-civil rights era. 2 We have witnessed attempts to refresh the term for a popular audience in discussions of a hip hop generation, soul babies, and the “children of Harold Cruse” who came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s. 3 Rather less has been documented about a transitional cohort of global African Americans who came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly the humanistic and translocal outlook of women and men who do not entirely subscribe to the U.S.-centrism and xenophobia of Cruse’s 1967 account of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.4 This chapter puts down some preliminary markers about a transitional generation of global African Americans by chronicling the journey of intellectual discovery taken by one talented member of this cohort. It not only argues that the cultural critic Armond White, born in Detroit in 1953, identified his mission as one that would honour the civil rights, anti-­ colonial, and Pan-African campaigns of his elders. It also contends that he has sought to make the struggles of his elders resonate with subsequent generations by scolding a younger generation that he associates with the shrinking of popular culture into less pleasurable, less skilled, and less humane dimensions. Global African Americans who turned twenty circa 1965–1975 may be aligned with the structures of feeling of a student New Left cohort. 5 They grew up listening carefully to musicians appropriating the UN Declaration of Human Rights and putting bureaucratic language to work in the service of freedom dreams, dread philosophy, and a do-it-yourself ethos. They took sustenance from awe-inspiring films that reflected the hopes and dreams of minorities in the modern world. They were able to recognize the sources of political legitimacy in pulpits, protest marches, polling booths, nightclubs, dance floors, and festival stages. They understood that pop songs such as “That Magic Moment,” released by the Drifters in 1960, could calmly deliberate and distil personal sentiment. They did not presume that such forms of popular culture were merely forms of entertainment that were devoid of politics. They had faith that they were artistic challenges to an exploitative and oppressive political landscape. 6 69

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Connecting their utopian soundscapes to a dreadfully objective analysis of compromised politicians, White and other members of a student New Left cohort developed powerful rejoinders to authoritarian populists denouncing Motown, disco, and punk as barbaric threats to civilized minds. They were also mindful of mainstream entertainment that cast performers from minority groups in shallow, degrading, one-dimensional roles, and the need to develop a serious, independent Black press that would counter editorials in publications such as National Review that asserted the “cultural superiority of whites over Negro” in the southern United States and supported White minority rule in South Africa.7 They remember their youth as the best of times and the worst of times—an age in which they might play around with the famous remarks of Charles Dickens about the French Revolution and pursue artful forms of criticism that avoided the Scylla of timid scholasticism and the Charybdis of superficial journalism. Readers who have only encountered White as a film critic for the conservative National Review Online since 2014 may be understandably surprised to find him claimed as a member of this student New Left cohort. After all, his reviews have repeatedly lambasted snowflakes, political correctness, and the so-called resistance on the left. Without explicitly celebrating Trumpism, they have developed a distinctive brand of anti-anti-Trumpism that questions the fitness, ability, and willingness of metropolitan elites to defend American patriotism and Western civilization from internal and external threats. His reviews are also noticeable for their sardonic appraisals of American youth.8 White has, for example, denounced young bloggers and claimed that no one should be a film critic under thirty because “you don’t know enough about art, you don’t know enough about life to be an effective critic.”9 He has chastised youthful members of Black Lives Matter as members of an “arbitrary, bogus ‘movement’” rather than activist-intellectuals responding to the liberal choice to collude with conservatives in building a carceral state for the urban Black poor.10 He has even recycled soundbites on Fox News about the perils of Marxist professors indoctrinating young minds, and suggested that “only Marxist criticism prevails in the academy.” 11 As a result of such polemical and overgeneralized claims, most journalistic commentary on White positions him as a “contrarian,” a “troll,” or “the most notorious film critic in the digital age.”12 He is similarly ignored or marginalized by writers ensconced in departments of film, media, communication, and African American studies, who claim that they only read him “to have their tastes tested.”13 Writers who share his desire to navigate a path between academia and journalism have even dismissed him as a bad joke and a bad writer who indulges in “unargued bluster,” confessing that they derive pleasure from online articles and comments that refuse to take White seriously.14 Rather than follow White and push back against “academic eggheads,” “closed-minded academics,” “hacks,” and “Armond haters,”15 this chapter draws on the historical archive to develop a portrait of a critic as a young man writing about film, music, theatre, and art for The South End, a newspaper in Detroit associated with the League of Black Revolutionary Workers, which claimed one class-conscious worker is worth 100 students and explicitly challenged the bourgeois fantasies of White liberals and conservatives in the United States. To go further, it suggests that there are important continuities between his early sorties for The South End in the 1970s and his more recent contributions to the National Review Online, which may be connected to a Black radical tradition in which intellectuals are determined to develop extra-academic work and “read the signs in the street in defiance of contemporary pressures to retreat into a contemplative state.”16 White’s trenchant critique of liberalism evokes the politics and poetics of various African American artists and intellectuals who called on Americans to reject the fakelore that treats



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Blacks with pity, condescension, or aggressive indifference. White’s intellectual project may be linked, for example, to George Schuyler, one of the best-known African American journalists of the early twentieth century, and his campaigns to recognize and cultivate a “mulatto-minded culture” in the United States.17 It is also informed by Albert Murray’s call for Americans to embrace a national identity that is “part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian—and part Negro,” and Ralph Ellison’s critique of art, analysis, and commentary that overemphasizes statistical abstractions of the jailed, dead, homeless, unemployed, and parentless Black bodies.18 White’s criticism has also acknowledged the important things James Baldwin had to say about “the movies, race and American society in general,”19 and draws on Amiri Baraka’s notion of a “changing same” to appreciate the ability of music and other art forms to help Black Americans address loss and recovery. 20 It also goes behind the veil of American segregation and cites European American journalists such as Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe and Pauline Kael as well as well-known African American and Black Atlantic thinkers such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Martin Luther King Jr., Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and W.E.B. Du Bois.21 This chapter acknowledges the diverse range of maîtres à penser who influenced White’s early days as a writer submitting his reviews to a subaltern public sphere that brought together political revolutionaries and countercultural dissidents, his mid-career as an essayist who believed that the counter-culture had been extinguished, and his more recent contributions to a conservative public sphere that continue to critique crass commercialism, pretentiousness, and antiBlack racism. Whereas White’s peers in the predominantly straight, White, middle-class, and secular world of film criticism have found themselves bamboozled by the existence of a “gay African-American fundamentalist-Christian aesthete,”22 I argue that White’s ability to draw on a broad range of influences that transcend the worlds of academia and journalism means that he has been able to craft explorative, suggestive, and provocative work that engages a reading public fractured along the experiential fault lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other social identities. I also contend that White’s desire to “search out and interpret the political secrets and emotional value of artists expressing themselves through resistance aesthetics” does not need to be read as a Manichean structure of contraries (selling out/resistance, Black/ White, academia/journalism, politics/culture, and so on), but may be engaged in a dialectical manner to address ongoing, human negotiation of contradictions.23

The Double Consciousness of a Movie-Obsessed Kid from Detroit In their landmark study of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin contrasted “hardcore political revolutionaries” with countercultural dissidents. Their historical narrative considered the former to be members of a vanguard who seized the power of the press as part of a war of position against false class consciousness and treated the latter as figures who wrote advertisements for themselves that merely appealed to “white guilt feelings,” emphasized moral and cultural questions over economic ones, and ended up solidifying the liberal mystique of open debate and tolerance of ideas.24 To illustrate such abstract ideas, they portrayed John Watson, the editor of the Inner City Voice, Detroit’s Black community newspaper with an original print run of 10,000, as a revolutionary leader who refused to rely on expensive printers and other outside technicians to build support for the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. They also followed a 1974 article in the Journal of Ethnic Studies, which depicted Arthur “Art”

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Johnston, the editor-in-chief of Wayne State University’s student newspaper, as a hip, rebellious dissident.25 Their analysis acknowledges that Johnston played a decisive role in changing the name of The Daily Collegian to The South End so as to signal the paper’s solidarity with the Black neighborhoods to the south of the university’s campus—which were the site of two of the most significant urban rebellions in the United States during the twentieth century—rather than the central offices of the General Motors Corporation, one of the wealthiest corporations in the world, situated to its north.26 It is, however, primarily interested in Johnston’s successor at The South End, who took over the daily run of 18,000 and a printing budget of $100,000 for the 1968–1969 academic year in the hopes of further radicalizing the paper and turning it into a revolutionary political organ that appealed to workers outside the university. Little has been written about The South End after a dispute within the staff over collective decision-making resulted in Watson and DRUM losing control of the paper in the 1969–1970 academic year. Beyond a rueful acknowledgment that The South End had become Detroit’s third-largest daily newspaper and would never return to its former political irrelevance as a newspaper narrowly focused on student affairs,27 writers have not tended to address the politics and poetics of a publication that offered Armond White an opportunity to evolve his distinctive approach to cultural criticism.28 Drawing on the print archive of The South End between 1972—when the editorials of The South End proclaimed the paper’s commitment to serving as a “viable and refreshing alternative to the drivel of the establishment bourgeois press which is the lap-dog of the ruling class” 29— and 1977—when his colleague Sweet T Williams bemoaned its shift in direction back towards a White, liberal sensibility and maintained that only a select number of principled writers like White had refused to sell out to “consumer or entertainment conglomerates”30 —this chapter paints a portrait of a young critic attuned to the ethics and aesthetics of countercultural dissidence, Black revolutionary protest, and popular culture. 31 Although many remember the political and economic terrains of struggle in Detroit in 1967, White reminds us that it was also a year in which he discovered spiritual and emotional sustenance in cinemas as well as churches. In 1967 he went on a school trip to bear witness to the awe-inspiring spectacle of Camelot on the big screen after teenage visits to movie houses had been curtailed by his parents’ conversion to Pentecostalism. He also picked up a copy of Pauline Kael’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: Film Writings 1965–67 and wrote about the life and work of the secular Jewish critic for a high school essay competition after his family became the first African Americans to move into a primarily Jewish neighborhood. As an undergraduate at Wayne State University, he would continue to draw on Kael’s example to use his position as a film critic and arts editor at The South End to participate in “a new era of Black people taking part in the creation of their own myths.”32 He savored the virtuoso reviews of Kael and her desire to convey the magic of movies that were emotionally and intellectually thrilling to an extra-academic audience. He discovered an American polemicist who assigned shame to craven commercialism, bigotry, and liberal cant, and an inspiring tutor who reserved her highest praise for expressions of thoughtful art that explored morality and humanity with wit, fun, and adventure. Kael’s film criticism was given space to breathe in lengthy articles for the New Yorker that could range up to 7,000 words. As a result, the winner of a National Book Award in 1974 for Deeper into Movies could develop a method that was markedly distinct to reviewers who primarily delivered consumer advice reports while retaining a subjective tone that was defined against film criticism and theory in the academy. This has not, of course, prevented academics attempting to domesticate her jazzy, extra-academic approach to writing. Perhaps the most

Figure 5.1. Front page, The South End newspaper. January 23, 1969. Headline: “DRUM—Vanguard of the

Black Revolution.” Reprinted by permission of Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.

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notable example is Leo Charney’s attempt to convey what he considers Kael’s rhetorical performance of a common person expressing common feelings. In Charney’s tripartite schema, Kael (a) distanced herself from both other critics and the entertainment industry, (b) emphasized the personal and subjective nature of her responses, and (c) used her writing as a catalyst for an American public sphere of film response. 33 To be sure, Kael repeatedly remarked on her distance from fellow film critics who aspired to objectivity and, in her estimation, overpraised pretentious films from Europe and Japan. In perhaps her best-known essay, “Trash, Art and the Movies,” she expressed her appreciation for the virtues of enjoyable “bad” American movies in opposition to the vices of dull “good” movies. 34 White similarly found history of England films like The Nelson Affair to be dull, unimaginative, and suited for television rather than the kinetic medium of the movies, 35 and was disappointed to report that 3 Women, a film directed by Robert Altman, an American auteur he cherished almost as much as Kael did, was a “hushed, portentous, schematic and obscure” film. 36 He could also find something to praise in trashy films such as Wattstax and Handle with Care that were “inoffensive and immensely enjoyable” and seemed to signal that “popcorn moviemaking is not totally corrupt.”37 There is also ample documentation to support the case that Kael and White launched critical sorties against an entertainment industry that bullied audiences and artists into consuming and selling generic, shallow products. Kael famously drew on her brief stint as a consultant at Paramount Pictures to inform her critique of a film industry beholden to publicists and television executives obsessed with ratings. 38 White’s repeated castigation of a “TV generation” that irons out any wrinkles of independence and personal flair in film culture is reflective of this strand of Kael’s criticism, and is evident in a review that attacked Star Wars as prosaic trash for “illiterate, insensitive, and unintelligent . . . suckers, dummies, ass-holes, morons, perverts” that rehashed the infantile stories that he had watched on TV as a child. 39 Kael and White both desired art that appealed directly to what they considered the “crazy energy,” complexity, self-awareness, and ambition of mature American Americans who were irreverent, unpretentious, and shallow (in a good way).40 Their particular vision of an American public sphere excluded some American citizens from a democratic American spirit, with Kael poking fun at WASP Americans who were invested in the aristocratic ethos of Ivy League schools and White expressing his frustration with movies like The Class of ’44 that portrayed the American past in lily-white terms and offered audiences a dreary bourgeois bildungsroman.41 Moreover, both critics creatively adapted the New Colossus poem mounted on the Statue of Liberty and embraced non-American mavericks such as Pedro Almodóvar who seemed to express an American spirit that defied the conventions of a straight, White, middle-class world.42 Despite such caveats that signal their rejection of any crude nativism, it would be remiss to ignore their willingness to deploy rather crude national, ethnic, and sexual stereotypes in their critical appraisals. If Kael sneered at Eastern European intellectuals, such as Milan Kundera, whom she considered too cultivated, as well as portrayals of Eastern European folk culture, which she found too morose,43 White was willing to produce pointed barbs that relied on stereotypes about bland, risk-averse Canadians.44 If they were both suspicious of films and performances that seemed too foreign, “too Jewish,” and “too gay,” neither Kael nor White would chastise a film for being too American.45 Dissatisfied with American films repeating the angst and awakening of White middle-class men and wanting something more than the cheap thrills of popcorn movies directed toward children or those in an arrested state of development, White and Kael reserved their highest praise for mature films that offered telling



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portrayals of ethnic particularity and American diversity. Their reviews of Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues—two of the most critically acclaimed films of the 1970s to feature predominantly Black casts—deserve particular attention for readers interested in African American arts and activism. Kael’s review of Sounder was one of the most laudatory that appeared in the mainstream press. It began by describing her surprise that an “inspirational movie about black strength and pride—and one based on a prize-winning children’s book, by a White author . . . could transcend its cautious, mealy genre to become the first movie about black experiences in America which can stir people of all colors.” Although she often poured scorn on historical films because of their unabashed sentimentality and anachronism, she believed that Sounder “earns every emotion we feel” and that its appeal to modern sensibilities was necessary “because the conventional movie trust-in-the Lord black mother would be intolerable to us.”46 Four months later, White would use similar language to express his delight in a film that he found deep, moving, and heartening rather than condescendingly “worthwhile” or inconsequentially abrasive. While Kael was content to appreciate the film’s ability to inspire Black and White Americans without recourse to weeping violins, White testified that Sounder “may be the finest motion picture made in American movie history!” There’s not another film in the world like it, some foreign films have the same feelings, but not nearly so complete of [sic] effective.” White not only shared Kael’s preference for multiracial art that was American American but was willing to spend more time praising and examining the relevance of such art to the freedom dreams of African Americans. He praised the craftsmanship of the Jewish director Martin Ritt, the Black playwright Lonnie Elder III, Taj Mahal’s musical score, and the honest, affecting performances of the actors. He also went further than Kael by noting the film’s emotional and intellectual use of African American culture, history, and memory, particularly its ability to develop scenes in which characters read the words of W.E.B. Du Bois with nuance and action. Whereas Kael sought to encourage a predominantly European American audience to check out a film they might have dismissed as irrelevant to their lives in a socially segregated America, White mixed together a potent cocktail of Black consciousness and prophetic Christianity in the hopes of elevating an art form and resisting the canard that movies were merely escapist entertainment or just another wing of its corporate-political complex. Awed by the power of transcendent art, White believed that Sounder offered a powerful alternative to the condescending liberal tendency to praise boring and uninspired films that had diverse casts but no personal style, imagination, or craft.47 Although Kael did not ignore the shallowness and artificiality of Lady Sings the Blues, she was willing to accept and defend its easy pleasures and tawdry electricity as the price of the ticket for the Black film’s entrance into the consciousness of a mainstream America.48 If it could not manage to express the complex art and struggle of its lead character, Billie Holiday, it could at least offer audiences the type of “immediate emotional gratifications that the subtler and deeper and more lasting pleasures of jazz can’t prevail against.”49 White was less sympathetic to Lady Sings the Blues, and found it to be a “faulty, gaudy excuse for a biography” that was celebrated by the Hollywood academy because of the “same sort of misdirection affecting most people who only see one film a year.”50 He would draw on Jesse Jackson’s calls for Black artists and audiences to move from ethnicity to ethicalness to excellence, and reject the slimy forms of White racism that presumed that an African American critic would uncritically praise films that were directed or produced by African Americans. 51 He would also note that Mean Streets, directed by the Italian American Martin Scorsese, conveyed ethnic consciousness and social

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realities with less than half the budget of Lady Sings the Blues, a “Black blockbuster” produced by Motown Productions for Paramount. 52 With that said, White was less concerned with exposing the lack of imagination and talent in Motown’s frivolous attempt to appeal to American moviegoers than he was in contesting elements of an American culture industry that seemed to be overly simplistic and exploitative. From his first article for The South End about the activities of the coalition against Blaxploitation, White was interested in weeding out the type of art that disrupted and diverted people away from the discipline of artistic practice. He considered Sweet Jesus, Preacherman to be a disgusting, dull, trite work of commerce that defamed Black people and religious organizations that had held Black people together. 53 In opposition to hacks and sell-outs who suggested that criminals and prostitutes were the fulfilment of Black dreams on screen, White considered it his moral duty as a critic to “encourage films that honor the basic ideas of the black experience . . . belief in God, belief in family, self-trust, growth from the past and loyalty.”54 In an early example of his fondness for neologism, he described the dangers of “stereopsyching” that kept Blacks in antiquated roles or meant that they could only imagine a future in which they prospered by pigeonholing other groups as narrow-minded, petty, unfair, and racist. 55 His criticism was always already concerned that the cartoonish figures and false icons in Blaxploitation movies would actively corrode the imaginations of African Americans rather than help them confront the overt and covert racism of their contemporary moment. Aside from calling on filmmakers to follow the lead of Ritt, Scorsese, or humanist filmmakers from abroad such as Vittorio De Sica and Satyajit Ray, White insisted that they could take inspiration from vernacular intellectuals such as Muhammad Ali, who acted with style, humor, control, and constant relevance to the way Black people lived their lives with personal conviction. 56 His desiderata was a deliberative democracy in which critics provoked and inspired the creation of films that had the power to tell American history with lightning—art that talked back to racist depictions of American culture and expressed the hopes of diverse postcolonial people for liberation with wit, beauty, and imagination. White’s reviews at The South End had little interest in developing a smooth, superficial tone that might have ingratiated him to the casual moviegoer looking for advice for a date night. Nor were they particularly concerned with presenting sober, academic reflections. They sought, instead, to develop an engaging style that might appeal to a multiracial student body and communities outside the Wayne State University campus that brought together political revolutionaries and countercultural dissidents. In his final article for The South End, White expressed gratitude for those people for whom his opinion made a difference. He also positioned himself as a crusading journalist who expressed the truths of racial minorities as well as individuals who thought for themselves (and were, in White’s eyes, an intellectual minority in the United States). In ruefully acknowledging that the “best American and foreign films never got the attention they deserved from most college students,” White condemned businesspeople who promoted cheap synthetic mini-theatres for fast turnover to be culpable, as well as the glibness and provinciality of film criticism in Detroit. The writers are generally culled from incompetence and a bureaucratic spoils system. The public is so used to this that, while at The South End, a few presumptuous idiots told me I wrote more than what readers wanted to know. That should not be true for a college audience (college papers need not subscribe to the typical journalistic rule that the audience has a sixth-grade reading



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level). I wrote so much because (besides loving it), it seemed the least that Altman, Scorsese, Peckinpah, De Palma—and their audiences—deserved. 57

A New York State of Mind Armond White enrolled in an MFA program with a focus on history, theory, and criticism at Columbia University in January 1980. At Columbia, he studied under life-changing teachers such as Samson Raphaelson, Stefan Sharff, John Belton, Dennis Turner, and, perhaps most significantly, Andrew Sarris. Unlike Kael, who claimed never to view a movie more than once and rarely revised her opinion of a film in print, Sarris encouraged White to repeatedly return to films as a means to classify and compartmentalize auteurs. Given the animosity that still reverberates in discussions of the “feuds” about the auteur theory between Kael and Sarris, with film critics tending to line up behind Team Sarris or Kael, it is worth noting that White saw his engagement with Sarris as a means to deepen his understanding of film, particularly his understanding of French films of the New Wave. This was not to repudiate Kael, who nominated White to join the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC) in 1987, but to help him differentiate himself from slavish acolytes of Kael who are often lampooned as “Paulettes” circling a Mother Hen and acknowledge Kael and Sarris as his “film critic mom and pop.”58 Kael’s blurb for White’s collection of essays, which began by noting that his “race-based approach to movies is more than challenging—it can be unnerving,” might seem to miss the point that White’s humanistic and antiracist approach to movies critiques the assumptions of European American critics—that their approach to film was normal, natural, and raceless; that their professed universality might shirk from the challenge of addressing structural forms of racism; that they may be unnerved by the existence of reviews and reviewers that refuse to overlook the humanity of racialized individuals. It does, however, help us to appreciate how White drew on Kael’s determination to speak her truths “as a critic, as a woman, as an American, as a Jew” rather than mimic her language, style, and taste and, as a result, earn her respect as a critic who might rouse her, and her fellow Americans, into “some fresh thinking.”59 Between 1984 and 1996 White served as a film critic and arts editor for the City Sun, a Brooklyn-based Black newspaper with the tagline “Speaking truth to power.” He considered his reviews for the City Sun about movies, music, television, theatre, and art exhibits to be important contributions to the enhancement and development of Black arts and culture. To go further, he considered it his ethical responsibility to respond to works of art honestly and judge the motives of other artists, critics, and celebrities.60 He thus developed trenchant criticism of Black figures, such as Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock, who entered a Black superpublic in the 1980s as “speaking and shrieking commodities” who violently attacked the Black poor, rejecting public displays of introspection and expressing unambiguous distrust of women and queers.61 Murphy responded to White’s review of Coming to America, which denounced the actor’s complicity in ongoing forms of anti-Black racism that treated dark-skinned African American women and the African continent as grotesque objects for the amusement of men in the overdeveloped world,62 by buying 34 percent of the City Sun’s advertising space to circulate an open letter. In this public relations move, Murphy claimed that the box office success of Coming to America revealed that he was in tune with the desires of the Black community, who wanted to consume films that were “simple, beautiful [and] timely” rather than waste their time reading the complex reviews of White that pushed politics and history down their

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throats.63 Undeterred, White maintained that Black critics had a responsibility to expose the “phoney ideal of brotherhood” used by “scoundrel-entertainers who accept the ethical compromises of mainstream institutions like Hollywood for their personal benefit and then claim they are doing it for the benefit of the entire race.”64 Rather than constrain critical debate in favor of supporting powerful male millionaires, readers of White’s columns at the City Sun were asked to think more deeply about films that offered no challenge to monogamy or light-skinned privilege. On the one hand, this meant that he did not repeat the columns at The South End that objectified female performers and reviled the insipid flashiness and “outlandishness” of androgynous glitter rock stars like Mick Jagger and David Bowie who had “perverted” popular music.65 On the other hand, White’s rejection of patriarchy and homophobia as a New Yorkbased writer tended to revise and expand his earlier critiques of White supremacy in Detroit. The critic in his twenties took aim at the “bland-blond Roger Moore” in The Spy Who Loved Me for The South End;66 the more mature critic at The City Sun questioned minorities who sacrificed the meaning of their lives before the altar of “America’s dominant ideology: the heterosexual White boy,” and were unable to challenge the idea that blue-eyed beauty was an all-American ideal or Hollywood’s failure to appreciate the humanity of non-White individuals. 67 From reviews that chastised Blaxploitation films and the provincialism of Detroit in the 1970s, White’s reviews in the 1980s and 1990s also spread out to question the impact of hip hop exploitation movies and the superficiality of Roger Ebert, the first film critic to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize and awarded a spot on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. To be more specific, White portrayed Spike Lee and other Black middle-class directors who exploited hip hop’s challenge to the American status quo as commercial tokens who put on a good show as mavericks for White liberals like Ebert (who repeatedly praised Lee’s films, revealed a liberal perspective on the “state of race relations in America,” and used the royal we to describe the “Western standards” of himself and his imagined readers).68 White was uninterested in uncritically promoting Black, female, and/or gay filmmakers. Quite the contrary, he consistently challenged the intentions and impact of members of minority and subcultural groups who seemed to pander to liberal sentimentality, or unquestioningly participated in American ideas of wealth, consumerism, and aggressive capitalism. In short, White held the following truth to be self-evident: the “fairest, most sensible pictures of society must come from its minorities and subcultures.” His reviews at the City Sun sought out and interpreted a diverse range of “unco-opted, non-mainstream moviemakers who respected differences in people” and regarded the “straight, middle-class world” with healthy scepticism.69 His reviews would praise the White director Samuel Fuller, who “clashed with the bourgeois taste of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People” in White Dog, as well as Black filmmakers such as Melvin Van Peebles, who assaulted the “white bourgeois filmgoing experience” in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, and Lionel Martin, who used “satire and sincerity” to tease the audience of Public Enemy’s music video for Night of the Living Bassheads into imaginative discussions of power, privilege, and politics.70 It bears repetition that such commentary was nuanced rather than hagiographic. For while White would appreciate the lively, original work that Public Enemy produced in collaboration with visionary directors, he was always already concerned about didactic or naïve expressions of masculine power that threw away the baby of the civil rights movement with the bathwater of its middle-class leaders, processes, and agendas.71 His readings of Public Enemy’s music lamented their blunt rejection of a respectable civil rights movement, and he would also note the perils of hypermasculinity, nihilism, fascism, and merciless forms of commercialized pop culture in NWA and other rap



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groups who ignored the principles that informed anti-colonial liberation movements.72 In addition, he remained wary of any works of art that seemed to portray racism or nationalism as a force that drives people. His highest praise was reserved for films and music that helped viewers perceive racism and nationalism as circumstances under which people act individually.73

A Prophet of American Carnage After The City Sun ceased publication in 1996 due to persistent financial problems, White returned to Columbia University to complete the coursework requirements to receive his master of fine arts (which he received on May 21, 1997) and became film critic and arts editor of New York Press, a libertarian alternative weekly that was conceived, in part, as a rival to The Village Voice. At New York Press, White cultivated an appreciation for American eccentrics and peppered his writing with jeremiads against hipsters, nihilism, and cynical approaches to movies that reflected the rather incestuous worlds of New York film and criticism. He would, for example, lambast the filmmaker Noah Baumbach, son of Georgia Brown, a former Village Voice film critic whom White accused of racism,74 and praise the humane outlook of Baumbach’s friend Wes Anderson.75 White also used his columns to work through his feelings of loss and anger after the terrorist attacks on New York and the death of his inspiration, Pauline Kael, in September 2001. Combining his review of Two Can Play That Game, a romantic comedy about African American dating habits, with an elegiac tribute to Kael’s open-hearted appreciation of Black films, White maintained that Kael should be read as the “greatest and least narcissistic of the New Journalists,” and that she honorably used her authoritative position at The New Yorker to cajole, defy, and provoke her European American readership to grow up and embrace the country’s democratic spirit and multiracial reality.76 While retaining faith in the possibility of an authentic, unifying American culture, White was not convinced by Barack Obama’s keynote speech to the Democratic Party Convention on July 27, 2004, which rhetorically challenged pundits who slice and dice the United States of America into liberal America and conservative America. With dreadful objectivity, White contends that 2004 was the year American culture broke.77 To support his position, White notes how positions were calcified with the marketing and promotion of The Passion of the Christ as a red-state movie and Fahrenheit 9/11 as a blue-state movie. Whereas Obama offered soundbites about the awesome power of a United States of America that transcended and brought together “a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America,” 78 White lamented the moral, aesthetic, intellectual, and political decline of America and its film culture by pointing to the “cultural fragmentation that sorts moviegoers by age, political proclivities, race, and gender [that] cannot be mended by taste or education.” 79 He could not accept ephemeral palliatives (comic books, rom-coms, mockumentaries, blockbusters, TV), or the politesse of ambitious figures determined to avoid anything that seemed too divisive, as a substitute for the all-American artistry of Pauline Kael, Robert Altman, and other artists he considered capable of profound work. White’s 2008 essay “The Pursuit of Crappyness” similarly compared Will Smith’s portrayal of the eponymous hero of Hancock, “an empowered black man who behaves no differently than an unprincipled white despot,” to Obama’s superheroic feat in becoming the first presidential candidate of a major party to identify as an African American. Smith, born in 1968, and Obama, born seven years earlier in 1961, were accused of exploiting the gains achieved by a civil rights generation composed of African American “civilians, politicians, artists and consumers: from Marvin Gaye to Julian Bond, Toni Morrison to Angela

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Davis, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to August Wilson.”80 In White’s combative essay, the politician and the actor were portrayed as hacks and fifth columnists who strategically managed racial identification in a nonpolarizing way. To extend his point about the carefully constructed public personas of Obama and Smith—which had a black, white, and beige complexion—one might say that White positioned them like couches in an IKEA catalogue that were safely exotic, easily reproducible, and attractive to consumers who wanted quick-fix conviviality or diversions from the realities of political division.81 Since his profile in New York Magazine in February 2009, White has continued to use his bullhorn to pronounce American decline in the digital age. The ironies of White’s positions are difficult to ignore, particularly if one downloads podcasts on iTunes in which he rails against Apple Corporation as a manufacturer of sleekly designed products that receive idolatrous attention and have stolen our souls.82 He is usually dismissed as one of those cantankerous trolls who haunt the Internet, and sympathetic readers of his earlier work suggest that his more recent reviews and essays for conservative outlets reveal the “problems of any self-styled maverick who once hurled his provocative bombs from the margin of culture, but now finds himself at its centre.” That is to say, film critics distance themselves and their profession from White by suggesting that his reviews in the digital age are based on superficial analysis and “inflammatory rhetorical procedures” that stem, in part, from “his intriguing political profile [as a] progressive (black, gay, a supporter of edgy pop culture) and a ‘post 9/11’ conservative, taking his adversaries to task for their lack of religious education, or their ‘kneejerk liberalism.’”83 Such critiques are rarely nuanced by journalists acknowledging that Black, gay, and “edgy” identities can be appropriated by corporate interests. Nor are readers likely to find journalists noting that religious education can be employed in the service of anticolonial liberation; or that liberals have portrayed Black radicals as purveyors of “superficial analysis” and worried about so-called “careless readers” of “[James] Baldwin, [Jean] Genet, Malcolm X, and Franz [sic] Fanon” stirring up “thoughtless, needless, and frustrated destruction.”84 Revealingly, Roger Ebert chose to support the proposition that White was a “troll” based on a table that he received from a reader listing “good and bad movies according to Armond.”85 A visible representative of the thumbs up, thumbs down approach to movie reviewing, Ebert did not point out that the table denied the nuance and subtlety possible in cultural criticism and note that White’s reviews might praise the aesthetics of a film while lamenting its ethics. He also failed to fact-check the table and learn that it placed Terminator Salvation in the thumbs-up column (even though White’s review considered it “junk” and “over-valued schlock”) and labeled Tropic Thunder a “bad movie according to Armond” (despite the fact that White praised the film’s “keen insight” and scrutiny of media icons and symbols). 86 As a result, Ebert’s hasty assessment reflected a wider tendency to dismiss White from the realm of serious film critics, 87 and the petition set up to ban White from Rotten Tomatoes because his “overly political” reviews were thought to be “screwing up the Tomatometer” by praising “bad” films (trashy sequels such as Transformers 2 and Transporter 3) and lambasting “good” films (critically acclaimed fare such as The Dark Knight and Toy Story 3).88 When he hosted the annual gala and seventy-fifth anniversary celebrations of the NYFCC on January 11, 2010, as the chair of the film circle, White delivered a characteristically provocative speech that implored his peers to honor the personal conviction and cinematic literacy of their predecessors (critics such as Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Frank S. Nugent, the first chair of the NYFCC) so as to “uphold the dignity and significance of film criticism” in opposition to online commentators who caricatured independent professionals as crazy, contrarian



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cranks.89 In the speech, White also paid special tribute to Sarris, the recipient of NYFCC’s rare Special Award, who “wrote one of the few seminal film texts: The American Cinema . . . [and] stood up for me once when a Circle meeting turned nasty.” White continued his war of position against Rotten Tomatoes, Internet “hordes” who ridiculed the need for “mature thought,” and online “avengers” who demanded that critics respond to “movies like thrill-hungry teenagers, colluding with commercialism,” in his essays and reviews.90 Although it should not come as a surprise that Rotten Tomatoes stopped providing links to White’s reviews after the print edition of New York Press was discontinued on September 1, 2011, the disingenuous attempts of Rotten Tomatoes to justify the site’s omission of film reviews written by White between 2011 and 2016 are rather curious. For example, when White joined City Arts as editor and lead film critic in 2011, representatives of Rotten Tomatoes claimed that they needed more time to review and add the new publication. By 2012 the site’s editor-in-chief sought to justify White’s absence from its list of “Top Critics” because White’s “[print] outlets do not have a significant reach outside of New York City.”91 He did not mention White’s ability to use social and digital media to connect with readers across the globe. He did not cite the possible influence of the petition set up to ban White from Rotten Tomatoes. Nor did he note White’s ongoing complaints against Rotten Tomatoes in an article defending Kael and so-called “contrarian viewpoints” in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2012.92 In his desire to question the slings and arrows of the term contrarian that were used to deride his writing and belittle the accomplishments of Kael, White launched a spirited defense of the type of independent criticism threatened with extinction by “the advent of the Internet and the rise of review aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes,” which spread the “illusion of consensus opinion [that] now dominates the culture’s perception of criticism.”93 Aside from Rotten Tomatoes, White’s critique called into question the integrity and ability of his fellow film critics and launched jeremiads against liberal targets such as The Village Voice and The New York Times. Long-simmering tensions between White and his peers came to a head at the 2014 NYFCC gala, when White was alleged to have brought the organization into disrepute by heckling Steve McQueen and calling him an “embarrassing doorman and garbageman,” when he accepted his best director award for 12 Years a Slave. In a statement that pointedly evoked the language that White used to harangue his peers in 2010, members of the NYFCC voted to eject White from their group at an emergency meeting held on January 13, 2014, because they believed that he had failed to uphold the “integrity and significance of film criticism.”94 A wide-ranging interview soon after his public ejection from the NYFCC granted White another opportunity to diagnose the state of film criticism. In it, he repeated his contention that 12 Years a Slave treats the history of slavery as “torture porn” and appeals to the bad faith of critics who wish to claim that “the struggles and the tragedy of slavery and racism belong to the past, that we can look at it as the past and not be concerned about contemporary racism today. . . . The worst people, the most racist and horrible people, love that movie. Because it allows them to think that they’re not racist, it allows them to think that because they voted for Obama, they’re not racist, and there is no racism.”95 White’s critique of contemporary articulations of post-racialism not only meant that he established Kael as a heroine who demanded that we bring a sense of fun and sensuality to our movie watching and a role model who shared her knowledge of social and cultural history to deepen our analysis of film; it also involved casting Ebert as a Trojan horse who opened the gates for bloggers and film critics to storm the citadel of film criticism and shower awards on 12 Years a Slave and other films that pandered to liberal guilt. In White’s account, Ebert’s simplistic, plot-driven print reviews, combined with his role

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co-hosting a popular television show produced by Disney-ABC, distorted the art of film criticism and turned it into a product to be sold to liberal and corporate elites. Such a narrative concludes with the warning that “there is almost no other critic” with Kael’s critical philosophy, intelligence, and integrity in the twenty-first century, and leaves open the possibility that White considers himself a worthy inheritor of Kael’s mantle who might save film criticism from bourgeois barbarism and the banality of gossip and consumer advice. Although he has inspired Black and White critics, White is not particularly well known for mentoring others or cultivating a circle or network of influence in which his long career is studied and debated. His career as a print journalist only tends to be invoked as a preface for articles to talk about the general threats facing professional journalism in a digital age and the dwindling advertising revenues for alternative weeklies. Alternatively, it is ignored in critiques that focus on the purportedly “contrarian” or nonsensical nature of White’s recent articles, which are freely available to access online.96 This chapter has proposed an alternative possibility to such presentism by taking White’s archive of diaspora and dissidence seriously. It has outlined the odyssey of a young soul rebel in Detroit who condemned Blaxploitation films that sold cartoonish caricatures to audiences brainwashed to triviality. It has paid attention to a mid-­ career critic who challenged a hip hop exploitation era of films as well as movie franchises or “Trump-like edifice” that assumed “with enough promotion, arrogance and money you can force-feed the public anything—even a baroque fantasy about a white millionaire vigilante ‘taking back the streets.’”97 Last but not least, it has put down some preliminary markers about his more recent anti-anti-Trumpism, which contends that Black Panther and other comic book films work by infantilizing their audience, then banalizing it, and, finally, controlling it through marketing and racial exploitation.98 In this later period he can look back with less anger to Blaxploitation films of the 1970s and note that they managed to express social frustration, ethnic pride, and moral daring, but he is unable to concede that contemporary social movements such as Black Lives Matter may express social frustration, ethnic pride, and moral daring. His earlier asides about youth culture—a “lost generation” and a “doomed generation” that grew up passively consuming blackness, cynicism, and nihilism in pop culture—are transformed into attacks on “political correctness,” “Black victimhood,” and “ahistorical, sanctimonious, paranoid fantasies.”99 Amid articles that erroneously label White as a “Black Republican” and seek to unambiguously position him as a fifth columnist who is out of touch with his people and his times, it may be more productive—morally as well as politically—to place White within a Black Libertarian Tradition. In doing so, we may note that he has contributed to Out Magazine as well as National Review Online since 2014 and that he values the opportunity to contribute to both publications and explore different political, emotional, spiritual, and sexual aspects of film. To give one example, his review of the Oscar-winning Moonlight for National Review Online might use the film to chastise liberal condescension and question the acclaim awarded to a cultural product that, he thinks, “pleads for pity for a gay, black character.”100 His review for Out Magazine may spend more time pointing out forms of romantic or exotic racism that allow people to indulge their pity, fear, and lust onto stereotypical portraits of Black males, and more explicitly calls on gays and viewers of color to respond more critically to the film.101 Yet in both reviews, White draws attention to what he sees as the film’s sentimental appeal to viewers who want to feel good about how politically correct they are and asserts Moonlight’s shallowness vis-à-vis contemporary films about gay self-realization from European filmmakers such as Terence Davies and André Téchiné.



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Whereas White’s peers and online critics have sought to position his work as a set of Manichaean contrasts and have written him off as a dedicated follower of Kael who places thinking and pleasure in opposition , this chapter has documented his humanist desire to expose the bad faith involved in Manichean contrasts of reason and emotion, American thrills and European intellectualism, Black and White, blue state and red state, and so on. It has also paid attention to his critical opposition to glib, superficial, and overly politicized appeals to veil these emotions, identities, and divisions rather than honestly address and work through them. Over his long career, White has remained steadfast to his belief that the “schizogenius” of great artists, artful critics, and “uncompromised politicians” provides us with cultural and political work that clarifies confounding contradictions.102 His archive of dissidence not only offers us repeated access to jeremiads against narrow scholarship, hacks who betray the field of journalism, and politicians who bask in pretense. It is also a clarion call for diverse and expansive work that is supple and substantive enough to do what most academics, journalists, and politicians shy away from, or only pretend to do—speak to the “deep, unarticulated emotional needs” of unparochial people who are simultaneously all-American and internationalist.103

Notes 1.  See, for example, Barack Obama, “Remarks on the 42nd Anniversary of the Selma March,” Brown Chapel

A.M.E. Church, Selma, Alabama, March 4, 2007; David Remnick, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (New York: Picador, 2010). 2.  Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 3.  Cruse is claimed as the intellectual father for a post–civil rights generation in Mark Anthony Neal, Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (London: Routledge, 2002), 17, 197n43. 4.  On Cruse’s xenophobia see Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1998), 262–291. 5.  For more on the periodization of a student New Left cohort, see Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004), 82. 6.  Armond White, “Soul Man,” The Nation, July 31, 2003, https://www.thenation.com/article/soul-man/. 7. Editorial, National Review, August 24, 1957; April 23, 1960. 8.  Armond White, “Phantom Thread and Downsizing: American Decadence, at Home and Abroad,” National Review Online, December 29, 2017, https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/12/phantom-thread-paul-thomas -anderson-downsizing-alexander-payne/. 9.  Armond White, “After Dark,” Filmcast, July 2010, http://www.slashfilm.com/the-filmcast-after-dark-ep -109-the-state-of-film-criticism-and-inception-theories-guest-armond-white-from-new-york-press/. 10.  Armond White, “Paying Attention to Black Lives,” National Review Online, July 24, 2015, https://www .nationalreview.com/2015/07/do-black-lives-matter-movies/. 11.  Interview with Armond White, MeatBone Express Filmmaking Podcast, January 16, 2018, https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=0r-yXxf WpLo. 12.  Luke Buckmaster, “Meet Armond White, the World’s Most Controversial Film Critic,” Flicks, October 25, 2017, https://www.flicks.com.au/blog/features/meet-armondwhite-the-worlds-most-controversial-film -critic/; Kunal Dutta, “Armond White Row,” The Independent, January 6, 2015, https://www.independent.co.uk /artsentertainment/films/news/armond-white-row-film-critic-who-called-harry-potter-the-dullest-franchise -in-the-history-of-movie-9961589.html. 13.  David Bordwell, “In Critical Condition,” David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema, May 14, 2008, http://www .davidbordwell.net/blog/2008/05/14/in-critical-condition/. 14.  Adrian Martin, “Review of American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now,” Film Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2006): 48–51; “Illuminating the Shadows: Film Criticism in Focus,” Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, May 4, 2012, http://jabba.at.northwestern.edu/podcasting /block/Illuminating_the_Shadows_Critics_and_scholars.mp3.

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15.  Armond White, The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World (New York: Overlook

Press), 310; “Interview with Armond White,” MeatBone Express Podcast.

16.  Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 47. 17.  Daniel McNeil, Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic: Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiahs (New York:

Routledge, 2010), 37. 18.  Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture (New York: EP Dutton, 1970); Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 2011). 19.  Steven Boone, “In a World That Has the Darjeeling Limited, Sidney Lumet Should Be Imprisoned!: A Conversation with Armond White, Part 1,” Big Media Vandalism, December 10, 2007, http://bigmediavandal .blogspot.ca/2007/12/in-world-that-has-darjeeling-limited.html. Although White is often lampooned by film critics, his review of the music video for Michael Jackson’s “Black or White,” which he considered “superior to any short or feature film released [in 1991],” received one of the Twenty-Fifth Annual ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for music criticism. Armond White, Keep Moving: The Michael Jackson Chronicles (New York: Resistance Works, 2009), 19, 96. White’s reflections on race and American society in general have also been well received by some cultural critics. See Eric Lott, “Public Image Limited,” Transition 68 (1995): 50–65; John Demetry, “Nobody’s Perfect,” Revolution to Revelation, December 14, 2007, http://johndemetry.blogspot .ca/2007/12/nobodys-perfect.html; Steven Boone, “Ten Armond White Quotes That Shook My World,” Slant Magazine, December 10, 2007, http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2007/10/white-power-ten-armond -white-quotes-that-shook-my-world. 20.  White, “Soul Man.” 21.  Armond White, “Paying Attention to Black Lives,” National Review Online, July 24, 2015, https://www .nationalreview.com/2015/07/do-black-lives-matter-movies/; White, “A Prophet,” New York Press, February 24, 2010. 22.  Owen Glieberman, “Why Armond White Got Kicked out of the Critics Circle,” Entertainment Weekly, January 13, 2014. 23. White, The Resistance, xv. 24.  Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit, I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), 71. 25.  There were approximately 2,500–3,500 Black students at Wayne State University during the 1960s. This meant that Wayne had a higher Black enrollment than all of the schools of the Big Ten and Ivy League combined. It also meant that, in a city that was rapidly on its way to a Black majority, less than 10% of the student population at Wayne was Black. J. Geschwender, “The League of Revolutionary Black Workers: Problems Confronting Black Marxist-Leninist Organizations,” The Journal of Ethnic Studies 2, no. 3 (1974), 1–23. 26. Editorial, The South End, September 21, 1967. 27.  Georgakas and Surkin, Detroit, I Do Mind Dying, 75. 28.  See, for example, the discussions of Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin’s Detroit, I Do Mind Dying and Finally Got the News (1970) in Frederic Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347–357; Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 29. Editorial, The South End, September 28, 1972. 30.  Sweet T Williams, “White, Liberal Press Dangerous Says Critic,” The South End, September 1, 1977. 31.  Daniel McNeil, “The Last Honest Film Critic in America: Armond White and the Children of James Baldwin,” in Film Criticism in the Digital Age, ed. Mattias Frey and Cecilia Sayad (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 61–78. 32.  Armond White, “Fade to Black: 20 Years of Movie History,” The City Sun, July 1, 1987. 33.  Leo Charney, “Common People with Common Feelings: Pauline Kael, James Agee, and the Public Sphere of Popular Film Criticism,” Cinémas: Revue d’études cinématographiques/Journal of Film Studies 6, nos. 2–3 (1996): 113–126. 34.  Pauline Kael, “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” Harper’s, February, 1969. 35.  Armond White, “The Nelson Affair,” The South End, April 19, 1973. 36.  Armond White, “3 Women: Altman Atrocity,” The South End, May 5, 1977. Twenty years later, White would change his mind about Altman’s 3 Women in order to contrast its bold vision of eccentricity with the



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“post-feminist retreat” of stereotypes in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997, David Mirkin, dir.). Armond White, “Female Reversions,” New York Press, May 7, 1997. On the thirty-fifth anniversary of the film’s release, White even described Altman’s 3 Women as “humorous-then-wacky” in order to deride the “Kael-haters” who “pompously decry a particular kind of accessibility and sensual or kinetic cinematic gratification in favor of ‘smartness.’” Armond White, “The Boy Who Played With Dolls,” City Arts, May 3, 2012. 37.  Armond White, “Citizen’s Band: Amusing Mania,” The South End, May 19, 1977. 38.  Pauline Kael, “Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers,” The New Yorker, June 23, 1980; Kael, Movie Love (New York: Plume, 1991), 134. 39.  Armond White, “Regression of Movie Art Award Winner,” The South End, July 21, 1977. 40.  Pauline Kael, The Citizen Kane Book: Raising Kane (Boston: Little, Brown 1971), 15. 41.  Armond White, “Class of ’4 4,” The South End, April 12, 1973. 42.  Ray Sawhill and Polly Frost, “Kaeleidoscope,” Interview Magazine, April 1989. 43.  Michał Oleszczyk, “Hooked & Gridlocked: Notes on Pauline Kael’s Provincialism,” Cineaste 40, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 20–25. 44.  Armond White, “Fellini’s ‘Borey Lyndon,’” The South End, April 5, 1977. 45.  Ed Sikov, “Circles, Squares, and Pink Triangles: Confessions of a Gay Cultist,” in Citizen Sarris, American Film Critic: Essays in Honor of Andrew Sarris, ed. Andrew Sarris and Emanuel Levy (Scarecrow Press, 2001), 255–266. 46.  Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema,” The New Yorker, September 30, 1972. 47.  Armond White, “Sounder: Above and Beyond,” The South End, January 12, 1973. 48.  Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema,” The New Yorker, November 4, 1972. 49. Ibid. 50.  Armond White, “Great Expectations,” The South End, February 26, 1973. 51.  Armond White, “Movies from Other Media,” The South End, January 26, 1973. 52.  Armond White, “Hilberry and ‘Aaaron Loves Angela,’” The South End, February 2, 1976. 53.  Armond White, “Sweet Jesus, Preacherman,” The South End, May 29, 1973. 54.  Armond White, “REAL Black Movies Needed,” The South End, November 20, 1972. Also see Armond White, “Hollywood Meets the CAB,” The South End, November 8, 1972; “Shape of Things (Black) to Come,” The South End, November 21, 1972; “Sold/Soul Brother,” The South End, December 6, 1972; “Means to an End,” The South End, May 4, 1973. 55.  Armond White, “The New Black Aesthetic,” The South End, May 4, 1974. 56.  Armond White, “Ali, the Greatest,” The South End, May 25, 1977. 57.  Armond White, “Use and Abuse of Movie Power,” The South End, September 1, 1977. 58.  Brian Kellow, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark (New York: Penguin, 2011). John Lingan, “Interview: Amrond White,” Splice Today, May 15, 2008. 59.  Armond White, “Open-Hearted Pauline Kael Would’ve Liked Two Can Play That Game,” New York Press, September 25, 2001. 60.  Armond White, “‘Spite’ Lee Puts the Brakes on Unity,” City Sun, October 2, 1996. 61. Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 104, 110, 175, 203. 62. White, The Resistance, 94. 63.  Wayne Dawkins, City Son: Andrew W. Cooper’s Impact on Modern-Day Brooklyn (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 152–156. 64.  “Armond White Responds,” City Sun, August 3, 1988. Also see Dawkins, City Son, 152–156. 65.  Armond White, “Movie Confusions: Women and Film,” The South End, May 9, 1975; “Satirizing Satanic Rock,” The South End, January 15, 1975; “Tommy: Senseless Surrealism,” The South End, April 9, 1975. 66.  Armond White, “Spy Flick Dazzles, but Bombs,” The South End, July 14, 1977. 67.  Armond White, “The New-Wave Stereotypes,” City Sun, July 16, 1986; “Whoopi Goes for the Gold,” City Sun, April 8, 1987; Armond White, “Keeping the Film Faith,” City Sun, September 7, 1988. 68. White, The Resistance, 321, 348; “White Dog: A Moral Metaphor Causes Uproar,” City Sun, July 24, 1991; “Beyond Malcolm X: African-American Cinema in the 90s,” New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, April 29, 1993; “Camera Ready: Hip Hop and the Moving Image,” in DEFinition: The Art and Design of Hip Hop, ed. Cey Adams and Bill Adler (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 104; Roger Ebert, Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 75–81, 167–169, 184, 218, 224.

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69.  Armond White, “Life on the Fringe,” City Sun, July 9, 1986; “Culture Pruning,” City Sun, July 30, 1986; The Resistance, 80. 70.  Armond White, “Liner Notes to White Dog,” White Dog, Samuel Fuller, dir. (Criterion Collection DVD, 2008); The Resistance, 26; “Official History of Music Video,” New York Press, August 1, 2007. 71. White, The Resistance, 103. 72.  Ibid., 158, 355, 434. 73.  Armond White, “Zwick on His Feet: Fighting Black,” Film Comment 26.1 (Jan 1990). 74.  Armond White, “Mr Jealousy,” New York Press, June 3, 1998. 75. “New York Film Festival,” GreenCine Daily Podcast, October 12, 2007, http://daily.greencine.com /archives/004701.html; Armond White, “Yellowy Submarine,” New York Press, December 7, 2004; “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk about Movies,” New York Press, April 30, 2008. 76.  White, “Open-Hearted Pauline Kael Would’ve Liked Two Can Play That Game.” 77.  Armond White, “The Year the Culture Broke,” National Review, August 25, 2014. 78.  Barack Obama, Keynote Address, Democratic National Convention, Boston, July 27, 2004. 79.  Armond White, “The Year the Culture Broke.” 80.  Armond White, “Pursuit of Crappyness,” New York Press, July 9, 2008. 81.  For more on beigeness and mixed-race metaphors, see Daniel McNeil, “Slimy Subjects and Neoliberal Goods: Obama and the Children of Fanon,” Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies 1, no. 1 (2014): 203–218; Daniel McNeil and Leanne Taylor, “Radical Love: A Transatlantic Dialogue about Race and Mixed-Race,” Asian American Literary Review 4, no. 2 (2013): 15–27. 82.  “ACF Critics Series #1 Armond White,” American Cinema Foundation, January 5, 2018, https://itunes .apple.com/ro/podcast/acfmovie-podcast/id1302805257. 83.  Adrian Martin, “Superbad Critic,” De Filmkrant, June 2008, http://www.filmkrant.nl/av/org/filmkran /archief/fk300/engls300.html. 84.  See, for example, Fred Goldberg, vice president of United Artists, who sought to target The Landlord (1970, Hal Ashby, dir.) to “downtown Chicago and other downtown areas, [where] the black audience is 70% of the toal [sic] downtown audience.” Fred Goldberg to Norman Jewison, August 19, 1970, Norman Jewison Papers, Victoria University in the University of Toronto, 38-4-9; Robin Winks, The Blacks in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 403, 478; Daniel McNeil. “Nostalgia for the Liberal Hour: Talkin’ ’bout the Horizons of Norman Jewison’s Generation,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 21, no. 2 (2012): 115–139. 85.  Roger Ebert, “Not in Defense of Armond White,” Roger Ebert’s Journal, August 14, 2009, http://www .rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/not-in-defense-of-armond-white. The link to the table of “good and bad movies according to Armond” is available at Maryann Johanson, “Question of the Day: Is Armond White a Troll?.” FlickFilosopher, August 17, 2009, http://www.flickfilosopher.com/2009/08/question-of-the-day-is -armond-white-a-troll.html. 86.  Armond White, “Terminator Salvation,” New York Press, May 21, 2009; “Reel War Is Hell,” New York Press, August 20, 2008. 87.  “Illuminating the Shadows: Film Criticism in Focus.” 88.  “Ban Armond White from Rotten Tomatoes,” Petition Spot, December 12, 2009, http://www.petition spot.com/petitions/banarmondwhite. 89.  Armond White, “Do Movie Critics Matter?” First Things, April 2010. 90.  Armond White, “Discourteous Discourse,” New York Press, September 28, 2010. 91.  Germain Lussier, “Has Armond White Been Kicked Off Rotten Tomatoes?,” /Film, November 15, 2011, http://www.slashfilm.com/armond-white-kicked-rotten-tomatoes/; Eric Randall, “Why Armond White Wasn’t Our Most Cantankerous Critic,” Atlantic Wire, March 16, 2012, http://www.theatlanticwire.com /entertainment/2012/03/why-armond-white-wasnt-our-most-cantankerous-critic/49997/. 92.  The site began linking readers to White’s reviews again in March 2016, soon after the publication of Daniel McNeil, “The Last Honest Film Critic in America” raised questions about the justification for White’s removal from the site. 93.  Armond White, “Why Kael Is Good For You,” Columbia Journalism Review 50, no. 6 (2012): 53–54. 94.  Ramin Setoodeh, “New York Critics Met for Hours to Oust Armond White,” Variety, January 14, 2014. 95.  Armond White, “Interview with Armond White,” New Day Jazz, KDVS 90.3 FM, January 25, 2015.



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96.  Stephen Kearse, “Critical Failure,” Hazlitt, August 17, 2017, https://hazlitt.net/feature/critical-failure. Articles that posit a period in the past in which White was “electric” and then tell a tale of decline, fall, and critical failure ironically (and perhaps tragically and farcically) repeat the narrative of Renata Adler’s infamous review of Kael, which sought to tell a tale of a “true and iconoclastic” voice that had become, by the mid-to-late 1970s, “vain, overbearing, foolish, hysterical.” Renata Adler, “The Perils of Pauline,” New York Review of Books, August 14, 1980. 97.  Armond White, New Position: The Prince Chronicles (New York: Resistance Works, 2016), 85. 98.  Armond White, “Black Panther’s Circle of Hype,” National Review Online, February 16, 2018, https:// www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/black-panther-overhyped-race-fantasy/. 99. White, The Resistance, 96, 173; “George Washington,” Current, March 11, 2002, http://www.criterion .com/current/posts/189-george-washington; “Murphy’s Flaw,” New York Press, July 30, 2008; “Hollywood Running Mates,” National Review Online, September 23, 2016, https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/09 /magnificent-seven-remake-queen-katwe-pointless-violence-banality/; “The 13-Annual Better-­Th an List,” National Review Online, January 5, 2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/01/annual-better-movies -list-european-films-dominate/. 100.  Armond White, “Moonlight: A Plea for Pity for a Black, Gay Statistic,” National Review Online, October 22, 2016, https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/10/moonlight-barry-jenkins-intersectionality-black-gay -character/. 101.  “Moonlight and the Myth of the Pathetic Queer,” Out Magazine, October 21, 2016, https://www.out .com/armond-white/2016/10/21/moonlight-and-myth-pathetic-queer. 102. White, The Resistance, xiv. 103. White, New Position, 109.

Bibliography Charney, Leo. “Common People with Common Feelings: Pauline Kael, James Agee, and the Public Sphere of Popular Film Criticism.” Cinémas: Revue d’études cinématographiques/Journal of Film Studies 6, nos. 2–3 (1996): 113–126. Clayton, Alex, and Andrew Klevan. The Language and Style of Film Criticism. New York: Routledge, 2011. Coates, Paul. “The Unavoidably Implicit Aesthetics of Pauline Kael.” Post Script—Essays in Film and the Humanities 35, no. 1 (2015): 30–34. Dawkins, Wayne. City Son: Andrew W. Cooper’s Impact on Modern-Day Brooklyn. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012, 152–156. Denning, Michael. Culture in the Age of Three Worlds. London: Verso, 2004. Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage, 2011. Flatley, Jonathan. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Georgakas, Dan, and Marvin Surkin. Detroit, I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975. Geschwender, James A. “The League of Revolutionary Black Workers: Problems Confronting Black Marxist-­ Leninist Organizations.” The Journal of Ethnic Studies 2, no. 3 (1974): 1–23. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. James, Winston. Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America. New York: Verso, 1998. Jameson, Fredric. “Cognitive Mapping.” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988, 347–357. Jellenik, Glenn. “The Problem of Pauline Kael: A Consideration of the Dynamics of Academic and Mainstream Criticism. Post Script—Essays in Film and the Humanities 35, no. 1 (2015): 35–46. Kael, Pauline. I Lost It at the Movies. Boston: Little Brown, 1965. Kael, Pauline. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Boston: Little Brown, 1968. Kael, Pauline. Going Steady. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970. Kael, Pauline. Deeper into Movies. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.

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Kael, Pauline. Reeling. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. Kael, Pauline. Movie Love. New York: Plume, 1991. Kael, Pauline, and Sanford Schwartz. The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael. New York: Library of America, 2011. Kehr, Dave. When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Kellow, Brian. Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark. New York: Penguin, 2011. Lott, Eric. “Public Image Limited.” Transition 68 (1995): 50–65. Lopate, Phillip. American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents until Now. New York: Library of America, 2006. Mankiewicz, Herman J., Pauline Kael, and Orson Welles. The Citizen Kane Book: Raising Kane. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971. Martin, Adrian. “Review of American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents until Now.” Film Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2006): 48–51. McNeil, Daniel. Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic: Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiahs. New York: Routledge, 2011. McNeil, Daniel. “Nostalgia for the Liberal Hour: Talkin’ ’bout the Horizons of Norman Jewison’s Generation.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 21, no. 2 (2012): 115–139. McNeil, Daniel. “Slimy Subjects and Neoliberal Goods: Obama and the Children of Fanon.” Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies 1, no. 1 (2014): 203–218. McNeil, Daniel. “The Last Honest Film Critic in America: Armond White and the Children of James Baldwin.” In Film Criticism in the Digital Age, edited by Mattias Frey and Cecilia Sayad. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015, 61–78. McNeil, Daniel, and Leanne Taylor. “Radical Love: A Transatlantic Dialogue about Race and Mixed-Race.” AsianAmerican Literary Review 4, no. 2 (2013): 15–27. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Murray, Albert. The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture. New York: EP Dutton, 1970. Neal, Mark Anthony. Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic. London: Routledge, 2002. Oleszczyk, Michał. “Hooked & Gridlocked: Notes on Pauline Kael’s Provincialism.” Cineaste 40, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 20–25. Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996. Sikov, Ed. “Circles, Squares, and Pink Triangles: Confessions of a Gay Cultist.” In Citizen Sarris, American Film Critic: Essays in Honor of Andrew Sarris, edited by Emanuel Levy. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001. Stengel, Wayne, ed. Talking about Pauline Kael: Critics, Filmmakers, and Scholars Remember an Icon. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. West, Patrick. “Democratic Corporealities of Love: The Architectural Cinema and Eroticized Publics of Pauline Kael.” Post Script—Essays in Film and the Humanities 35, no. 1 (2015): 47–55. White, Armond. The Resistance. Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World. New York: Overlook Press, 1995. White, Armond. “Camera Ready: Hip Hop and the Moving Image.” In DEFinition: The Art and Design of Hip Hop, edited by Cey Adams and Bill Adler. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. White, Armond. Keep Moving: The Michael Jackson Chronicles. New York: Resistance Works, 2009. White, Armond. “Do Movie Critics Matter?” First Things (April 2010). White, Armond. “Why Kael Is Good for You.” Columbia Journalism Review 50, no. 6 (2012): 53–54. White, Armond. New Position: The Prince Chronicles. New York: Resistance Works, 2016. Winks, Robin. The Blacks in Canada: A History. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997.

6 • R ACE AND HISTORY ON THE OPER ATIC STAGE Caterina Jarboro Sings Aida LU C Y C A P L A N

Introduction Thousands of people streamed into Manhattan’s Hippodrome Theatre on July 22, 1933, undaunted by sweltering temperatures and teeming crowds, eager to witness a performance of Aida unlike anything they had seen before. The 5,300-seat theatre, the largest in New York, had sold out days in advance, and patrons clambered for standing-room-only spots; still more were turned away at the door. This audience was not the White, moneyed one often associated with opera: many were members of the city’s Italian American immigrant community, and about one-third were African American.1 The evening’s star, soprano Caterina Jarboro, entered the theatre to prolonged applause. Fanning their programs in the heat, the audience greeted her with a “tremendous ovation” as, in the words of one operagoer, “Italians sat in admiration. White America gasped in amazement. And Harlem applauded its heroine in magnificent and splendorous debut.”2 By evening’s end, Jarboro had become the first African American woman to perform with a major opera company in the United States. For much of the twentieth century, the title character of Aida was the primary means by which Black women arrived on previously all-White operatic stages. 3 The racialized logic is clear: in the mostly White universe of opera plots, Aida is the atypical heroine who is also racially marked as Black. “In Aida, my skin was my costume,” Leontyne Price, perhaps the role’s most iconic interpreter, has explained.4 For Price and other African American women who essayed the role before her, Aida presented a valuable opportunity for entrance into the opera house. Yet while Black singers have long been associated with the role of Aida, the connection was not preordained. Before Aida could become reified as the most likely role for Black sopranos, these performers had to advocate for the ability to have any place whatsoever in the overwhelmingly White world of opera. Jarboro’s 1933 debut was a formative moment in the racial politics of opera in the United States and a catalyst for critical inquiry. In this essay, I situate Jarboro within a longer history of Black women’s operatic singing and then examine the reception history of this particular performance, with a focus on how ideas about race and history factored into critics’ accounts. The response that her debut elicited, especially in the Black press, explored a layered connection between blackness and Aida. Critics argued that Jarboro’s performance spoke to the 89

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past, present, and future of the nation’s interlocking racial, musical, and cultural hierarchies. Cumulatively, their responses denaturalized the idea of an essential relationship between Black women and Aida, instead revealing the complexities, as well as the inherent conceptual weaknesses, undergirding that relationship. Jarboro’s performance seemed a moment of immense promise, one in which she might redefine the terms of the racial logic that enabled her to perform the role in the first place. But her success would prove fleeting. After some additional European operatic performances and scattered recital appearances in the early 1940s, her career languished. More broadly speaking, Black women remained underrepresented on the operatic stage. 5 And as the art form became nominally integrated, but remained racially hierarchical, the role of Aida came to be considered an expectation, even a requirement, for African American sopranos.6 Jarboro’s debut, then, set into motion a radical yet ultimately imperfect transition: that from presumed impossibility (no Black soprano could ever sing Aida) to assumed inevitability (all Black sopranos would sing Aida). Performances like Jarboro’s proceeded from a race-based precondition, the idea that blackness was both a requirement for these women’s initial participation and a quality that must eventually become irrelevant to their inclusion. Intended to undermine the color line in opera, this contradictory rationale ended up leaving room for the legitimation of racialized casting and the perpetuation of existing imbalances of power. The discrepancy between the optimistic sense of potential that surrounded Jarboro’s performance and the subsequent failure to realize that potential raises a question that resonates beyond the context of one singer’s debut: do Black women’s performances of Aida challenge the color line or reify it? An unresolved contradiction stood at the heart of Black women’s entrance into opera via this role. Despite the limits of this representational strategy, however, Jarboro and the critics who wrote about her performance in the Black press successfully put forth a more capacious relationship between Aida and blackness, or what cultural studies scholar Jayna Brown, in her work on transnational Black female performers, calls a “multi-signifying performance.” 7 As she performed, Jarboro brilliantly remade an image of Black female subjection—Aida suffers enslavement, betrayal, and, by the opera’s end, death—into a venue for Black female stardom and vast possibility.

Aida and Blackness, 1871–1927 Often regarded as “the grandest of grand operas,” Aida premiered at the Cairo Opera House in 1871 and received its first U.S. performance in 1873. It became a centerpiece of the canon by the early twentieth century, and it remains one of the most frequently performed operas in the world.8 Commissioned by the Egyptian ruler Isma’il Pasha to write an opera on an Egyptian subject, composer Giuseppe Verdi and librettist Antonio Ghislanzoni created an opera with a plot that has been described as “the politics of nationhood writ large through the vehicle of a romantic triangle”: both Aida, an enslaved Ethiopian princess, and her Egyptian enslaver, Amneris, find themselves in love with Radames, an Egyptian military commander, during wartime.9 (Or, as musicologist Naomi André pointedly describes it, “Aida is a made-up story by Italians and Frenchmen set in the time of the Pharaohs with little knowledge of the historical Egyptians and Ethiopians and makes no reference to living Egyptians or Ethiopians during the late nineteenth century.”10) Verdi’s music shifts fluidly between intimacy and grandeur, making frequent use of cliché orientalist and exoticist sonic tropes, particularly within musical material associated with Aida herself.11 In performance, the opera is often a vehicle for spectacle and



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extravagance, with a large chorus and orchestra, extended ballet sequences, elaborate sets, and sometimes even live animals. Most productions portray Aida’s Egyptian characters as White and Ethiopians as Black, a convention that dates to an early production book indicating that the Ethiopian characters have “olive, dark reddish skin.”12 As a result, White singers often have performed the role of Aida using various types of skin-darkening makeup, including blackface. Many studies of Aida highlight its imperial entanglements, including the way its characters are represented through the distortive lenses of exoticism and Orientalism. Edward Said famously characterized the opera as “saturated . . . in the European dominance of the Middle East.”13 And like many operatic women, Aida is a tragic figure who suffocates to death at the opera’s end.14 Other scholars have critiqued the totalizing nature of Said’s argument and offered alternative analyses of what musicologist Gabriela Cruz calls Aida’s “imperial genealogy.”15 Jennifer McFarlane-Harris and Christopher Gauthier, for example, assess the racial dynamics at play in the opera’s reception by Egyptian audiences at its Cairo premiere, and Kira Thurman discusses black singers in Aida and other exoticist operas in twentieth-century Germany and Austria.16 Building upon these scholars’ work, this essay examines the racialized meanings that emerged in response to Aida within a temporally and geographically specific context, that of the United States in 1933. Rather than focusing exclusively on the composer and other (White, male) creators of the work, thus eliding the influence of performers and other participants in what Christopher Small calls the social experience of “musicking,” I highlight the symbiotic relationship among performers, critics, and audiences in defining Aida’s significance as it circulated among African American audiences with an African American soprano in the title role.17 For Black singers, the role of Aida was an aspiration before it was a reality. Sissieretta Jones, the renowned late-nineteenth-century Black concert singer, was reportedly promised the role at the Metropolitan Opera as early as 1892, but if this is true, the promise was never fulfilled.18 Nevertheless, critics praised Jones as “like a veritable Aida”; one wrote that “the thought was irresistible that she would make a superb Aida, whom her appearance, as well as her voice, suggested.”19 The vaudevillian Aida Overton Walker was likely inspired by the opera when she changed her first name from Ada to Aida around 1905. 20 The vocalist Abbie Mitchell held a “long-cherished ambition” of singing the role; one critic, upon hearing her in recital, was so impressed that he resorted to all capital letters: “WHAT AN ‘AIDA’ THIS WOMAN WOULD MAKE!”21 Yet Black women were able to sing the role in full only if they attained positions with the Drury Grand Opera Company, a small-scale company established by African American impresario Theodore Drury that featured mostly Black singers and staged Aida in 1903, 1906, and 1930. Before Jarboro’s 1933 debut, however, no major opera company in the United States offered this role to a Black singer. Amateur musicians, too, were inspired by the figure of Aida. Across the country, African American musical clubs were named in her honor: the Aida Club of Musical Art, Aida Choral Club, Aida Choral Society.22 In 1925, the celebrated Italian tenor Edoardo Ferrari Fontana, in partnership with the New York Amsterdam News, sponsored a contest for Black sopranos. The winner would receive free voice lessons and, potentially, an operatic role: the contest announcement stated that “it is one of the ambitions of Mr. Fontana’s life to hear the opera ‘Aida’ sung in the noted Metropolitan Opera House with a Negro soprano in the leading role, which would be the greatest triumph of the Negro in the musical world.”23 Over 200 women applied. The winners, Marguerite Avery and Jessie Zackery, flourished in their musical careers, but neither would ever sing Aida.24

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The Fontana contest rested upon a contradictory set of ideas about racialized representation in opera anticipating those that emerged in response to Jarboro’s performance. On the one hand, Fontana assumed an essential, naturalized relationship between Black singers and the role of Aida.25 On the other, his search putatively rested upon a race-transcending commitment to artistic cosmopolitanism. As Fontana proclaimed at the contest finals, “Art, the true art, has neither nationality nor color. It cares not for race.” 26 These paradoxical statements hint at the shakiness of using Aida as a foundation for working toward equity for Black opera singers, speaking to what theorist Nicole Fleetwood refers to as the risk of conflating representation with progress and the assumption that the mere presence of Black bodies will necessarily challenge normative racial discourses.27 Furthermore, the premise of the contest, in which a White male organizer preemptively determined what would constitute the Black female winner’s ultimate “triumph,” represents an additional constraint. But what men like Fontana imagined as a natural fit between blackness and Aida, Black women denaturalized and reimagined in order to transform the role into a site of creative resistance to dominant modes of racialized representation. One such woman was Florence Cole-Talbert, who in 1927, in Cosenza, Italy, became the first African American to sing Aida with a European opera company. The Detroit-born daughter of a Fisk Jubilee Singer, Cole-Talbert never sang the full role in the United States, but she enjoyed a transnational reputation. While abroad, she wrote articles for the Black press noting that while she faced racist derision from Americans abroad, Italians uniformly embraced her artistry.28 While certainly an oversimplification of Italian racial politics, Cole-Talbert’s framing was effective. Unlike U.S. listeners who failed to imagine even the possibility that a Black woman might participate in opera, Cole-Talbert’s Italian audiences seemed to welcome her as one of their own.29 Her words also resonated with the rhetoric of other African American artists who spent time in Europe during the interwar period (including well-known figures from Langston Hughes to Josephine Baker), similarly emphasizing the contrast between U.S. racism and European racial tolerance. 30 Reproduced in the Black press, these comments served a strategic function, and Cole-Talbert’s work created a sense of pride and solidarity among African American readers. As a writer for the New York Amsterdam News rejoiced, “The critics need no longer complain that Verdi made his greatest heroine black, forcing white singers to make themselves up for the role . . . we have our own Aida.”31

Caterina Jarboro’s Debut The woman who would become Caterina Jarboro was born Katherine Yarborough in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, to John Wesley Yarborough, a barber, and his wife, Elizabeth. Educated in Catholic schools, she showed an early talent for music and moved to New York as a teenager to live with an aunt. In 1921 she joined the cast of the wildly successful Broadway show Shuffle Along, and in 1926 she moved to Europe to study opera. There she followed the example of Cole-Talbert, making her debut as Aida at Milan’s Puccini Theatre in 1931. She may also have spent time in East Africa in preparation for the role, later claiming, “Before singing Aida I went up the Nile. I had Ethiopian friends and lived alongside them, because I wanted to know how Aida would feel.”32 Upon returning to New York in 1932, Jarboro met the impresario Alfredo Salmaggi. An immigrant from central Italy, Salmaggi was a larger-than-life figure who produced and directed “popular price opera,” massive and massively extravagant productions for which tickets cost between 25 and 99 cents. 33 He favored spectacle and excess: parades of



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animals, enormous choruses, and a generally circus-like atmosphere. For him, hiring a Black singer to perform the role of Aida may well have been a way to heighten the production’s spectacular nature and appeal to his audience’s taste for novelty, capitalizing on romanticized and racist tropes of Black women’s performance as sensational, primitive, and desirable. 34 In the summer of 1933, he engaged Jarboro to sing Aida with his Chicago Grand Opera Company. So successful was her Saturday night debut that Salmaggi hastily hired the celebrity baritone Jules Bledsoe, among the most renowned Black artists of the era, to sing the role of Aida’s father, Amonasro, alongside Jarboro the following Monday. 35 Headlines splashed across the front pages of major Black newspapers: “Miss Jarboro Scores in ‘Aida’”; “Harlem Goes to Opera and Acclaims Its Own”; “Rises to Fame as Singer.”36 The editor of the New York Amsterdam News reported that scores of young women sent in letters regarding Jarboro’s performance, and he deemed public interest significant enough to publish a 700-word synopsis of Aida. 37 While both White and Black critics praised Jarboro’s performance, the richer and more heterogeneous response emerged in the Black press. White critics tended to focus primarily on the novelty of Jarboro’s appearance and on her vocal technique, but rarely contextualized the performance further or related it to broader cultural phenomena. 38 In contrast, African American critics marveled at Jarboro’s visual and sonic suitability for the role, located her performance within a historical trajectory that culminated in modern Black cultural production, and declared that the performance heralded a racially utopian musical future. Photographed in costume, Jarboro radiates glamour: adorned in necklaces and bracelets, a jeweled ankle-length dress, and a headband dripping with beads, she gazes into the distance with determination and confidence. Yet few such aesthetic details emerge in contemporary accounts. Instead, both Black and White critics described her body primarily in terms of the color of her skin. A headline in Time declared her an “Aida without makeup.”39 The focus on skin color rather than other visual signifiers invited direct comparison between Jarboro and White singers, and many Black critics emphasized the intrinsic artificiality of White singers’ use of makeup, implying that Jarboro’s blackness made her the superior choice for the part. “Ever since the days when Verdi’s great opera was produced in 1871 for the first time,” one noted, “the stars who have sung the role of Aida have had to revert to the use of powder, Vaseline, and the spreading of pomade of some sort.”40 Yet “Miss Jarboro, unlike all other singers of ‘Aida,’ needed no grease paint to make her face brown. She did not have to use brown colored gloves to effect brown-skin arms.”41 Eva Jessye (who would later direct the chorus for Porgy and Bess) wrote proudly that “the presence of dark-skinned artists, although demanded by the story [of Aida], is a wholly new step for America.”42 To return to Leontyne Price’s resonant phrase, Jarboro’s skin was her costume. This fetishization of Jarboro’s body as ideally suited to play Aida—and the concomitant implication that White artists lacked a legitimate claim to the role—simultaneously upheld and challenged early-twentieth-century ideas about racialized bodies and music. This element of Jarboro’s reception seems to adhere to what musicologist Karl Hagstrom Miller calls the “authenticity paradigm,” an idea that emerged in the Jim Crow South and established a previously nonexistent link between “racialized music and racialized bodies,” effectively shoring up the musical color line.43 Yet Jarboro unsettled this same boundary by performing opera, a genre thought to be firmly on the White side of that line. The resulting paradox echoes that which lurked beneath the surface at the Fontana contest: blackness both authenticated Jarboro’s performance and rendered it transgressive.

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Critical descriptions of Jarboro’s voice had a strikingly different focus. Musicologist Nina Sun Eidsheim has noted that Black classical singers often have been evaluated in terms of “sonic blackness,” as “visual blackness was projected onto timbre,” but the reception of Jarboro’s performance suggests a less straightforward relationship between the sonic and visual facets of operatic blackness.44 While a few White critics did evaluate Jarboro’s voice in racialized terms— the New York Times, for instance, praised her “characteristically racial timbre, husky and darkly rich”—most described her voice not as Black, but as Italian.45 Critics highlighted her experience studying with Italian teachers, and her singing garnered admiration for its “real understanding of the true Italian spirit,” “Italian diction,” and “typically Italian quality of voice.”46 Offstage, her very name, which she changed from Katherine Yarborough to Caterina Jarboro, announced her connection to Italianness, and she spoke the language fluently.47 Upon her return from Europe, one reporter characterized her thus: “Hasn’t spoken English in years. When excited flies off into French or Italian. Is wild about Italy.”48 Another noted her taste for Italian food, and one even revealed that Jarboro spoke Italian to her dog, with whom she often strolled through Harlem.49 Jarboro’s Italian voice facilitated professional success as well: when she introduced herself in fluent Italian to Salmaggi, he reportedly was so impressed by her command of the language (as well as her singing) that he offered her the role of Aida on the spot. 50 Her voice also proved useful when, upon being denied entry to a segregated New York restaurant, Jarboro responded in Italian and convinced a waiter that she and her companion were actually non-Black Europeans, thereby circumventing the restaurant’s racist policy. 51 The minor incident suggests Jarboro’s broader ability to mobilize her Italian voice strategically: whereas blackness and Italianness worked together to qualify her to sing Aida, here she used Italian to destabilize her blackness and evade Jim Crow segregation. Another strain of critical thinking located Jarboro’s performance within the longer scope of post-emancipation African American history. 52 There was some precedent for linking Verdi and Aida to Black historical narratives. Decades earlier, the writer Robert Carter suggested an affinity between Frederick Douglass and Verdi, both of whom rose from modest origins to heroic stature, and in 1913, W.E.B. Du Bois incorporated two arias from Aida into The Star of Ethiopia, his diasporic historical pageant commemorating the Emancipation Proclamation’s fiftieth anniversary. 53 Jarboro asserted a historically destined, race-based birthright to the role of Aida, telling a reporter, “I felt very natural in the part. You see, my role was written for me sixty-two years ago by Verdi.”54 The critic T. R. Poston generalized this claim by describing the Harlem crowds who flocked to the theatre as “the descendants of Verdi’s Ethiopian princess.”55 Noting that Aida’s 1871 premiere coincided with a post–Civil War vogue for spirituals, Poston wrote, “Verdi and the freedmen have traveled parallel paths to immortality. . . . And now, after sixty-two years, the parallel is destined to end. For, on Saturday night at the Hippodrome Theatre, the mythical Ethiopian princess will come to life through the voice and personality of a freedman’s descendant.”56 Contextualizing Jarboro’s performance as part of a progressive narrative of modern Black history elided the paradox at the heart of Aida, namely that Jarboro attained artistic freedom by portraying an enslaved woman who dies at the end of the opera. Instead, Poston’s framing accentuated Jarboro’s own status as a historical actor and aligned her with a lineage of African American achievement. Moreover, locating Jarboro within a specifically African American history undermined the essentialist notion that race alone sufficed to connect Jarboro, a modern African American woman, to Aida, a fictional character from ancient Ethiopia. Thus refigured, her achievement could be understood as historically specific and distinctly modern.



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Others questioned the merits of such historical comparisons. In the Cincinnati Union, two eminent Black intellectuals debated how to evaluate Jarboro’s performance against the legacy of slavery. Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, the archivist and collector, insisted that her debut be analyzed in light of historical injustice: “In the language of Frederick Douglass,” Schomburg proclaimed, “let us judge her from the depths she came, and let us bow in gratitude.”57 In a dissenting reply, the Brooklyn minister Reverend George Frazier Miller wrote: “If Miss Jarboro has attained the heights accredited to her by the musical critics of recognized competence, why ‘judge her from the depths she came’? Might she not be measured by normal standards?” Miller continued, “This young woman should be judged on the intrinsic merits of her excellence and brilliancy. . . . Her comparison should be with those who are holding forth in a similar field of celebrated artists.”58 Their debate raised an array of metacritical questions: what constituted Miller’s “normal standards”? Did portraying Jarboro as having overcome historical burdens enhance or diminish her achievement? To what extent should the weight of history tip the scales of critical judgment? Like Schomburg and Miller, the critic Fred Moten has characterized the Black operatic voice in terms of “depths,” writing that the “black voice is . . . figured as ‘deep,’ an adjective that is both spatialised through metaphors of meaning, truth and history (as opposed to surface, as opposed to any absolute newness) and anatomized (wherein the sound is tied to a kind of deep-throatedness that is sometimes seen as a function of training but has often been linked to supposed anatomical features specific to black bodies).”59 Joining physical and epistemological concepts of depth, Moten suggests that a range of possibilities emerge in response to what he calls the “disruptive” potential of the Black voice.60 In contrast to the literally surface-level focus on Jarboro’s skin, emphasis on the deep historical resonances of her performance disrupted a perception, predominant among White critics, that her achievement was notable mainly because it was unprecedented. Instead, critics’ variegated descriptions of her blackness gave the performance a history of its own, recasting it as a culmination of historical struggle rather than merely the breaking of new ground.

Conclusion What did the future hold for Black women in opera? Inspired by the magnitude of Jarboro’s achievement, African American critics imagined what the scholar Josh Kun calls an audiotopia, a musical pathway toward imagining a different social world.61 In a historically resonant turn of phrase used by two different critics, the occasion signaled a “new deal” for African Americans in opera.62 Another hailed the performance as “proving that prejudice is giving way to art”; still another predicted, “Some day in the not too distant future, Negroes will be called upon to take leading roles with the Metropolitan and with other grand opera companies. Color lines will be erased and Negroes will sing not only in operas depicting darker peoples, but also in Wagner’s ‘Tristan und Isolde,’ Alfano’s ‘Resurrection,’ and many others.”63 In a particularly poignant framing, the vaudeville actor Salem Tutt Whitney wrote that as he read the program for Jarboro’s performance, “The wonder of it all filled my eyes with tears and blinded my sight so that I could not see the names of those wonderful white artists, whose love for their art and devotion to their art ideals, completely erased all thought of racial prejudice, and in so doing proved that art is universal and international.”64 Whitney’s overwhelming emotion literally blinded him to the existence of the color line, presaging an audiotopian future in which race was not authenticating, but irrelevant. Importantly, though, this was a mode of

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universalism that did not require the erasure or transcendence of race, but rather insisted that racial difference could not be used to justify inequality of musical opportunity. Similar sentiments arose six years later when Marian Anderson, barred from appearing at Washington, D.C.’s segregated Constitution Hall, performed at the Lincoln Memorial. Introducing her, Harold Ickes proclaimed that “genius draws no color line.”65 Anderson reiterated a connection in the national consciousness between desegregation and the Black operatic voice, and further successes followed.66 For Jarboro, her well-received debut led to subsequent engagements with Salmaggi’s company and a bevy of European appearances, including several additional performances of Aida. In Europe, she also appeared in other racialized roles in Gounod’s The Queen of Sheba and Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine (the latter of which, she wryly noted, “has absolutely nothing to do with Africa”).67 Salmaggi went on to feature other Black singers in the role of Aida on an occasional basis: Minto Cato in 1937, Edith Dixson Sewell in 1943, and Muriel Rahn in 1948 and 1949. In 1937, two African American singers, La Julia Rhea and William Franklin, sang the roles of Aida and Amonasro with the Chicago Civic Opera Company. After the African American soprano Ellabelle Davis performed Aida in Mexico City in 1946, Eleanor Roosevelt used her “My Day” column to lament that the United States trailed the rest of the world in desegregating its opera houses.68 In 1948, Muriel Rahn became the first Black woman to sing excerpts from Aida at the Metropolitan Opera House, and Gloria Davy sang the full role there in 1958. By the time Leontyne Price became the century’s exemplary Aida in the 1960s, Black women had repeatedly excelled in the role, making their skin their costume.69 These women’s accomplishments, though, did not challenge the color line in the ways that Jarboro’s more optimistic listeners had imagined. The central paradox of entrance into the opera via racialized casting remained, and these singers’ attempts to challenge the dominant whiteness of opera thus relied upon a seeming capitulation to its underlying racial logic. Black singers were compelled to sing only roles marked as racially other, thus conforming to essentialist schemes of racial difference. Musicologist Nina Sun Eidsheim has noted that when Marian Anderson became the first Black woman to perform at the Metropolitan Opera, in 1955, her debut role was that of the gypsy sorceress Ulrica, another character already marked as non-White.70 As more African American women broke into the ranks of opera, Aida became notorious as one of the only roles regularly offered to Black sopranos. Responding with frustration to this expectation, Grace Bumbry once referred to such typecasting as a “sickness,” and Shirley Verrett has recalled that “they looked at Black sopranos in that day and said, ‘You’re a soprano—Aida!’” 71 What had once seemed a path toward progress became a means of racialized constraint. To rework Audre Lorde’s famous phrase, could a masterwork like Aida ever dismantle the opera house? Jarboro’s performance illuminates both the promise and the limits of this role as a means of challenging the color line in opera. It suggests that the persistence of racialized casting on the operatic stage was by no means inevitable; rather, it was continually maintained and reiterated as Black women ascended to prominence in opera. Perhaps even more significantly, though, the heterogeneity of the performance’s reception illuminates that African Americans’ operatic aspirations extended far beyond the mere fact of desegregation. Instead, opera in general, and Jarboro’s performance in particular, represented a point of entry into much more expansive conceptual territory. As Jarboro and other Black women sang Aida, they prompted and participated in debates about the relationship between the visual and sonic parameters of blackness, meditated on their status as historical actors, and seized the opportunity to imagine a future that rejected hierarchical racial-musical logics. If their performances did not dismantle



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the opera house, they began to build a different and more urgently relevant space through and for operatic performance.

Notes 1.  T. R. Poston, “Harlem Goes to Opera and Acclaims Its Own,” New York Amsterdam News, July 26, 1933, 1. 2.  Geraldine Thornton, “Gotham Thunders Praise of Mme. Jarboro,” Chicago Defender, July 29, 1933, 2. 3.  The other major operatic work to feature Black women was, of course, Porgy and Bess (1935). But that work

was broadly considered musical theatre until the 1970s. Its first production by an opera company was Houston Grand Opera’s 1976 version, and the Metropolitan Opera did not present it until 1985. See Ellen Noonan, The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess: Race, Culture, and America’s Most Famous Opera (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 259–261. 4.  Leontyne Price, “Aida,” in The Metropolitan Opera Encyclopedia: A Comprehensive Guide to the World of Opera, ed. David Hamilton (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 16–17. Price used the phrase “my skin was my costume” in various other contexts, including her 1990 illustrated children’s book about the opera and her conversations with young audiences. Leontyne Price, Leo Dillon, and Diane Dillon, Aida (New York: Voyager Books, 1990); Anthony Tommasini, “Aida Takes Her Story to Harlem: Leontyne Price Reads Her Book and Sings for Schoolchildren,” New York Times, May 30, 2000, E1. 5.  Nina Sun Eidsheim, “Marian Anderson and ‘Sonic Blackness’ in American Opera,” American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2011): 659–662. 6.  The musician and scholar Wallace Cheatham has called Aida, along with Bess of Porgy and Bess, one of “the two ‘ethnic roles’ so often made a must for African-American sopranos,” noting that it was “an unspoken fact of early operatic history as it relates to the black experience” that “if a black soprano came along she had to do Aida.” Cheatham, “African-American Women Singers at the Metropolitan Opera before Leontyne Price,” Journal of Negro History 84, no. 2 (1999): 176, 177. 7.  Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 8.  During the 2015–2016 season, Aida was performed 320 times in sixty-six cities around the world. Operabase, http://operabase.com/oplist.cgi?id=none&lang=en&is=aida&by=&loc=&stype=abs&sd=1&sm=9&sy =2015&etype=abs&ed=1&em=9&ey=2016. Aida has been performed at the Metropolitan Opera House alone more than 1,150 times. “Repertory Report,” MetOpera Database, The Metropolitan Opera Archives, http://archives.metoperafamily.org/archives. 9.  Having never visited Egypt, Verdi also drew upon the work of French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette as he created the work. Jennifer McFarlane-Harris and Christopher Gauthier, “Nationalism, Racial Difference, and ‘Egyptian’ Meaning in Verdi’s Aida,” in Blackness in Opera, ed. Naomi André, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 59. 10.  Naomi André, Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 10. 11.  See Fabrizio Della Seta, “‘O cieli azzurri’: Exoticism and Dramatic Discourse in Aida,” Cambridge Opera Journal 3, no. 1 (1991): 49–62. 12.  Hans Busch, Verdi’s Aida: The History of an Opera in Letters and Documents (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978), 558–559. Early-twentieth-century Black music critics expressed their opposition to the use of blackface makeup in opera: Nora Douglas Holt, for instance, wrote that the practice “shock[ed] the ethnic sense of various reviewers. . . . In opera one anticipates truer portrayals.” Lena James Holt, “The Opera,” Chicago Defender, January 5, 1918, 8. 13.  Edward Said, Musical Elaborations (London: Vintage, 1991), 65. 14.  Catherine Clément, Opera; or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 15.  Gabriela Cruz, “Aida’s Flutes,” Cambridge Opera Journal 14, no. 1 (2002): 177. See also Ralph Locke, “Beyond the Exotic: How ‘Eastern’ is Aida?,” in Art and Ideology in European Opera: Essays in Honour of Julian Rushton, ed. Rachel Cowgill, David Cooper, and Clive Brown (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2010), 105– 139; Ralph Locke, “Aida and Nine Readings of Empire,” in Fashions and Legacies of Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera, ed. Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Hilary Poriss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 152–175; Katherine Bergeron, “Verdi’s Egyptian Spectacle: On the Colonial Subject of Aida,” Cambridge Opera

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Journal 14, no. 1 (2002): 149–159; John Drummond, “Said and Aida: Culture, Imperialism, Egypt and Opera,” Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 10, no. 1 (2014): 1–12; Serena Guarracino, “Verdi’s Aida across the Mediterranean (and Beyond),” California Italian Studies 1, no. 1 (2010): 118; Paul Robinson, “Is Aida an Orientalist Opera?,” Cambridge Opera Journal 5, no. 2 (1994): 133–140. 16.  McFarlane-Harris and Gauthier, “Nationalism, Racial Difference, and ‘Egyptian’ Meaning in Verdi’s Aida,” 59; Kira Thurman, “A History of Black Musicians in Germany and Austria” (PhD dissertation, University of Rochester, 2013), 297–302. 17.  Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). 18.  Maureen Lee, Sissieretta Jones: “The Greatest Singer of Her Race” (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012), 38. 19.  Chicago Inter Ocean, undated; Philadelphia Times, December 3, 1892. Quoted in Willia Daughtry, “Sissieretta Jones: A Study of the Negro’s Contribution to Nineteenth Century American Concert and Theatrical Life” (PhD dissertation, Syracuse University, 1968), 148. 20.  One White critic wondered, “Is the change from ‘Ady’ to ‘A-e-da’ meant to make a musical advance by Williams and Walker from negro melody to operatic music?” See Mary Simonson, Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 208n53. 21.  “Seeks Opera Role,” Baltimore Afro-American, February 2, 1929, 7; Maud Cuney Hare, Negro Musicians and Their Music (1936; repr. New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), 370. 22. Advertisement, New York Amsterdam News, February 3, 1926, 5; “Dallas Club Sings,” Baltimore Afro-American, January 16, 1926, 9; “‘Ruth the Gleaner’ at New Star,” Chicago Defender, May 4, 1918, 2. 23.  “Greatest Musical Offer Ever: Ferrari-Fontana Seeks Negro Voice for Grand Opera,” New York Amsterdam News, July 1, 1925, 1. 24.  There is no evidence that either woman ever sang the role. Moreover, it is unclear whether Fontana’s promised training ever materialized, as he moved to Toronto shortly after the contest. Laura Macy, ed., The Grove Book of Opera Singers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 158. 25.  Fontana also celebrated Black women’s vocal prowess in race-dependent terms by reiterating the common stereotype that African Americans were innately musical, remarking after the first round of the contest, “In no other race, and I have listened to most of them, will one find so many wonderful voices.” “Final Audition to Be in Town Hall August 7,” New York Amsterdam News, July 29, 1925, 1. 26.  “Greatest Musical Offer Ever,” New York Amsterdam News. 27.  Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 5. 28.  In print, Cole-Talbert claimed that “the Italians have tried to make up for the hateful attitude of the Americans toward me,” and she often emphasized the highly positive reviews she received in the Italian press. “Cole-Talbert Is Success in Italy,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 31, 1925, 4. Similar sentiments appear in “Mme. Cole Talbert May Sing before King of Italy,” Baltimore Afro-American, February 27, 1926, 4; and “Madame Florence Cole-Talbert Returns after Three Years in Europe,” New York Amsterdam News, October 26, 1927, 10. Although Cole-Talbert never performed the full role of Aida in the United States, she did perform an aria from the opera with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1930, and she frequently included excerpts on recital programs. 29.  As historian Kira Thurman has noted, this sort of critical praise should be read with a heavy dose of skepticism, as European directors often granted Black singers the opportunity to perform due to their perceived exoticism. See Thurman, “A History of Black Musicians in Germany and Austria,” 297–302. 30.  There is an extensive literature on African American artists and intellectuals in Europe during the interwar period, most of which focuses on France. Notable works include Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996); T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Bricktop’s Paris: African American Women in Paris between the Two World Wars (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2015); and Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 31.  “Madame Florence Cole-Talbert Returns,” New York Amsterdam News, 10. 32.  Caterina Jarboro, interview by James V. Hatch, February 29, 1972, Hatch-Billops Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. This interview was conducted decades after



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such a trip might have occurred, and I have not located any supporting evidence for Jarboro’s claim. Regardless of its veracity, though, Jarboro’s claim is revealing: it suggests her investment in exploring the role from the perspective of the Ethiopian people it purports to represent, rather than those of the European composer who created it and the Italian American director under whom she worked. 33.  Edward Ansara, The Fabulous Maestro: A Remembrance of Alfredo Salmaggi and His Legacy (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2001). 34.  On modernism, primitivism, and the display of the Black female body, see Mae Henderson, “Josephine Baker and La Revue Negre: From Ethnography to Performance,” Text and Performance Quarterly 23, no. 2 (2003); and Brown, Babylon Girls. 35.  Bledsoe is a remarkable and understudied figure. For a helpful assessment of his career, see Katie N. Johnson, “Brutus Jones’s Remains: The Case of Jules Bledsoe,” Eugene O’Neill Review 36, no. 1 (2015): 1–28. 36.  Poston, “Harlem Goes to Opera and Acclaims Its Own,” 1; A. White, “Jarboro Scores In ‘Aida,’” New Journal and Guide, July 29, 1933, 1; “Rises to Fame as Singer,” Chicago Defender, July 22, 1933, 1. 37.  Romeo Dougherty, “Story of ‘Aida,’” New York Amsterdam News, August 23, 1933, 7. 38.  See, for example, “Soprano Applauded at Debut as Aida,” New York Times, July 23, 1933, N2. 39.  “Aida without Makeup,” Time, July 31, 1933. 40.  “As Others See Us,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 17, 1932, 14. This comment refers to Jarboro’s 1931 performance of the role in Italy. 41.  Thornton, “Gotham Thunders Praise.” 42.  Eva Jessye, “Jarboro-Bledsoe Triumph in Aida,” New York Amsterdam News, July 26, 1933, 1. 43.  Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 4. Miller focuses primarily on popular music in the South, but the cultural shift he describes is applicable to opera and other musical forms as well. 44.  Eidsheim, “Marian Anderson and ‘Sonic Blackness,’” 653. 45.  “Soprano Applauded at Debut as Aida.” 46.  Thornton, “Gotham Thunders Praise”; “Soprano Applauded At Debut As Aida”; “Critic Says Jarboro Sings Like Claudio Muzio,” San Antonio Register, June 8, 1934, 1. 47.  Jarboro’s renaming is also an interesting reversal of the trend of Black opera singers being identified in relation to their White counterparts, most notably in the case of Sissieretta Jones, known as “Black Patti.” 48.  “‘God Sent Me Brown Song Bird,’ Says Italian Maestro,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 19, 1932, 16. 49.  Deal Moore, “Kathi Jarboro Gives Interview for the Afro,” Baltimore Afro-American,” December 2, 1933, 2; T. R. Poston, “Caterina Jarboro to Sing ‘Aida’ Saturday Evening,” New York Amsterdam News, July 19, 1933, 1. 50.  Poston, “Caterina Jarboro to Sing ‘Aida.’” 51.  Moore, “Kathi Jarboro Gives Interview.” 52.  This way of thinking is especially notable given that in other contexts, Aida was often associated with Egyptomania, morbidity, and death. Cruz, “Aida’s Flutes.” These critics’ connection of the opera to the recent African American past represents a strikingly creative reimagining of the opera’s relationship to history. 53.  Robert W. Carter, “The Drury Opera Company in Verdi’s ‘Aida,’” Colored American Magazine (August 1903): 596. 1913, the year of the premiere of The Star of Ethiopia, marked both the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the centennial of Verdi’s birth. In addition, around 1920, Du Bois penned notes for a short story titled “The Secret Singer,” about a “black girl . . . with a phenomenal voice” who “succeeds as Aida.” The story was apparently never written. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Secret Singer” [notes], W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. 54.  Edgar Rouzeau, “Jarboro Lauded by Whites in Company,” New York Amsterdam News, July 26, 1933, 1. 55.  Poston, “Harlem Goes to Opera.” 56.  Poston, “Caterina Jarboro to Sing ‘Aida.’” 57.  Jarboro and Schomburg were also personal friends; some of their correspondence can be found in the Arthur Alfonso Schomburg Papers, Boxes 5 and 8 (microfilm), Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. 58.  Schomburg Papers, Box 11, Folder 4 (microfilm). 59.  Fred Moten, “The Phonographic Mise-en-Scène,” Cambridge Opera Journal 16, no. 3 (2004): 278–279. 60.  Ibid., 272. 61.  Kun defines audiotopia as “the space within and produced by a musical element that offers the listener and/or the musician new maps for re-imagining the present social world,” and additionally as a space that is

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formative of the “audio-racial imagination.” Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 22–23. 62.  Maurice Dancer, “Caterina Jarboro Thrills in ‘Aida,’” Pittsburgh Courier, July 29, 1933, A6; Ralph Matthews, “Looking at the Stars,” Baltimore Afro-American, August 5, 1933, 18. 63.  Ralph Matthews, “Salmaggi Kisses Caterina before 12,000 Eyes,” Baltimore Afro-American, July 29, 1933, 10; “The Negro in Opera,” New York Amsterdam News, July 26, 1933, 6. 64.  Salem Tutt Whitney, “Timely Topics: Caterina Jarboro and Jules Bledsoe,” Chicago Defender, August 5, 1933, 5. 65.  This statement was made by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes when he introduced Anderson. See Raymond Arsenault, The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, The Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 159–160. 66.  Farah Jasmine Griffin identifies Anderson’s performance as one of several iconic moments, spanning the twentieth century, in which “the black woman’s voice can be called upon to heal a crisis in national unity as well as provoke one.” Griffin, “When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black Women’s Vocality,” in Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, ed. Robert O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 104. 67.  Jarboro would go on to perform Aida in France, Belgium, Latvia, Poland, and elsewhere. The quotation is from Jarboro’s interview with James Hatch, 1972. 68.  Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” July 31, 1946. Excerpts from Roosevelt’s column were reprinted in various Black newspapers; see “Opera Star,” Chicago Defender, August 31, 1946, 10; and “Racial Prejudice Spoils Our Enjoyment of Talent—Mrs. FDR,” Baltimore Afro-American, August 10, 1946, 6. 69.  Price has commented multiple times on what the role of Aida means to her, and her words serve as an important reminder that while the persistence of racialized casting reflects enduring structures of racial inequality within opera, the role concomitantly continues to be a source of great aesthetic and personal worth to individual singers. In an interview with Helena Matheopoulos, for instance, Price commented that “Aida says things about where I am as a woman and as a human being, about my life and the progress, or lack of, of millions of people at home in the States—things I could not have said as eloquently in other ways.” Leontyne Price, interview by Helena Matheopoulos, in Diva: Great Sopranos and Mezzos Discuss Their Art (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 163. 70.  Eidsheim, “Marian Anderson and ‘Sonic Blackness,’” 663. 71.  Controversies about race and Aida have persisted, especially as the opera has been adapted to settings outside the opera house. In 1952, a Broadway show called My Darlin’ Aida (a Civil War–era adaptation of Verdi’s opera set in Memphis, Tennessee) provoked an outcry among Black activists after its producers announced the casting of a White singer, Elaine Malbin, in the title role. In 1953, the first film version of the opera was released; it featured a nonsinging Sophia Loren in blackface makeup. Decades later, in 2000, Elton John and Tim Rice’s version of Aida premiered on Broadway with a Black performer, Heather Headley, as Aida. The production’s creators seem to have considered it an expectation that Aida should be played be a Black woman: in an interview, Tim Rice stated, “I think it would have been unnecessarily provocative to have cast a white girl in the role of Aida first time out.” But Rice was reluctant to comment more thoroughly on the work’s racial politics. “Obviously, the show makes the not wildly original point that the enslavement of one nation by another is on the whole not a good idea,” he noted. “We’re certainly not saying anything else in that department.” Kamal Al-Solaylee, “Playing the Race Card,” Toronto Globe and Mail, May 6, 2003.

Bibliography André, Naomi. Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018. André, Naomi, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor, eds. Blackness in Opera. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Ansara, Edward. The Fabulous Maestro: A Remembrance of Alfredo Salmaggi and His Legacy. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2001. Arsenault, Raymond. The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009.



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Bergeron, Katherine. “Verdi’s Egyptian Spectacle: On the Colonial Subject of ‘Aida.’” Cambridge Opera Journal 14, no. 1 (2002): 149–159. Brown, Jayna. Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Busch, Hans. Verdi’s Aida: The History of an Opera in Letters and Documents. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978. Cheatham, Wallace. “African-American Women Singers at the Metropolitan Opera before Leontyne Price.” Journal of Negro History 84, no. 2 (1999): 161–181. Clement, Catherine. Opera; or the Undoing of Women. Translated by Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Cruz, Gabriela. “Aida’s Flutes.” Cambridge Opera Journal 14, no. 1 (2002): 177–200. Cuney Hare, Maud. Negro Musicians and Their Music. 1936. Reprinted New York: Da Capo Press, 1974. Daughtry, Willia. “Sissieretta Jones: A Study of the Negro’s Contribution to Nineteenth Century American Concert and Theatrical Life.” PhD dissertation, Syracuse University, 1968. Della Seta, Fabrizio. “‘O cieli azzurri’: Exoticism and Dramatic Discourse in Aida.” Cambridge Opera Journal 3, no. 1 (1991): 49–62. Drummond, John. “Said and Aida: Culture, Imperialism, Egypt and Opera.” Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 10, no. 1 (2014): 1–12. Du Bois, W. E. B. Papers. Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Eidsheim, Nina Sun. “Marian Anderson and ‘Sonic Blackness’ in American Opera.” American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2011): 641–671. Fleetwood, Nicole. Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black Women’s Vocality.” In Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, edited by Robert O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, 102–125. Guarracino, Serena. “Verdi’s Aida across the Mediterranean (and Beyond),” California Italian Studies 1, no. 1 (2010): 1–18. Hamilton, David, ed. The Metropolitan Opera Encyclopedia: A Comprehensive Guide to the World of Opera. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Hatch-Billops Collection. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Henderson, Mae. “Josephine Baker and La Revue Negre: From Ethnography to Performance.” Text and Performance Quarterly 23, no. 2 (2003): 107–133. Jarboro, Caterina Papers. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Johnson, Katie N. “Brutus Jones’s Remains: The Case of Jules Bledsoe.” Eugene O’Neill Review 36, no. 1 (2015): 1–28. Kun, Josh. Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Lee, Maureen. Sissieretta Jones: “The Greatest Singer of Her Race.” Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012. Locke, Ralph. “Aida and Nine Readings of Empire.” In Fashions and Legacies of Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera, edited by Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Hilary Poriss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 152–175. Locke, Ralph. “Beyond the Exotic: How ‘Eastern’ is Aida?” In Art and Ideology in European Opera: Essays in Honour of Julian Rushton, edited by Rachel Cowgill, David Cooper, and Clive Brown. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2010, 264–280. Macy, Laura, ed. The Grove Book of Opera Singers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Matheopoulos, Helena. Diva: Great Sopranos and Mezzos Discuss Their Art. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991. McFarlane-Harris, Jennifer, and Christopher Gautier. “Nationalism, Racial Difference, and ‘Egyptian’ Meaning in Verdi’s Aida.” In Blackness in Opera, edited by Naomi André, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012, 55–77.

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“MetOpera Database.” The Metropolitan Opera Archives. http://archives.metoperafamily.org/archives/frame .htm. Miller, Karl Hagstrom. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Moten, Fred. “The Phonographic Mise-en-Scène.” Cambridge Opera Journal 16, no. 3 (2004): 269–281. Noonan, Ellen. The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess: Race, Culture, and America’s Most Famous Opera. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. “Performances.” Operabase. http://operabase.com. Price, Leontyne, Diane Dillon, and Leo Dillon. Aida. New York: Voyager Books, 1990. Robinson, Paul. “Is Aida an Orientalist Opera?” Cambridge Opera Journal 5, no. 2 (1994): 133–140. Said, Edward. Musical Elaborations. London: Vintage, 1991. Schomburg, Arthur Alfonso Papers. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Bricktop’s Paris: African American Women in Paris between the Two World Wars. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2015. Simonson, Mary. Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Small, Christopher. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998. Story, Rosalyn. And So I Sing: African-American Divas of Opera and Concert. New York: Warner Books, 1990. Stovall, Tyler. Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. Thurman, Kira. “A History of Black Musicians in Germany and Austria, 1870–1961: Race, Performance, and Reception.” PhD dissertation, University of Rochester, 2013.

7 • “I AM BASQUIAT” Tracing Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Alterity and Activism in Paint and Performance G E N E V I E V E H YAC I N T H E

Basquiat’s Black Atlantic Performativity as Royal and Vulnerable In his art, Jean-Michel Basquiat engages in the tracing of the spectrum nature of Black masculinity and its concomitant political ramifications in the arts, hip hop, and culture more broadly. He does so in his painting practice and in the fashioning of his persona, in a manner brought to the fore through readings of the 1981 Untitled (Fallen Angel) and 1983 Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart) works. Contemporary hip hop artists often structure their identity formation to include a nod to African regality, particularly the regality of kings, as the late Pimp C did: “They don’t understand, is because we really from Africa, and that’s where all this stuff comes from. And we originated from kings, you know what I’m saying?”1 These constructions of African masculinity after the African king are nuanced in Basquiat’s work, in reference to and gesture of unity within the Black Atlantic milieu. “Kingship” is a metaphorical thread throughout this essay, highlighting Basquiat’s construction of a sophisticated Black masculinity—royal and vulnerable—as created and received in its time (1980s) that influences contemporary artists of today to varying degrees. Basquiat’s painting Untitled (Fallen Angel) is compared to a Benin Kingdom (Edo) presentation of masculine royalty to set the foundation of my consideration, thus imagining a “type of king” with whom Basquiat and Pimp C may have found brotherhood. In addition to Black Atlantic royalty, Basquiat alludes to critical topics including Black male artistic genius, alternative sexual habitus, and gender construction; Black appropriation— recontextualization—of European painting; and demonstrated prescience regarding the critical landscape of today’s pushback against the “Whitelash” 2 and heteronormative tenure of the current political landscape of the United States in the post-Obama era. My sense of the Black Atlantic is in part informed by Paul Gilroy’s thesis. Gilroy suggests that the Black Atlantic is a dynamic, referencing the “circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artifacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs [as well as conceptual and ephemeral art forms like spoken word, music, and dance]”3 by Black people living around the Atlantic. Black Atlantic people have directly or indirectly (through ancestry) experienced the Middle Passage, a forced crossing of the Atlantic through the modern slave trade (sixteenth–nineteenth centuries) or through contemporary immigration dynamics. 105

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Gilroy argues that among members of this cultural milieu, “global, coalitional politics in which anti-imperialism and anti-racism might be seen to interact if not to fuse.”4 In particular, I am interested in the formative ways that Basquiat’s art and activism enable a practice for realizing/tracing Black alterity with regard to gender expression. I explore this by considering Basquiat’s performative in relation to the increasingly liminal ground of the performance of hip hop masculinity by examining examples from hip hop artists and those influenced by hip hop culture yet working in varying media. I muse Basquiat’s artistry and activism of the 1980s to differing degrees in relation to the performatives and perspectives of such artists and writers (some of Basquiat’s time and others of the contemporary moment), including Shenge Ka Pharaoh, Michael Stewart, Greg Tate, Kanye West, Kehinde Wiley, Young Thug, and JAY-Z. 5 Basquiat’s Untitled (Fallen Angel) is an embattled body that, despite its conflicts, appears majestic (Figure 7.1). At 66 × 78 inches, the scale of Basquiat’s Untitled (Fallen Angel) is grand, and its arm span impressive. While heroic in stature, the figure itself is painted without fanfare in acrylic and oil stick, rather than the oil paint medium that is typically reserved for paintings of the venerable. Basquiat’s figure of venerability is rife with tensions. The body he paints is replete with interplays of opacities and transparencies that we might expect of a divine or otherworldly being.6 Its wings seem like a polychromatic take on the accumulative design formats of African king pageantry similarly styled around dynamics of opacity and transparency, or what Mary H. Nooter refers to as the coaction of concealment and revelation integral to West African presentations of royalty and divinity.7 Basquiat’s figure of auspiciousness is enveloped within a profusion of colors, textures, and gestural marks that has a formal semblance with the presentation of the Edo king of the Benin Empire who formerly reigned in what would be considered today’s southwest Nigeria. Like the figure of Untitled (Fallen Angel), the Edo king, mounted upon an ornately costumed horse, appears enveloped in his own right by members of his court as a gesture of protection as well as an expression of might (Figure 7.2). Though “painted in brass monochromy” the sense of color and texture worn by the Edo king’s court complements and highlights his position of nobility, itself made manifest by the dynamism of his attire and accouterments, which include an ornate textile skirt, cowrie shells and coral, sophisticated beadwork, and an impressive crown. Like Basquiat’s figure, the king has a sense of power, yet vulnerability, suggested by the protective detail that surrounds him, as well as his crown; impressive as it may be, its collar adds mystique to the king’s appearance as it covers and protects his mouth, perhaps evoking connection to the thoughts and words of divinity while simultaneously shielding him from the miswords and misdeeds of others. Like Basquiat’s Untitled (Fallen Angel), the Edo king hovers between worlds as indicated by his connection to the men of his court as well as the floating spirits standing guard as they flank him to the left and right in the upper realms of the image plane. The arabesques Basquiat makes in polychromy are etched into the Edo brass plate as delicate floral designs and symbols of majesty. Critics from Robert Farris Thompson (1985, 2014)8 to Franklin Sirmans (2014)9 have discussed “Africanness” in the work of Basquiat. Like a diviner paying respect to the spirits, with the Untitled (Fallen Angel) and Edo king comparison opening, I suggest that Basquiat’s work structurally educes “Africanness,” particularly as reworked in the Black Atlantic, as a means of paying respect to African art, processes, constructions of masculinity and regality, and broader modes of being. Sirmans opens his essay on Basquiat with a similar obeisance by quoting writer Edwidge Danticat, who asserted, “Haiti, like Puerto Rico, and the continent of Africa, was



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Figure 7.1. Jean Michel Basquiat. Untitled (Fallen Angel). 1981 © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 168 × 197.5 cm. Licensed by Artestar, New York.

obviously both in Basquiat’s consciousness and in his DNA.”10 Unmistakably, Basquiat’s Untitled (Fallen Angel) pays respect to African artistry and kingship as exemplified by its resonance with the presentation of the king in the Edo context. This dynamic of Black Atlantic respect is a constant yet variable undercurrent and implication within my analysis. The late hip hop lyricist Pimp C references Africa in the first verse of JAY-Z’s hit “F**kWithMeYouKnowIGotIt” with a similar spirit. “Africanness” translated for example from the Edo king presentation into Black Atlantic aesthetics by Basquiat’s paintbrush, or as sung by Pimp C, evinces what Thompson called in reference to Basquiat’s paintings and persona “Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets.”11 Thompson did so to emphasize an African aesthetic of eminence existing in the work of Black Atlantic artists, primarily male at the time of his writing, who, like Basquiat, work with art world or otherwise “lofty” recognition in tandem with an allegiance to a sense of the populist. Keeping in mind the regality and heraldry of African performance underscored by Thompson’s observations and demonstrated by the Edo king and both Basquiat’s painted and Pimp C’s sung resonance with him, I now consider other tendrils that Basquiat weaves into his performative matrix, here a visual alterity that signifies Black masculine alternative sexual and

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Figure 7.2. Equestrian Oba and Attendants. 1550–1680. Brass. 19 7/16 × 16 1/2 × 4 1/2 in. Michael C. Rocke-

feller Memorial Collection, Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1965 (1978.412.309). Metropolitan Museum of Art.

gender construction as political agency. Basquiat’s legacy of alterity is established not only through his own art but also across the performances and writings of artists and critics, like Greg Tate, among others, who claim at the very least, a brotherhood with Basquiat.12 And, in its full expression, these artists, like Kanye West and JAY-Z, declare that they are Basquiat.13 But are they, really? What parts of Basquiat are they, and do they embrace those “dark shadows” that may actually threaten their perceptions of African royalty, stable Black masculinity, downness, or authentic homeboy cosmopolitanism, as Manthia Diawara might put it?14



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I delve into and expand the issues I preview here in this opening section in the following section—“Kings and Queens, Gods and Goddesses”—which compares and contrasts Basquiat’s Untitled (Fallen Angel) with Jacopo Tintoretto’s The Origin of the Milky Way (c. 1575) to demonstrate Basquiat’s gender blurring between mythological figures of the Italian Late Renaissance and what we might consider one of his Black Atlantic self-portraits. I also consider Basquiat’s playing fast and loose with fixed gender construction and the appropriation of narrative and techniques of “the Old Masters” in relation to the painting strategies of the contemporary artist Kehinde Wiley. Finally, I allude to how hip hop artists authenticate their masculinity by identifying with a cosmopolitanism, which includes a nod to Italian symbols and references, that coexists with African authenticating statements. The third section, “Limiting the Crown,” is a reflection upon how the spectral nature of masculinity that Basquiat paints in Untitled (Fallen Angel) is eschewed by critics endeavoring to “claim” Basquiat as an artistic “royal”—an artistic genius who also has “street credibility” as part of a Black “heteronormative” brotherhood.15 In the fourth section, “A King Is Dead,” I analyze Basquiat’s expressed brotherhood with the LBGTQ artist Michael Stewart using Basquiat’s Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart). The work is both a memorial to Stewart and through a presentist lens reads as one to those Black people of various gender identities brought to the fore by the Black Lives Matter movement of the recent era. I explore how contemporary hip hop artists Kanye West, Young Thug, and JAY-Z build off of Basquiat’s involvement with haute couture fashion houses in the fifth section, “Sovereign Attire and Attitude.” Basquiat’s fashion iconicity provides a new freedom for these artists, but what they do with it in regard to the spectrum of Black male gender expression is critical to both the contemporary reception and a rethinking of the history of Basquiat’s performatives in relation to his painting and persona.

Kings and Queens, Gods and Goddesses: Basquiat’s Untitled (Fallen Angel) and Gender Fluidity In deep contrast to the liminal bodies we tend to associate with forms of royalty and divinity, the question of whether Basquiat’s Untitled (Fallen Angel) can actually take flight is debatable. As the title implies, he seems to have hit the ground, though his visuality betrays him. The angel’s flat feet are positioned wide to intimate grounding, but there is no ground. There is only blue sky under the feet, the same sky that surrounds the body. Basquiat appropriates and redeploys the techniques of the Italian masters he studied, like Jacopo Tintoretto, whose swirling composition of The Origin of the Milky Way (c. 1575)16 (Figure 7.3) appears reformatted within a setting with more heightened liminal impact as presented in Untitled (Fallen Angel). Basquiat adapts the characteristic rose, blue, white, and gold color scheme of the Italian Late Renaissance, found in The Origin of the Milky Way, into the palette of Untitled (Fallen Angel) but offsets the smoothness inherent in the oil medium through his use of the less refined and, at the same time, more liberating oil stick and acrylic. Tintoretto’s ethereal hues reflecting the light sonorous glide of Italian Renaissance music is updated by Basquiat into the swarthy heterogeneous sonic pulse of jazz and beatbox, with their hardcore energies as well as the fluid, heterogeneous nature of his construction of masculinity. Despite the grace of Tintoretto’s work, the artist is illustrating a tension-filled violent moment, and one perceives a subtle registration of that in his insertion of a menacing interplay

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Figure 7.3. Jacopo Tintoretto. The Origin of the Milky Way. 1575. Oil on canvas, 149.4 × 168 cm. National Gallery of London.

between lights and darks in the bottom left of the picture plane, for instance, where one innocent putto is struggling to fly upward, endeavoring to free itself from the g-forces of the earth below. Similarly, on the right side of the picture plane, a cupid with its bow at the ready seems to have its right arm bounded by the foot of a peacock. A putto spinning into the scene from the upper-right holds a net on the verge of being entangled by a shadowy eagle, a symbol of the god Jupiter, who clutches the figure Hercules in its talons. This angel’s wings share the smoky pallor of the eagle, conjoining them, potentially pointing to the polarity of dominance and innocence. Jupiter is an omnipotent force in a position of conflict, endeavoring to make his son a legitimate god. “Hov just landed in Rome, nigga. All hail, Caesar’s home, niggas.”17 Playing off of hip hop references to a Black homeboy cosmopolitanism signified in part by world travel, particularly to Italy, as JAY-Z raps in “F**kWithMeYouKnowIGotIt” (2013),18 as well as hip hop artists’ interest in Italy vis-à-vis oft-quoted Mafioso references in hip hop songs, I will insert all of the Roman names for the Greek mythological figures referenced in the following excerpt of art historian Erna Mandowsky’s description of The Origin of the Milky Way in an article she wrote for



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The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs in 1938.19 The excerpt, with the Italian name substitutions, will help emphasize Basquiat’s Untitled (Fallen Angel) in a hip hop–spun Italian context. Mandowsky writes: Zeus [Jupiter] wished to procure for the son [Hercules] born to him by the mortal Alcmene [Alcmena], and whom Hera [Juno] was persecuting, the immortality enjoyed by the legitimate sons of the gods. He therefore held the boy to the breast of the sleeping Hera [Juno] and thus made her—against her will—his divine mother by adoption. The vigorous child drank so deep of the food of immortality that the milk was scattered on all sides; the drops which fell on the vault of heaven became the Milky Way; where they fell on the earth the lily sprang up. . . . At first sight it would seem as if Tintoretto’s representation of the legend were incomplete. We see to-day in the picture only Zeus [Jupiter], Heracles [Hercules], Hera [Juno], and the Milky Way; the lilies are not there. . . . Nature is born up by the clouds, while below is the fruitful earth—a most beautiful work by Tintoretto. 20

Basquiat compresses the edginess and action of the myth of the Milky Way’s formation into one central figure that fully occupies the picture plane of his painting. The tension registered by Tintoretto in various bodies and positions is pressurized into Basquiat’s Untitled (Fallen Angel). Basquiat borders on achieving a one-to-one conferment between the two paintings. I take Untitled (Fallen Angel) as a meta-self-portrait where Basquiat has made himself the angel, a compilation of Juno, Jupiter, and baby Hercules, along with the other figures—putti and birds—included by Tintoretto to point to Jupiter and Juno’s godliness. Basquiat as angel is positioned where Juno would be, and this idea is underscored by the close evocation of her gesture and positioning on her sacred bed. The left wing of Untitled (Fallen Angel) sweeps slightly upward at a diagonal, as Hera’s outstretched hand does on the Tintoretto canvas. At the same time, Basquiat’s Fallen Angel’s right hand sweeps back behind the body to the right, as Juno balances herself, startled by Jupiter’s arrival and the simultaneous situation of Hercules’s suckling at her breast. Juno’s back, shoulder, and arm brush up against an ornamental backdrop of gold drapery and an arrangement of white sheets and a pillow, whose color scheme matches Basquiat’s gold and white layering in the complementary area of his painting. A collision of figures and their concomitant energies—Jupiter with Hercules in his arms, a putto swirling under Jupiter, and Jupiter’s eagle in the shadows—blow in from the upperright of Tintoretto’s picture plane, colliding in the area of where the left wing of Basquiat’s Fallen Angel would be located (our right). Basquiat’s left wing possesses all of the colors and textures represented by those in Tintoretto’s painting. The Fallen Angel’s wing is a nest made by Jupiter’s rose robe, the black of the eagle’s wings, and the gold of the stars and the gold-tinted complexions of Jupiter and Cupid. The texture of Jupiter’s flowing robes intermingles with the coarse feathers of the eagle into a heap, forming Basquiat’s wings. Under the Fallen Angel’s left wing, Basquiat has painted a brown shadow where Tintoretto painted the earth just over which another putto hovers, the one with the bow who seems to be ensnared by a peacock. The red tie of that putto is perhaps evoked by the red flourish in oil stick Basquiat places in the corresponding section of his painting. Where Jupiter, wrapped in flowing rose drapery, is in the Tintoretto painting, Basquiat has swapped out a tight rendering of the god for a signification of him created as a red crown. We know this is Basquiat’s signature for kings. As he once told critic Henry Geldzahler, the subject of his work is “Royalty, heroism, and the streets.”21 Tintoretto’s backdrop of whimsical blue

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sky and white clouds is thickened and smudged in Basquiat’s hands. Basquiat also makes Tintoretto’s resplendent stars and trails into staccato marks, some of them as plays on graffiti tags, as in the upper-right plane of Untitled (Fallen Angel). In the central section of the painting, one sees how Basquiat creates a halo of white into a crown of black and red thorns where Tintoretto placed a graceful gesture of glowing gold stars emanating from Juno’s balletic hand. As Basquiat did before him, Kehinde Wiley appropriates the way the Old Masters painted. Wiley’s strategy of appropriation results in portraits of heraldry featuring youthful Black men inserted where Europeans were commonly positioned. Simultaneously, Wiley’s portraits point to Black masculinity as a fluid gender construction where gayness is positioned centrally through the luscious renderings of Black musculature, skin tones, and, at times, the inclusion of significations such as sperm intermixed within “Old World” design patterns serving as portrait backdrops. “His portraits initially depicted African-American men against rich textile or wallpaper backgrounds whose patterns he has likened to abstractions of sperm. . . . The substitution of black for white faces and low for high culture created all kinds of mind-bending twists and turns, especially since Mr. Wiley, who is gay, often brought out the homoeroticism implicit in much European portraiture and used it to undercut the machismo bluster of his subjects.”22 My discussion of Untitled (Fallen Angel) in relation to Tintoretto’s The Origin of the Milky Way points to the fact that Basquiat was a (perhaps cryptic) precedent to Wiley; he was also adept at appropriating and remaking scenes previously rendered by European masters. Unlike Wiley, however, Basquiat’s appropriation is more veiled and imbued with tension and brokenness, where Wiley’s paintings and the sitters depicted are resplendent and slick. The sexual alterity of Wiley’s figures is surfaced in bling and, as such, does not easily reveal signs of conflict.23 Bathing the men of his portraits with light, Wiley “presents viewers with images of young black men bathed in brilliant light that highlights their facial features, literally making their skin shine,”24 in a manner that Krista Thompson asserts evokes the visual gloss of hip hop video director Hype Williams’s videos.25 In this way, Wiley’s figures, irrespective of their possible sexual alterity, reflect the rapper Fabolous’s hook “I Shine, You Shine.” 26 If Wiley’s references to Black male sexual alterity are not obvious to the viewer, the artist makes it clear in his statements. He comments, “There is a certain desire in my work to tie the urban street and the way it’s been depicted with elements that are not necessarily coded as masculine,”27 and it is not atypical for Wiley to give his portraits of Black masculine shine female names. For example, his St. Lucy is a strapping young Black man wearing a Gorilla Unit T-shirt. Wiley’s paintings may be conceptually more like Basquiat’s than they appear at first blush. The sheen of Wiley’s resplendent and smoothly operating surfaces at times blinds critics to the complexities of Black male alterity. Critics have, not without controversy, suggested that Wiley’s process for procuring models for his paintings may have the sensibility of a pick-up. One derisively referred to it as a “casting-couch method.”28 During the early 2000s, while in residence at the Studio Museum of Harlem, Wiley would ask men he encountered on the street if they would like to model for his paintings. Critic Jessica Dawson uses Wiley’s statements, in part, to support her implication that Wiley is engaging in a dynamic of “cruising” by using this method of model solicitation, in which she perceives that he is abusing his position of privilege as an elite artist to ensnare beautiful young Black men. Wiley states, “When I’m approaching these guys, there’s a presupposed engagement. . . . I don’t ask people what their sexualities are, but there’s a sense in which male beauty is being negotiated.” 29 Sarah Lewis remarks that “in [Wiley’s] Investiture of Bishop Harold as the Duke of Franconia No. 2 (2004), after Ingres, the confident figure is accompanied by floating yellow roses, and could as well be the recipient as



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the generator of the sperm teeming around him. . . . And for all of the machismo that Wiley’s figures exude, he frequently labels them with female names.”30 In Untitled (Fallen Angel), Basquiat’s formal appropriation, like his references to gender fluidity, can be considered closeted. Basquiat places male genitalia where Juno’s pudendum exists in Tintoretto’s painting as his means of encoding gender fluidity and/or sexual alterity. Basquiat is the female goddess Juno. The white sprays of paint that emanate from the edges of his torso and wings are Wiley’s sperm florations, the white drapery upon which Juno’s body is precariously reclining as she is startled from sleep and, at the same time, Juno’s milk spraying out to form the Milky Way. The “fall” of Basquiat’s Fallen Angel encapsulates the coming together of various tendrils of Black masculine alterities into one painted form: Basquiat is mortal and immortal, earthly and celestial, male and female, king and queen. This is his authentic self, which transcends the “permissible” and “authentic” limits of Black masculinity. This is Basquiat, expansive, Untitled, and fallen.

Limiting the Crown: The Tensions of “Brothering” Basquiat Writing relatively soon after Basquiat’s death, Greg Tate legitimizes Basquiat’s Black masculinity and position as “a brother” with a misogynistic scene from the 1973 Black action film Superfly, directed by Gordon Parks. Tate remarks that he and a friend attended a party at Basquiat’s loft in 1984, semireluctantly, because “the man was surrounded by white people.” Tate goes on to note: Our only deep moment of brotherly exchange coming was when I found myself alone in his [Basquiat’s] study watching the bubble bathtub sex scenes from Superfly playing on his VCR. . . . Ron O’Neal smackin’ Sheila Fraser on the Basquiat videodrome. His absence was his presence, as my presences, and other brothers like me and Vernon, was the absence in his life. And whether we could have saved him is something we’ll never know. Arthur Jafa proposes a Black Asylum Initiative, which would involve kidnapping and healing black geniuses in times of crisis, suicidal doubt, despondency, self-destruction. It’s a thought whose time may never come. 31

By “brothers like me and Vernon,” we can assume that Tate means heterosexual men who are into dominating Black women by “smackin’” them in the bathtub. While we understand that smackin’ means “kissing,” the term also evokes violence, and was not the only synonym that Tate could have employed. In fact, Basquiat was in the presence of “other brothers.” One of Basquiat’s most loyal assistants, originally from Barbados, Shenge Ka Pharaoh, would have been at the party Tate attended, since he began working with Basquiat in 1983. 32 Basquiat confided in Pharaoh. Descriptions of him suggest that he was not “hard” like Superfly—the character played by Ron O’Neill also actually did not seem so very “thug,” given his shoulder-length perm and light complexion, which made him appear as an older brother to Prince on the unicorn on the back cover of his album Prince (1979). 33 Shenge Ka Pharaoh was described with an emasculating tinge by Robert Farris Thompson as “a personable young black man in gentle dreadlocks named Shenge, an assistant in charge of general calm and cool,”34 and with more exoticism by Phoebe Hoban: “Basquiat’s current assistant, Shenge Ka Pharaoh . . . lived in the basement, a cramped space which nonetheless had its own Jacuzzi. Shenge was a gentle dreadlocked painter who partied

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almost as hard as Basquiat, and spoke in cryptic, philosophical soundbites. His Rasta mannerisms were amusing, given that his real name was Selwyn O’Brien.”35 Jennifer Clement remarks on Pharaoh’s maternal characteristics, noting that while he was not gay, he possessed a “feminine maternal side. . . . He was so gentle.”36 Basquiat was also in the presence of Fred Braithwaite, who introduced the artist to the burgeoning visual and sonic arts scene of Harlem and the South Bronx. Franklin Sirmans notes that Braithwaite familiarized Basquiat with the “new culture flowering uptown, in the streets of Harlem and in the basements of the South Bronx: deejaying, emceeing, creating graffiti, and break dancing—the formative/primordial elements of hip-hop.”37 Sirmans quotes Brathwaite as noting that “the scene downtown . . . was pretty much all white except for me, Jean-Michel, and a few other people.”38 In addition, Sirmans writes that “Braithwaite introduces Basquiat to uptown graffiti and rap artists, including Lee Quiñones, Toxic, A-One, and Rammellzee, a graffiti artist and deejay with whom Basquiat soon formed a confrontational, though valuable, friendship.”39 According to Suzanne Mallouk, “Rammellzee often told Jean-Michel that he now had a responsibility to people of color. He brought him to meetings of the Five Percent Nation. At first, Jean-Michel seemed indifferent to this idea.”40 My point is that Tate’s imagined Black masculine brotherhood with Basquiat is rightly about an acknowledgment of genius but, at the same time, is limited more generally with respect to what connotes a Black masculine man. Tate, in this specific article and specific reference to Basquiat, links Black brotherhood and masculinity to heterosexual aggression toward Black women. Even if “with bubbles,” it is an imagined Black female conquest and, if screened, all the better for Black male bonding. If, as Braithwaite notes, he and Basquiat were among only a handful of Black artists in the downtown art scene during the 1980s, then Basquiat does the work of representing in his paintings. By rendering visually embattled Black male bodies in his work with little exception, Basquiat is metaphorically creating Black male presence in paint to accompany him during those instances of working and exhibiting in the White arenas of the contemporary art world—at blue chip art galleries like Mary Boone, Annina Nosei, Bruno Bischofberger, Gagosian—when he experienced the most palpable Black fraternal absence. In relation to my efforts to bring attention to the spectral nature of Basquiat’s Black masculinity, I suggest that Tate’s positioning of Basquiat as being possessive of a Ron O’Neill Superfly affinity may be more aptly recast as a Supa Fly designation in the gender-fluid references offered by Missy Elliot in her song “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” and the 1997 album Supa Dupa Fly:41 “Me I’m supa fly (uh-huh). Supa dupa fly (uh-huh). Supa dupa fly!”42 Appearing in The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly) video wearing various pants ensembles, the visual hook is a return to Elliot and four men dressed in orange coveralls, all, including Elliot, with closely cropped hair. They dance a laconic and extended adaptation of “the running man,” on a stage flooded with sherbet oranges, yellows, and pinks. Elliot’s appearance in these sequences is blended with that of her male colleagues, resonating with a verse where she raps that she and her male collaborator, Timbaland, are “so tight, that . . . [they] get their styles tangled.”43 In other portions of the video, we encounter Elliot alone in the shot, dressed in shapeless, androgynous cover-ups. The tempo of her movement feels like loitering. She sometimes mugs at and at other times macks to the camera, as if trying to attract a hook-up. In the video, these scenes are often in a call and response to others, depicting dancing shots of singles or trios of women, mostly wearing a sporty look and appearing as the object of Elliot’s advances. Elliot riffs off of the Superfly stereotype in her video by enacting a laid-back and cool Black masculine style. In Supa Dupa Fly, Elliott invokes precisely the expansive (all-encompassing) nature



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of Basquiat’s Untitled (Fallen Angel) legacy postflight, all while deftly allowing us to rethink Tate’s positioning of Basquiat. Maithreyi Krishnaraj reminds us that gender is an inherently variable social construction ironically grounded in socially determined norms claiming to reflect differences between men and women dictated preeminently by physiology. She writes, “The duality of male–female is not a mutually exclusive, purely logical category . . . except insofar as the purely physiological aspects of reproduction are concerned.”44 Gender is a performative dynamic, inherently fluid and deployed by an individual in response to a mutable sociocultural context. Gill Perry submits that performativity suggests an in-process and ongoing exchange between an artist or individual and his or her audience or public: Theories of the performative tend to identify meaning in the active engagements—the shifting feelings, desires, perceptions, pleasures and apprehensions—that are exchanged between performer and viewer. Such theories emphasize the intersubjective character of these activities, arguing that the identity of the protagonists is continually being negotiated and interpreted through the artistic process. The performative is thus understood as a process rather than as an “act” with a final goal.45

A King Is Dead: Basquiat’s Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart) as a Memorial to Michael Stewart and . . . “It could have been me! It could have been me!”46 That is the lamentation of Basquiat upon hearing about the murder of his friend, the painter and graffiti artist Michael Stewart, who died after being beaten by the members of the New York Police Department in September 1983. A police spokesman said Stewart was seen scrawling graffiti on the wall of an IND subway station at the corner of First Avenue and Fourteenth Street at 3 a.m. on September 15. According to the arresting officers, he became violent, struggled with the officers, had to be subdued, and then lapsed into a coma as he was being taken to Bellevue for psychiatric observation. He arrived at the hospital in handcuffs with his legs bound with tape. . . . Among the charges filed against him were resisting arrest and unlawful possession of marijuana.47

The police alleged that Stewart was writing graffiti, yet no graffiti or markers were found. The officer claims that Stewart resisted arrest. The arresting officer called for a backup unit. Five cops arrived. An attorney for the family, Louis Clayton Jones, described Michael Stewart as “a retiring and almost docile 135-lb. young artist.” He said Stewart had been on his way home, in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn, where he lived with his mother, a retired teacher, and his father, a Transit Authority maintenance worker. Michael Stewart was described by Jennifer Clement as a gentle being. “He has never felt the whack of a hand to the back of his neck. He has never felt a punch to the side of his face. He has never known his skeleton. . . . Michael Stewart is a shy, light-skinned black man. He comes from a very nice middle-class Baptist family in Brooklyn. . . . I’ll never forget how sweet and kind Michael Stewart was. He was gentle and quiet.”48 Isaac Jackson, a Black gay writer, forges a sense of brotherhood with Stewart in his memorial “Michael Stewart Is Dead.” Like Basquiat, he laments:

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/it could have been me. I waz living on the lower east side/a few blocks from the pyramid/when I first noticed him/ picking up empty beer glasses/pushing thru the mixed crowd/gays/lesbians/straights/ bridge & tunnel crowd/shoulder to shoulder w/ east village artists/thin dreads hanging into his eyes/I often commented to friends I might consider trimming my dreads like his/ long in front/short on the sides/like the black guy in the Thompson Twins/“Hush my baby . . . don’t you cry . . . we have one weapon in our defense/silence”/49

In Jackson’s ode to Stewart, José Esteban Muñoz would consider the use of silence to be a weapon—one of many strategies adopted by gay men to survive. Muñoz would say that these strategies are employed by men of color who may have a spectral sexual identity. These men may not be gay but embrace notions of dandyism or effeminacy, as he suggests is the case for Basquiat. Muñoz poignantly comments: The survival of children who are both queerly and racially identified is nothing short of staggering. The obstacles and assaults that pressure and fracture such young lives are as brutally physical as a police billy club or the fists of a homophobic thug and as insidiously disembodied as homophobic rhetoric in a rap song. . . . I understand the strategies and rituals that allow survival in such hostile cultural waters. 50

In his 1983 painting Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart), Basquiat conjures silence through the use of a grainy white backdrop and two striking black forms (Figure 7.4). One form, a depiction of Stewart’s body, is rendered as a specter; the other, its shadow on the ground. The shape of the body-doubling technique signifies Stewart’s physical collapse, while the two black, corporeal spaces provide entry points into a deeper sense of calm. These spaces function as an escape into the recessions behind the ashen silence of Basquiat’s white palette. They are a means of imagining ourselves as Stewart—if we can muster the courage—and/or escaping from the ineffable violence that befell him, in order to protect our sensibilities. Basquiat incorporates silence and retreat as necessary tactics of survival, in the Muñoz-described sense, perhaps to endow himself with the strength required to create his memorial to Stewart. In Stewart, Basquiat recognizes himself: endangered painter and tagger, mover within and between the disparate worlds of New York created by racial and gender identity discrimination, possessor of a contested Black masculinity. For this reason, both Stewart and Basquiat are vulnerable to the blows of the police and, potentially, of some of their brothers, owner[s] of “the fists of a homophobic thug,” who spit rhymes of “homophobic rhetoric.”51 Basquiat actualizes the disquieting spin on the silence of the painting through his rendering of two police officers as automatons in blue. Lacking fully developed features or limbs, they break the silence with no words of their own but rather with their bared teeth, predatory eyes, and savagely poised batons, all sanctioned by the most steady feature of their appearance—the yellow badges that signify their authorization to beat Stewart into a blackout.



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Figure 7.4. Jean-Michel Basquiat. Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart). 1983 © Estate of Jean-­M ichel

Basquiat. Oil, oil stick, and acrylic on canvas, 66 × 60 in. Licensed by Artestar, New York.

Basquiat’s use of what Muñoz might refer to as gay Black masculine tactics of survival facilitates his ability to memorialize a Black life lost that, as Erik Nielson notes, has yet to be acknowledged in a hip hop song (a nod to a certain, particularly masculine construction of Black authenticity). At the same time, as noted, Basquiat uses this silence as a way for us to both empathize with Stewart and protect ourselves from the shock of his end. The ability to deal with the inexplicable is a hurdle in the way of memorializing the many Black lives lost, including the life of Stewart. His death occurred some thirty years before the Black lesbian activists Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza joined Opal Tometi to form #BlackLivesMatter (BLM). In part, this movement began as a response to what can only be called socially prescribed and institutionally permissible killings. Memorializing the lost life of a Black man like Stewart or Basquiat through a compromised “downness,” stemming from a complex display of gender, is in the spirit of the BLM movement. An editorial entitled “11 Major Misconceptions about the Black Lives Matter Movement,” which can be found on the organization’s website, asserts that the organization is committed to LGBTQ lives. The piece notes that to underscore this position, the BLM movement selected Elle Hearns as the opening presenter at its 2015 national convention. As stated in “11 Major Misconceptions about the Black Lives Matter Movement” (author not noted),

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Hearns is “a trans Black woman organizer from Ohio. That she was collectively chosen to open the proceedings was a deliberate choice to center both women and queer and trans people as movement leaders. Not only does the Movement for Black Lives embrace queer and trans black people, but it has been at the forefront of efforts to highlight our national epidemic of murders of trans women of color.”52 Basquiat in Defacement is not alone in addressing the hurdle of ineffability intrinsic to Black memorials, and particularized for Stewart, but in this is joined by Martha S. Jones. Writing in 2014, Jones remarks that she was reluctant to open the internalized wounds of her memory by revisiting the Stewart murder. But the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson some thirty years later compelled her to testify about Stewart to a new generation. Reflecting on her journey to Brown’s memorial, Jones divulged: Before arriving in Ferguson, I had never retold Stewart’s story, or my own. I’d hoped to spare the next generation. Still, Stewart’s killing has never left me. It indelibly marked my soul and informs how I move through everyday life: wary, guarded, even afraid, and believing that our bodies are the front lines in a contest over race, rights, and who counts for what . . . from Michael Stewart to Michael Brown. It was time they knew what I cannot forget. 53

Dozens of artists—including Public Enemy, Dead Prez, Jasiri X, and The Game and Cassidy—released tracks decrying the murders of Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, and Trayvon Martin, keeping their memories alive. “Now, as we approach the thirtieth anniversary of Michael Stewart’s death, perhaps it’s time for a couple of tracks in his honor, too. I’m sure his mother would appreciate it,” said Erik Nielson. 54

Sovereign Attire and Attitude Basquiat modeled for the Paris fashion house Comme des Garçons, appearing in its runway shows in 1987 wearing pantsuits and masculine Mary Jane shoes. Basquiat’s presence as a European haute couture model set a precedent. This can be seen in the designs of Kanye West, who experiments with new cuts and styles that are perhaps more readily embraced by European metrosexuals than Black American male hip hop consumers in the 2000s. West contends that he is responsible for the dissemination of “the skinny jean” among fashion-conscious men of every ilk, making it an acceptable mode of clothing for fashion-conscious European men and the Black macho male alike. West—rightly so, I think, following Basquiat’s lead—observes his influence over the fashion styles of contemporary hip hop artists like Wiz Khalifa, noted for his “cool pants.” Emma Spedding recounts that West “has previously taken credit for . . . leather jogging pants. [West asserted,] ‘We brought the leather jogging pants six years ago to Fendi, and they said no. How many mother******* you done seen with a jogging pant?’”55 Enter Jeffery Lamar Williams, aka Young Thug. While he does not identify as gay, Young Thug deploys a Black masculinity that, from the perspective of fashion, is expansive and embraces what might be considered feminine aesthetics. In the video for his song “Check,” Young Thug reflects all the standard criteria for Black masculine “downness” in hip hop contexts. These include gold teeth and abundant bling reflecting off his body. This projection of Thug opulence might be destabilized to some extent by his hair; however, the statement Young Thug makes with his dyed blond dreadlocks pulled back into a short ponytail is not enough



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to cast a shadow upon his Black masculine legitimacy. “In my world, you can be a gangsta with a dress or you can be a gangsta with baggy pants. I feel like there’s no such thing as gender.”56 At the same time, he includes props and cues that point to the Black masculine hip hop comfort zone—from manipulating large piles of currency with one hand to gesturing with a red bandana signifying the Bloods with another. At some point in the video, he is joined by his brothers, many of whom bond with him by swaying large bottles of alcohol to-and-fro to the beat. Svelte, with a narrow face, wearing low skinny jeans that show the top of his underwear, Young Thug comes off as both thuggish and soft. The cracks in his deployment of an expected hip hop gender performative widen when the object of his affection in the Check video seems to be a young woman who looks as thug as he does, maybe more so. No Lil’ Kim, but more like Missy in “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” Young Thug’s girl wears a Bloods bandana and little makeup, and uses hard expressions as she speaks to Young Thug on the telephone. With his Black hip hop masculine authenticity established, Young Thug is free to be freer. As Ashley Haines notes, Young Thug’s “decision to wear dresses on multiple occasions . . . [including in] his Dazed magazine cover and spread . . . his ‘Best Friend’ video . . . his Calvin Klein campaign. . . . The examples are endless [and suggest that] . . . he’s simply a man who loves women’s clothes.”57 Young Thug explained his fashion choices in a GQ interview: Why do you wear women’s clothing? Because women’s clothes are slimmer than men’s clothes. The jeans I got on right now, they’re women’s jeans. But they fit how they’re supposed to fit. Like a rock star. The only thing I probably have in men’s is, like, briefs. T-shirts. Ninety percent of my clothes are women’s. When did you start wearing predominantly women’s clothing? When I was 12 or some shit, started gambling, getting my own money. My dad wouldn’t buy me tight pants. I had to get my own money to buy them. 58

In his Calvin Klein ad campaign where he is photographed by Tyrone Lebon, Young Thug appears in a fitted dark pinstriped sheath dress over matching bell-bottoms, standing on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean (the image may be viewed online). 59 In one image, the camera shoots Thug from below, to emphasize his elongated Twiggy or Alek Wek–like litheness. The width of the bell-bottom pants at their base helps diminish the masculine impact of his apparently large feet, which sport sturdy, almost mosh-pit-evoking, Black shoes. To counter this image, Thug poses with his arms behind him, perhaps to hide his large hands, which might detract from his metrosexual grace. Similarly, the lighting is softened in a way not to display the many tattoos that sleeve his arms. The blond dreads he wore in the video for “Check” are dyed natural and loosened from their ponytail into a windswept coiffure reminiscent of the hairdos worn by another Calvin Klein model, Christy Turlington, in the Eternity campaigns. Referencing the then-teenage Brooke Shields’s pronouncements in the Calvin Klein spreads in the 1980s (“You wanna know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”), the image of Thug is captioned with the one-liner, I disobey in #mycalvins. Like Basquiat, Thug exhibits gender complexity. Perhaps enjoying the benefits of a more recent and accepting era, Thug’s expression seems tolerable—even on trend—for his audiences. By contrast, Basquiat’s spectrum-gender expression was painted rife with tension and audiences largely looked past it, as suggested by comments from Greg Tate, among others, previously discussed.

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It ain’t hard to tell I’m the new Jean Michel Surrounded by Warhols60

JAY-Z says that he is like Basquiat. However, he does not seem to acknowledge Basquiat’s gender complexity, brokenness, and courage, as exemplified, for example, by his rendering of a highly personal Black ineffable regarding the murder of Michael Stewart. Instead, these facets of Basquiat are diminished and smoothed out into an ambient countercurrent of the white cube that is New York City’s Pace Gallery, in the Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film video, directed by Mark Romanek.61 JAY-Z’s signature appears as a graphic in the film. His name is crossed out as a signification to Basquiat, who often painted names and words and proceeded to strike over them with thick painted lines or an X. But, in contrast to Basquiat, the sleekness of JAY-Z’s printed label—the clean, crisp edges and the perfectly black font—points to a perfectly glossed JAY-Z who strove to get to where he is, but whose visual aesthetic in the Picasso Baby video glosses over his personal battles and any perceptible residual brokenness. Everyone is welcome into the Picasso Baby white space, and at the close of the video, JAY-Z identifies many of the audience members, in case we were not able to: Jay hugs various luminaries of acting, hip hop culture, and the art world—but where is the conflict? Where is that register of the legacy of the “racist U.S. society and its equally racist counterpart in miniature, the 1980s art world”?62 Is the imprint not present in Chelsea because the imbalance no longer exists? Instead, JAY-Z throws a hype party in a globally neutral gallery space (?!). The hip hop luminary performs with and hugs up against the self-proclaimed grandmother of performance art, Marina Abramović, as a gesture of his own art world legitimacy.63 His gesture may be similar in some ways to but also vastly different from Basquiat’s relationship with Andy Warhol. Like Warhol in relation to Basquiat, Abramović represents a fading art past. She is an art standard with little relationship to a poetically uncertain and potentially fecund avant-garde future perhaps uncomfortably represented, in part, by a Calvin Klein–styled Young Thug poised on an ocean precipice. It is JAY-Z’s party, yes, but if he is the new Jean-Michel, what aspects of the artist has he entrained? When are Basquiat’s lines or his personal performatives ever straight-edged? They are always off-center, dripping, oozing, and splattered with various fluids—including but not limited to concurrent metaphors of breast milk and ejaculate—as in Untitled (Fallen Angel). Basquiat’s lines also appear as liminal boundaries of painted versions of the artist himself, reflecting the liminal nature of his gender construction and its deployment. When Basquiat’s lines form words, like the SAMO label he assumed and widely tagged in the urban landscapes of his paintings and of everyday life, they are irregular, repeated, scratched, misspelled, glitched, rather than sure of themselves, stable, authoritative. What JAY-Z’s incommensurable claims to Basquiat reveal are Basquiat’s most politically and performatively viable spaces of alterity, an alterity that seeks elsewhere—as we see in Untitled (Fallen Angel) and Defacement—even as it strives to tackle the urgent materiality of the moment. It is difficult to locate Basquiat’s label constructions and their referents as reliable, static, or status quo. Basquiat’s signature remains in a state of unrest, while JAY-Z’s reflects the mirage of a Black masculine certainty. Basquiat’s deployment of gender fluidity and Black masculine sexual alterity is activism—a radical, political act—positioning his heterogeneous Black masculinity as a “royal” standard. His deployment is not without flaw, and my analysis opens up the discussion to the proposition of more questions rather than the provision of definitive answers. By contesting his



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own body in his personal performative in real time and in paint, Basquiat brings to light the need for a cessation of the violence of social hegemony that dictates heteronormative gender construction and implementation. This systemic, insidious gender complex establishes limits for Black self-expression. As expected, those who establish and benefit most from this systemic framework enforce it, consciously or otherwise. More insidiously, it is also enforced by those in the margins who, as a result, often occupy positions of self-policing, self-erasure, and self-harm.

Postscript Expanded readings of Basquiat through the lenses of gender complexity and activism have been considered of late in a few noteworthy contemporary art forums. In February 2016, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York held a symposium, “Basquiat and Contemporary Queer Art.” In fall 2016, Williams College organized a series of conversations around the display of the painting Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart) discussed in this essay.

Notes 1. JAY-Z, “F**kWithMeYouKnowIGotIt,” released July 4, 2013, Magna Carta Holy Grail, Roc-A-Fella

Records, CD. This verse is sung by the late Pimp C. The lyrics are reproduced at genius.com. See “‘F**K WithMeYouKnowIGotIt,’ JAY-Z,” Genius, https://genius.com/Jay-z-fuckwithmeyouknowigotit-lyrics. The lyrics to this verse are also noted in Craig Douglas Albert, “No Church in the Wild: Politics, Morality, and Hip Hop in the Political Science Classroom,” in The Organic Globalizer: Hip Hop, Political Development, and Movement Culture, ed. Christopher Malone and George Martinez Jr. (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 33. 2.  Khaled Diab, “White Supremacy’s Inferiority Complex,” Al Jazeera, November 30, 2016, www.aljazeera .com/indepth/opinion/2016/11/white-supremacy-racial-inferiority-complex-161129104031285.html. 3.  Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4. 4. Ibid. 5.  Shawn Carter, the artist known as JAY-Z, often changes the spelling of his name. In this chapter, the most recent edification of his name is being used: JAY-Z. See for instance, Peter Sblendoria, “Jay Z Is Changing His Name Again,” New York Daily News, June 20, 2017, www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music/JAY-Z -changing-article-1.3262445. 6.  Éduoard Glissant’s notion of the interplay of opacity and transparency as a binary signifying global Black perspectives in contrast to or in dialogue with Eurocentric worldviews has relevancy here. See Édouard Glissant, “For Opacity,” in Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 190. 7.  Mary H. Nooter, “The Impact of the Unseen,” in Secrecy: African Art That Conceals and Reveals, ed. Mary H. Nooter (New York: The Museum for African Art, 1993), 235. 8.  Robert Farris Thompson, “Activating Heaven: The Incantatory Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat,” in Jean-­ Michel Basquiat (New York: Mary Boon and Michael Werner, 1985); Thompson, “Three Works by Basquiat,” in Basquiat and the Bayou, ed. Franklin Sirmans (New York: DelMonico Books, 2014), 31–37. 9.  Franklin Sirmans, “Basquiat and the Bayou,” in Basquiat and the Bayou, 23–30. 10.  Quoted in ibid., 23. 11.  Robert Farris Thompson, “Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets,” in Jean-Michel Basquiat, ed. Richard Marshall (New York: Harry N. Abrams and the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992), 28–43. 12.  Greg Tate, “He Is Truly Free Who Is Free from the Need to Be Free: A Survey and Consideration of Black Male Genius,” in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 111–118. 13.  Lauren Moraski, “Kanye West: ‘I am Picasso’ and ‘Steve Jobs,’” CBS News, February 27, 2013, www.cbs news.com/news/kanye-west-i-am-picasso-and-steve-jobs. West was quoted as saying, “I am Picasso. I am

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Michelangelo. I am Basquiat. I am Walt Disney. I am Steve Jobs,” in a clip posted on YouTube. JAY-Z, “Picasso Baby,” released July 4, 2013, Magna Carta Holy Grail, Roc-A-Fella Records, CD. Here JAY-Z raps, “It ain’t hard to tell/I’m the new Jean-Michel.” 14.  Manthia Diawara and Silvia Kolbowski, “Homeboy Cosmopolitan,” October 83 (Winter 1998): 51–70. 15.  See Michael O’Rourke, “Series Editor’s Preface,” in Hegemony and Heteronormativity: Revisiting ‘The Political’ in Queer Politics, ed. María do Mar Castro Varela, Nikita Shawan, and Antke Engel (New York: Routledge, 2016), xiii–xxiv. O’Rourke reminds us that “heteronormative” is a hegemonic dynamic predicated on whiteness and thus like other hegemonic entities, “designates ‘legitimacy through consensus’” (p. xv). O’Rourke goes on to underscore the necessity for readers to remain mindful of the “interlinking of regimes of sex, gender, sexuality, race, colonialism, neoliberalism, ableism, class” (p. xix) in broader examinations of hegemony and heteronormativity. 16.  Jacopo Tintoretto, The Origin of the Milky Way, 1575, oil on canvas, 149.4 × 168 cm, National Gallery of London, www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/jacopo-tintoretto-the-origin-of-the-milky-way. 17.  JAY-Z, “F**kWithMeYouKnowIGotIt,” Lyrics Freak, www.lyricsfreak.com/j/jay+z/fuckwithmeyou knowigotit_21064038.html. 18. JAY-Z, F**kWithMeYouKnowIGotIt. 19.  Erna Mandowsky, “The Origin of the Milky Way in the National Gallery,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs (1938): 88. 20. Ibid. 21.  Thompson, “Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets,” 32. As Arthur Danto (among others) notes, Basquiat frequently inserted crowns into his work in honor of figures he deemed heroic in some way. In most cases, these heroes were Black artists—Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, for instance. See Arthur C. Danto, “Flyboy in the Buttermilk,” The Nation, May 9, 2005, 26. 22.  Roberta Smith, “Art Review: Kehinde Wiley, A Hot Conceptualist Finds the Secret of Skin,” New York Times, September 4, 2008. 23.  Recognizing the complexities of the term sexual alterity, I offer a general definition: “a reference to sexual and romantic life that exists outside of heteronormative domestic existence.” See Mark Davis, Sex, Technology, and Public Health (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 4. Among these facets of sexual and romantic life in focus here is Black male gay sexuality. 24.  Krista Thompson, Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 219. 25. Ibid. 26.  John David Jackson (aka Fabolous) and A. Roettger, “I Shine, You Shine,” released January 1, 2007, on Def Jam Sessions Vol. 1, The Island Def Jam Music Group, CD. 27.  Sarah Lewis, “From the Archives: Kehinde Wiley’s 2005 Brooklyn Museum Debut,” Art in America (April 2015), a republication of Sarah Lewis, “‘De(i)fying the Masters,’” Art in America (April 2005): 120–121, www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/from-the-archives-kehinde-wileyrsquos-2005-brooklyn -museum-debut. 28.  Jessica Dawson, “What to Make of Kehinde Wiley’s Pervy Brooklyn Museum Retrospective?,” The Village Voice, March 11, 2015. 29.  Dawson’s article is riddled with controversial statements that many have noted point to both the racial biases and homophobic position of the writer. See, for instance, Jillian Steinhauer, “Reactor: What to Make of the Village Voice’s Offensive Kehnide Wiley Review?,” Hyperallergic, March 13, 2015, http://hyperallergic .com/190474/what-to-make-of-the-village-voices-offensive-kehinde-wiley-review. After arguing that many artists employ similar methods for soliciting models for their work, Steinhauer asserts, “Clearly, there is something about the sexualization of black men that offends or frightens [art critic] Dawson.” 30.  Lewis, “From the Archives.” 31.  Tate, “He Is Truly Free,” 117–118. 32.  Leonhard Emmerling, Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1960–1988 (Los Angeles: Taschen, 2011), 94. 33.  Prince Nelson Rogers, Prince, recorded April–June 1979, Warner Brothers BSK 3366, LP. 34.  Thompson, “Activating Heaven.” 35.  Phoebe Hoban, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (London: Quartet Books, 1998), 241. 36.  Jennifer Clement, Widow Basquiat (Bristol, UK: Shearsman Books, 2010), 85.



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37.  Franklin Sirmans, “Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Chronology,” in Basquiat and the Bayou, 96. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40.  Quoted in ibid. 41.  Melissa Elliot and Timothy Mosley, “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” released July 2, 1997, Supa Dupa Fly,

Elektra Records, CD. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44.  Maithreyi Krishnaraj, “Androgyny: An Alternative to Gender Polarity?,” Economic and Political Weekly 31, no. 16/17 (April 20, 1996): WS9–WS14. 45.  Gill [Gillian] Perry, “The Expanding Field: Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series,” in Frameworks for Modern Art, ed. Jason Gaiger (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 158–159. 46.  Quoted in Hoban, Basquiat, 212. 47.  Sam Roberts, “Death Stirs Police Brutality Charges,” New York Times, September 29, 1983, www.nytimes .com/1983/09/29/nyregion/death-stirs-police-burtality-charges.html. 48.  Jennifer Clement, Widow Basquiat: A Love Story, (New York: Broadway Books, 2000), 112. 49.  Isaac Jackson, “Michael Stewart Is Dead (1985),” in Freedom in This Village: Twenty-Five Years of Black Gay Men’s Writing, 1979 to the Present, ed. E. Lynn Harris (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), 45–46. 50.  José Esteban Muñoz, “Famous and Dandy like B. ’n’ Andy: Race, Pop, and Basquiat,” in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, ed. José Esteban Muñoz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 37. 51. Ibid. 52.  “11 Major Misconceptions about the Black Lives Matter Movement,” Black Lives Matter, http://black livesmatter.com/11-major-misconceptions-about-the-black-lives-matter-movement/. This url is no longer extant, but the article is reprinted on the Cosmopolitan magazine website where the quote may be seen in context. The author byline for the Cosmopolitan magazine version is Brittney Cooper. See Brittney Cooper, “11 Major Misconceptions about the Black Lives Matter Movement,” Cosmopolitan, September 8, 2015, www .cosmopolitan.com/politics/a45930/misconceptions-black-lives-matter-movement/. 53.  Martha S. Jones, “The Blog: From Michael Stewart to Michael Brown: A Reflection on #Ferguson October,” Huffington Post, November 14, 2014, www.huffingtonpost.com/martha-s-jones/from-michael-stewart -to-m_b_6154272.html. 54.  Erik Nielson, “‘It Could Have Been Me’: The 1983 Death of a NYC Graffiti Artist,” Code Switch: Race and Identity, Remix, aired September 16, 2013, NPR, www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/16/221821224 /it-could-have-been-me-the-1983-death-of-a-nyc-graffiti-artist. 55.  Emma Spedding, “Kanye West Thinks He’s the Reason Everyone Wears Skinny Jeans,” Telegraph, Lifestyle Fashion, January 28, 2016, www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/news/kanye-wests-best-fashion-quotes-of-all-time/. 56.  @brokencool, “Young Thug Says, ‘You Can Be a Gangster in a Dress,’” DJ Booth, July 8, 2016, http://djbooth .net/news/entry/2016-07-08-young-thug-gangster-dress. 57.  Ashley Haines, “No, There’s Nothing Gay about Young Thug Wearing a Dress on ‘Jeffrey,’” Hypebae, August 26, 2016, http://hypebae.com/2016/8/young-thug-alessandro-trincone-dress-jeffery-album. In her article, Haines also considers Frank Ocean’s deployment of a qualified Black masculinity. Ocean expressed his sexual alterity by sharing that he had had experiences that would qualify him as bisexual, but that he continues to blur the lines of his sexual identity in his music and videos. See, for example, Ann Powers, “A Close Look at Frank Ocean’s Coming Out Letter,” The Record: Music News from NPR, www.npr.org/sections /therecord/2012/07/04/156261612/a-close-look-at-frank-oceans-coming-out-letter. 58.  Mark Anthony Green, “Young Thug Did Not Try to Kill Lil Wayne, Does Wear Women’s Clothes,” GQ: Music, September 28, 2015, www.gq.com/story/young-thug-hyun35-album-interview. 59.  See Tyrone Lebon, I disobey in #mycalvins (photograph of Young Thug), July 2016, http://hiphopdx.com /news/id.39590/title.young-thug-models-womenswear-for-calvin-klein. 60.  JAY-Z, “Picasso Baby.” 61.  JAY-Z—Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film, directed by Mark Romanek (DER TV, 2013), Vimeo video, 8:55, https://vimeo.com/80930630. 62.  Muñoz, “Famous and Dandy,” 37.

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63.  Abramović tells Slava Mogutin in an interview of 2010 that she wished she had never referred to herself

with that title because “now everyone quotes it and nothing else. . . . I really meant . . . I was a pioneer.” See Slava Mogutin, “The Legend of Marina Abramović,” Whitewall Magazine, Summer 2010, http://slavamogutin .com/marina-abramovic/.

Bibliography Albert, Craig Douglas. “No Church in the Wild: Politics, Morality, and Hip Hop in the Political Science Classroom.” In The Organic Globalizer: Hip Hop, Political Development, and Movement Culture, edited by Christopher Malone and George Martinez Jr. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Basquiat, Jean-Michel. Untitled (Fallen Angel). 1981. Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 168 × 197.5 cm. Private collection. © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Basquiat, Jean-Michel. Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart). 1983. Oil, oil stick, and acrylic on canvas, 66 × 60 in. © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. @brokencool. “Young Thug Says, ‘You Can Be a Gangster in a Dress.’” DJ Booth. July, 2016, http://djbooth .net/news/entry/2016-07-08-young-thug-gangster-dress. Clement, Jennifer. Widow Basquiat. Bristol, UK: Shearsman Books, 2010. Cooper, Brittney. “11 Major Misconceptions about the Black Lives Matter Movement.” Cosmopolitan, September 8, 2015, www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a45930/misconceptions-black-lives-matter-movement/. Danto, Arthur C. “Flyboy in the Buttermilk.” The Nation. May 9, 2005, 25–28. Davis, Mark. Sex, Technology, and Public Health. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Dawson, Jessica. “What to Make of Kehinde Wiley’s Pervy Brooklyn Museum Retrospective?” The Village Voice. March 11, 2015. Diab, Khaled. “White Supremacy’s Inferiority Complex.” Al Jazeera. November 30, 2016, www.aljazeera .com/indepth/opinion/2016/11/white-supremacy-racial-inferiority-complex-161129104031285.html. Diawara, Manthia, and Silvia Kolbowski. “Homeboy Cosmopolitan.” October 83 (Winter 1998): 51–70. Elliot, Melissa, and Timothy Mosley. “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly).” Supa Dupa Fly.  Elektra Records 755963916-0. 1997. CD. Emmerling, Leonhard. Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1960–1988. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2011, 94. Equestrian Oba and Attendants. 1550–1680. The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1965 (1978.412.309). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. http://library.artstor.org.lib proxy.newschool.edu/asset/MMA_IAP_10310749113. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Glissant, Édouard, “For Opacity.” In Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997, 189–194. Green, Mark Anthony. “Young Thug Did Not Try to Kill Lil Wayne, Does Wear Women’s Clothes.” GQ: Music. September 28, 2015, www.gq.com/story/young-thug-hyun35-album-interview. Haines, Ashley. “No, There’s Nothing Gay about Young Thug Wearing a Dress on ‘Jeffrey.’” Hypebae. August 26, 2016, http://hypebae.com/2016/8/young-thug-alessandro-trincone-dress-jeffery-album. Hoban, Phoebe. Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art. London: Quartet Books, 1998. Jackson, John David (aka Fabolous), and A. Roettger. “I Shine, You Shine.” Def Jam Sessions Vol. 1. The Island Def Jam Music Group. 2007. CD. Jackson, Isaac. “Michael Stewart Is Dead (1985).” In Freedom in This Village: Twenty-Five Years of Black Gay Men’s Writing, 1979 to the Present, edited by E. Lynn Harris. New York: Carroll & Graf, 45–46. JAY-Z, “F**kWithMeYouKnowIGotIt.” Lyrics Freak. n.d., www.lyricsfreak.com/j/jay+z/fuckwithmeyou knowigotit_21064038.html. JAY-Z. “F**kWithMeYouKnowIGotIt.” Magna Carta Holy Grail. Roc-A-Fella Records B0018877-02. 2013. CD. JAY-Z. “Picasso Baby.” Magna Carta Holy Grail. Roc-A-Fella Records B0018877-02. 2013. CD. JAY-Z—Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film. Directed by Mark Romanek. DER TV, Vimeo video: 8:55. 2013, https://vimeo.com/80930630.



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Jones, Martha S. “The Blog: From Michael Stewart to Michael Brown: A Reflection on #Ferguson October.” Huffington Post. November 14, 2014, www.huffingtonpost.com/martha-s-jones/from-michael-stewart-to -m_b_6154272.html. Krishnaraj, Maithreyi. “Androgyny: An Alternative to Gender Polarity?” Economic and Political Weekly 31, no. 16/17 (1996): WS9–WS14. Lawal, Babatunde. The Gẹ`lẹ`dẹ´ Spectacle: Art, Gender, and Social Harmony in an African Culture. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996. Lebon, Tyrone [Young Thug]. I disobey in #mycalvins. July 2016, http://hiphopdx.com/news/id.39590/title .young-thug-models-womenswear-for-calvin-klein. Lewis, Sarah. “From the Archives: Kehinde Wiley’s 2005 Brooklyn Museum Debut.” Art in America. April 2015. A republication of Lewis, Sarah. “‘De(i)fying the Masters.’” Art in America. April 2005, 120–121, www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/from-the-archives-kehinde-wileyrsquos-2005 -brooklyn-museum-debut. Mandowsky, Erna. “The Origin of the Milky Way in the National Gallery.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs (1938): 88. Mogutin, Slava. “The Legend of Marina Abramović.” Whitewall Magazine (Summer 2010), http://slavamogutin .com/marina-abramovic/. Moraski, Lauren. “Kanye West: ‘I Am Picasso’ and ‘Steve Jobs.’” CBS News. February 27, 2013, www.cbsnews .com/news/kanye-west-i-am-picasso-and-steve-jobs. Muñoz, José Esteban. “Famous and Dandy like B. ’n’ Andy: Race, Pop, and Basquiat.” In Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, edited by José Esteban Muñoz. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 37. Nielson, Erik. “‘It Could Have Been Me’: The 1983 Death of a NYC Graffiti Artist.” Code Switch: Race and Identity, Remix. NPR. September 16, 2013, www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/16/221821224/it -could-have-been-me-the-1983-death-of-a-nyc-graffiti-artist. Nooter, Mary H. “The Impact of the Unseen.” In Secrecy: African Art That Conceals and Reveals, edited by Mary H. Nooter. New York: The Museum for African Art, 1993, 235–240. O’Rourke, Michael. “Series Editor’s Preface.” In Hegemony and Heteronormativity: Revisiting ‘The Political’ in Queer Politics, edited by María do Mar Castro Varela, Nikita Shawan, and Antke Engel. New York: Routledge, 2016, xiii–xxiv. Perry, Gill [Gillian]. “The Expanding Field: Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series.” In Frameworks for Modern Art, edited by Jason Gaiger. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003, 158–159. Powers, Ann. “A Close Look at Frank Ocean’s Coming Out Letter.” The Record: Music News from NPR. July 5, 2012, www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2012/07/04/156261612/a-close-look-at-frank-oceans-coming -out-letter. Prince Nelson Rogers. Prince. Warner Brothers BSK 3366. 1979. LP. Roberts, Sam. “Death Stirs Police Brutality Charges.” New York Times. September 29, 1983, www.nytimes .com/1983/09/29/nyregion/death-stirs-police-burtality-charges.html. Sblendoria, Peter. “Jay Z Is Changing His Name Again.” New York Daily News. June 20, 2017, www.nydaily news.com/entertainment/music/jay-z-changing-article-1.3262445. Sirmans, Franklin. “Basquiat and the Bayou.” In Basquiat and the Bayou, edited by Franklin Sirmans. New York: DelMonico Books, 2014, 23–30. Sirmans, Franklin. “Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Chronology.” In Basquiat and the Bayou, 96. Smith, Roberta. “Art Review: Kehinde Wiley, A Hot Conceptualist Finds the Secret of Skin.” New York Times. September 4, 2008. Spedding, Emma. “Kanye West Thinks He’s the Reason Everyone Wears Skinny Jeans.” Telegraph, Lifestyle Fashion. January 28, 2016, www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/news/kanye-wests-best-fashion-quotes-of-all-time/. Steinhauer, Jillian. “Reactor: What to Make of the Village Voice’s Offensive Kehnide Wiley Review?” Hyperallergic. March 13, 2015, http://hyperallergic.com/190474/what-to-make-of-the-village-voices-offensive -kehinde-wiley-review. Tate, Greg. “He Is Truly Free Who Is Free from the Need to Be Free: A Survey and Consideration of Black Male Genius.” In Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, edited by Thelma Golden. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994, 111–118.

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Thompson, Krista. Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Thompson, Robert Farris. “Activating Heaven: The Incantatory Art of Jean Michel Basquiat.” In Jean Michel Basquiat. New York: Mary Boon and Michael Werner, 1985. Thompson, Robert Farris. “Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets.” In Jean-Michel Basquiat, edited by Richard Marshall. New York: Harry N. Abrams and the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992, 28–43. Thompson, Robert Farris. “Three Works by Basquiat.” In Basquiat and the Bayou, 31–37. Tintoretto, Jacopo. The Origin of the Milky Way, 1575. Oil on canvas, 149.4 × 168 cm. National Gallery of London. www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/jacopo-tintoretto-the-origin-of-the-milky-way.

8 • “I LUH GOD” Erica Campbell, Trap Gospel, and the Moral Mask of Language Discrimination SA M M A NTH A M CC A LL A

In the 1990s a young man released gospel music that shook the genre to its core. He received his share of praise for his new sound, and a heap of criticism and judgment for the use of secular tracks and beats to deliver gospel lyrics. Kirk Franklin, now in his forties, has been credited with the creation of urban gospel and has enjoyed mainstream success including platinum sales, along with Grammy, BET, Stellar, and Dove awards as well. However, what Kirk Franklin contributed to the gospel music genre is far from novel. Thomas Dorsey, a trailblazing composer of gospel music along with Sally Martin, chartered the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses in 1939, which gave autonomy to singers of gospel music to embrace or challenge trends through the vehicle of the choir.1 In 1969, Edwin Hawkins rearranged and recorded “Oh, Happy Day” with the Northern California State Youth Choir; people dancing and bopping to that song had no clue it was a gospel piece. Musical styles overlap and move within each other, creating gospel music with sounds of jazz and, later, soul. Examples of this are singers such as Duke Ellington, Gladys Knight, and Aretha Franklin recording gospel songs, and groups like the O’Jays and the Doobie Brothers including gospel songs on their albums.2 More recently, the contemporary gospel scene that has emerged includes a plethora of hip hop sounds from the Black community, with artists singing and rapping gospel. Artists like T-Bone, LeCrae, DJ Ambassador, Sir the Baptist, and Mali are only a few in a large genre of gospel hip hop talent utilizing media outlets such as holyhiphop.com and Christianhiphop.com. Conversely, yet similarly, contemporary Christian music (CCM), the universal term labeling Christian music with a pop/country sound, has permeated the mostly White Christian music arena, with artists such as Hillsong, MercyMe, Casting Crowns, and Lauren Daigle, to name a few. Back in the early 1990s, CCM artist Amy Grant released her Heart in Motion album, for which she took reproach for her choices in the particular sound of the album and was met with criticism that she was trying to bolster album sales by appealing to pop audiences. Despite the denigration, the album featured a hit single that sold over five million copies in the United States. 3 While both contemporary gospel or urban gospel and contemporary Christian music engage critiques of whether or not their music is acceptable as worship to God, this essay explores 127

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a specific song in contemporary or urban gospel. I examine the song “I Luh God” by Erica Campbell, a well-respected and seasoned gospel artist and former member of the famed gospel duo Mary, Mary. I assert that current negative criticisms do not stem only from a space of secular versus spiritual but the respectable versus the “disrespectability” of Black language and hip hop music. In Contemporary Gospel Music, Horace Clarence Boyer talked about the new sound of gospel back in 1979. The sound of the more modern gospel music in the late 1970s and early 1980s “found no tolerance in most Methodist churches, no place in a Presbyterian choir loft, and even the thought of its performance in the sanctuaries of the Episcopal and Roman Catholic churches would have been sacrilegious.”4 I argue that “I Luh God” is renounced due to its use of Black language or, more specifically, Black southern language, because of the ways Black vernacular and hip hop are viewed as criminal, uneducated, and therefore unworthy of Black Christian and dominant middle-class values, which include spirituality, righteousness, and sanctification. Campbell’s first solo album in 2014, Help, cinched a number 6 spot on Billboard, and Help 2.0 one year later, which features “I Luh God,” debuted at 120 on Billboard’s top 200. “I Luh God” peaked at the number 1 position on April 18, 2015, and stayed on the charts for sixty-four weeks. 5 “I Luh God” also won the 2015 Contemporary Gospel/Urban Song of the Year at the 49th Annual Dove Awards, the premier awards in the United States offered by the Gospel Music Association.6

Gospel Music Performance is Black Aesthetic Performance The obvious association of gospel music with religion, more specifically Christianity, sometimes excludes the music itself from more secular artistic expressions and critiques that are readily viewed as Black art or Black culture, or even the Black aesthetic. Usually, critics refrain from critiquing gospel music as art or performance because it is faith-based. Many gospel artists refrain from calling their shows and pieces performances, to reinforce their acts as solely worship and not as entertainment. The Black aesthetic has been linked to the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States.7 The Black Arts movement and even the Black power movement of the 1960s and 1970s stemmed from the social and economic stratification that is upheld by institutionalized racism, which results in innumerable impacts such as segregated schools and neighborhoods, unemployment, aggressions such as the Tuskegee experiments, and the treatment of Black GIs after World War II. Even the 1954 decision of Brown v. Board of Education to desegregate schools was not born from the conscience of the United States, but rather the embarrassment the United States faced by the Soviet Union and their allies during the Cold War. 8 During these historic events many Black musicians and literary figures joined the ranks of both movements. These were mostly fiction writers, poets, and jazz and blues artists of the day.9 Gospel music singers were relegated to a space that was for faith only, which didn’t outwardly engage with politics in the sense of the music, whereas literature, jazz, and the blues explicitly critiqued the political and social stratifications of the era. However, the absence of an aesthetic critique on gospel music does not exclude gospel from the social phenomenon of racialization. Black literary and cultural critic Alexander Weheliye states that racialization happens through education, the legal system, economics, and religion, among others, and these discourses are what create culture.10 I would add music to this



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list and, within religion, Black religious music that is gospel music. This racialization, which creates a dominant discourse in the United States, cannot adequately assess, evaluate, or give proper value to an aesthetic that is born of dehumanized citizens. James M. McPherson and Laurence  B. Holland make this point clearly in realizing that “white aesthetic terminology, for all its avowed lack of social involvement, is rooted in racism of white society and therefore inappropriate for judging black expression.”11 The Black aesthetic then, which many define differently, most certainly includes Black gospel music. Without question, hip hop is the contemporary embodiment of the U.S. Black aesthetic in the musical genre. The categorization of genres make it simple to file away each arm of a Black aesthetic—including Black art, Black theatre, and even Black education. But hip hop has emerged as the Black aesthetic in contemporary music, and although it has been commoditized, complete with its peppering of White performers, hip hop was born from the “expressions of the restrictions and dominations which their creators experienced in the world about them . . . the pathos and aspiration of the newly transplanted people; and through them the race was able to endure suffering and survive.”12 Although Benjamin Mays and Joseph Nicholson are referring to Negro spirituals, their point easily fits with the birth of hip hop. However, in talking about the function of Negro spirituals in Black culture, Black gospel music, which is the child of the Negro spiritual, functions in the exact same way hip hop does in Black performance and aesthetics, even with its religious roots. Mellonee Burnim (1988) successfully asserts that gospel music is also Black philosophy: For Black Americans, the essence of power in gospel music rests in the complex of cultural functions which it serves. Gospel is not just a musical exercise; it is a process of esoteric sharing and affirmation. It is more than the beat; it is more than the movement; it even embodies more than text, harmonies or instrumental accompaniment. All of these factors and others intertwine to produce a genre which represents a uniquely Black perspective, one which manifests itself in a cogent, dynamic cultural philosophy or world view. (p. 112)

Burnim affirms gospel music as a genre that performs the aesthetical duty of commonality and “affirmation” in that commonality. In the Christian religion, the text is the Bible, and her assertion that gospel music “embodies more than text” is a strong statement. Here the performance of gospel music is the very embodiment of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the text, the Bible. But because the Bible is used by every Christian, not just Black Christians, the Bible itself is not owned by a race or culture, but a religion. Therefore, the embodiment of that text, gospel music, is a Black aesthetic, and gives the Black Christian a place at the Christian religion table, even if it was the outhouse13 during the Jim Crow era.

Black Churches and Churches with Black People Gospel music most certainly is indicative and a part of Black American culture. The religious connection, or more precisely, the birthright of gospel music, sometimes tends to make people place it outside of identity politics as well. Yet gospel music is a musical genre of U.S.-based Christianity. Christians are charged with putting on the identity of Christ (2 Cor 5:17 NIV) because Christ is the Christian’s identity (Eph 4:24)14. That is, however, extremely difficult for Black Christians who were stripped of their religious beliefs through the transatlantic slave trade, converted by force to Christianity, and then forbidden to worship and be Christians with

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White Christians. Therefore, Blacks occupy a second-class citizenship space in Christianity. Even in the body of Christ (the church), Blacks are Black first, then Christian. Segregation of the Christian religion lies far beyond ethnic enclaves. The type of worship has long been a sticking point in the delineation of denominations of the Christian religion. From a Catholic’s quieter rote and scripted service, called a mass, to the boisterous, free-­flowing calland-response preaching of a Pentecostal service, Christianity’s many denominations all hold doctrine as important as the Bible itself. From the formation of the Catholic Church to the Protestant Reformation, the quiet, more reserved church services were always seen as more civilized and proper, while the singing, preaching, and worship styles of Pentecostal churches, which were closer to the roots of African dance and singing, are aligned with savage, disrespectful, and base services. Although the advent of the megachurch has seen its way to have a more inclusive church body, the old stereotypes of how a church congregation should worship still ring true. Subsequently, within the different denomination of churches with mostly Black members, there is the Black church,15 which carries a stigma of less affluent and/or less educated Blacks that worship in a more Pentecostal style.16 The Black church also carries a freer style of worship that does two things—worship and have fun. African and African American studies scholar Thomas DeFrantz “align[s] pleasure with aesthetic purpose as well as social function.”17 Although he is referencing hip hop, it is indicative of gospel music and church worship as well. In other words, the style of worship associated with the Black church incorporates the social function that DeFrantz mentions through the dancing and more upbeat singing that creates an atmosphere of socialization through worship, as congregants are encouraged to interact with each other while worshipping. This includes singing, harmonizing, ad-libbing to songs that are not rehearsed but in the moment, dancing in the aisles, and incorporating dance moves that often serve not only as entertainment value but also pleasure in the bodily involvement of the worship process. The more refined church services, the ones that resemble the White church model, are assigned to the middle- to upper-class Blacks. This demarcation among Black Christians has softened as gospel music has adopted (as it has throughout the ages) the more contemporary sounds of its secular counterparts. However, the release of “I Luh God” by Erica Campbell caused an excitable but expected stir and brought to the forefront the inextricable issue of Black language and Black gospel music. While gospel music has always used Black language and Black aesthetics, “I Luh God” uses Black language more associated with criminality and vulgarity, not just being Black alone.

I Luh God, You ’on’t Luh God? Whas Wrong Whit Chyu? As evidenced in the struggle that Outkast and Goodie Mob faced in the hip hop audiences of the East and West Coasts, hip hop had a huge problem with southern rappers when they first emerged with their music in 1992 and 1995, respectively. Darren Grem took a look at these rap groups’ emergences in hip hop and chronicled their experiences and stated that “detractors cast Dirty South rap as ‘country,’ an epithet in Black culture roughly equivalent to white culture’s ‘redneck’ . . . and thus unable to produce ‘real’ rap.”18 It is not just that the rap itself was southern but the language of the “Dirty South” was considered country and backward. Many Blacks in the Northeast and West Coast associated the southern Black population that spoke with southern Black English and twang with stupidity



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and therefore an inability to be talented in hip hop. At that time, it was presumed that there was nothing tangible a southern rapper could contribute to the genre.19 But times have indeed changed, and the South has all but taken over the hip hop genre. Artists such as Future, 2 Chainz, Lil Wayne, Young Thug, and Travis Scott reign as kings in hip hop and they all hail from the Dirty South. In fact, southern rap artists have made such an impact that trap music, which is a rap sound created in the South, has actually permeated the northeast United States. Rappers such as Fetty Wap and Desiigner are releasing trap music tracks although they come from New Jersey and Brooklyn, New York, respectively. Trap music has not limited its infusion to the hip hop scenes. Gospel artist Erica Campbell, who hails from California, released a song titled “I Luh God” in March of 2015. The song has been labeled as trap gospel, with a clear sound of Dirty South trap music elements, since Campbell performs the lyrics in perfect southern twang and Black English. The trap music element is not only strong in the rap sequence, but it is also in the breathless high-pitched intonations of Erica’s chanting of the verses and chorus. Although Campbell is from Inglewood, California, the trap sound is spot on, which cements the southeastern Black language within her performance. Campbell could most certainly have been influenced by the hip hop of her day (the 1990s, when she would have been in her twenties) since in “1989 . . . N.W.A. introduced their album Straight Outta Compton, effectively placing California, and Southern California in particular, on the Hip Hop map  .  .  . [and] cities like Oakland  .  .  . Los Angeles, Compton, Inglewood, Long Beach and El Segundo found their place on the Hip Hop landscape.” 20 She doesn’t struggle at all with the southern language, solidifying a “performing process . . . so intuitive as to be almost unteachable.” 21 Campbell’s roots are deep in gospel; however, her ability to flawlessly sing the language of the Dirty South within the gospel genre in exactly the same way gospel is sung, with “audible breath intake and expulsion of air . . . a rhythmic factor and . . . an essential part of black timing and rhythmic pacing” make the gospel music in “I Luh God” the Black aesthetic, inclusive of criminality and folly. 22 LaShawn Daniels, aka Big Shizz, performs the rap sequence in “I Luh God” and is a gospel rapper. However, he is more known for writing music for heavy hitters such as Beyoncé and even the late great Michael Jackson. The trap elements not only bring trap music to gospel, but the elements also bring Black hip hop trap music performance to Christianity—Christianity that is already rife with its denominations and racial divides, political lines, and caste worship system as referenced earlier. Campbell’s song uses Black performance in a system that is supposed to never judge, never politicize, never castigate, and never condemn, with the same music that is already condemned and politicized as music of the criminal and uneducated, which in the United States, crystalizes into the Black body. Yet the Black body is commoditized in its criminality, almost ravishingly so. Performance studies scholar, poet, and philosopher Fred Moten summarizes this phenomenon of “the raced figure, particularly the figure of the black . . . [and shows] the exemplary figure of abjection, exploitation, pity and revulsion is also always the exemplary figure of danger, threat and irreducible, unavoidable attraction.”23 In other words, the criminality of the Black body is central to the Black aesthetic, especially in hip hop, and their relationship is inextricable. Erica Campbell then, does the unthinkable, by bringing this criminality into a space that is noncriminal and wholesome. Although Blacks occupy this space, which is the church, the respectability of the church is recognized by others that are not of color, and Campbell’s song is viewed as stripping church members of their respectability and reducing them to their former state of criminality, as uneducated and immoral Black bodies, unworthy of salvation.

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First, we can examine the widespread criticism of Erica Campbell for releasing such a gospel song. Since “the cool kids drive the marketplace,” Campbell is marketing her song to those who are purchasing trap music—the cool kids.24 A successful song may not be the most eloquently written, but a strong beat and great production will get a song to top the charts and achieve platinum status. The criticism from the conservative Christian (who of course shuns money in all its forms since it is the root of all evil) chastises Campbell’s carnal efforts to build her coffers with the satanic sound of criminality. Yet another critique is that “I Luh God” isn’t even really Christian; the song is simply targeting a younger audience and trying to bring God into their life spheres through music. What better way to have that sound and that look to attract younger people to the church. Throughout the video, everyone, including Campbell, is dressed in urban hip hop clothing, not at all the attire for a respectable Christian song. In one scene she has a cap on that flashes #SELFIE, a thick gold chain with a sneaker on it, and iridescent-framed catlike glasses. Influential gospel blog SoulInStereo illustrates the criticisms mentioned earlier, and many more of “I Luh God.” In Edward Bowser’s blog post titled “Trap Gospel? Erica Campbell’s ‘I Luh God’ Needs an Intervention,” he condemns not only the song but Campbell herself, asking “who told Erica it was cute to name hymns after drug houses?” and “If we gotta talk like Lil’ Darryl to express our love for Jesus, something has gone seriously wrong.” Comments on the post include reactions such as “plain and simple ignorant. . . . Luh is not a word”; “I was wondering when the bottles would pop and the strippers would start their routine”; and “It is shameful because we have worked so hard to learn to speak, spell, and use English correctly and for someone of her caliber, who is also a mother, to resort to slang, to ‘reach the masses’ is inexcusable.”25 These comments’ common thread is their reference to Black language and when and where it should be used. Another redolent critique is that of Erica Campbell “setting us back.” I use this phrase loosely to encompass the sentiment among a small group of Black middle-class women who have discussed their views about the song. They are all Christian, ranging in age from thirty-six to forty-three, and all but one are married with children. All are educated with at least a baccalaureate degree; one has a law degree, and four have master’s degrees. All but one own their own homes and are a part of a two-income family. Their socioeconomic status would most likely be in the range of middle to upper-middle class. 26 As the topic of Erica Campbell’s song came up, so did the opinions. Everyone agreed that it was definitely targeted at a younger audience and that whatever one does to “get them in church” is good enough. However, a commonality among all of the ladies was the theme that the song is not good for the race. While some said that she (Campbell) looked “cute” in her video, they still offered that the song makes “us look uneducated and backward.” Other statements that resonated were the “ghetto-ness” of the song, which is at “direct odds” with gospel music. This particular critique implies that the ghetto and gospel music do not mix and that the ghetto is somehow not where gospel music should be found. The women were also very much concerned about the damage a Black woman with such star power as Erica Campbell could do to the status of other Black women that occupy a space of education, respectability, and middle- to upper-class status. Because Erica Campbell occupies that space as well, her singing of “I Luh God” makes a representation of Black women that occupy that space with her, and signifies the fall from their respectable platforms to uneducated, criminal, and low class. This demotion of Campbell demotes other middle-class Black women who attend church, not only in the eyes of White dominant discourse, but within the Black community itself.



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In the opinions of the women of this group, questions arose (I asked) as to what exactly demoted Campbell’s class status. Was it the lyrics? The outfit? The track? The answers were slightly different; most liked her outfit and hair, but they didn’t like the sound of the song. After a good half an hour, one woman finally came out and said southern talk is “trash and uneducated.” She was met with resounding agreement. “It just sounds so ghetto” and “it makes us look bad” permeated the conversation. One woman mentioned the sneaker necklace Campbell had on in the video and said it represented the ghetto lifestyle of wanting the best sneakers and gold chains. I would be remiss to mention that this woman had with her, that very day, a $3,000 Louis Vuitton handbag at the fellowship. At one point it was added that we (nonsoutherners) have our own slang talk that we use, which was met with the response of “It’s for us.” The “It’s for us” argument refers to the literacies that African Americans use in our own spaces and discourses. More specifically, this group of women expressed that the “literacies [that] refer to ways of knowing and acting  .  .  . through storytelling, conscious manipulation of silence and speech, code/style shifting, and signifying” is for private use of African Americans only. 27 Black respectability politics is nothing new. In Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham examines the African American promotion of certain qualities during the women’s conventions of the Black Baptist Church. These qualities, namely politeness, cleanliness of not only the self but of all personal property, sexual purity, and temperance create the “politics of respectability” that were to “uplift” the race. This uplift was to be achieved for not only African Americans but for Whites to observe and be convinced that Blacks could actually be respectable people, and therefore award them (African Americans) with the full citizenship of humanity. 28 I would add language or, more specifically, the absence of Black language, to the list of qualities that secure respectability and entrance into the body of the church. If African Americans are to convince Whites they are respectable, then Blacks are held to the standards of White dominant discourse, which prizes not only the meritocratic badge that the list of qualities purport, but also the language of White dominant discourse which Black Americans must achieve to be respectable, good, and worthy Christians. Knowing when and with whom to speak a certain way is taught to many children of immigrant parents who speak another language and/or speak different Englishes—vernaculars and dialects. The basis for code switching is built upon the “It’s for us” rationale. It is as if speaking in our language, whether it’s Black language or trap southern English, is dirty laundry that should never be aired for the White dominant discourse to see and judge. With trap gospel, the Dirty South language is now aired for the Christian to judge as well. The women did not say it outright, but their reasons for the dismissal of the song stem from the fact that the language of the song makes Blacks look uneducated and they were embarrassed that the criminality of the Black body has now sullied the image of the upstanding Black Christian citizen. Now that Erica Campbell has seemingly opened wide the doors to allow trap music to enter in the realm of gospel music, Black Christians are now lumped in with the criminal and uneducated Black that is somehow lower than the upstanding Black Christian. Now all Blacks are the same in the eyes of these Black, upstanding, educated Christians, even though that sentiment may already be understood in White dominant discourse. Before standing on a soapbox and pointing the finger at the hypocritical stance the church has taken in its judgment of not only criminals, the poor, the uneducated, the LGBTQ community, addicts, and anyone else that does not meet the standard of the upstanding, respectable,

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hard-working citizen, the disclaimer must be put forth that there are plenty of places a societal outcast could go and find acceptance in the Christian religion. What I would like to point out here, however, is that this small group of Black bourgeois women have formulated a viewpoint not based on religion solely. Nigerian American anthropologist John Ogbu states the “minority speech community in the U.S., White-American proper English (i.e., the standard English) is the high dialect which is approved for education, jobs, and communication with ‘outsiders.’ The mother tongue of the minorities (e.g. Black English) is the low dialect for everyday life in the family and community.”29 So, for these women, it is not just the doctrine and man-made rules of Christianity that have built their rationale. The effects of Jim Crow and the hypercriminalization of the Black body in the United States are also to blame for the sentiments of the women in the group. In effect, the music is just too Black to be respectable. “I Luh God,” in the viewpoint of the ladies in the fellowship group, disparages not only Black worship but Black language. Even an argument supporting the song manages to malign Black language. MadameNoir is an international online magazine that caters to Black women and ranges in topics from parenting and relationships to hair care and entertainment. In a blog post on MadameNoir, Victoria Uwumarogie makes a claim that the song isn’t that bad. She remarks that she is “torn” because the song definitely “bumps” (meaning the beat is catchy and party worthy), but she knows the elders at her church would have a “complete fit” if they heard the song. Her post seems to deliver the message that Christians need to reach greater numbers of people however they can, and then comments that “some Ebonics here and there never hurt anybody. We haven’t been saved all our lives.”30 It is apparent that the use of Ebonics is just fine, in Uwumarogie’s opinion, for the “unsaved.” Once one becomes a saved believer, a member of the body of Christ, a member of the church, they are to shed their sinful past, which here includes their uneducated, criminal, and low-class language. This means that there is no room in the body of the church for the criminalized language of trap music or, in Uwumarogie’s words, Ebonics. Therefore, even those who may like the song must resign their affection for it to the baser part of being Black, the very part they try to shed, which manifests in language. The shedding of Black language gives a perception of distance of these Black Christians from the criminality of blackness; however, it merely reinforces that criminality and its inextricable link with blackness as referenced by Fred Moten earlier.

You May Luh God, But Not as Much as I Love Him While much has changed in the hip hop and gospel music scenes in the past twenty years, society’s discrimination of language remains solid. Consider the silencing of Rachel Jeantel, a witness for the prosecution in The State of Florida v. George Zimmerman in the capital murder case of Trayvon Martin. Her inability to eloquently answer questions by the defense with perfect standardized English rendered her entire testimony irrelevant. The implication of the defense team was that “Ms. Jeantel was unintelligent and thus not credible.” One of the defense lawyers’ own daughters took to social media the night of Ms. Jeantel’s cross-examination and messaged that her dad “beat stupidity.”31 This illustrates how language shaped Ms. Jeantel’s intellectual identity to not only the courtroom and the jurors but to the eyes of the world. It becomes crystal clear how language not only forms an identity but lays the foundation for judgment in intellect, socioeconomic status, and therefore worth in society, and, in Ms. Jeantel’s case, worth and credibility as an eyewitness. She “looked different, spoke different, but none of that is supposed to matter. Was she telling the truth? That’s what [sic] supposed to matter.”32



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Of course, the disregarded testimony of Rachel Jeantel is massively incomparable to that of the rejection of Campbell’s song. The impact of Jeantel’s dismissal as a credible witness works to uphold institutionalized racism that devalues the lives of people of color, which in turn ratifies the criminalization of the Black body in the United States and, of course, allowed Martin’s murderer to walk free. I merely endeavor to point out that language played a role in her dehumanization, as it is similarly used to discriminate within the body of the Christian church. Even with trap sounds, Campbell’s song purports the truth—and testifies to the truth— since in Christianity Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life (Jn 14:6). In her lyrics, she speaks of being forgiven, which Christians believe comes from Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross (Jn 1:29, 2:2). She sings of her modern daily blessings. This is a truth also, in that Christians believe that their daily blessings come from God (Mt 6:11, Ps 121:2). Does it matter that this truth sounds different? That it doesn’t sound like Handel’s Messiah or Martin Luther’s “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow”? It should not. Yet Campbell’s “I Luh God” represents exactly what the women in the fellowship group are trying to avoid and shun. Two of the women in the group are of Caribbean descent. One is first-generation American, and the other immigrated at a younger age. They consider their home languages of “pidgen and creole as a hindrance to mobility and Western status . . . [and] object to their children’s use of Ebonics, thinking it also retrogressive . . . [since] Standard English has enjoyed a certain privilege as the language of government, formal education systems, and the church.”33 That placement in the church also serves to give Standard English a moral placement in society. The inclusion of trap gospel is an affront to the senses of the churchgoing women in that they cannot reconcile the trap gospel music in the church. It is immoral, wrong, and just not good enough for the church. It seems as though the more eloquent, the better a person is, and not just socioeconomically but morally. The “I Luh God” debate has brought to the forefront the reality that the criminalization of the Black body extends to the church and that language is a major part in that criminalization. The Black members of the church and, in this case, of the fellowship group are unconsciously upholding the rhetoric of Black inferiority when they subscribe to the belief that certain languages are not good enough for the church, even language without profanity since Campbell’s song has none. Ultimately, these church members have reinforced the immoral paint on a Black body and, unfortunately, have done it where race is supposed to not matter in the construct of identity—the church. They have fortified the inferior Black Christian, not Erica Campbell, by limiting the Christian Truth to only those they deem worthy—a very familiar sound to the days of slavery and the Jim Crow era. While everyone will not agree whether or not to accept “I Luh God” as a gospel song, the fact remains that it’s here, and it has the gospel world talking. Its success can only pave the way for more trap gospel, whether the artist is actively working against the criminalization of the Black body or just trying to make a buck. Either way, more artists pushing the genre by creating songs that don’t fit the classic gospel mold can only work to create further inclusion in not just the church, but to illuminate language discrimination where it can be subtle and covert. The eventuality that trap gospel may be acceptable someday causes Black respectable Christians to have to go back to the drawing board to convince their White counterparts that Black Christians do indeed deserve their respectable status. How then will upstanding Black Christian citizens separate themselves from the Black criminal masses? What will Black Christians who employ Higginbotham’s “respectability politics” and exercise censorship of gospel songs use to physically signify that they are not a part of the uneducated Black criminals who enjoy trap music?

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Erica Campbell’s performance actively works to include modern-day societal outcasts— people who speak a language other than Standard English. Kirk Franklin similarly took a risk and had his share of criticism, but is now known as a pioneer in the gospel genre often credited with bringing gospel music into the modern era. Similarly, Campbell took a chance with “I Luh God” and effectively annihilated Standard English’s claim on morality, respectable behavior, and identity. In doing so, Campbell actively advocates for Black language and the anticriminalization of the Black body and, ultimately, the anticriminalization of the Black aesthetic. Her activism works to legitimize and give value to the Black aesthetic and its language to not only mainstream society, but even to the worship of a deity.

Notes 1.  Mellonee Burnim, “Functional Dimensions of Gospel Music Performance,” The Western Journal of Black Studies 12, no. 2 (1988): 112. 2.  Horace Clarence Boyer, “Contemporary Gospel Music,” The Black Perspective in Music 7, no. 1 (1979): 11. 3. RIAA, Gold & Platinum, n.d., https://www.riaa.com/gold-platinum/?tab_active=default-award&se=heart +in+motion#search_section. 4.  Boyer, “Contemporary Gospel Music,” 5. 5. “Big Shizz I Luh God Chart History,” Billboard, https://www.billboard.com/music/big-shizz/chart -history/goespel-digital-song-sales/song/885648. 6.  Dove Awards, Past Winners, n.d., http://doveawards.com/awards/past-winners/. 7.  David Lionel Smith, “The Black Arts Movement and Its Critics,” American Literary History 3, no.1 (1991): 93–110. 8. Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Landing on the Wrong Note: The Price We Paid for Brown,” Educational Researcher 33, no. 7 (2004): 3–13. 9.  James Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 10.  Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 3. 11.  James M. McPherson and Laurence B. Holland, eds., Blacks in America: Bibliographical Essays (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1971), 264. 12.  Burnim, “Functional Dimensions,” 2. 13.  I use outhouse to describe the separation of worship within the same religion by Jim Crow. Christianity is a part of the colonialization of enslaved Africans, yet they were not allowed to practice/worship with Whites. 14.  Both books of Ephesians and II Corinthians are found in the New Testament of the Bible. Essentially, these verses assert that the believing (faithful) Christian becomes a new being—basically relinquishing the labels conscribed upon oneself by society and the hold of sin and sin’s guilt on the person. Paul, believed by Christians to have written both Ephesians (a letter to the church in Ephesus) and Corinthians (a letter to the church in Corinth), illustrates in these letters the pitfalls of the doctrinal and legalistic labels of Judaic law and purported a “new creation” with the union of Christ, “created to be like God” in righteousness. 15.  Here I employ the term Black church to mean churches that have predominantly Black members in the non-Catholic tradition—those of the Protestant denomination. For a list of Protestant denominations, see Tom W. Smith, “Classifying Protestant Denominations,” Review of Religious Research 31, no. 3 (1990): 225–245. 16.  For social stratification among differing religious groups in the United States, see Christian Smith and Robert Faris, “Socioeconomic Inequality in the American Religious System: An Update and Assessment,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44, no.1 (2005): 95–104. 17.  Thomas DeFrantz, “Hip Hop Habitus 2.0,” in Black Performance Theory, ed. Thomas DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 230. 18.  Darren E. Grem, “‘The South Got Something to Say’: Atlanta’s Dirty South and the Southernization of Hip Hop America,” Southern Cultures 12, no. 4 (2006): 62. 19. Ibid.



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20.  Marcyliena Morgan, “Nuthin’ but a G Thang: Grammar and Language Ideology in Hip Hop Identity,” in

Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English, ed. Sonja L. Lanehart (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2001), 192. 21.  Pearl Williams-Jones, “Afro-American Gospel Music: A Crystallization of the Black Aesthetic,” Ethnomusicology 19, no. 3 (1975): 380. 22.  Ibid., 382. 23.  Fred Moten, “Preface for a Solo by Miles Davis,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 17, no. 2 (2007): 222. 24. DeFrantz, Hip Hop Habitus 2.0, 224. 25.  Edward Bowser, “Trap Gospel? Erica Campbell’s ‘I Luh God’ Needs an Intervention,” Soul in Stereo, April 7, 2015, http://www.soulinstereo.com/2015/01/trap-gospel-erica-campbells-i-luh-god-needs-an-inter vention.html. 26.  In July 2016, in Long Island, New York, five women visited the sixth woman at her home during the sixth woman’s health convalescence. I, being one of the six in attendance, asked the ladies if I brought up a subject, would they be willing to have their comments stated anonymously in a future project I might undertake as a graduate student. All agreed and participated enthusiastically. 27.  Elaine Richardson, “‘She Was Workin’ Like Foreal’: Critical Literacy and Discourse Practices of African American Females in the Age of Hip Hop,” Discourse & Society 18, no. 6 (2007): 789–809. 28.  Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 29.  John Ogbu, “Beyond Language: Ebonics, Proper English, and Identity in a Black-American Speech Community,” American Education Research Journal 36, no. 2 (1999): 151. 30.  Victoria Uwumarogie, “Is Erica Campbell’s New Trap Gospel Track “I Luh God” Really That Bad?,” MadameNoire, March 30, 2015, http://madamenoire.com/522132/is-erica-campbells-new-trap-gospel-track -i-luh-god-really-that-bad/. 31.  Montré D. Carodine, “Contemporary Issues in Critical Race Theory: The Implications of Race as Character Evidence in Recent High Profile Cases,” University of Pittsburgh Law Review 75 (2013): 688. 32.  Kristina Randle, “The George Zimmerman Trial: Witness Rachel Jeantel,” Mental Health & Criminal Justice, July 1, 2013, http://kristinarandle.com/blog/the-george-zimmerman-trial-witness-rachel-jeantel/. 33.  Joseph McLaren, “African Diaspora Vernacular Traditions and the Dilemma of Identity,” Research in African Literatures 40, no. 1 (2009): 103.

Bibliography “Big Shizz I Luh God Chart History.” Billboard. https://www.billboard.com/music/big-shizz/chart-history /goespel-digital-song-sales/song/885648. Bowser, Edward. “Trap Gospel? Erica Campbell’s ‘I Luh God’ Needs an Intervention.” Soul in Stereo. 2015, http://www.soulinstereo.com/2015/01/trap-gospel-erica-campbells-i-luh-god-needs-an-intervention .html. Boyer, Horace Clarence. “Contemporary Gospel Music.” The Black Perspective in Music 7, no. 1 (1979): 5–58. Burnim, Mellonee. “Functional Dimensions of Gospel Music Performance.” The Western Journal of Black Studies 12, no. 2 (1988): 112. Campbell, Erica. “I Luh God (featuring Big Shizz).” Help 2.0. eOne, 2014. CD. Carodine, Montré D. “Contemporary Issues in Critical Race Theory: The Implications of Race as Character Evidence in Recent High-Profile Cases.” University of Pittsburgh Law Review 75 (2013): 679. DeFrantz, Thomas F., and Anita Gonzalez, eds. Black Performance Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Dove Awards. Past Winners. http://doveawards.com/awards/past-winners/. Grem, Darren E. “‘The South Got Something to Say’: Atlanta’s Dirty South and the Southernization of HipHop America.” Southern Cultures 12, no. 4 (2006): 55–73. Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Holy Bible, New International Version, 3rd ed. Colorado Springs, CO: International Bible Society, 1984.

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Ladson-Billings, Gloria. “Landing on the Wrong Note: The Price We Paid for Brown.” Educational Researcher 33, no. 7 (2004): 3–13. McLaren, Joseph. “African Diaspora Vernacular Traditions and the Dilemma of Identity.” Research in African Literatures 40, no. 1 (2009): 97–111. McPherson, James M., and Laurence B. Holland, eds. Blacks in America: Bibliographical Essays. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1971. Morgan, Marcyleina. “Ain’t Nothin’ but a G Thang”: Grammar, Variation and Language Ideology in Hip Hop Identity.” In African American Vernacular English, edited by Sonja Lanehart. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2001, 185–207. Moten, Fred. “Preface for a Solo by Miles Davis.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 17, no. 2 (2007): 217–246. Ogbu, John U. “Beyond Language: Ebonics, Proper English, and Identity in a Black-American Speech Community.” American Educational Research Journal 36, no. 2 (1999): 147–184. Randle, Kristina. “The George Zimmerman Trial: Witness Rachel Jeantel.” Mental Health & Criminal Justice. 2013, http://kristinarandle.com/blog/the-george-zimmerman-trial-witness-rachel-jeantel/. RIAA. Gold & Platinum. https://www.riaa.com/gold-platinum/?tab_active=default-award&se=heart+in+ motion#search_section. Richardson, Elaine. “‘She Was Workin’ Like Foreal’: Critical Literacy and Discourse Practices of African American Females in the Age of Hip Hop.” Discourse & Society 18, no. 6 (2007): 789–809. Smethurst, James. The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Smith, Christian, and Robert Faris. “Socioeconomic Inequality in the American Religious System: An Update and Assessment.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44, no. 1 (2005): 95–104. Smith, David Lionel. “The Black Arts Movement and Its Critics.” American Literary History 3, no. 1 (1991): 93–110. Smith, Tom W. “Classifying Protestant Denominations.” Review of Religious Research 31, no. 3 (1990): 225–245. Uwumarogie, Victoria. “Is Erica Campbell’s New Gospel Track “I Luh God” Really That Bad?” MadameNoir. 2015, http://madamenoire.com/522132/is-erica-campbells-new-trap-gospel-track-i-luh-god-really-that -bad/. Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Williams-Jones, Pearl. “Afro-American Gospel Music: A Crystallization of the Black Aesthetic.” Ethnomusicology 19, no. 3 (1975): 373–385.

9 • THE HIDDEN CODE OF THE KONGO COSMOGR AM IN AFRICAN AMERICAN ART AND CULTURE NETTRICE R. GASKINS

In her essay on Afrofuturism, scholar-educator Emma Dabiri asks readers to consider the “decimation of African epistemologies, dismissed as primitive, and the wholesale destruction of vast corpuses of knowledge that existed in oral genres.”1 Visual, literary, and performance-based works across the African diaspora are folkloric, often embedded with secret technologies and hidden codes to be interpreted or reinterpreted by diverse communities of practice. Diagrams found in some artworks move viewers (travelers) “through the maze from points along the diamond or the circle from birth to life to death and then finally to rebirth,” as part of a journey.2 Codes are used to safeguard and sometimes conceal important messages. Before emancipation, enslaved Africans in the United States were infrequently permitted to gather, sing, dance, and play music under the watchful eyes of their owners. Communication such as drumming was prohibited; so enslaved Africans used their bodies and symbolic gestures as alternatives. Some gestures referenced cultural art of the Kongo people in West Central Africa, specifically the cosmogram, a core symbol of the Kongo culture. An ideographic religious symbol, it was called dikenga dia Kongo, shortened to dikenga in this essay. Kongo cosmograms (dikenga) comprise information (i.e., symbols or codes) that serves as ciphers, maps, or organizing principles for communication, creative expression, and interaction. Dikenga is described as a quartered circle or diamond, a seashell spiral, or a cross with solar emblems representing the four moments of the sun. A person stands upon it to engage in a ritual or to signify that he or she understands the meaning of life. This chapter draws on “dikenga ideology” through heritage artifacts, older rituals, and contemporary cultural practices, immersive artworks, and sonic and design fictions that provide a foundation for artistic production across the African diaspora. These works advance the notion of improvisation through call-and-response participation, repetition, and the deliberate fracture or disruption of typical rhythms or patterns to create new arrangements. The Kongo cosmogram provides an analytic framework for interpreting these works. To make the case for the Kongo cosmogram as a coded system, this study draws attention to its development over the centuries, influencing many African American artists and performers such as jazz maverick Sun Ra, painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, and sculptor Houston Conwill. The latter two artists’ works intentionally reference the Kongo cosmogram while other artists 139

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are influenced less directly. In general, these artworks provide a key for understanding aesthetic African American qualities such as rhythmic pattern or the “cut,” as James Snead called the Black cultural insistence on repetition (e.g., music, literature, and dance). 3 According to scholar Robert Farris Thompson, the intersecting lines or axes of the cosmogram emphasize visual improvisation and repetition.4 The principles illuminated by the Kongo cosmogram have guided African American cultural production spanning several decades. This information is useful for scholars and critics across disciplines and in various mediums because it reveals the modification, or amplification, of a cultural heritage artifact that bridges continental Western/Central African and African American ritual and artistic practices. Cosmograms are geometric figures that depict a cosmology, or the science of the origin and development of the universe. A key premise of dikenga ideology is that nothing survives intact or in a fixed form. 5 The cosmogram is fractal, cyclic, and self-regenerating; it is eternal and infinite. Change, mixture, and innovation are givens. However, to better understand the existence of this knowledge in the present we must examine the past. Before European contact in 1482, the Kongo cosmogram, interchangeable with dikenga (also called yowa), existed as a long-standing symbolic tradition within the Kongo culture and, with the forced migration of Kongo people to the Americas, has spread and taken on different forms. In its fullest embellishment, cosmograms served as an emblematic representation of the Kongo people and summarized a broad array of ideas and metaphoric messages that comprised their sense of identity within the universe. Scholar Robert Farris Thompson describes the Kongo cosmogram as a symbol that signifies a circular journey of human souls around the intersecting lines at its center.6 The “turn in the path”—that is, the “crossroads”—remains an indelible concept in the Kongo-Atlantic world, as the point of intersection between the ancestors and the living.7 The design consists of a simple cross with one line representing the boundary between the living world and that of the dead, and the other representing the path of power from below to above, as well as the vertical path across the boundary. Within its design yowa contains “mirrored worlds” within the spiritual journey of the sun, and it connects with funerary ceremonies and the end of life. 8 The yowa universe is divided into two parts with the relationship of the land of the dead or Mpemba and this world or Nseke (Figure 9.1). A body of water represented by the Kalunga, or water line, which is seen as a passage and barrier, separates these two worlds. This chart visualizes the concept of ritual and movement, as well as newly established spaces that transform identities and communities. Yowa belongs to an ensemble of practices, meanings, and recombinant institutional forms that comprise a nexus for personal and group identity.9 For example, in a basement floor at the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia, which is well into its third century and one of the oldest Black churches in the United States, builders punctured holes in the floor in the cross-and-diamond shape of the Kongo cosmogram and publicly worshipped its ancient meaning. Below, there is a space that is four feet tall that held hundreds of escaping, enslaved Africans following the Savannah River to freedom. Quietly, underneath, the escapees worshipped the light and air the symbols allowed.10 Certain elements of its design prevail in the ring shout, the oldest continuously practiced African-­derived dance in the United States that is still performed today. The ring shout is an ecstatic, transcendent religious ritual in which worshipers dance counterclockwise in a circle while shuffling and stomping their feet and clapping their hands. The worshipers sing their own improvised hymns, called shouts, in a call-and-response format, often pantomiming actions described in songs. This performance suggests the movement around the cosmogram.



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Figure 9.1. Nettrice R. Gaskins, “Cosmogram with Kalunga line and cross.” 2015 © Nettrice R. Gaskins. Reprinted by permission of Nettrice Gaskins.

Cosmograms have been elaborated upon in contemporary dance (i.e., break dancing), showing complex intricate patterns or simplified into abbreviated X’s, or even V’s, implying an arc of travel or motion. Nelson George describes the final element of the performance as the exit, or “a spring back to verticality or a special movement that returned the dancer to the outside of the circle.”11 Watching dancers reveals the circular, spiraling movements that replicate the Kongo cosmogram. This simulation is what artist Sanford Biggers calls an “aesthetic echo.”12 The aesthetic response in this instance embraces improvisation and exists as a form of call and response, which is a pervasive pattern of participation that includes the spontaneous verbal and nonverbal interaction between speaker and listener or listeners in which statements (calls) from a speaker are emphasized by expressions (responses) from the listeners.13 Circularity pervades West African ideology, and the circle has proved equally important. Moreover, the watery barrier, or Kalunga, which separates the corporal and spirit worlds of the Kongo cosmogram, has also found a weighty role in African American art. This design has resonance: the ring shout has evolved to include countless other formations, including freestyle break dance and rap cyphers in hip hop and expressions that represent the universe. These examples provoke modes of perception and interaction, with the cosmogram serving as a moderator between different positions or states in space and time.

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Cosmograms are also familiar symbols in Afrofuturism, a critical perspective that opens up inquiry into myriad overlaps between technoculture—the interactions between technology and culture—and Black diasporic histories.14 Jazz musicians such as John Coltrane and Sun Ra were pioneers of Afrofuturism. Circular imagery that is central to many mystical traditions can be found in artwork related to music production, especially the crossroads, which is “the radial point of African cultural production that has seeded so much American music.”15 Adam Rudolph writes that the circularity in Coltrane’s diagram for his well-known jazz composition for Giant Steps shows the “non-linear multiplicity of possible tone relationships.”16 Coltrane explores the rhythmic weaving of space and motion that is a common musical practice around the world; these “thematic fibers” show the weaving of threads in repeated patterns of rhythmic regularity and irregularity. These polyrhythmic patterns are produced in music, as well as in the improvisational, algorithmic, circular, or star-based patterns embedded in African American quilts.17 Coltrane’s use of melodic cells or motifs can be expanded to include other thematic contexts such as the symmetry of the solar system, or even wave patterns in water. These designs are revealed in works produced by Sun Ra and his Arkestra. The artworks highlighted in this chapter reveal a cosmological model in which the universe follows infinite, or indefinite, self-sustaining cycles based on cultural, spiritual, and ritualistic practices. Giant Steps and other works featured in this writing contribute to a vast resource pool on which readers can draw to unlock the hidden codes of the dikenga universe.

Rivers and Crossroads: Dikenga in African American Art Cosmograms, in all manifestations, serve as a foundation and guide for the exploration and analysis of African American creative expression, with instances of the designs resonating in visual art, music, and film/video. Art installations have a common blueprint: a blend of Western culture (spirals inspired by the thirteenth-century floor labyrinth in the cathedral at Chartres), pictograms that echo traditional Africa, and dance diagrams that double as maps.18 Late African American sculptor Houston Conwill created large floor installations such as Rivers at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York. Conwill’s motif, in the shape of a cosmogram, is accented with an inscription from Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Fragments of Hughes’s poem are positioned symbolically on the map. The final words of the poem, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers,” are embedded in the body of a fish symbol at the center of the design that signifies life, fecundity, and transformation.19 The center represents the Kalunga barrier and yowa cross of the Kongo cosmogram. Scholars have linked this space and the crossroads within it as a radial point of cultural production that has profoundly seeded African Atlantic creative expression and innovation. Conwill’s design contains song lines, texts, symbols, historical markers, and waterways. If we look at Rivers as a map key or legend we can read the embedded information. Much of the guide comes from African American vernacular, as part of a critical theory on everyday practices that are associated with local language, culture, literature, and art.20 This language is at the heart of Black artistic expression and performance that has “produced a unique music that expresses at its base a philosophy of survival.”21 Early twentieth-century blues musician Robert Johnson calls forth the yowa cross in “Cross Road Blues.” In specific verses from the song, the speaker/singer kneels at a crossroads to ask for God’s mercy, while another line tells of a failed attempt to hitch a ride before sunset. The



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meanings of the verses in the song are open to interpretation. The significance of the sun, once rising, but now descending, is perhaps a reference to laws in “sundown towns” that included a curfew during racial segregation in the United States.22 What is clear in the song is that, after some sort of trouble, the speaker has reached a turning point at the crossroads. He is turning himself over to stronger forces and calling to God for help. In the Kongo cosmogram, his soul would be positioned at a horizontal line that divides the world of the living (heaven and earth) from the kingdom of the dead (underworld). The bottom half of the cosmogram or the world of the dead corresponds with Johnson’s protagonist who believes he is dying at sunset. In the yowa cross, heaven is imagined at the top and hell at the bottom, with water in-between. The four disks at the points of the cross stand for the four moments of the sun, and the circumference of the cross represents the certainty of reincarnation, but this is not apparent in Johnson’s song. What is more obvious is the connection between the setting of the sun in Johnson’s song and the symbolic sunset of yowa, leading travelers to cross over from a physical realm to the spiritual realm. In Rivers, “Cross Road Blues,” and other works by Johnson, the cosmogram functions similarly to a global positioning system, or GPS, with users positioned at the center of the cross. This art acts as a springboard to explore the realm of vernacular mapping, which has a seemingly infinite capacity for the play of form and action. The world outside of this map represents displacement, migration, and movement. Artist-scholar Duane Deterville writes about director Kahlil Joseph’s use of the Kongo cosmogram in his short film Until the Quiet Comes, with music by Flying Lotus. Deterville examines the narrative spaces depicted in this film with what he calls an Afriscape, or critical lens that can be used to interpret images that are closely connected with African metaphysics.”23 Deterville notes how the film’s sequence highlights how closely death dwells with life—and tragedy with ecstatic joy—under the constant reminder of police surveillance of Black bodies. Once again, water (kalunga) becomes a space for conflict, transition, and action. The most important elements of Joseph’s film are water, the crossroads or point of intersection, and crossing over. At the crossroads, a dancer named Storyboard P, murdered by a mysterious killer’s bullet in a Los Angeles housing development, begins his “ghostdance” toward the land of the ancestors. At the end of the video, a man is submerged and falls deeper into a pool of water, having made the transition from the world of the living to the world of the dead.

Cosmogramma: The Cosmogram in Afrofuturism As noted by Wyatt MacGaffey, the Kongo cosmogram, or yowa, is the “simplest ritual space” that symbolically overlaps with the Christian crucifix and Buddhist mandala. 24 From graphic imagery to the mapping, layering, and cyclical rhythms of space and motion in visual art, performance, sound, and film, we can find resonances of yowa that are central to traditions across the African diaspora, including in Afrofuturism, which is a way that African American artists recontextualize and synthesize the past, present, and future. Afrofuturism, a term coined by writer Mark Dery, fuses African mythologies, technology, science fiction, and art, while rebuking conventional depictions of Black people in the future. 25 Considered a sacred sign to make sense of the world, the Kongo cosmogram maps the continuity of life through lines, arrows, and circles—and most importantly implies movement and change from one state or reality to another. Cosmograms can be fashioned from elements in nature, such as in the form of

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two crossed sticks or the intersection of two roads, implying the intersection of two realms. Thompson writes: “This is the simplest manifestation of the Kongo cruciform, a sacred ‘point’ on which a person stands to make an oath, on the ground of the dead and under an all-seeing God. This Kongo ‘sign of the cross’ has nothing to do with the crucifixion of the Son of God, yet it overlaps with the Christian vision.”26 In Kongo folklore and mythology, the crossroads represents a location “between the worlds” and, as such, a site where supernatural spirits can be contacted and paranormal events can take place. Symbolically, it can mean a locality where two realms—Nseke and Mpemba—touch and, therefore, it represents liminality, or a place literally “neither here nor there.” According to some scholars, the Kongo cosmogram is not only a two-dimensional design but also a three-dimensional, virtual reality continuously interacted with by the community and the individual. 27 This idea of diverse dimensionality has implications for future artistic and cultural production, especially in digital media and computer-generated art. In Black speculative fiction, authors allude to African cosmology and the circularity of the life cycle. Venetria Patton links authors and scholars such as Tananarive Due and Christopher Okonkwo with the practitioners of Afrofuturism who “harness the potentials of the speculative mode and African diaspora spirituality and mythologies to represent black people’s old and New World experiences.”28 Embedded codes—images, symbols, objects—that are associated with elements of the Kongo cosmogram draw on cultural ethos, ritual and spirituality, technology, and artistic actuation (moving from thought to action) in a self-determined, representational space. Scholar Duane Deterville notes that the ideograms contained in the drawings are frequently based on Kongo and Yoruba cosmology, indicating a connection to and contiguity with the spirituality of African continental space.29 Afrofuturism has given artists agency to repurpose the existing codes in the Kongo cosmogram to navigate the past, present, and future. African American artists, including those channeling Afrofuturism, contribute their own conceptions of these codes in their art. Steven Nelson explores the contributions of Houston Conwill and other African American artists. 30 Specifically, Nelson talks about Conwill’s The New Cakewalk, an installation and dance floor that includes a map of the United States with a focus on the American South. The title references the cakewalk, a plantation dance in which enslaved Africans spoofed the movements and mannerisms of their owners. In The New Cakewalk Conwill exposes an alternate version of the dance using symbols that represent the migration and movement of African Americans. Scholar Lisa Clark reconciles Jean-Michel Basquiat’s oeuvre with the hieroglyphics and ideology of the Kongo Cosmogram. 31 Basquiat’s use of the cosmogram in his paintings bridges the physical gap with body over mind. Clark analyzes several Basquiat examples that demonstrate the Black figure and the cosmogram’s polarity as an intersection of opposing forces. Two works by Basquiat show figures at crossroads where opposing forces meet, or the exact locus where opportunity or action happens. King Alphonso is a distinct example of the Kongo cosmogram in plain sight, acting like the head of an arrow on the right side of the canvas. The title of the piece refers to Nzinga Mbemba, otherwise known as King Alfonso I, who ruled the Kongo in the first half of the sixteenth century and was best known for converting the Kongo to Catholicism, merging tribal spiritual customs with Christianity. Clark mentions how the “technical diagram aspect” of Basquiat’s King Alphonso suggests a transition, or a change from one place or system to another. This is a common theme in much of Basquiat’s work, including Black warrior figures in his self-portraits. Regarding Basquiat’s 1982 Self Portrait, Clark notes how certain angles are reminiscent of the kind of grid and geometry we see over and over in cosmograms,



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and elements in other works use the head and body as a matrix or grid, intersecting lines within a circle. 32 The Kongo cosmogram in African American art is a device, vehicle, or engine that powers and charts action. Basquiat’s use of the cosmogram, as a site for collision, change, and movement, has influenced many contemporary African Atlantic artists, including Sanford Biggers, who uses similar diagrams in his work. Mandala of the B-Bodhisattva II, a floor installation by Biggers (with David Ellis) makes visible the hip hop ritual of the cypher, a figure that is based on the cosmogram. Where the Buddhist mandala represents balance, holding different points simultaneously in a calm stasis, yowa differs by charting action over time and space, sometimes even described by geometry. The Biggers/Ellis piece is somewhere in-between cultures, as break dancers or b-boys perform on top of floor tiles painted with designs that together form a circle. At the center is the crossroad—the clash, the butting up against or crossing over. In contrast to Basquiat’s warrior figures, b-boys join the cypher; their dance suggests the balance of action, of call-and-response participation as a positive and necessary phenomenon—a colorful, dynamic opportunity for action. Similar to the ring shouts of old, dance becomes the ritual that liberates its subject from its constrictions. The Kongo cosmogram, as described by scholars, is a sign of reappropriation, as well as representing the intersections of the present and past, mundane and spiritual, and so on.33 Electronic musicians use sound as a way to liberate Africans who have survived the Middle Passage in such a way to explicate Kongo cosmology and tacitly connect the metaphysical space of the Kongo cosmogram to the everyday space of Black communities. The motif and themes such as Kalunga (water) are revealed in sonic fictions created by musicians Sun Ra, George Clinton, Detroit-based duo Drexciya, and Flying Lotus. In the liner notes to their 1997 album The Quest, Drexciya created a map to frame their own mythology. Drexciya, according to the duo, was an underwater country populated by the unborn children of pregnant African women thrown off of slave ships. These children had adapted to breathe underwater in their mothers’ wombs. 34 These mythological muses exist between known worlds. Elements of the cosmogram’s matrix, such as Drexciya’s quasi-African Atlantis, are an important aspect of Afrofuturism; they describe physical as well as spiritual transition, transformation, and movement. Like Drexciya, the Parliament-Funkadelic, or P-Funk creation mythology, is based on a Black Atlantis, or a place where one can “dance underwater without getting wet.” In fact, Drexciya’s The Quest may have been inspired by the P-Funk creation myth in which the ocean is a realm where the life of survivors continues, where the diaspora is united in rhythm and music. 35 Flying Lotus channels pioneering Afrofuturists like Sun Ra, Alice and John Coltrane, P-Funk, and Drexciya in his music. The album Cosmogramma explores these subjects, with tracks such as “Arkestry” and album art that references the mythical and mystical designs in Afrofuturism. 36

We Have Always Lived in the Future: The Afro-Future as a Designed Fiction Sun Ra is a central figure in contemporary African American artists’ embrace of science and technology, as well as engineering and mathematics. His notion of “myth science” emphasized the ways in which artists recreate themselves in places of adversity and oppression. Myth science and other future-forward fictions present interesting ways to consider new, different, distinctive social and artistic practices that assemble around cultural models such as the cosmogram,

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which is encoded in various artworks. Sun Ra’s creation myth appears real and legible in the artifacts that were produced; yet these materials were also used to speculate and extrapolate, or offer reflections on how things were and how they might become something else. Artifacts such as business cards, receipts, and letterheads document how Sun Ra’s artistic practice unfolded across several media and across many social contexts. 37 Myth science is a “designed fiction,” or way of “materializing ideas and speculations without the pragmatic curtailing that often happens when dead weights are fastened to the imagination.”38 Like design fiction, myth science created imaginative conversations about possible future worlds. It speculated about a near future tomorrow, extrapolating from physical reality. Some of the artifacts created during that time were cosmograms that, once made into digital form, explored virtual realms. In the 1980s, Sun Ra and the Arkestra worked with Boston-area inventor/engineer Bill Sebastian on an Outerspace Visual Communicator, or OVC, which was a complex hybrid visual music machine with various control interfaces for electronic video effects and video generation. 39 The original OVC was played with the hands and feet, allowing artists to paint with light similar to how musicians create and explore sound with their instruments. The cosmograms and other algorithmic designs produced by the OVC resonate with contemporary African American artists’ works that sit somewhere between science fiction and science fact. Visual artists Xenobia Bailey and Saya Woolfalk pick up where Sun Ra left off in terms of reappropriating and recontextualizing the cosmogram-mandala motif to create more ethereal and abstract forms of the symbol’s matrix. The notion of a universal whole permeates Xenobia Bailey’s expression, underlying her definition of funk: “the constructive energy of the decomposing elements of nature.”40 Bailey’s Paradise under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk consists of brightly colored, overlapping crocheted mandalas, as well as crowns, elaborate dresses, and domestic items such as a sewing machine. Her “funkadelic-meets-African-priestess-meets-Southern-quilting-patterns aesthetic” encompasses African and Native American craft traditions, Eastern philosophies, global religions, and 1970s funk.41 Bailey not only designs and crochets overlapping, algorithmic cosmogram-mandalas for her Sister Paradise goddess piece, but she also created the story of this goddess’s passage to the Americas to help enslaved African people. Like the b-boys in the Biggers/Ellis piece, this figure stands at the center of a circular stage, once again at a crossroads. Bailey’s artfully costumed mannequin “Sister Paradise,” a compilation of cultural depictions, is immersed in a diversity of philosophical processes and religions and these seemingly disparate representations resonate strongly with Afrofuturism. Saya Woolfalk’s ChimaTek and Empathic Morphology consist of hybrid avatar mannequins hanging from walls or levitating in outfits with headdresses and silver shoes. These figures (Empathics) are formed from interspecies hybridization that, through biomutation and “Utopia Conjuring Therapy,” develops wings that allow participation in aerial displays.42 At the center of Woolfalk’s installations are colorful mandalas. The Empathics’ hybridization process allows them to live in two worlds at once. ChimaTEK, the third and final component of the Empathics, finds Woolfalk’s fictional characters designing a product that gives access to a “chimeric existence through the creation of personalized virtual avatars.” This technology facilitates the process of choosing, manipulating, and enhancing different components of the “Empathic” identity, thereby allowing them to form and inhabit a new consciousness. While not directly referencing Funk like Xenobia Bailey, Woolfalk’s artwork comes very close to



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P-Funk’s Funkentelechy, which is derivative of Aristotle’s entelecheia, or a sense of completeness or utopia. In other words, The Empathics stand in place of P-Funk “clones,” as avatars whose job is to ensure that everyone is on “the One.” Contemporary artists and practitioners of Afrofuturism channel dikenga ideology by telling their own stories, from their own cultural or personal lenses. From an Afrofuturist perspective, then, the cosmogram attests to the survival and persistence of Kongo/Bantu iconography, often in terms that relate to other speculative design and sonic fictions. For example, “the One” is a unifying ideology that taps into a vast archive from which practitioners draw to confront adversity and oppression in hostile environments. The One is both a musicological place and a spiritual place, the “navigation of that beat is invested with age-old rhythms and nuances that end up propelling the rest of everything else.”43 The cosmogram is a vernacular map or portal used to travel or navigate both real and imagined worlds. In these realms, the cosmogram is a mnemonic sign and organizing structure that has a seemingly infinite capacity for the play of form and the manipulation of content. The cosmogram-mandala in art represents a balance between worldly issues (i.e., migration, diaspora, movement) and the internal world as a springboard for analysis. Employing mystical spirituality, cosmic mythologies, utopian/dystopian homelands, and styles all their own, contemporary artists of the African diaspora present mythical matrixes that transport us to other realms that hover outside of the bounds of our temporal knowledge. Scholars and critics across disciplines will find this useful because it reveals the modification, or amplification, of a cultural heritage artifact that bridges continental African and African American creative practices. This chapter explores the possibilities offered by the Kongo cosmogram (dikenga), which is influenced by an Afrofuturist paradigm to help African American artists address past, current, and future realities. By studying and amplifying dikenga, African American artists can unlock knowledge of the universe through the lens of Black culture. Through its design dikenga tells the stories of Africans’ journey to the United States, their migration from the South to the North, and the creation of mythologies that transcend the physical realm. Dikenga offers a lens through which we can interpret images presented to us in a way that makes clear their affinity with African mythologies and metaphysics. African American artists such as Jean-­M ichel Basquiat and Houston Conwill studied the Kongo cosmogram and its design is embedded in their work. Less directly, other artists and their audiences focus their imaginations to speculate about nature, life, and the future using these motifs. The cosmogram, in all of its representations and expressions, acts as a system of knowledge that creates texts, drawings, paintings, films/videos, symbolic formulations, and so on. These representations are helpful ways to understand African American art, as well as the cultural production in Afrofuturism. This is just the beginning of the journey into a myriad of spatialities where cosmic themes help artists reimagine many cultural, scientific, and technological concepts. Manifestations of the Kongo cosmogram or dikenga are never fixed. The forms and meanings attached to the forms are ever-changing. Dikenga contains the hidden codes, languages, and secret technologies of the past, the signs of the present, and the extrapolations and speculations of the future. Artists create maps that audiences or participants can use to read the embedded information. In physical and virtual realities, the cosmogram has the ability to learn from the people who use it. The cosmogram, as a mechanism for aesthetic response, positions the observer of an event here within the moment of now as an interactive part of creation. It

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is a design that triggers the aesthetic experience in its practitioners and in the audiences that are immersed in their works. Within this domain is the aesthetic response as improvisation through call-and-response participation, repetition, and the deliberate fracture or disruption of typical rhythms or patterns to create new arrangements.

Notes 1.  Emma Dabiri, “Afrofuturism: An Invitation to Dance, or a Provocation to Insurgency?,” Media Diversified, 2015, https://mediadiversified.org/2015/02/07afrofuturism-an-invitation-to-dance-or-a-provocation-to -insurgency. 2.  Sidney Lawrence, Houston Conwill Works (Washington, DC: Hirschhorn WORKS, 1989), 3. 3.  James A. Snead, “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture,” in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. H. L. Gates Jr. (London: Routledge, 1984), 59–80. 4.  Robert Farris Thompson, “Kongo Influences on African American Artistic Culture,” in Africanisms in American Culture, ed. Joseph E. Holloway (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), 293. 5.  Grey Gundaker, “The Kongo Cosmogram in Historical Archaeology and the Moral Compass of Dave the Potter,” Historical Archaeology 42, no. 2 (2011): 176. 6.  Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1985), 108. 7.  John M. Janzen and Wyatt MacGaffey, An Anthology of Kongo Religion: Primary Texts from Lower Zaire (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1974), 37. 8.  Robert Farris Thompson and Joseph Cornet, The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1981), 28. 9.  Felix Barbaro Martinez Ruiz, Kongo Machinery: Graphic Writing and Other Narratives of the Sign (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 2004). 10.  Jamie Gumbrecht, “Past Inspires Modern Solutions for Historic Black Church,” CNN Living, 2010, http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/10/21/oldest.savannah.church. 11.  Nelson George, Sally Banes, Susan Flinker, and Patty Romanowski, Fresh: Hip-Hop (New York: Random House, 1985), 90. 12.  Emory University. “Sanford Biggers on Installations, Videos and Performances,” YouTube, April 11, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePNtU33y1cU&t=4558s. 13.  Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1977). 14.  Howard Rambsy II, “A Notebook on Afrofuturism,” Cultural Front, 2012, http://www.culturalfront .org/2012/04/notebook-on-afrofuturism.html. 15.  Adam Rudolph, “Music and Mysticism, Rhythm and Form: A Blues Romance in 12 Parts,” in Arcana V, ed. John Zorn (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2010), 331. 16.  Ibid., 332. 17.  Maude Southwell Wahlman, Signs and Symbols: African Images in African-American Quilts (New York: The Museum of American Folk Art, 2001). 18.  Corydon Ireland, “Mapping Blackness in Creativity,” Harvard Gazette, April 26, 2013, news.harvard .edu/gazette/story/2013/04/mapping-blackness-in-creativity. 19.  Gabriel Peoples, A Circular Lineage: The Bakongo Cosmogram and the Ring Shout of the Enslaved Africans and Their Descendants on the Georgian and South Carolinian Sea Islands (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). 20.  Houston A. Baker Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 21. Lawrence, Houston Conwill Works, 2. 22.  James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York: The New Press, 2005). 23.  Duane Deterville, “Kahlil Joseph’s ‘Until the Quiet Comes’: The Afriscape Ghost Dance on Film,” SFMoMA, 2013, http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2013/03/kahlil-josephs-until-the-quiet-comes-the-afriscape ghost-dance-on-film.



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24.  Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa: The BaKongo of Lower Zaire (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1986), 49.

25.  Jamil Smith, “Black Panther Marks a Major Milestone for Culture,” Time 191, no. 6 (2018): 43. 26. Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 108. 27. Peoples, A Circular Lineage. 28.  Venetria K. Patton, The Grasp That Reaches beyond the Grave: The Ancestral Call in Black Women’s Texts

(New York: SUNY Press, 2013), 181. 29.  Duane Deterville, “Defining the Afriscape through Ground Drawings and Street Altars,” Sightlines (2009): 45. 30.  Steven Nelson, “Structural Adjustment: Visual Cultures of Blackness,” New England Public Radio, 2016, nepr. net/audiofiles/2016/03/29/structural-adjustment-mapping-geography-and-the-visual-cultures-of-blackness. 31.  Lisa Clark, “Jean-Michel Basquiat: The African Cosmogram as a Blueprint for Modern Art,” Ancient Charts and Modern Art, 2013, https://lisakyleclark.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/modern-art-and-ancient charts-the-african-cosmogram-as-a-blueprint-for-the-works-of-jean-michel-basquiat. 32. Ibid. 33.  Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit. 34.  Ben Williams, “Black Secret Technology: Detroit Techno and the Information Age,” in Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life, ed. Alondra Nelson, Thuy Linh N. Tu, and Alicia Headlam Hines (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 168. 35. Parliament, Motor Booty Affair, Casablanca Records, 1978, LP. 36.  Flying Lotus. Cosmogramma, Warp, 2010, LP. 37.  Daniel Kreiss, “Performing the Past to Claim the Future: Sun Ra and the Afro-Future Underground, 1954–1968,” African American Review 45, nos. 1–2 (Spring/Summer 2012): 197. 38.  Julian Bleeker, “Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction,” Near Future Laboratory, March 2009, http://blog.nearfuturelaboratory.com/2009/03/17/design-fiction-a-short-essay-on-design -science-fact-and-fiction/. 39.  Chris King, “Bill Sebastian’s Outer Space Visual Communicator,” Video Circuits, 2013, http://video circuits.blogspot.com/2013/09/bill-sebastians-outer-space-visual.html. 40.  Mary Thomas, “Arts Preview: Feminism and Funk Mix in Artist’s Crocheted Pieces,” Post-Gazette, 2002, http://old.post-gazette.com/ae/20020808xenobia3.asp. 41.  Donna Mintz, “Review: ‘Brides of Anansi: Fiber and Contemporary Art’ Deftly Weaves Many Stories, at Spelman,” ArtsATL, 2014, http://www.artsatl.com/2014/09/review-brides-anansi-fiber-contemporary-art -spelman. 42.  Nicole R. Fleetwood, “Performing Empathies: The Art of Saya Woolfalk,” Callaloo 37, no. 4 (2014): 973. 43.  Mark Reynolds, “That Thing That Makes Funk Funky: ‘The One: The Life and Music of James Brown,’” Pop Matters, 2012, http://www.popmatters.com/column/157147-that-which-makes-funk-funkythe-one-the -life-and-music-of-james-brown.

Bibliography Baker, Houston A. Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Bleeker, Julian. “Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction. Near Future Laboratory. March 2009, http://blog.nearfuturelaboratory.com/2009/03/17/design-fiction-a-short-essay-on-design -science-fact-and-fiction/. Clark, Lisa. “Jean-Michel Basquiat: The African Cosmogram as a Blueprint for Modern Art.” Ancient Charts and Modern Art. April 8, 2013, https://lisakyleclark.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/modern-art-and-ancient charts-the-african-cosmogram-as-a-blueprint-for-the-works-of-jean-michel-basquiat. Dabiri, Emma. “Afrofuturism: An Invitation to Dance, or a Provocation to Insurgency?” Media Diversified. February 7, 2015, https://mediadiversified.org/2015/02/07afrofuturism-an-invitation-to-dance-or-a -provocation-to-insurgency. Deterville, Duane. “Defining the Afriscape through Ground Drawings and Street Altars.” Sightlines. 2009, http://viscrit.cca.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/09deterville.pdf.

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Deterville, Duane. “Kahlil Joseph’s ‘Until the Quiet Comes’: The Afriscape Ghost Dance on Film.” SFMoMA. March 2, 2013, http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2013/03/kahlil-josephs-until-the-quiet-comes-the-afriscape ghost-dance-on-film. Fleetwood, Nicole R. “Performing Empathies: The Art of Saya Woolfalk.” Callaloo 37, no. 4 (2014): 973–989. George, Nelson, Sally Banes, Susan Flinker, and Patty Romanowski. Fresh: Hip-Hop. New York: Random House, 1985. Gumbrecht, Jamie. “Past Inspires Modern Solutions for Historic Black Church.” CNN Living. October 21, 2010, http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/10/21/oldest.savannah.church. Gundaker, Grey. “The Kongo Cosmogram in Historical Archaeology and the Moral Compass of Dave the Potter.” Historical Archaeology 42, no. 2 (2011): : 176–183. Ireland, Corydon. “Mapping Blackness in Creativity.” Harvard Gazette. April 26, 2013, news.harvard.edu /gazette/story/2013/04/mapping-blackness-in-creativity. Janzen, John M., and Wyatt MacGaffey. An Anthology of Kongo Religion: Primary Texts from Lower Zaire. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1974. Johnson, Robert. Cross Road Blues. Vocalion Records. 1937. 78 rpm. King, Chris. “Bill Sebastian’s Outer Space Visual Communicator.” Video Circuits. September 27, 2013, http:// videocircuits.blogspot.com/2013/09/bill-sebastians-outer-space-visual.html. Kreiss, Daniel. “Performing the Past to Claim the Future: Sun Ra and the Afro-Future Underground, 1954– 1968.” African American Review 45, nos. 1–2 (Spring/Summer 2012): 197–203. Lawrence, Sidney. Houston Conwill Works. Washington, DC: Hirschhorn WORKS, 1989. Loewen, James W. Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. New York: The New Press, 2005. Lotus, Flying. Cosmogramma, Warp, 2010, LP. MacGaffey, Wyatt. Religion and Society in Central Africa: The BaKongo of Lower Zaire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Martins, Chris. “Flying Lotus Rising.” LA Weekly. May 13, 2010, http://www.laweekly.com/music/flying -lotus-rising-2164980. Mintz, Donna. “Review: ‘Brides of Anansi: Fiber and Contemporary Art’ Deftly Weaves Many Stories, at Spelman.” ArtsATL. September 23, 2014, http://www.artsatl.com/2014/09/review-brides-anansi-fiber -contemporary-art-spelman. Nelson, Steven. “Structural Adjustment: Visual Cultures of Blackness.” New England Public Radio. March 29, 2016, nepr.net/audiofiles/2016/03/29/structural-adjustment-mapping-geography-and-the-visual-cultures -of-blackness. Parliament. Motor Booty Affair. Casablanca Records. 1978. LP. Patton, Venetria K. The Grasp That Reaches beyond the Grave: The Ancestral Call in Black Women’s Texts. New York: SUNY Press, 2013. Peoples, Gabriel. A Circular Lineage: The Bakongo Cosmogram and the Ring Shout of the Enslaved Africans and Their Descendants on the Georgian and South Carolinian Sea Islands. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2008. Reynolds, Mark. “That Thing That Makes Funk Funky: ‘The One: The Life and Music of James Brown.’” Pop Matters. April 18, 2012, http://www.popmatters.com/column/157147-that-which-makes-funk-funkythe -one-the-life-and-music-of-james-brown. Rudolph, Adam. “Music and Mysticism, Rhythm and Form: A Blues Romance in 12 Parts.” In Arcana V, edited by John Zorn. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2010. Ruiz, Felix Barbaro Martinez. Kongo Machinery: Graphic Writing and Other Narratives of the Sign. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 2004. “Sanford Biggers on Installations, Videos and Performance.” Emory University, 11 Apr. 2012, http:://www .youtube.com/watch?v=ePNtU33y1cU&t=4558s Smith, Jamil. “Black Panther Marks a Major Milestone for Culture.” Time 191, no. 6 (2018): 43. Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1977. Snead, James A. “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture.” In Black Literature and Literary Theory, edited by H. L. Gates Jr. London: Routledge, 1984. Thomas, Mary. “Arts Preview: Feminism and Funk Mix in Artist’s Crocheted Pieces.” Post-Gazette. August 8, 2002, http://old.post-gazette.com/ae/20020808xenobia3.asp.



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Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random House, 1985. Thompson, Robert Farris, and Joseph Cornet. The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1981. Wahlman, Maude Southwell. Signs and Symbols: African Images in African-American Quilts. New York: The Museum of American Folk Art, 2001. Williams, Ben. “Black Secret Technology: Detroit Techno and the Information Age.” In Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life, edited by Alondra Nelson, Thuy Linh N. Tu, and Alicia Headlam Hines. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

10 • FROM BALDWIN TO BEYONCÉ Exploring the Responsibility of the Artist in Society— Re-envisioning the Black Female Sonic Artist as Citizen A B BY D O B S O N

As an artist, I wrestle daily with the question “What is the role of the artist as citizen in our society?” In a climate where inequality, violence, discrimination, and lies are normalized systems of behavior, how can artists and how do artists help us march forward in times of turmoil, inequity, and uncertainty? In “The Creative Process,” James Baldwin wrote, “The peculiar nature of [the artist’s responsibility to his society] is that he must never cease warring with it for its sake and for his own. . . . The war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself, and with that revelation make freedom real.”1 Artists hold up a mirror to society and lovingly point out flaws unseen and ills untended to. Artists reveal some of our deepest individual and collective wounds. Artists create works that serve as both balm and medicine in turbulent times. With the ill treatment of Black women and girls still prevalent, including ever-clear and present attacks on and insensitivity toward our lives, this notion and dream of freedom made real for Black women and girls that goes beyond the symbolic tropes of freedom and nods to the equality heralded by mainstream America is my call to action as an artist, scholar, and activist. There are many inspirations I draw on as an artist, scholar, activist, and global citizen to explore the responsibility and role of the Black female artist to her community and communities. I have been deeply inspired by the women’s movement for gender equality, the Black power and civil rights movements for social justice, and Black feminists’ fight and movement(s) for freedom and justice for all of humanity. In my work, I seek to interrogate and reimagine how the artist, specifically the Black female artist, can help make freedom real and what this freedom could and should look like. I am interested in the contemporary connections between the arts and progressive sociopolitical movements, including Black Lives Matter, 2 Say Her Name, 3 and the Movement for Black Lives4 and their respective calls for transformative justice. I am interested in exploring how the expectations of Black women sonic performers in popular culture, or the lack thereof, limit their experience of citizenship, including the ways in which these expectations and assumptions inhibit Black women sonic performers from engaging politically through music creation and performance. I also analyze the devaluation of Black female sonic expression that is intended (or has the potential) to inspire civic and political engagement. Intersectionality and critical race theory are theoretical frameworks undergirding this inquiry. In addition, this chapter examines the political geography of music production and consumption 152



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whereby space, place, rights, and duties are shaped simultaneously by the intersection of gender, race, class, color, and sexuality. With Reaganomics, neoliberalism, post-civil rights notions of colorblindness and a pervasive meism, defined by consumption, as symbiotic bed fellows operating in tandem with the commercialization and commodification of the American Dream, the 1980s ushered in a period where the connection between music, activism, and the social responsibility of artists to their communities became estranged. The political, social, and economic environment post-1980 precipitated the reluctance on the part of artists in general, and Black female sonic artists in particular, to express political desire through music in popular culture. It is this peculiar character, so different from the era that gave us Nina Simone and Lorraine Hansberry, which has gone under-theorized and deserves attention and examination. As such, in this chapter I begin to explore the idea of re-envisioning the Black woman singing artist as citizen looking at sonic narratives as expressions of sociopolitical desire post-1980. I will also discuss the inspirations behind two of my musical compositions, including the sonic recordings and performances produced to give them embodied life. I will highlight events leading up to these compositions, including the African American Policy Forum’s work to bring about awareness of the extrajudicial killings of Black women and girls and our collective failure to acknowledge police brutality at the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality.

Singing to Exist, Singing to Resist I privilege narratives sounded by the singing voice. The singing voice is incredibly powerful. As observed by renowned artist Bernice Johnson Reagon, when we sing, we announce our existence. 5 This is no small thing. We sing to sound ourselves into view. As captured beautifully by esteemed author bell hooks, “Coming to voice is an act of resistance.”6 We sing to push back on the forces that seek to marginalize our existence. Full disclosure. I have a particular feeling for, knowledge, and understanding of the Black female singer songwriter; SHE is me. And as a Black woman who sings, I continually ask myself and others the following question: Can you help change the world using your singing voice? A meaning-making tool, where identities are “performed,” music is a space of contested representations and visions marked by power dynamics themselves shaped by particular histories. What of the singing voice? According to feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero, voices create spaces of relation and narration among unique plural subjects. Cavarero focuses on the “vocal phenomenology of uniqueness”: the uniqueness of the speaker as manifested in the singular and particular sound of the voice.7 In his introduction to “For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression,” Paul A. Kottman reiterates that for Cavarero, “speaking up or vocalization implies that someone is revealed through the sound of their voice.”8 A woman’s particular voice matters. A woman’s voice embodies her story and point of view. A woman’s story is part of her living archive. To listen to a voice is to recognize another in that voice. The voice is evidence of a subject’s existence and state of being. What about the Black woman’s voice in our society? How is Black womanhood revealed by her singing voice? How does her voice evidence her existence?

When Malindy Sings . . . She Tips on a Tight Rope! The voice is an expression of one’s uniqueness and particular precarity. I argue that artistic expression of Black female artists is policed and censored by various actors, not the least of which includes listeners, music labels, and other channels that control the major means of

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distribution. Stated more explicitly, the music industry is racialized, gendered, and classist; sound and voices are often segregated and genres are based largely on race. In this setting, Black artists are marketed as urban contemporary to Black consumers and mainstream pop is a code expression for White consumers and White artists. Career trajectories are often influenced by experiences at the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality. To be sure, the music industry can be placed on a continuum of political economies that have exploited the sexualized labor of Black women. Scholar Adrienne Davis highlights the extent to which slavery was a sexual political economy used to exploit Black women to replenish the enslaved labor force that built this nation, in “Don’t Let Nobody Bother Yo’ Principle.”9 This sexual terror and violence was in turn justified by stereotypes of Black women as unnaturally hypersexual “jezebels” incapable of being raped but well suited to birth a nation. Davis notes that “the political economy of slavery systematically expropriated black women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity for white pleasure and profit” to serve the political and economic interests of elite White men.10 The enslaved woman’s reproductive capacity was thus converted into market capital to serve economic and political interests. Similarly, the sonic works created, birthed, and (re)produced by Black female culture workers have been converted into market capital to serve the economic, social, and political interests of White men, whether we look at Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Donna Summer, or Whitney Houston. A close look makes clear the continuum between the foundational sexual political economy (of slavery) and its contemporary offspring in the music industry, where light skin color, European features and hair textures, and highly sexualized bodies are privileged in Black female creative laborers by mainstream consumers and spectators of popular music. The Erotic Life of Racism by Sharon Patricia Holland is particularly instructive here. Her project seeks to shift our understanding of the “erotic (sexual),” generally understood as an independent zone, to a site marked by racist practices. Holland posits that the very notion of what it means to desire is embedded in racist practice. Restated, for Holland, the erotic—the personal and political dimensions of desire—are in conversation with everyday racist practice. Racism must be understood then as wielding tremendous power in its ordering of desire.11 This is a good lens through which to review the desire and consumption of music which employs the sexuality of Black singing bodies. Music is often consumed in ways influenced by racist desires. It begs the question: What do audiences desire from Black singing female bodies? Moreover, what stages or arenas are considered proper geographies for Black female singing bodies to inhabit? What spaces are considered appropriate for Black female sonic artists to use to embody subjectivity and perform citizenship? The social construction of race, gender, class, sexuality, and skin color impacts how Black women experience the music business and life as culture workers. The theoretical framework of intersectionality12 is helpful when evaluating experiences of Black female singers in the political economy of the music business. Kimberlé Crenshaw, noted legal scholar and activist, coined the term intersectionality in a pair of essays published in 1989 and 1991, creating a new analytical framework to resist the practice in feminist and antiracist theory and social justice movements to “treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis.”13 Crenshaw articulated the importance of not separating out race from gender and vice versa when analyzing and combating discrimination and marginalization. Intersectionality seeks to describe Black women’s multidimensional experience of oppression and identify policy prescriptions to mitigate the positionality (multiple forms of intersecting discrimination) Black women experience at the margins. In “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” Crenshaw pointed



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out that “Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender. These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.”14 The exclusion of Black women’s experiences in the conception, articulation, and implementation of frameworks for maximizing societal goods in quotidian life globally, including our radical visions for transformative change and social justice, cannot be addressed by focusing on race or gender alone. Analyses of the intersection of race and gender erase Black women when proper attention is not paid to the particular ways that Black women are marginalized in society. Crenshaw’s seminal theoretical intervention sought to repair erasures of Black women by addressing multiple intersectional failures within feminism and antiracism movements. As Crenshaw also put it, “I will center Black women in this analysis in order to contrast the multidimensionality of Black women’s experience with the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences. . . . With Black women as the starting point, it becomes more apparent how dominant conceptions of discrimination condition us to think about subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis. I want to suggest further that this single-axis framework erases Black women in the conceptualization, identification and remediation of race and sex discrimination by limiting inquiry to the experiences of otherwise-privileged members of the group.”15 In “Doing Intersectionality Research: From Conceptual Issues to Practical Examples,” political scientist Evelyn Simien defines intersectionality as “an analytical tool that rejects the separability of identity categories as it recognizes the heterogeneity of various race-sex groups. Firmly rooted in an experience-based epistemology, it encompasses perspectives that maintain that such identity categories as gender, age, race, ethnicity, class and sexuality are mutually constituted and cannot be added together.”16 The intersection of race, gender, class, skin color, and sexuality impacts the choices available to Black female artists for cultural production. It impacts the ability of an artist to access sponsorship and support for her cultural productions and artistic decision-making. It impacts marketability in a society defined by market fundamentalism. As noted by economist Michael J. Sandel in What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, “Markets are not mere mechanisms. They embody certain norms. . . . [Markets] presuppose—and promote—certain ways of valuing the goods being exchanged.”17Skin color as well as race, gender, class, and sexuality affect a Black female singer’s social capital, value, and economic prospects. Experiences at the heart of this intersection can also impact self-censorship and/or self-limiting behavior. It can impact an artist’s decision(s) to conform to mainstream expectations based on racialized, gendered, and color-coded conceptions of possibilities. The intersection of race, gender, class, sexuality, and skin color impacts listener responses to music, including the acceptance or rejection thereof (and the narratives contained within). It also impacts whether a Black female singer’s vulnerabilities are recognized and addressed or not. Listening is a political act. This intersection can help make or break a career, impacting the valuation of a singer’s productive creativity based on the very skin and body that she lives in. In other words, Black female artists often fall prey to expectations that are influenced by misrecognition on the part of others and the devaluation of their cultural expressions by mainstream White capitalist patriarchal heteronormative values. In a nutshell, desires at the intersection of race, gender, color, sexuality, and class can and do shape and construct limits on content and form. If I comment on or critique this or that aspect of our racist

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White supremacist heteronormative patriarchal nation, what will I risk losing today? This is a reasonable question for the Black female sonic artist to ask even post-1980. Why focus on the voices of singing Black female bodies? Black women have historically used art to render themselves visible and to bring about self-determination. As a Black feminist I share scholar Daphne Brooks’s “concern [about] what it means for a people of forced migration, whose bodies have been historically used against their will, to take back their bodies sonically . . . how they use their physicality and performance to rewrite their selfhood.”18 We are creating sonic narratives to give voice to and evidence our subjectivity. Black singing female bodies create sonic narratives to remember and embody their own humanity in spite of the ravages of dehumanization heaped on their backs. Contemporary Black female artists’ quest for subjectivity is comparable to that of post-­ Reconstruction domestic novelists. Professor Claudia Tate’s incredible scholarship in Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century contextualizes eleven domestic novels written by Black female authors in the post-Reconstruction era (between 1877 and 1915). Tate notes that “the political desire in these Black female texts is the acquisition of authority for the self both in the home and in the world.”19 Tate is “particularly interested in examining the symbolic representation of the political desire—collective and personal—of the heroines of the novels; for the heroines’ desires are reflections of the aspirations of their creators and first readers” during the post-Reconstruction era. 20 I find this work relevant to the analysis of Black female singer/songwriters today who in their sonic narratives seek to author their personhood. As Black women, we experience precarity and longing in ways political and personal. Political desire highlights our radical dreams for protection, equality, and freedom beyond mere survival, as well as our vulnerability. I find Tate’s work relevant to analyzing Black female consumers of sonic narratives who likewise “find pleasurable self-affirmation that reflects their racial and gender aspirations to live in a world where their stories are possible.”21 A world where their vulnerabilities, precarity, and subjectivity are recognized, apprehended, met with empathy, and inspire liberatory praxis. Professor Farah Jasmine Griffin, in her incredible work “When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black Women’s Vocality,” cites Frederick Douglass’s classic description of the relationship between Black singing and the social and political condition of Black people’s lives: “I have sometimes thought that the very hearing of those songs will do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject would do. . . . Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery.”22 According to Griffin, “[to] hear the voice is to witness the history. To embody the voice, to play it, to represent it, is to bear witness to that history.” 23 Griffin eloquently describes what most Black women artists know from lived experiences: “The black voice is part of the black body; [and] the black body was . . . [and has been] deemed the very antithesis of all that was [and is] white and therefore . . . [truly valuable] and human.” 24 This situational reality is a fact that influences how that voice located in the Black female body is received and for what purpose it is received, employed, valued, and devalued. The sound of Black women singing unlocks feelings born from the pain of hand-me-down memories— unbottled, uncovered, exorcized, and excavated—revealing connective tissues and tongues— revealing that all in the present is not new. A Black woman much like you, who breathed air and walked on the earth maybe three hundred or two hundred or one hundred or fifty years before



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you, experienced similar pains and restrictions and still tried to use her voice, with or without words, to articulate her reality. What about the Black woman’s voice? One such voice can be heard in an excerpt from an essay written by Deborah Danner about five years before her death. ls [it] a delusion, I ask myself, my belief that I am worthy of respect and a “normal” happy life? . . . We’re asked to accept less than our natural rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. . . . We are all aware of the all too frequent news stories about the mentally ill who come up against law enforcement instead of mental health professionals and end up dead. . . . It has never been lost on me that the old adage, “There but by the grace of God, go I” could as easily apply to me, and having said that, I will get down off my soapbox. 25

On October 18, 2016, a neighbor called the police complaining about a woman acting erratically in an apartment building in the Castle Hill neighborhood of the Bronx. A sixty-six-year-old Black woman suffering from the ravages of schizophrenia lived there. Police found an agitated and clearly mentally ill Deborah Danner in her apartment alone. She took a swing at an officer with a baseball bat while in a state of mental crisis. She was shot twice by a police sergeant and killed.26 Roughly five years before her death, Ms. Danner revealed her fears, frustrations, longings, and precarity as a Black woman living with a mental illness in an essay she penned. In revealing her own truth, Danner cited an earlier killing in 1985 of Eleanor Bumpurs by the NYPD in the Bronx. To create art that sheds light on this and other everyday Black women in crisis is an important task for the Black woman artist. In so doing, as an artist I can help to create an opportunity for all of us, as a community, to bring estranged voices into rooms and spaces typically closed to Black women and girls. I privilege the opportunity to use art as a tool to encourage a community or a series of communities to engage with marginalized voices who reveal themselves through the telling of and listening to their stories. As you read or as you listen to Deborah Danner’s voice embodied in her essay, what do you hear? What do you feel? What do you know? What do you long for? More pointedly, what do we do in the face of such brutality that is the unwarranted and unjustifiable extrajudicial killings of Black women and girls? What do we do in the face of laws, practices, policies, and social mores that make life emotionally, financially, politically, and socially difficult for us. As an artist, one course of action is always to create art in response to something that troubles and/or moves you.

”Why We Can’t Wait” In 2016, I composed “Why We Can’t Wait.”27 It was inspired by the African American Policy Forum’s (AAPF)28 #WhyWeCan’tWait campaign created in response to President Barack Obama’s “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative. By way of background, on June 17, 2014, AAPF in conjunction with over 1,500 Black women submitted Why We Can’t Wait: Women of Color Urge Inclusion in “My Brother’s Keeper” to the White House in Protest. The campaign called for the inclusion of girls and young women of color in the initiative. My composition seeks to shed light on Black women in mental health crises who are killed by police and Black women who are disproportionately incarcerated in the United States. It seeks to transport the listener to a space where she or he can feel and understand, after listening, why the stakes are so high, why these situations must be acknowledged and why, as individuals and a community, we cannot

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afford to wait to take action to address barriers facing Black and Brown women and girls that make them disproportionately vulnerable to extrajudicial killings when suffering from mental illness and to incarceration for nonviolent offenses and/or crimes they did not commit. It seeks to beseech the listener to go beyond national myths and stereotypes about Black women in order to see and feel beyond what he or she has seen and felt for Black women and their lives before experiencing the song in performance. The first verse and chorus of “Why We Can’t Wait” tells the story of a Black woman with a mental disability who seeks out help but is met by a police officer who ignores her vulnerability in crisis. The song starts: “I am in crisis. I call you for help. Why won’t you see me, that all is not well? But I am holy, a child of God. You kiss me with your bullets and end my life’s song. Why we can’t wait. Why we can’t wait. Our lives hang in the balance. All humanity is at stake. Why we can’t wait. Why we can’t wait. Our lives hang in the balance. That’s why we can’t wait.”29 “Why We Can’t Wait” was created for Deborah Danner and the countless Black women who have sought help while in crisis (or whose families have sought help for them) and ended up dead at the hands of police officers (or unjustly convicted or sentenced) instead of receiving the critical assistance they needed. 30 A guitar and voice duet, the directness and simplicity of the musical arrangement of “Why We Can’t Wait” complements the intimate vulnerability and precarity felt by Black women subjected to racialized gender violence. Judith Butler’s Frames of War is useful here as it points out that “the frames through which we apprehend or indeed fail to comprehend the lives of others as lost or injured (lose-able or injurable) are politically saturated. They are themselves operations of power.”31 In a later passage, Butler goes on to say that “the ‘frames’ that work to differentiate the lives we can apprehend from the ones we cannot (or that produce lives across a continuum of life), not only organize visual experience but also generate specific ontology’s of the subject. . . . [Essentially] there are subjects who are not quite recognizable as subjects, and there are ‘lives’ that are not quite—or, indeed, are never—recognized as lives.”32 What do you do when your life and the lives of Black women like you are not recognized? What do you do when your injuries are not recognized as injuries, and when your humanity is unseen and disregarded.

Song as Political Project It was never intended for Black women to have full-fledged citizenship in the United States. Citizenship has important social and political meanings: it gives status of equal membership in a polity. It defines the privileges and obligations of membership in the community and it offers a common identity. Our conceptions of citizenship, however, are not without vigorous contestation throughout U.S. history. In “The Meaning of American Citizenship,” political theorist Rogers M. Smith provides a brief history of the concept, describing how the United States has embodied and combined liberal, civic-republican, and/or nativist ideals to connote more than a legal identity. “It is at bottom a statement of political and personal identity that evokes complex, powerful, and often contradictory ideas and sentiments, for Americans and non-Americans alike. But while the laws regulating American citizenship have never captured all the rich significance of the status, neither have they been immune to these broader political and personal meanings. Because being a United States citizen has stood for different things to different Americans at different times, the constitutional provisions, legislative statutes, and judicial decisions governing civic membership have blended several distinguishable and evolving conceptions of what American citizenship means.”33 Citizenship in the United States,



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however, has always been complicated, particularly for poor women of color. In “Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays,” T. H. Marshall34 analyzed the development of citizenship, noting three main elements over time: civil rights, political rights, and social rights. In this context, citizenship has been historically raced and gendered in America, regulating interactions between insiders and outsiders; and affecting power, freedom, and equality in the labor force, in the bedroom, and on the street. In Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination, Salamishah Tillet discusses how contemporary representations of slavery in African American literature, film, theatre, visual culture, and law engage and reconcile with “one of the fundamental paradoxes of post-civil rights American politics: African Americans’ formal possession of full legal citizenship and their inherited burden of ‘civic estrangement.’”35 Tillet argues that “post-civil rights African American writers and artists claim and reconstruct pivotal figures, events, memories, locations, and experiences from American slavery in order to provide interiority and agency for enslaved African Americans and write them into the national narrative.”36 She further suggests that “African Americans shape their post-civil rights representations of slavery to gain access to this multidimensional American citizenship [civil, political, and social], particularly the extralegal markets of citizenship such as the economic (the right to earn) and the civic (the right to recognition).”37 Tillet’s analysis of what she calls the “peculiar citizenship” of Blacks in America does not specifically examine music and the representations of sonic cultural workers. It is, however, nonetheless instructive in its examination of the civic estrangement of Black people generally. Building on Tillet, my work suggests that singing is more than a “site of slavery” or “site of memory.” I argue that cultural products produced by Black female sonic performers are a critical part of a political project beyond seeking inclusion in the national narrative. This political project relates more to using music as a site of civic education to cultivate civic action and political participation. Put another way, this political project calls for embodied civic participation through sonic expression that functions as a type of civic education. This use of sonic performance to provide civic and political education is seen as both a right and obligation of citizenship that goes beyond the right to earn or the right to recognition. The Black female artist thus provides civic education through sonic performance for a new site of empowerment and a new space for the cultivation of civic networks for public debate and deliberation. Why is this political project important and what is at stake? As Black women, we reside in a very particular space in the American culture, polity, and imagination. The roads we travel on our quest for real recognition, structural support and protection, visibility, wellness, and the “good life” in this nation are littered with insults to our personhood, unapologetic denials of our very humanity and value, limits on the scope of our citizenship, and roadblocks that structure our material economic, social, and political experiences. The litany of examples of this precarious position in society gives me pause. Black women are more likely than most groups to live in poverty. “Between 2004 and 2014, median annual earnings for black women who worked full-time, year-round, declined to $34,000, lower than for most groups of men or women in the country. Unsurprisingly, that means that black women experience poverty at a higher rate than any other group, save Native American women.”38 Black women are more likely to die in childbirth than any other group of women in the United States. “Black women are facing a maternal mortality crisis in America, and the silence is deafening. Black maternal mortality rose from a rate of 36 deaths to 42.8 deaths per 100,000 live births between 2009 and 2011. Maternal mortality for white women remained virtually unchanged during the same time period (12 to 12.5 per 100,000 live births). Black

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women’s maternal mortality rate is more than 10 times that of women in most other industrialized nations. In fact, a Black woman in America would more than double her chance of surviving childbirth if she lived in places like Lebanon, Libya, Albania, or Serbia.”39 Black women represent 30 percent of all incarcerated women in the United States, although they represent only 13 percent of women in the United States. Black women are more likely to be killed than any other group in the United States. “Non-Hispanic Black and American Indian/Alaska Native women experienced the highest rates of homicide (4.4 and 4.3 per 100,000 population, respectively).”40 The landscape is daunting. In fact, ours has been a never-ending quest for a safe space where we are protected from the violence of interlocking racist, sexist, and classist structures and the pervasive and unrelenting sense of homelessness we experience in a land littered with spaces carved out by neighbors who would rather close doors in our faces than hold them open for us. This legacy of suffering and sacrifice has defined Black women’s experiences in America. Our most gifted musical and literary heroes write and sound this suffering and sacrifice. They sound and write stories of our resistance as well as our complicity and resignation. In his essays, James Baldwin theorized on the importance of music, film, and theatre and, as literary historian and cultural critic Koritha Mitchell points out, he “consistently engaged with the meaning making power of performance.”41 James Baldwin used his pen and the sonority of his voice like a trumpet sounding a bugle call in the midst of white noise and devastation on the battlefield that is Black life in America. He wrote in his 1951 essay “Many Thousands Gone” that it is “only in music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the American Negro has been able to tell his story.”42 That story has had much to do with the construction of race and its impact on our national consciousness and culture. It is for this reason that critical race theory’s centering of storytelling from the margins and centering of race,43 in complex relationship with class, gender, and other areas of difference, holds such value. It provides an innovative theoretical tool to examine the interplay of power between seemingly isolated actions and impersonal institutional practices. This research inquiry is predicated on the prevalence and normalization of racism (in complex relationship with sexism) in the music industrial complex. The normalness of racism in this space is complemented and complicated by assumptions of color-blindness post-1980. As noted previously, the “erotics of racism,” as outlined by Hollands, helps to underline the manner in which racism (consciously or unconsciously) orders and constructs desire in ways that limit cultural productions to those that echo national myths and stereotypes about Black womanhood. Further, the landscape of the music industry is such that interests often converge among listeners, performers, consumers, label owners, presenters, and music distributers to trouble the notion of the Black female sonic artist’s role beyond performing entertainer (i.e., as a civic/political educator, civic actor, and citizen). Furthermore, this inquiry is also defined by the importance and power of stories and counternarratives to provide evidence of experiences unrecognized and unseen by mainstream consumers and spectators. As such, critical race theory’s focus on the experiential knowledge of racial minorities and the discursive nature of race offers an astute lens through which to examine the questions posed here.

Singing to Power, Composing for Freedom More than the sum of its parts—sonic, lyric, visual, and emotive—the sounds of music help us construct our daily lives. Indeed, the sonic space of music is often a terrain of contested representations and visions marked by power dynamics themselves shaped by particular histories.



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Dreams and frustrations are sounded. Identities are performed, stereotypes are excavated, and structures and systems get reinforced through music performance and reception. The potential power of sound as embodied by the singing voice was beautifully captured by Bernice Johnson Reagon. She notes, “Sound is a way to extend the territory you can affect, so people can walk into you way before they can get close to your body. . . . And so anybody who comes into that space, as long as you’re singing, they cannot change the air in that space. The song will maintain the air as your territory.”44 Sound and music-making is thus a productive enterprise that performs important work. As such, for as long as I’ve wondered about the potential of the singing voice to inspire change, I’ve had a strong feeling—a deep and abiding sense of knowing—that music, particularly vocal music, has the potential to inspire empathetic connection and civic engagement in everyday people. As an artist, activist, and scholar I am looking at the connection between the arts and politics, specifically how music and other sonic-based performative art can function as a civic tool for empathy cultivation to promote and model transformative social change. Armed with this knowledge, I have been somewhat obsessed with the notion of re-envisioning the Black woman artist as citizen and looking at sonic-based narratives as expressions of sociopolitical desire post-1980. I am interested in how contemporary Black female artists deal with life in the neoliberal, postracial, and post-everything milieu they find themselves in. Moreover, which Black female artists are using their voices to insist on a “hearing” of Black female concerns and demands today and for what purpose? Both my artistic and research projects investigate the potential of music to inspire empathy for the lives of Black women and girls. Both projects emphasize the “Black female interior”—to riff on esteemed poet and scholar Elizabeth Alexander’s The Black Interior—a space beyond public everyday life where we envision complex Black female selves challenging stereotypical views of Black womanhood.45 My work aims to serve as a space for resisting stereotypes about Black female musical expression and seeks to cultivate and inspire empathetic feeling for Black women and girls to help change how people see, hear, protect, and treat us. There are situations too numerous to catalog where a Black woman or girl cannot count on being protected by strangers, familiars, or the state alike. Renisha McBride, who knocked on the door of a stranger seeking help after a car accident and ended up shot in the face and killed by a White male homeowner with a shotgun, is but one example.46 My artistic and academic projects seek to sound a historical (re)membering of Black women’s voices, our petitions, our pain, our bodies, our struggles, our sacrifices, our memories, and our recommendations and prescriptions for future possibilities. It invites the following questions: How do marginalized people use sound and the body to express resilience, dreams, and strategies for freedom? How do we use sound and the singing voice to remember lives mistreated, unprotected, erased, and snuffed or choked out? How do we use the singing voice to remind people of our humanity?

Birth of a Sonic Intervention: Making Room, Claiming Space On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January 2015 when activists rallied in Harlem, New York, and marched to the United Nations to protest police brutality of Black and Brown bodies, I was one in the number. I went to march with the African American Policy Forum because, as a Black feminist, AAPF’s work to promote transformative intersectional social justice speaks deeply to me. I marched with AAPF helping to hold up its #SayHerName banner, the only one in a sea of signs and banners to address police brutality waged against Black women and girls. In May

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2015, I attended the #SayHerName vigil organized by AAPF in Union Square and listened as loved ones and concerned citizens told stories of Black women and girls who had been killed by police officers. An admirer of AAPF cofounder, critical race theorist, and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s seminal work articulating intersectionality,47 I joined other concerned individuals on a series of conference calls held by AAPF to formulate strategies for addressing the lack of inclusion of Black women and girls in the My Brother’s Keeper initiative, the pushout of Black girls from primary and secondary schools around the nation, and our collective need to recognize that #BlackGirlsMatter. These calls highlighted the gaping holes in the dominant narrative about police brutality of Black bodies in the United States and our collective need and responsibility to #SayHerName. These actions can be seen as attempts by a community of activists to carve out space and expand the geography of our narratives about the disposability of Black lives to include the particular vulnerability of Black women and girls. Marching with AAPF from Harlem to midtown Manhattan alongside other activists and everyday folk sounding calls for justice was an experience I will never forget. I was energized by the music that played on a large portable sound system that became our traveling boom box. I can still feel the energy generated by this march and the role that music and chanting played. During the final leg of the march I was overcome by emotion, tears welling in my eyes as “Glory,” written for the motion picture Selma and performed by John Legend and Common, seemed to explode out of the speakers. Right on time, the song helped us all to keep moving as if we had just started marching, reenergized for the continued journey. In that powerful moment, there was a silence that shook and troubled me. In that moment, I also wanted to hear a contemporary song that spoke to the specific experiences of Black women and girls and our longing for real inclusion, equality, justice and freedom, right now. Later, at the vigil in Union Square in May 2015, surrounded by images of Black women and girls murdered by police officers as we called out their names and listened to their stories, I vowed silently to create a song that could be of some use—a song with gravitas that would privilege our experiences, knowledge, memories, and demands. It was in that moment that I set the intention of crafting a song that could be used as a soundtrack to the #SayHerName movement for intersectional racial justice. My composition “Say Her Name”48 was thus inspired by a social justice movement of the same name that calls attention to police brutality and all manners of structural and nonstructural violence committed against Black women and girls. It was created as an acapella piece in the tradition of the legendary Sweet Honey in the Rock.49 The song begins with humming and moves through moans and wails to say the names of just a few of the countless Black women and girls who have been either killed by police or died under suspicious circumstances while in police custody. The song is at once a lullaby, lament, dirge, and hymn—a sonic space in which to honor and remember Black female lives. The song’s melismas and long tones are meant to carry tools for resilience, fighting, survival, hope, and the possibility of joy, notwithstanding pain. The song, in its entirety, is (over ten minutes) long and incorporates a sonic citation or remixed and reconstituted acoustic sampling of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (the Black national anthem), composed by James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson. “Say Her Name” is at once a modern-day spiritual and a lullaby that dances with silence, breath, and memory, in and out of time, to name the fallen and declare that they, as Black women and girls, matter. It references this cornerstone anthem and repurposes it for today. It calls for us to remember the names and stories of Black women who have been lost to violence and societal amnesia and who have been killed by arms of the state in our contemporary moment, thus connecting them to Black women who have been victims of violence since the Middle Passage. The song further implores each



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one of us to “Say Her Name for all the names [we] cannot say. Say Her Name for all the names [we’ll] never know. Say Her Name. Black Girls Matter. Say Her Name. Black Women Matter.”50 The song attempts to use sound to extend the territory that a Black woman artist can affect on behalf of other Black women by carving out and taking up space to remember and center Black women’s lives. Each long tone, cadence, and musical silence in-between are meant to hold our grievances and our petitions beyond our bodies and what we experience daily. Since December 2015, I have been serving as artist-in-residence with the African American Policy Forum. I sing “Say Her Name” as a call to action, to both document the movement in song and to serve as a living and breathing sonic text and testimony to Black female lives cut short by senseless violence, either at the hands of the police, as a result of other forms of state violence (i.e., economic, social, and/or political practices and policies), or at the hands of an intimate/domestic partner or any other individual/citizen. This song was created in a manner loose enough to incorporate additional narratives and additional names of women who have been or who will be killed or marked by racialized gender violence. It is an attempt to remind people of the humanity of Black women and girls. It is a call for action. It recognizes that as much as the voice of a sonic artist is an expression of her uniqueness and particular precarity, singing delineates and embodies spaces for the Black female artist to engage in action beyond making a statement of existence or subjectivity.

Empathy in Action: An Ethical Duty of the Citizen In “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mister Charlie,” Koritha Mitchell discusses the importance of the theatre to Baldwin. She points out that Baldwin insisted that “black stage actors can help U.S. citizens fulfill our greatest ethical duty: to rediscover our connection to each other.”51 Mitchell goes on further to observe and suggest that ultimately, Baldwin, speaking through Tom, one of his characters in Blues for Mister Charlie, believed that the art of theater created a space for fulfilling the ethical mandate to recognize that we are all each other’s flesh and blood”52—a recognition that Baldwin believed would recreate us and the United States. Mitchell points out that “Baldwin demands that we rediscover our human connection—that we find ways to see that we really are each other’s flesh and blood.”53 “Say Her Name” was created to offer a snapshot of what it feels like to experience Black womanhood today outside the sonic performative boxes typically permitted by commercial music that curtails and restricts Black female vocality. It is an attempt to remind each listener that we are each other’s flesh and blood. It is my intention to inspire empathy for Black female lives with a musical composition. In so doing, I too seek to help people rediscover their connection to Black women and girls and ours to them. I seek to remind people that Black women and girls are not superhuman, not impervious to pain and suffering, and not exempt from empathy. We are human beings and, as such, integral members of humanity. Baldwin inspires me to create art that is hard to look at and hard to listen to as much as it is beautiful, to explore the Black female interior in my music, and to bring my complexity as a thinking Black woman into the cultural spaces privileged and not so privileged in our times. Baldwin continues to inspire me to create work that will resonate beyond this current moment. He inspires me to challenge, extend, and even reinvent myself as an artist always in conversation with who I am at my core. In “Nobody Knows My Name” Baldwin talks about listening to Bessie Smith and the impact of how she threw her tone and cadence, helping him to dig back for things he buried deep down. Discussing racism in an interview, Baldwin noted, “You have

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to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.”54 As a Black woman artist of a certain point of view, I have to arm myself daily to deal with the long arms of White supremacy and patriarchy that show up in how people conceive of, imagine, and receive art and music-­making by a Black woman comfortable in her skin. Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Nina Simone, and Audre Lorde inspire me to create brave sonic spaces that allow Black women to access their emotions to create opportunities for us to remember, (re)member, mourn, honor, and support each other. I am encouraged and inspired by these sonic and literary way-makers to create sonic spaces that recognize our humanity and demand that people treat us accordingly. Again, my work seeks to interrogate the central questions of (a) What is the responsibility of the artist to her community/communities? and (b) How can music call for and help make freedom real? Baldwin’s example inspires me to be intentional in my music creation, which is essentially a place- and space-making exercise. I am intentionally developing work to serve as a sonic intervention—a tool for awakening and inspiring a civic-minded and engaged community of everyday folk. It is a call to (re)membering. It is a call to acknowledge the humanity of Black women and girls in the United States and around the world. It is meant to be an embodied petition in support of today’s progressive social justice movements rooted in a Black feminist ethic and theory of liberation, including the Say Her Name and Black Lives Matter movements for justice. I wrestle with what it means to come ready to participate as a citizen in our contemporary world. I’m interested in emotional and empathetic preparation for civic agency and democratic participation. I see empathy cultivation in the United States and global citizenry as part of making people ready to participate in our democracy. It is in fact critical to public participation in the democratic process. This empathy cultivation is moreover inextricably linked to Black feminist praxis and action.

Can Our Persuasion Build a Nation? Interestingly, I think Beyoncé and I have been on a similar creative and philosophical trajectory over the past few years. In “Runs the World (Girls),” Beyoncé makes an important statement: “My persuasion can build a nation. Endless power. . . . You’ll do anything for me. Who run the world?”55 Upon every listen, this declaration jumps right out at me. It speaks of a future possibility and suggests the relevance of Black women sonic performers to nation-building. You should know, I use to be critical of Beyoncé; I did not feel that she used her amazing platform and celebrity to make explicitly political statements. 56 For a long time, the promise of her vocality was not explored in ways that could satisfy my desire for her to be overtly political in terms of petitioning the nation state or a state actor (i.e., cataloguing or alluding to grievances against abusive governmental authority and/or suggesting alternatives to the globalized capitalist White supremacist patriarchal project in which we live). While Beyoncé’s performances have begun to make important interventions with political and civic implications, her societal critiques, particularly of racism, amount to intersectional failures. Why this focus on Beyoncé? When focusing on the Black female singing body, who better to review or analyze than arguably the most popular Black female artist in modern history. 57 When asked by a reporter for People magazine during a June 2012 interview, “If you could be someone else, who would you be?” Michelle Obama replied, “Gosh. If I had some gift, I’d be Beyoncé. . . . I’d be some great singer.”58 I was blown away by this revelation. I believe First Lady Michelle Obama’s admission evidences her recognition and appreciation for Beyoncé’s use of



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her body and sonic narratives as instruments to carve out space as a subject to be seen and heard in American society. Much has been written about Beyoncé’s sexualized image, body politics, songs of female empowerment, identity as a feminist, and her vocal and visual performances. Beyoncé’s artistic expression can and should be read as a quest for subjectivity and a demand to be seen. “Bootylicious” helped to rewrite the specter of the Hottentot Venus in American culture so that in 2018 women of all stripes crave derrières like those of Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, and my reallife cousins Jo and Michelle, self-affirming progress for the young Black and Brown girl who is thick and curvaceous. Why focus on Beyoncé? She is in a unique position because of her celebrity and gifts. More than just singing the national anthem at the Super Bowl, she had the halftime show. With L’Oréal, Covergirl, countless other endorsements, and a squeaky clean image in comparison to many in the popular music industry, legions of little girls and grown women feel connected to her, her artistry, and personal narrative. They aspire to be like Beyoncé. A song like “Independent Women” uses the trope of the strong Black woman coping-­mechanismturned-stereotype to assert female empowerment. Unfortunately, “Independent Women” might just be what power brokers in America want Black women to continue singing—all the better for there to be no need to address structural inequities, as Black women are expected to fend for ourselves without affirmative acts to redress wrongs that persist and hamper us to this day. “If I Were a Boy,” although not penned by Beyoncé, fleshes out gender politics and inequities between men and women. It speaks volumes to power dynamics in households and workplaces all over America. Beyoncé’s utilization of an all-female band, primarily women of color, is also significant. To create this gendered space on stage that privileges the feminine artistic and creative energy to create music that moves people all over the world is one of the most radical artistic choices Beyoncé has made in her career. “Runs the World (Girls)” represents aspirational politics to be applauded but it falls short as women do not in reality run the world. Despite Beyoncé’s fund-raising for the Obama campaign, use of Tumblr and Instagram to evidence her voting, and open letters to the Obamas praising them as role models, before the summer of 2014, her cultural work did not go far enough for me. In 2019, her cultural productions still do not go far enough. On the one hand, I seek to situate Beyoncé’s cultural productions within an interrogation of the politics associated with using Black female singing bodies and their narratives to help foster American nation-building based in part on the fallacy of color-blindness, equality of opportunity, and gender neutrality. The Black woman’s voice has become the quintessential American voice used historically to sell a version of the American democratic project that America has oftentimes not lived up to in practice. 59 As such, of all the contemporary Black female popular artists, Beyoncé is a great case study to single out for intersectional analysis. Singing your subjectivity to have others recognize your existence is important, but alone the politics of recognition will not liberate Black women and girls. While individuals and institutions alike recognize Beyoncé’s power globally in the media, she was increasingly critiqued for not being a politically engaged and socially responsible artist.60 In fact, when most people thought about Beyoncé, the words “artistic activism” and “social change” did not immediately come to mind before the summer of 2014—the summer when Michael Brown was left on the street to bleed out in the heat in front of his community, the summer when a nation of Black citizens rose up in protest in and outside of Ferguson, Missouri. Two solo visual albums later (Beyoncé and Lemonade), I am happily forced to revisit some of my earlier critiques. From “Formation” performed at the Super Bowl with its visual homage

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to the Black Panther Party and its incessant call for Black women to assemble and get in formation; to the video and lyrics for “Super Power,” cowritten with Frank Ocean, and its call for outsiders, the rejected, and other everyday people to rage, dance, move, and love in protest against the machine up and down these city streets; to “Ghost” read as a metaphor for shadow citizens, working nine to five just to stay alive, who are relegated to merely existing in the same position; to all that was/is Lemonade; to giving money to BLM activists for bail in Ferguson, Missouri, when they protested the police killing of Michael Brown; to organizing fund-raisers and performing in support of the Obama and Clinton presidential campaigns; and to encouraging her fans to exercise the right to vote, one can argue that Beyoncé is using her sonic platform as political theatre. While Beyoncé does not comment directly on critiques about her level of sociopolitical activism, I argue that her songs and embodied performances (both on and off the stage) have been evolving beyond that of a sonic discourse of desire for subjectivity (to have one’s Black womanhood recognized and celebrated) to a rather nuanced, sophisticated, and complex tightrope of performance that addresses issues of a civic and political nature.61 Beyoncé’s recent visual albums are an exercise in a kind of subtle and nascent civic engagement. It is at once a requiem for citizens who exist in the shadows and champions of love (romantic and agape) willing to fight for liberation and transformative change for self and for others. Beyoncé’s use of performance, including her social media posts, public appearances, musical performances, public statements, and donations (i.e., political speech) went beyond supporting personal and economic empowerment to calling for sociopolitical empowerment for Black people. After the police killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in 2016, she posted the following on her website: “It is up to us to take a stand and demand that they ‘stop killing us,’” providing a link for fans to contact their congressional representatives.62 When Beyoncé intentionally references and comments on the disposability of Black lives and by doing so calls out racism and the hypocrisy of the American dream of color-blindness, she engages in what scholar Regina Bradley refers to as “sonic disrespectability”: “the use of sound and volume to contest oppression in the shape of dictating how black women should or should not act.”63 While Beyoncé’s performances and sonic disrespectability embody civic consciousness and political theatre, her critiques of White supremacy and racism fall short to me. In Lemonade, the precarity and criminalization of blackness is recognized and explored by Beyoncé most fiercely and compellingly in the body of a Black man or Black boy and lacks a political subjectivity that acknowledges a need for justice that is intersectional and specific to (or at least inclusive of) Black women. Beyoncé’s use of imagery in Lemonade is unquestionably powerful, from her dressing in a hoodie and walking in a field, to a young Black boy also in a hoodie dancing defiantly in protest before a line of police officers, to the memorialization of Black men and boys killed by police officers in a picture frame held in the arms of their beloveds, now turned Mothers of the Movement. In all of these frames and sonic spaces I long for the defiant Black female in protest as symbol, inspiration, catalyst, and change agent. It begs the question: Are Black women and girls not also killed by cops? Are not Black women and girls on the frontlines of the battles we fight as Black people? Do not the mothers of the Black women and girls killed by cops deserve to be uplifted as Mothers of the Movement also aching to have their loved ones’ voices heard, and remembered and considered when solutions and responses to the brutality of institutionalized racism are being identified and developed? Notwithstanding my critiques, Beyoncé and I appear to have been on a similar voyage of discovery. We’ve been wrestling side by side—Beyoncé and me. We’ve been wrestling with some important questions. Do I as an artist have a responsibility to make art that seeks to uplift



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and inspire my community to get in formation and be the best it (we) can be? What is my role and function as an artist? What should it be? How can I use my creative and artistic imagination to help cultivate freedom? How can music be used as a tool to help develop a critical consciousness and an empathetic ethic of community care in the public for the public? How can music and singing created and performed by Black women be used to establish a political subjectivity that marshals civic and political actions by Black women and others who wish to help transform the world to a place where we are no longer politically, socially, and economically unprotected and vulnerable. In and through my work, I am wrestling with how to create and inspire empathy for Black women’s lives through interpretation, creation, performance, and analysis of song. Empathy necessitates that one goes beyond individual recognition of one’s privilege to deeply caring for another person’s humanity. While important, empathy, however, is not enough. I’m calling for empathy that radicalizes an individual, an empathy that is kinetic and sufficient to move and propel someone to be brave in spaces where they hold and wield power and where they are in a position to influence power. This empathy must then be channeled to tackle systems that oppress people who are both similar and different from one another. In our current sociopolitical and economic climate where people remain in prison for months or even years because they can’t pay a $300 fine or make a $1,000 bail, where people who work fifty hours a week cannot afford to live because the corporations they work for refuse to pay them a living wage, where healthcare is viewed as a privilege and not a right, where funding for schools is directly proportional to the wealth of the community, where Black girls are disproportionately pushed out of middle and high schools for small infractions for which White girls and boys get a slap on the wrist, where Black and Brown women are disproportionately sent to jail for nonviolent crimes, and where Black bodies are stopped, frisked, dehumanized, and killed for sport by too many of our nation’s police officers, cultivating empathy through music and performance seems sometimes like an impossible passion . . . an impossible aspiration . . . an impossible task. I’m encouraged, however, by James Baldwin, who once noted in the The Fire Next Time, “But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand— and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.”64 Our times, like the post-Reconstruction and post–civil rights eras, demand that as a society we recognize and address the particular vulnerabilities of Black women by using these vulnerabilities to forge a political subjectivity that reimagines the artist as citizen beyond merely singing about or calling for recognition of our personal subjectivity. As I demand the best and seemingly impossible of myself as an artist and global citizen, I am tremendously blessed and excited that my journey is being defined by my connection to music, words, and an examination of their potential to inspire and cultivate actions and change—change that helps to make a better place for all of us—to help make the world that we dream.

Notes 1.  James Baldwin, “The Creative Process,” in Creative America (New York: Ridge Press, 1962), http://thenews

choolhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Baldwin-Creative-Process.pdf.

2.  Alicia Garza, “A HerStory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” Black Lives Matter, 2017, http://black

livesmatter.com/herstory. In “A HerStory,” Alicia Garza points out that she, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi created #BlackLivesMatter as a response to anti-Black racism. It was created as a call to action for Black people after seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was murdered and his killer was not held accountable

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for the crime. It moved beyond a hashtag to a movement in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Garza notes, “Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression. . . . Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements. It is a tactic to (re)build the Black liberation movement.” 3.  Say Her Name is the social media campaign (#SAYHERNAME) and social movement launched by the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and its executive director, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, in February 2015 to promote public awareness of police violence against Black women and girls. Say Her Name was a response to the failure to include women and girls in the mobilization against police violence against Black people. Consistent with AAPF’s mission of promoting intersectional racial justice through research and public education about the ways issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality create and foster erasure, inequality, and injustice, Say Her Name was developed to help ensure that Black women’s names and stories are acknowledged and integrated into demands for justice, whether in policy recommendations to combat police violence or media representation of victims of anti-Black police brutality. For a powerful documentation of stories of Black women who have been killed by police and/or who have experienced gender-specific racist forms of police violence, see Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and Andrea J. Ritchie, with Rachel Anspach, Rachel Gilmer and Luke Harris, “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality against Black Women,” African American Policy Forum, the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia Law School, 2016, http://aapf.org/sayhernamereport. See also Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Ted Talk discussion on the need for #SayHerName and intersectional social justice, featuring Abby Dobson’s rendition of her composition “Say Her Name” at Kimberlé Crenshaw, “The Urgency of Intersectionality,” TedWomen, October 28, 2016, TedTalk video, 18:49, https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency _of_intersectionality 4.  The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) is a collective of more than fifty organizations representing Black people across the United States and globally, formed in response to continued anti-Black violence in order to articulate a collective aspiration for liberation as well as to create a document that provides tangible resources for groups and individuals doing freedom work. The M4BL created a platform available on its website with policy briefs that describe the steps that must be taken for Black people to achieve liberation. The platform is both a visionary agenda and a resource for Black people. Black humanity and dignity requires Black political will and power. Despite constant exploitation and perpetual oppression, Black people have bravely and brilliantly been the driving force pushing the U.S. towards the ideals it articulates but has never achieved. In recent years we have taken to the streets, launched massive campaigns, and impacted elections, but our elected leaders have failed to address the legitimate demands of our Movement. We can no longer wait. . . . We are a collective that centers and is rooted in Black communities, but we recognize we have a shared struggle with all oppressed people; collective liberation will be a product of all of our work. We believe in elevating the experiences and leadership of the most marginalized Black people, including but not limited to those who are women, queer, trans, femmes, gender nonconforming, Muslim, formerly and currently incarcerated, cash poor and working class, disabled, undocumented, and immigrant. See Movement for Black Lives, Platform, 2017, https://policy.m4bl.org/about/. 5.  Bernice Johnson Reagon, “The Songs Are Free,” interview by Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company, February 6, 2001, print, http://billmoyers.com/content/songs-free/. 6.  bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1989), 12. Discussing the feminist focus on coming to voice, hooks writes in full: “However, for women within oppressed groups who have contained so many feelings—despair, rage, anguish—who do not speak, as Audre Lorde writes, ‘for fear our words will not be heard nor welcomed,’ coming to voice is an act of resistance. Speaking becomes both a way to engage in active self-transformation and a rite of passage where one moves from being object to being subject. Only as subjects can we speak. As objects, we remain voiceless—our beings defined and interpreted by others.” 7.  Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans. Paul A. Kottmann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 2.



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8.  Paul A. Kottman, translator, Introduction to For More Than One Voice, xvii–xviii. 9.  Adrienne Davis, “Don’t Let Nobody Bother Yo’ Principle: The Sexual Economy of American Slavery,” in

Sister Circle: Black Women and Work, ed. S. Harley (Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 103–127. 10.  Ibid., 105. 11.  Sharon Patricia Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 9–10. 12.  See Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1, art. 8. See also Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6. (July 1991): 1241. 13.  See Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” 139. 14.  Ibid., 140. 15.  Ibid., 139–140. 16.  Evelyn Simien, “Doing Intersectionality Research: From Conceptual Issues to Practical Examples,” Politics & Gender 3, no. 2 (2007): 264–271. 17.  Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013). 18.  Quoted in Katie Koch, “Queen of Soul—and Body: Radcliffe Fellow Explores Aretha Franklin’s role as Feminist Icon,” Harvard Gazette, November 12, 2010, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/11 /queen-of-soul-and-body/. 19.  Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (Oxford: 20. Ibid. 21.  Ibid., 20. 22.  Quoted in Farah Jasmine Griffin, “When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black Women’s Vocality,” in Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, ed. Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 109. 23.  Ibid., 117. 24.  Ibid., 106. 25.  Deborah Danner, “Living with Schizophrenia,” https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3146953 /Living-With-Schizophrenia-by-Deborah-Danner.pdf, January 28, 2012. This is an excerpt drawn from a sixpage essay Deborah Danner wrote about her existence at the intersection of black womanhood and mental illness in 2012. 26.  “The Death of Deborah Danner” [Editorial], New York Times, October 21, 2016, p. A26, https://www .nytimes.com/2016/10/21/opinion/the-death-of-deborah-danner.html. 27.  Abby Dobson, “Why We Can’t Wait” [Featuring Wes Mingus], Sister Outsider: A (Re)membering (Forthcoming), LadyBraveBirdMusicWorks, November 1, 2016, CD. 28.  Cofounded by Kimberlé Crenshaw (executive director) and Luke Charles Harris (director of programming) in 1996, “AAPF is a think tank that connects academics, activists and policy-makers to promote efforts to dismantle structural inequality utilizing strategies to transform public discourse and policy. [It promotes] frameworks and strategies that address a vision of racial justice that embraces the intersections of race, gender, class, and the array of barriers that disempower those who are marginalized in society. AAPF is dedicated to advancing and expanding racial justice, gender equality, and the indivisibility of all human rights, both in the U.S. and internationally.” African American Policy Forum, Our Mission, 2017, http://www.aapf.org /ourmission. 29.  See Dobson, “Why We Can’t Wait.” 30.  Michelle Cusseaux, Natasha McKenna, Kayla Moore, Korryn Gaines, and Renisha McBride are five compelling examples of this failure to recognize and/or empathize with Black women in mental health or physical crisis. Their stories are heartbreaking. 31.  Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 1. 32.  Ibid., 3–4. 33.  Rogers M. Smith, “The Meaning of American Citizenship,” in This Constitution: A Bicentennial Chronicle, Project ’87 of the American Political Science Association and American Historical Association, Fall 1985, 1. 34. Marshall, T H. Citizenship and Social Class: And Other Essays. Cambridge, UK: University Press, 1950. Print.

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34.  35.  Salamishah Tillet, Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 3. 36.  Ibid., 4. 37.  Ibid., 6. 38.  Gillian B. White, “Black Women: Supporting Their Families—With Few Resources,” The Atlantic, June 12, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/06/black-women-economy/530022/. 39.  Black Women’s Roundtable, “Black Women in the United States” [Executive Summary], 2015 (last modified December 18, 2017), https://ncbcp.org/news/releases/BWRReport.BlackWomeninU.S.2015.3.26.15 FINAL.pdf. 40.  E. Petrosky, J. M. Blair, C. J. Betz, K. A. Fowler, S. P. Jack, and B. H. Lyons, “Racial and Ethnic Differences in Homicides of Adult Women and the Role of Intimate Partner Violence—United States, 2003–2014,” MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 2017, no. 66: 741–746, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr .mm6628a1. 41.  Koritha Mitchell, “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mr. Charlie,” American Quarterly 64, no. 1 (March 2012): 34. 42.  James Baldwin, “Many Thousands Gone,” in Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 24. 43.  See Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York: New Press, 1995); Charles R. Lawrence III, “The Id, Ego, and Equal Protection: Reckoning with Unconscious Racism,” Stanford Law Review 39 (1987): 317; Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 44.  Reagon, “The Songs Are Free. 45.  Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004), x–xi, 3–19. 46.  Monica Davey, “Fatal Shooting of Black Woman outside Detroit Stirs Racial Tensions,” New York Times, November 14, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/us/fatal-shooting-of-black-woman-outside-detroit -stirs-racial-tensions.html. 47.  In a keynote speech entitled “On Intersectionality” given at the 2016 Women of the World Festival (WOW) conference in the United Kingdom, Crenshaw reiterated that intersectionality is “about how structures make certain identities the consequences of and vehicle for vulnerability.” See Kimberlé Crenshaw, “On Intersectionality,” 2016 WOW Festival at Southbank Centre (London), YouTube. https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=-DW4HLgYPlA Crenshaw’s articulation of intersectionality was developed to draw attention to Black women’s often distinct experiences of gender-based racism resulting in our suffering from unique and distinct burdens and vulnerabilities. Crenshaw’s coining of “intersectionality” was preceded by a long history of Black feminist intellectual work and political activism, and intersectionality must be understood in the context of this intellectual work and political activism that laid the groundwork for Crenshaw’s theoretical intervention. 48.  See Abby Dobson, “Say Her Name,” Sister Outsider: A (Re)membering (Forthcoming), LadyBraveBird­ Music­Works, December 3, 2015, CD. 49.  I listened to Sweet Honey in the Rock as much as I listened to Aretha Franklin in high school and college. The history contained in their lyrics and melodies sustained me. The sonic spaces they created in a sister circle remain some of the most powerful singing I have ever heard. On top of the soundscape, the point of view embodied in the sound was spirit affirming and life changing for me. Beautiful Black women raising their voices in a semicircle shedding light on issues that impacted Black women spoke to me of possibilities. The virtuosity and brilliance of that soundscape was also one of the first sonic spaces created by Black women in which I heard and read explicit references to politics in music, from songs like “Joanne Little” to “Letter to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” and from “Ella’s Song” to “Are My Hands Clean.” Sweet Honey in the Rock was an early sonic and lyrical influence that shaped my love of music that speaks to issues of the day seeking to edify, empower, and uplift the listener with a little bit of sweet honey inside the sometimes cold hard complex rock that is the truth in our world. 50.  SAY HER NAME. Alexia Christian, Gabriella Nevarez, Malissa Williams, Sharmel Edwards, LaTanya Haggerty, Alteria Woods, Kendra James, Margaret LaVerne Mitchell, Aura Rosser, Yvette Smith, Alberta Spruill, Rekia Boyd, Shantel Davis, Shelley Frey, Kayla Moore, Kyam Livingston, Miriam Carey, Michelle Cusseaux, Tanisha Anderson, Deborah Danner, Eleanor Bumpurs, Mya Hall, Charleena Lyles, Korryn Gaines, India Beaty, India Kaeger, Meagan Hockaday, Kathryn Johnston, Danette Daniels, Frankie Ann Perkins, Janisha Fonville, Tarika Wilson, Pearlie Golden, Shereese Francis, Sheneque Proctor, Natasha



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McKenna, Tyisha Miller, Korryn Gaines, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and Sandra Bland. This list is obviously not comprehensive. It lists the names of some to invoke all of the names we do not know and therefore all the names we cannot say. See Abby Dobson, “Say Her Name.” 51.  Mitchell, “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mr. Charlie,” 35. 52.  Ibid., 50. 53. Ibid. 54.  Interview of James Baldwin by Studs Terkel, December 29, 1961: “All you are ever told in this country about being black is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be. Now, in order to survive this, you have to dig down into yourself and re-create yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America. You have to impose, in fact—this may sound very strange—you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not its idea of you.” “James Baldwin,” in James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (New York: Melville House, 2014), 7. 55.  Adidja Palmer, Beyoncé Knowles, David James Andrew Taylor, Nick Van De Wall, Terius Nash, and Thomas Wesley Pentz (2011) Run the World (Girls)[Recorded by Beyoncé] On 4 [CD]. New York, NY: Columbia Records. 56.  Here I am referring to Political with a capital P rather than a lowercase p. It is clear that from the beginning Beyoncé’s artworks could be read as advocacy for Black women’s economic and social empowerment and beyond that as a specific critique of the politics of vilifying and shaming the Black female body. Her works did not however speak specifically to racism, gendered or otherwise. 57.  There are several Black women singers post-1980 whose sonic work and contribution should also be examined, including Whitney Houston, Diana Ross, Tracy Chapman, and Lauryn Hill. 58.  Coder, Maria, “First Lady Michelle Obama: If I Could Have a Different Occupation ‘I’d Be Beyoncé’”, July 31, 2015, www.people.com. Accessed July 20, 2019. 59.  See Griffin, “When Malindy Sings,” 102–104. 60.  “And I think one of the great abuses of this modern time is that we should have had such high-profile artists, powerful celebrities. But they have turned their back on social responsibility. That goes for Jay-Z and Beyoncé, for example. Give me Bruce Springsteen, and now you’re talking.” See Alexandra Zawia, “Harry Belafonte on Capitalism, Media Moguls and His Disappointment with Jay-Z and Beyoncé” [Q&A], The Hollywood Reporter, August 7, 2012, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/print/359192. 61.  For a timeline charting Beyoncé’s march toward a civic life and political consciousness since 2009, see Melissa Harris Perry, “The Politicization of Beyoncé: A Timeline of the Singer’s Civic Consciousness,” ELLE, November 8, 2016, https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a40610/beyonce-political-history/. 62.  Quoted in ibid., 6. 63.  Regina Bradley, “SANDRA BLAND: #SayHerName Loud or Not at All,” Sounding Out!, November 16, 2015, https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/11/16/sandra-bland-sayhername-loud/. 64.  James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage International, 1993), 104.

Bibliography African American Policy Forum. Our Mission. June 1, 2017, http://www.aapf.org/ourmission. Alexander, Elizabeth. The Black Interior. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004. Baldwin, James. “Many Thousands Gone.” In Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. Baldwin, James. “The Creative Process.” In Creative America. New York: Ridge Press, 1962, http://thenew schoolhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Baldwin-Creative-Process.pdf. Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Vintage International, 1993. Black Women’s Roundtable. “Black Women in the United States” [Executive Summary]. 2015 (last modified December 18, 2017), https://ncbcp.org/news/releases/BWRReport.BlackWomeninU.S.2015.3.26.15 FINAL.pdf. Bradley, Regina. “SANDRA BLAND: #SayHerName Loud or Not at All.” Sounding Out! November 16, 2015, https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/11/16/sandra-bland-sayhername-loud/. Cavarero, Adriana. For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Translated by Paul A. Kottman. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.

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Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1, art. 8. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6. (July 1991): 1241. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “On Intersectionality,” WOW Festival at Southbank Centre (London), YouTube, June 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DW4HLgYPlA Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “The Urgency of Intersectionality.” TedWomen. TedTalk video, 18:49. October 28, 2016, https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality. Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. New York: New Press, 1995. Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, and Andrea J. Ritchie, with Rachel Anspach, Rachel Gilmer, and Luke Harris. “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality against Black Women.” African American Policy Forum, the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia Law School. 2016, http://aapf.org /sayhernamereport. Danner, Deborah. “Living with Schizophrenia.” January 28, 2012, https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents /3146953/Living-With-Schizophrenia-by-Deborah-Danner.pdf Davey, Monica. “Fatal Shooting of Black Woman outside Detroit Stirs Racial Tensions.” New York Times. November 14, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/us/fatal-shooting-of-black-woman-outsidedetroit-stirs-racial-tensions.html. Davis, Adrienne. “Don’t Let Nobody Bother Yo’ Principle: The Sexual Economy of American Slavery.” In Sister Circle: Black Women and Work, edited by S. Harley. New York: Rutgers University Press, 2002, xx. “The Death of Deborah Danner” [Editorial]. New York Times. October 21, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com /2016/10/21/opinion/the-death-of-deborah-danner.html. Dobson, Abby. “Say Her Name.” Sister Outsider: A (Re)membering (Forthcoming). LadyBraveBirdMusic­ Works. December 3, 2015 CD. Dobson, Abby. “Why We Can’t Wait” [Featuring Wes Mingus]. Sister Outsider: A (Re)membering (Forthcoming). LadyBraveBirdMusicWorks. November 1, 2016. CD. Garza, Alicia. “A HerStory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.” Black Lives Matter. 2017, http://blacklives matter.com/herstory. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black Women’s Vocality.” In Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, edited by Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, 102–125. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Holland, Sharon Patricia. The Erotic Life of Racism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1989. Koch, Katie. “Queen of Soul—and Body: Radcliffe Fellow Explores Aretha Franklin’s Role as Feminist Icon.” Harvard Gazette. November 12, 2010, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/11/queen-of -soul-and-body/. Mitchell, Koritha. “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mr. Charlie.” American Quarterly 64, no. 1 (March 2012): 33–60. Movement for Black Lives. Platform. 2017, https://policy.m4bl.org/about/. Perry, Melissa Harris. “The Politicization of Beyoncé: A Timeline of the Singer’s Civic Consciousness.” ELLE. November 8, 2016, https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a40610/beyonce-political-history/. Petrosky E., J. M. Blair, C. J. Betz, K. A. Fowler, S. P. Jack, and B. H. Lyons. “Racial and Ethnic Differences in Homicides of Adult Women and the Role of Intimate Partner Violence—United States, 2003–2014.” MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 2017, no. 66: 741–746, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.15585 /mmwr.mm6628a1. Reagon, Bernice Johnson. “The Songs Are Free.” Interview by Bill Moyers. Moyers & Company. February 6, 2001, print, http://billmoyers.com/content/songs-free/. Sandel, Michael J. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013. Simien, Evelyn. “Doing Intersectionality Research: From Conceptual Issues to Practical Examples.” Politics & Gender 3, no. 2 (2007): 264–271.



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Smith, Rogers M. “The Meaning of American Citizenship.” In This Constitution: A Bicentennial Chronicle, Project ’87 of the American Political Science Association and American Historical Association. Fall 1985. Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Terkel, Studs. “James Baldwin.” In James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. New York: Melville House Publishing, 2014. Tillet, Salamishah. Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. White, Gillian B. “Black Women: Supporting Their Families—With Few Resources.” The Atlantic. June 12, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/06/black-women-economy/530022/. Williams, Patricia J. The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Zawia, Alexandra. “Harry Belafonte on Capitalism, Media Moguls and His Disappointment with Jay-Z and Beyoncé” [Q&A]. The Hollywood Reporter. August 7, 2012, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/print /359192.

11 • SL AYING “FORMATION” A Queering of Black Radical Tradition J. MICHAEL KINSEY

“I did not come to play with you hoes. . . . I came to slay, Bitch!”1  —Big Freedia

Lemonade (2016), a visual album created by famed R&B/pop and publicly proclaimed feminist Beyoncé, was received with critical acclaim after its premiere on HBO. 2 While Lemonade is Beyoncé’s sixth album release, her previously released self-titled album, Beyoncé, is also a visual album, with fourteen tracks, each accompanied by a short film (video) offering a visual representation of the song. The success of Beyoncé provided a platform for Beyoncé’s second visual album, Lemonade, which includes twelve tracks and an hour-long short film of the same name. Directed by Khalil Joseph and Beyoncé Knowles Carter, Lemonade also includes spoken word by UK-based poet Warsan Shire, narrated by Beyoncé. This visual album project functions similarly to its antecedent, Beyoncé, in that the visuals are used to imagine the themes of the songs. Lemonade is a nonlinear journey that illuminates the beauty, violence, and challenges of womanhood through exploring familial and romantic relationships while simultaneously providing images representative of Black radical tradition in the United States. 3 Throughout the short film, visuals representing the Creole South juxtaposed to the mothers of slain Black youths from this present moment in U.S. history provocatively canvas the screen for audience viewership. Several scholars and journalistic publications have praised and critiqued Lemonade, but I signal to words from the bell hooks Institute. hooks writes: Obviously, Lemonade positively exploits images of black female bodies—placing them at the center, making them the norm. In this visual narrative, there are diverse representations (black female bodies come in all sizes, shapes, and textures, with all manner of big hair). Portraits of ordinary everyday black women are spotlighted, poised as though they are royalty. . . . Throughout Lemonade the black female body is utterly aestheticized—its beauty a powerful in your face confrontation. This is no new offering. Images like these were first seen in Julie Dash’s groundbreaking film Daughters of the Dust (1991), shot by the brilliant cinematographer Authur Jafa. . . . It is the broad scope of Lemonade’s visual landscape that makes it so distinctive—the construction of a powerfully symbolic black female sisterhood that resists Invisibility, that refuses to be silent.4 174



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This comparison of Lemonade to director Julie Dash’s 1991 Daughters of the Dust5 has been ubiquitous in the discourse surrounding the release of Beyoncé’s sixth album. 6 Through stunning visual images and a feminist lens, Lemonade attempts to produce historical and cultural landscapes of U.S. Black genealogies that have been considered to be influenced by Daughters of the Dust. Both films offer privilege and agency to the Black female body while negotiating the ways in which they might lead and support the familial structure (as Black women have been doing since the beginning of time). Yet the most astounding similarity in the discourse surrounding these two projects is the erasure of queer themes present in these narratives that are intended to complicate representations of Black radical tradition. “Slaying Formation” is an attempt to illuminate the queer aesthetics used to frame the presence of resistance in Lemonade’s debut single, “Formation.” I argue that the queer embodiment used in the narrative, lyrics, and choreography in “Formation” should be considered aesthetics of “shade.” 7 Shade, itself, ascends from the labor of gay and trans bodies of color and I contend this performance labor is a rhetorical and performative form of resistance.8 While “Formation” can be considered an anthem that amplifies the Black Lives Matter movement,9 its erasure of queer aesthetics is indeed throwing shade at “the kids”10 and ignoring their presence in contemporary U.S. Black social movements. In my solo play The Kids, I explore the power and productivity of shade, but more importantly it exemplifies shade as an act of resistance. This essay hopes to honor Black and Latinx LGBT communities and demonstrate their presence in arts and activism. Daughters of the Dust offers a cinematic representation of familial legacies in the U.S. South while centering Black women and the varied ways in which they relate. One compelling relationship often concealed in critiques of this film is the relationship between Yellow Mary and Trula. In their article “Exiled at Home: ‘Daughters of the Dust’ and the Many Post-Colonial Conditions,” Catherine Cucinella and Renée R. Curry offered: Dash’s film foregrounds its own awareness of seeing, and it makes clear that new and multiple perspectives, as well as multiple stories, will emerge.  .  .  . The first interaction between Trula and Yellow Mary takes place in relation to the kaleidoscope. While Mr. Snead, a photographer, explains the concept behind the toy, Yellow Mary looks into it as Trula playfully peers through the other end. The two women laugh, and an intimate moment between Yellow Mary and Trula emerges. Thus, the camera begins the subtle delineation of the lesbian relationship between them. While the camera captures this playfulness and intimacy, it also registers the disapproval and discomfort of Yellow Mary’s cousin Viola.11

The relationship between Yellow Mary and Trula isn’t necessarily obvious but it isn’t at all concealed either. One cannot consider the depth of the women in Daughters of the Dust without acknowledging this romantic relationship. Yet somehow in the previous life of this film, the link between these two women has been buried in the periphery of discourse regarding cinematic scholarship. This negligence is also evident in the work of Lemonade, specifically with its hit single “Formation.” “Formation,” released the day before the 2016 Super Bowl12 and then performed during the anticipated half-time show, was received with varied criticism from the U.S. public. Coined by some as a “Black Anthem,”13 the song amplified the current racially tense movement known as Black Lives Matter (BLM) through a theme song motif. The song itself was released through media sources (i.e., social media, Beyoncé’s personal website, etc.) very much in the way the

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BLM movement was galvanized. This record incited liberation for some audiences while others, who generally thought of Beyoncé as America’s sweetheart, began to express their disdain for the artist’s signaling of “Black power” and support of the BLM plight through her controversial Super Bowl 50 performance. While the video for “Formation” assumes many visual references that highlight U.S. issues of police brutality or the Hurricane Katrina natural disaster that disproportionately displaced primarily African American residents in Louisiana and neighboring cities, it also encompasses lyrics that signal Black radical tradition. Yet the Super Bowl performance left another impression on viewers. Donning black leather and black afros, the crew of women dancers follow Beyoncé (as the blonde bombshell) as she marches center stage down the field chanting, “Okay Ladies now let’s get in formation. Okay ladies now let’s get in formation. Prove to me you got some coordination. You just might be a black Bill Gates in the making.” As she utters the last line she stands tall with the women with raised fists, a flagship symbol of the Black Panther movement, an earlier iteration of Black radical tradition in U.S. history. This moment ironically, or perhaps not, takes place in the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the organizing of the Black Panther Party by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.14 Beyoncé’s surprise political performance on this important day in African American history was unlikely coincidental. It appears that this kind of shock value is a tool used to intrigue the public while gaining the excitement and intrigue of her fans. The pop diva is known for these kinds of marketing tactics, including the midnight release of her self-titled album Beyoncé, on December 13, 2013. Upon its release, Beyoncé came as a total surprise to audiences and this shock value could be contributed to the success of the album. In examination of “Formation,” the surprise regarding this pop performance and song is its covert use of queer choreography, lyrics, and vocal production. Through political discourse and media representation, the song’s association to queerness, which undergirds the tune, becomes erased. The recorded version of “Formation” is narrated by two queer individuals; the late Messy Mya, a budding YouTube star slain in 2010,15 and Big Freedia, a queer New Orleans hip hop artist known for his contribution to the New Orleans Bounce16 music genre. In the song, Big Freedia exclaims, “I didn’t come to play with you hoes. I came to slay, Bitch!” and in the chorus, in a call-and-response style, Beyoncé exclaims, “OK, Ladies let’s now get in formation,” and the response is, “I slay.” Slay, in the context of the song, is used colloquially to assert a brand of fierceness, and I argue that its use in this song has been appropriated from queer jargon, which is demonstrated when first stated by Big Freedia on the track. It is used to describe the way in which one can look, dress, or act in a devastatingly supreme, superior, and fashionable manner, a compliment in the highest regard. Both with Big Freedia and Beyoncé, it is used to express this meaning, but what becomes invisible is the nature of its origins. As Jose Esteban Muñoz posits, “Queerness is always on the horizon. . . . This mode of ontological certitude is often represented through a narration of disappearance.”17 Although the lyrics of the song in its entirety do not match the revolutionary sentiments impressed upon the song, slay, in Beyoncé’s lyrics, would suggest a superiority over the racially driven oppression that Black bodies have experienced during the BLM movement. In other words, the fierceness that becomes projected in “Formation,” through a queer lexicon, challenges the incessant violence on Black bodies slain by law enforcement. Again, “Formation,” as a performance object, represents the undergirding of queer representation during movements of Black radical tradition; however, it also represents the recursive history of the eradication of queer presence in the narratives of African American activism and liberation. If “Formation” can be deemed an anthem of the BLM movement, how can the



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queer-making artists used to embellish the revolutionary themes in the song be recognized for their contributions? Why is it that queerness can be used to create and promote messages of revolution but omitted from discourse concerning the liberation of Black lives? Further, how is it that it can be forgotten that #blacklivesmatter, a movement developed in response to the recursive history of slain Black bodies in the United States, became a rousing hashtag created by Black queer women? In response to the aforementioned questions, this essay explores the relationship between queerness, radical performance, and activism pertaining to a contemporary practice of Black radical tradition. Moreover, the following discourse seeks to unpack what Marlon M. Bailey terms the “performance labor”18 of Black queer bodies as modes of activism and survival, while signaling its appropriation by mainstream culture. It is this idea of “shade” or “throwing shade” that emanates from the invisible queer artists that narrate “Formation,” and it is that same queer gesture that becomes codified through solo performance by a cisgender woman and thus becomes erased. By identifying “shade” as a “disidentification,”19 as posited by Muñoz, I make the distinction that shade is a queer act of resistance and its appropriation in moments of Black radical tradition does not “slay” but rather contributes to the neglect of queer bodies in U.S. Black history. Through this significant distinction, I illuminate the queer aesthetics used in “Formation” and other sites of U.S. Black resistance, while also recalling important contributions of these aesthetics in contemporary Black radical tradition. This act in and of itself is an expression of arts and activism. I begin with a focus on the video release of “Formation” to extrapolate its revolutionary work while signaling the invisibility of queer presence in the visual imaging.20 The “Formation” video opens with Messy Mya’s voice, through voiceover, exclaiming, “What happened at the New Wildins??”21 While this narration continues, Beyoncé is seen squatting atop a New Orleans patrol car partially submerged in water. This image asks viewers to recall the 2005 national disaster and tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and the prolonged displacement of primarily Black inhabitants of southern Louisiana. Messy Mya continues, “Bitch I’m back by popular demand.” The tone in their voice harkens a sonic queerness that echoes throughout the tune. As the music video continues, shots of what appears to be spaces and places in New Orleans jump-cut between flashes of Black queer men thriving, dancing, and hip winding. Not only is Messy Mya heard yet not seen but these queer bodies become invisible in the mashup of director Melina Matsouka’s imagery. Perhaps these figures are representative of Messy Mya’s narration, but then again who is Messy Mya and how can they22 be identified as queer? Messy Mya, named Anthony Barre at birth, was a budding YouTube performer and Bounce music rapper. On November 15, 2010, after leaving the baby shower of their unborn child, Messy Mya was fatally murdered in New Orleans, and because of their Internet notoriety, a photo of their dead body was immediately uploaded to the Internet for public consumption. In their most popular YouTube video entitled “Messy Mya, Booking the Hoes from New Wildin” they walk through a New Orleans neighborhood as their friend “Messy Ho Rolly”23 films them with what seems to be a cellular device. Messy Mya was known for their unbridled critiques of the members of their community and the complex realities of life in urban New Orleans. In this video, as they comment on negative feedback they have received because of their savage commentary, they exclaim, “Bitch I’m back by popular demand,” which can be heard on the “Formation” record. Suppose the image of the shirtless young man with his back to the camera winding in front of a mirror, or the two young men twerking with similar energy in a dark room, which could

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be easily missed, represent the queerness that Messy Mya offers the track. This certainly could be the case; however, the audience is never introduced to Mya nor are they visually noted for the queerness that pervades the record. Messy Mya’s sonic queerness isn’t at all aggressive but one of confidence and coolness. Their use of the word bitch is not a misogynistic epithet but that of a colloquial expression in contemporary culture traversing between a term of endearment or warning.24 When Messy Mya exclaims, “Bitch I’m back by popular demand,” they are signaling, through shade, a kind of fabulousness that is a result of queer affect. This discursive labor is representative by the queer-making practices which can be linked to the niche community of ballroom culture. In this case, shade is the discourse and throwing shade is the labor of survival and the labor of resisting hegemony. I surmise that shade is historically queer, a disidentificatory act, and by performance allows queer folk to seek emancipation from marginalization. In Butch Queen Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit, Marlon M. Bailey works through notions of queer sustainability specific to Black and Latinx LGBT communities: There is much to be learned about gender and sexual nonconformity from the Ballroom community’s gender system. In the outside world, community members are required to adhere to the pervasive male/female, masculine/feminine, man/woman, hetero/homo binaries and therefore must behave and identify as one or the other or suffer discrimination, violence, and exclusion throughout their social lives. . . . Members can be, and often are, openly queer in terms of sex, gender, and sexuality, but they are understandably reluctant to make those same queer claims in the world outside of the Ballroom sphere. I argue that these malleable, contingent, and strategic deployments of identity should not always be read as signs of internalized racism, homophobia, or heterosexism, or as nonsubversive for that matter; instead, these practices are strategies deployed by these Black LGBT people to negotiate and survive a sometimes perilous and complex social terrain; communal performance labor and realness are cultural mechanisms through which they can do so. 25

Unfortunately, Messy Mya succumbed to the perils of navigating a world that disregards a gender embodiment that doesn’t align with normative measures, and to that end “Formation” was and is a missed opportunity to critique issues of gender and sexuality in the context of Black lives. Concealing queer imagery, narrative, and contribution to “Formation” is a grave calamity in the visibility of Black radical performance and the preservation of Messy Mya’s legacy. The first verse continues with Beyoncé sitting on the squad car and jump-cuts to her sitting inside some sort of historic home, in late nineteenth-century-inspired couture. Her “ladies-inwaiting” (background dancers) join her in JaQuel Knight’s choreography which I presume to be inspired by vogue dance, a dance form originating from the ballroom community made of Black and Latinx queer folk. The choreographic gestures appear to embody hand movements that could be inspired by vogue dance and while this movement transpires, Beyoncé sings, “My daddy Alabama, momma Louisiana, You mix that negro with that Creole, make a Texas bama. I like my baby heir with baby hair and afros. I like my negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils.” In this moment, the song’s lyrics offer a revolutionary empowerment of self-love and pride in one’s heritage and identity while embellished by queer performance aesthetics. Of course, by aesthetics I mean the unique and revolutionary choreography that Knight uses to set a feminist tone in “Formation.” After the song’s first verse another voice can be heard speaking during an interlude, exclaiming, “I did not come to play with you hoes. . . . I came to slay, bitch!” Big Freedia, famed New



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Orleans Bounce artist, is another queer body used on the track and while he too is unseen, he also becomes codified into this revolutionary work while his sonic queerness is simultaneously rendered. Both his voice and Messy Mya’s are distinctly queer, but because of their tangential position this contemporary Black anthem subsequently commodifies these queer artists, images, and even choreography to embellish its artistic and sellable value without exposing their valuable contributions to this record. As the video progresses, all throughout, the audience is inundated with representations of African American culture demonstrating scenes of the Black church, members of a marching band (which is a significant group in predominantly African American high schools and Historically Black Colleges and Universities), images of Black cowboys, and in one quick shot a newspaper can be seen with the image of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with the headline “More than a Dreamer.” At the video’s end a young boy can be seen dancing in front of a barricade of officers with a shot toward a graffiti backdrop where “please stop killing us” is displayed. While the camera cuts to these different images the following lyrics are sung: Sometimes I go off (I go off), I go hard (I go hard) Get what’s mine (take what’s mine), I’m a star (I’m a star) Cause I slay (slay), I slay (hey), I slay (okay), I slay (okay) All day (okay), I slay (okay), I slay (okay), I slay (okay) We gon’ slay (slay), gon’ slay (okay), we slay (okay), I slay (okay) I slay (okay), okay (okay), I slay (okay), okay, okay, okay, okay Okay, okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation, cause I slay.

Here the use of the term slay, I claim, serves as a colloquially queer expression emanating from Black and Brown bodies in niche queer communities. When Big Freedia states, “I came to slay, bitch,” his sound is the epitome of the queerness that has become appropriated throughout “Formation.” Ultimately while Beyoncé’s efforts to use her music to speak to this very present politically heightened climate should be considered admirable, she carelessly throws shade to “the kids,” whom she uses as product to support this agenda. Shade, by power of language and performance, is one way in which I believe some queer communities resist and survive, and in this moment where its presence is becoming quite pervasive in mainstream arenas it is important to reclaim that power by representation. It is my belief that shade ontologically is a queer act, and in my solo play, The Kids, I manage to express this theory through artistic efforts. The play and this chapter also seek to reclaim the authenticity and performance labor of shade for the community in which it belongs.

A Meditation on Shade You know they say when it gets hot, go walk in the shade where it’s cool. It’s supposed to be cool in the shade.  —The Kids, J. Michael Kinsey26

On February 7, 2017, Merriam-Webster took to Twitter announcing the addition of the slang usage of shade to its dictionary.27 The tweet is accompanied by a GIF created from Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris Is Burning (1990). This GIF features the deceased and legendary drag queen Dorian Corey, a subject from the documentary. The GIF reads, “Shade is: I don’t tell you you’re ugly, but I don’t have to tell you because you know you’re ugly.” Paris Is Burning, thus far, is

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the earliest explicit documentation of the use of the term shade and examines the ballroom scene which evolved from drag balls that existed as early as the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drag balls would transpire in New York City from the West Village to Harlem and would later evolve into ballroom competitions. These Ballroom communities developed groups known as “houses” which can be considered kinship networks within the larger niche community. The members of these houses compete in balls under varying categories that might include, but are certainly not limited to, walking face, realness, and vogue performance. It is in these spaces where the essence of shade manifests as a labor of performance. George Chauncey executed exhaustive research in his book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. Regarding the establishment of drag balls in the early 1900s, Chauncey reveals the emergence of ball culture in Harlem: Black gay men nonetheless turned Harlem into a homosexual mecca. Denied access to most of the segregated restaurants and speakeasies white gay men patronized elsewhere in New York, they built an extensive gay world in their own community, which in many respects surpassed the Village’s in scope, visibility, and boldness. The Village’s most flamboyant homosexuals wore long hair; Harlem’s wore long dresses [ . . . ] The Village’s Liberal Club ball was attended by scores of drag queens and hundreds of spectators; Harlem’s Hamilton Lodge ball drew hundreds of drag queens and thousands of spectators. 28

Chauncey also notes that the Hamilton Lodge ball, organized by African Americans, was the “largest annual communal event of New York’s gay society.”29 He also demonstrates how “the world created by homosexuals in the city’s streets, cafeterias, and private apartments became the crucible in which they forged a distinctive gay culture. That culture helped them to counteract the negative attitudes about themselves pervasive in their society, develop strategies that enabled them to survive outside of gay enclaves, and establish a collective identity.”30 These strategies, I have determined, represent the “disidentification” that Muñoz has offered. It is “meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.”31 I surmise that queer people use language as a strategy of survival, and it is important to note that Beyoncé did not coin phrases like “I slay,” as it has been in the rotation of queer vernacular for some time. In Butch Queen Up in Pumps, Bailey writes at length about the ballroom scene where he interrogates the performance labor of shade. A command of language holds power, and in his book, Bailey states: Black LGBT persons who belong to either the Ballroom Community or larger LGBT communities constantly create “gay lingo” by constructing new terms and adding new meanings to standard terms in order to build protective boundaries around the marginalized community [ . . . ] communities like Ballroom create and use lingo as a part of overall performance labor. This performance labor is also the means by which Ballroom members attempt to recuperate putatively derogatory terms and push their limits to create alternative meanings for those terms. Thus, in the Ballroom context, as far as my interlocutors are concerned, cunt, pussy, and bitch are viewed as criteria and used as a way in which to acknowledge participants’ exceptional adherence to those standards established in the community. In this sense, Ballroom members, like



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members of other marginalized communities, place their community-defined values, terms, and meanings at the center of the culture, deliberately defying the dominant ones by which they are largely oppressed. 32

Language becomes the defensive measure in which queer bodies protect themselves in the battle of existing in an unwavering society and this language can be performed verbally and/or physically. In Paris Is Burning, Willie Ninja explains that “voguing came from shade because it was a dance that two people did because they didn’t like each other. Instead of fighting you would dance it out on the dance floor and whoever did the better move was throwing the best shade basically.”33 This movement that Ninja articulates precisely describes the energy that exudes in the opening scene of choreography in Beyoncé’s “Formation.” The women are grouped and dressed as if they are the “Formation” dance team and the camera is the competition. When Beyoncé claims to “love her negro nose and Jackson 5 nostrils” she is throwing shade to the violence of White supremacy and the terror that Black bodies presently face in the United States. She is embodying exactly what Ninja has identified—the ways in which shade is a recuperative gesture or performance used by Black and Latinx queer bodies to communicate, protect oneself or others, or in some cases to verbally and choreographically decimate another party. Shade is a nuanced iteration of the insult. 34 There is a certain jargon or queer vernacular associated within the art of throwing shade where shade cannot exist without it. The two indeed are not mutually exclusive. Throughout “Formation,” Beyoncé repeats the phrase “I slay” but, with this tune, the origin of this vernacular becomes lost in Beyoncé’s fight against oppression toward Black bodies. In formal English texts, the word slay means “to kill a person or animal in a violent way,” but the Urban Dictionary notes that slay ultimately means to “dominate or to kill the game” or “to kill it and succeed in something amazing.” In Jonathan David Jackson’s article “The Social World of Voguing,” he documents research he collected during 1997–2001 in Philadelphia and New York City where he observed participants in the ballroom scene. He notes, “Members have many terms for the demand to become possessed in the spirit of the battle, the quality of the music, or the whole work of performing to gain status.” Some of the phrases that members have used for emotive possession are as follows: “live for it”; “create attitude”; “battle”; “find the focus”; “find focus points”; “emote”; “work it”; “work for it”; “work it bitch”; “eat it”; “punish it”; “slay it”; or “believe it.”35 Please note that during this time Beyoncé was certainly not slaying but rather she was asking young men if they could pay her “Bills, Bills, Bills.”36 Shade! Earlier in this same decade, in 1990, Madonna released her hit single “Vogue”37 to critical acclaim as she introduced the world to voguing, a dance form that many still consider a creation of her own. Even with the representations of Jose Guitterez Xtravaganza and Luis Xtravaganza Camacho, both hailing as Madonna’s background dancers and both members of the House of Xtravaganza, the critical information of voguing’s origins failed to transfer to audiences, leaving them with the assumption that Madonna had created what has presently become a dance phenomenon. As a solo artist, Beyoncé’s “Formation” seeks to incite liberation in addition to a call to action but relies on queer aesthetics to reach its success. The suggestion here is not to say that the song could not reach the same level of achievement without these artists, but their presence on the record contributes to the song’s flair. Theatrically, solo performance is a performative genre typically used to invoke thought or to illuminate themes and causes in which the artist

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attempts to resist. Its singular nature is rooted in activism and as a catalyst to illuminate a particular theme and ignite empathy. Solo performance is a significant genre within the scope of queer performance. In O Solo Homo, coauthor David Román offers: Queer solo performance comes out of a sense of community and thus helps inform and shape our understanding of identity and community. Queer solo performers trouble the comfort of community even as they invest in it, and this tension is what I find so exciting. One could even argue that queer solo performers are often at the frontiers of new social identities and more inclusive community formations. This sense of pioneering new Identity formations is evident in the history of the form. 38

O Solo Homo, published in 1998 and canonized as a critical queer performance text for its work in carving a space and revealing varied representations of identity, successfully includes a Black queer narrative written by Craig Hickman. While discussing how he came to write his solo show skin & ornaments, he asks: Where does it all come from? The Universe. My experience. Someone else’s experience. I do not believe that the imagination is as limited as it may seem to those who believe it can only rearrange bits and pieces from one’s own experience and spit that out as something resembling novelty. I believe artists—all artists, but especially we performative artists—are rearranging bits and pieces of not only our own experience, but those experiences that come through us from the richness of a vast Universe. 39

Hickman’s belief in the magic of the universe allowed his piece to be born, and maybe also his privilege. As a graduate of Harvard College and later having a career in American politics, one might assume that his experience is different than that of someone like Messy Mya, but I highlight Hickman’s experience to showcase the ways in which class and social capital can differentiate members of the LGBT communities. Ultimately, I question who will proliferate a Butch Queen’s40 narrative? How can “the kids” used in “Formation” find performative representation? And ultimately, what is the “it” that Big Freedia and Messy Mya add to Beyoncé’s “Formation” that allows her to look in the camera and slay? These questions cause me to reflect on my solo work The Kids, which explores the possibilities of shade and the challenges of existing as Black and queer while empowering and celebrating the fierceness in #blackgayslay!41 As a Black queer artist from the South I’ve always felt an overwhelming desire to illuminate the imperfect aspects that shape my own identity politics and the complex details of others who exist in queer communities. Through my personal experience, I have learned to celebrate the intricacies within the intersection of blackness and queerness and through this desire to interrogate this intersectionality I was inspired to write The Kids. Similar to Hickman, I used the experience of others and my own to develop a multidisciplinary piece—a mashup of dramatic text, video, song, and soundscape that evolved into solo performance which seeks to reveal and expose the complexities of urban Black gay life. I traversed the cavities of my mental archive to determine how to embody the intricacies of various dimensions in my community. Recalling my own experiences and casual conversations I’ve had with friends, dates, and lovers over the years became the method to create this disidentificatory performance. I ask more questions. How can Black queers have a visible narrative when their contributions to the fabric of American culture have been substantial, yet ignored, as in “Formation”? How do my personal



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encounters reflect a broader experience that may be common, or not, but known to the subjects which it affects? I found that The Kids must be written. The Kids, a solo performance, was first workshopped at the Black Theatre Network on August 2014 with scholar Daniel Banks as respondent. The Kids explores Black queer life in urban U.S. spaces while grappling with fraught issues of identity politics, addiction, and gender representation. Shade is the liberating catalyst that is revealed throughout the one-man show that demonstrates the ways in which it can be, and perhaps always is, a performance of politics. The performance centers around a character, Marcel, whom the audience never sees but hears through sound mediation. Ms. Baw, a gender nonconforming maternal figure who deconstructs shade for the audience, provides much of the comedy in the piece and demonstrates the skill in throwing shade. In the opening scene, she throws shade to members of the audience whom, unbeknownst to them, are characters she knows from “The Place,” the nightclub in which the opening scene takes place. As the play continues Ms. Baw explains why shade is ever-present in the queer experiences of trans women and men as well as butch queens. Through video the audience is introduced to Dick Cuntington, a news anchor who offers “Real Queer News: Scared Straight.” In his news segment he explores issues of promiscuity, crystal meth addiction, and self-hate that some queer men embody in their existence. Through these live, direct, and shady tales, Cuntington exposes hardships that some queer folk experience. By the play’s end Ms. Baw illuminates the power, danger, and the possibility of healing that shade exudes. Initially, it was not my intention to write a piece that interrogates the queer epistemic nature of shade, as my desire was to simply develop a project that represented an authentic snapshot of urban queer life. But through the workshop process both in New York City, Montreal, and at Cornell University, I found that The Kids operated as a platform to mark shade as a Black queer epistemology. This solo play recognizes shade as a primary tool of survival for queer bodies within their own communities but also beyond. Through the rehearsal process shade became exposed, not only as a provocative and performative act, but an act refusing hegemonic influence and societal dictation on queer lives. Shade refuses interpolations ascribed by heteronormative ideologies and puts in check respectability politics that are not applicable to queer realities. In queer communities the ability to deliver a nuanced response that offers the highest blow is a celebrated commodity. This nuanced ability demonstrates a protective instinct that perhaps could be a projection of violence received within queer spaces but also from outside influence—a historical experience all too common to queer presence. There is shade in being forgotten, erased, and not acknowledged, yet my work with The Kids seeks to use performance as an act of activism to unpack the presence of queer aesthetics. With my work, I am addressing the disregard of queer folk, in this case Black queer men, who through radical practices, resist and slay. Considering the invisibility of “the kids” in “Formation” I find this piece important to Black queer sustainability.

Queering Black Social Movements It is ironic to celebrate and complicate the phrase “I slay” in a moment where the recursive history of Black bodies being slain in unjust manners occurs in the contemporary fabric of U.S. history. After George Zimmerman was acquitted for murdering Trayvon Martin, three women took to Twitter to coin the hashtag #blacklivesmatter in response to Martin’s murder. What happened next sparked a movement over which the U.S. public is still reckoning and

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situating in present narratives of Black radical tradition. The following words from Patrisse Khan-Cullors, one of the three BLM founders, express this sentiment: When you design an event/campaign/et cetera based on the work of queer Black women, don’t invite them to participate in shaping it, but ask them to provide materials and ideas for next steps for said event, that is racism in practice. It’s also hetero-patriarchal. Straight men, unintentionally or intentionally, have taken the work of queer Black women and erased our contributions. Perhaps if we were the charismatic Black men many are rallying around these days, it would have been a different story, but being Black queer women in this society (and apparently within these movements) tends to equal invisibility and non-relevancy.42

Alicia Garza, along with Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Opal Tometi, are indeed correct that the labor and political work of women continues to go unnoticed or becomes coopted by the hegemonic regime of U.S. society—in this case, straight men. However, straight men have not only taken credit for the work of women, but queer men too. The eradication of Black queer men in political moments harkens back to the civil rights movement. How ironic that Beyoncé would signal the remarkable work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the “Formation” video. Her acknowledgment to King and his political advancements signals the invisibility of Rustin’s critical contributions to the civil rights movement, similarly to the masking of queer performance in “Formation.” Bayard Rustin, a Black historical figure known for his radical ideals on political progress and his profound involvement in mid-twentieth-century civil rights has been overlooked in the palimpsest of U.S. historical narratives. This discounting has been the result of Rustin’s sexual desires and interests, which were very much open for public consumption and disdain. Homophobia was the catalyst that disassociated Rustin from the civil rights movement and severed the political relationship he shared with King. In John D’Emilio’s Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, he frames Rustin as a political figure with great potential, particularly focusing on his important professional relationship with Dr. King. Yet Rustin garnered a reputation for his “sexual deviance,” which led to the removal of his position with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), due to discrimination and disapproval of Rustin’s identity, and led to the demise of his career. Considered to be the “brains” behind the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Rustin was King’s chief political assistant. Yet Rustin has been obliterated from the narrative of this iconic moment in the Black radical tradition of protest and activism. However, long before his association with King, Rustin was an activist for human rights. Interestingly enough, before moving into politics Rustin earned a living in Harlem as a nightclub vocalist. He later worked with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the War Resisters League (WRL) before becoming a well-known figure in the civil rights movement. A socialist and member of the Communist Party, Rustin worked tirelessly for the freedoms and liberties of disenfranchised people. He influenced activists like Stokely Carmichael, an active member of the Black Panther Party, with his presence in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), but more importantly Rustin influenced and worked closely with Dr. King. Rustin assisted King with the bus boycotts of 1955 and eventually became instrumental in the planning of the 1963 March on Washington, but before the event took place Rustin resigned and severed ties with King. It appeared that Rustin’s reputation as an out queer man as well as his



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controversial position in politics were intimidating to men in the movement—namely, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Moreover, rumors that King was sexually involved with Rustin caused King to retreat from working with him. And merely because King would not confront the rumors to support and protect his colleague, Rustin in turn resigned. D’Emilio notes: He [Rustin] had shaped and nurtured and devoted himself to King’s career. He had drawn up the plans for what became the SCLC. He had been the invisible hand behind many civil rights initiatives for years. And yet, again, he was being discarded, this time for something that had never happened and that went publicly unnamed. Because the sexual slander behind the resignation remained hidden, the events appeared puzzling and hazy, and they generated little press commentary.43

Although Bayard Rustin’s career was not totally destroyed (he continued to slay!) and his work went on until his death in 1987, the erasure of his presence in the civil rights narrative of Black radical tradition is indicative of a common occurrence in performance and activism. In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, Judith Butler engages critical interventions in queerness. She writes: It is one of the ambivalent implications of the decentering of the subject to have one’s writing be the site of a necessary and inevitable expropriation. But this yielding of ownership over what one writes has an important set of political corollaries, for the taking up, reforming, deforming of one’s words does open up a difficult future terrain of community, one in which the hope of ever fully recognizing oneself in the terms by which one signifies is sure to be disappointed.44

Butler’s intervention on the importance of a political and personal ownership of language supports my understanding of the disregard of the use of queerness in Beyoncé’s “Formation.” Queer folk are radical in a hegemonic world that finds them abject, and the shade in “reforming/deforming” their work as well as the words of Big Freedia and Messy Mya is simply iniquitous. Currently, the presence of queerness in pop culture and music has become excessive, and the illumination of the aesthetics of shade is essential in proliferating queer folk whose mere labor of existence has contributed to performance and activism. For far too long, queer bodies have been commodified, and here the song “Formation” is the performance object to begin redirecting these patterns of erasure. It is high time queer folk, particularly Black queer men, continue to advocate for themselves and their contributions to the human race. “Slaying ‘Formation’” is a manifesto to disrupt acts of appropriation toward the labor and influences of queer bodies, especially at the expense of social and capitalistic gain. While this criminal activity cannot be likened to that of a hate crime, this cultural theft is an attack and injustice to those who identify under the LGBT umbrella. These acts generate false understandings of iconic cultural objects (i.e., voguing, queer vernacular, throwing shade, etc.) within pop culture entertainment while creating misunderstandings of their origins. These kinds of exploits keep queer constituents outside the margins of taste-making production, furthering the act of disregarding their influence. While there is space to critique the value of activism in Beyoncé’s “Formation,” that is not the intention of this essay. I choose to reveal the presence of queer performance in citations of activism and Black radical tradition. Queer folk have slayed and will remain present in sites of justice and liberation as has been demonstrated by Cullors, Garza, and Tometi in their quest

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to proliferate #blacklivesmatter. And in this present moment of arts and activism queer presence is booming. Consider Moonlight (2016), the film that won the 2017 Oscar for Best Picture.45 This not only was the first film with an all-Black cast to win the award, but it must also be recognized as a Black queer film. It is important to highlight the dynamic work of Black queer artists in the margins of history, such as Tarell Alvin McCraney (Adapted Screenplay Oscar winner for Moonlight)46 or the historical 2014 Emmy nomination of transgender actress Laverne Cox for her appearance in Orange Is the New Black 47 and later her Daytime Emmy Award win48 for Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word.49 The unapologetic presence of queer bodies in arts and entertainment and the willingness to create artistic work with queer themes, alone, is a practice of activism and a welcomed addition to the complexities of Black traditions. And through this disidentificatory act of slaying “Formation,” Messy Mya is “back by popular demand” with an homage to their contributions and legacy to a critical moment in Black history and radical tradition.

Notes 1.  Big Freedia, New Orleans Bounce artist, speaks this sentence in “Formation” at 1:16 on the track. Beyoncé,

“Formation,” Feb. 6, 2016, Lemonade, Parkwood Entertainment of Columbia Records, Web. 2.  Lemonade premiered on the HBO network April 23, 2016, at 9 pm EST. 3.  Here I use the term “black radical tradition” as a reflection of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1983). Ultimately the book explores histories and genealogies of Black radicalism and I feel the term is appropriate in this essay as I find that the radical feminism portrayed in Lemonade is significant to this present moment in Black traditions. 4.  bell hooks, “Moving beyond Pain” [Blog post], May 9, 2016, http://www.bellhooksinstitute.com/blog /2016/5/9/moving-beyond-pain. 5.  Daughters of the Dust, Julie Dash, dir. (Kino International, 1991), DVD. 6. From Essence to the New York Times to Vanity Fair to a critique by scholar Joan Morgan, several publications, scholars, and journalists have compared these two cinematic entities. https://genius.com/a/beyonce -black-feminist-art-and-this-oshun-bidness https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/movies/daughters-of -the-dust-restoration-beyonce-lemonade.html 7.  “Throwing shade” is an example of the queer vernacular I’m taking up in this chapter. Urban Dictionary’s fifth definition states, “Picking out one’s flaws in a derogatory manner. Also called reading. Used extensively in the gay community and especially in drag queen culture.” This is just an example of the many understandings and uses of shade. “Throwing shade,” Urban Dictionary, October 5, 2010, https://www.urbandictionary .com/define.php?term=Throwing%20shade. 8.  I will expand on this later in the essay but “performance labor” is in reference to Marlon M. Bailey’s theories in Butch Queen Up in Pumps. Marlon M. Bailey, Butch Queen Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013). 9.  Later in the paper I explore this more, but it is a contemporary social movement in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, accused of the murder of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin. 10.  A colloquial term in queer vernacular, “the kids” refers to members that identify under the LGBTQIA umbrella, sometimes more specifically to Black gay men. 11.  Catherine Cucinella and Renée R. Curry, “Exiled at Home: ‘Daughters of the Dust’ and the Many Post-Colonial Conditions,” MELUS 26, no. 4 (2001): 197–221. 12.  Beyoncé, along with Bruno Mars, were invited by British rock group Coldplay as guest performers for Super Bowl 50. The performance took place February 7, 2016, at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California. 13.  Through social media and pop culture blogs and publications the term “black anthem” was used in context to the song “Formation.” See Workneh, L. (2016). [online] Huffpost.com, https://www.huffpost.com /entry/beyonce-formation-video_n_56b67a09e4b08069c7a789e6?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0c HM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAJkdE8a51x34HP4PVVdzGgaW0F6Ms1



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Q2Z4QrUGd4VS0TmTImU3DBOHYSZfJRjYwgY00mlV5I-5xxLK4W3clPVVFOc6Xc-XW_WubOSUuS XGG2vBZXH3EMrIXB9Gy _O_kzVyW_WvIEK E4NzBNofdYmEE538il A 4j6omYCLQQ-ZPmW U [Accessed 20 Jul. 2019]. Also see: Fallon, K. (2019). Beyonce’s ‘Formation’: A Fiery Black Power Anthem and Call to Arms. [online] The Daily Beast. Available at: https://www.thedailybeast.com/beyonces-formation -a-fiery-black-power-anthem-and-call-to-arms. 14.  The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded October 15, 1966, in Oakland California, by then Merritt Junior College students Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale (a response to the assassination of Malcolm X). 15.  In the nascent years of YouTube, Messy Mya was a pioneer for current “YouTube sensations” and became highly recognized after the release of their video Booking The Hoes from New Wildin’, which currently holds 3.2 million views. Messy Mya, “Booking the Hoes from New Wildin’,” YouTube, 2010, https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=daKqgdcypTE 16.  New Orleans form of hip hop which originated as early as the 1980s. 17.  José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 11. 18. Bailey, Butch Queen Up in Pumps. 19.  Disidentification, Muńoz’s theory, expands on the ways in which queer subjects understand their identity in a world that considers them abject. I argue that shade was formed out of this act. 20.  Beyoncé, “Formation” [Music video], YouTube, Melina Matsouka, dir., December 9, 2016, https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=WDZJPJV__bQ&t=76s. 21.  New Wildins, a nightclub in New Orleans. 22.  Messy Mya was given a male’s name at birth. Their gender identity appears ambiguous (according to their appearance) and although they engendered a child, in an effort to not misname them, I use “they/their/them” pronouns out of respect. 23.  They reference their friend’s name in the video clip. 24.  Another example of the ways in which queer vernacular is codified in “Formation.” The word bitch has varied meanings in queer communities and often it is not pejorative. 25. Bailey, Butch Queen Up in Pumps, 76. 26.  Quote provided by permission of the author of this chapter, J. Michael Kinsey. The quote is from his play. 27.  Merriam-Webster [Post], Twitter, February 7, 2017. https://twitter.com/MerriamWebster/status/82905 6249467637760 28.  George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890– 1940 (New York: BasicBooks, 1994), 244–245. 29.  Ibid., 227. 30.  Ibid., 280. 31.  José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 4. 32. Bailey, Butch Queen Up in Pumps, 69. 33.  Willie Ninja, in Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston, dir. (Off White Productions, 1991), DVD. 34.  This is a more sophisticated rendering of words spoken by Dorian Corey in Paris Is Burning. 35.  Jonathan David Jackson. “The Social World of Voguing,” Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement 12, no. 2 (2002): 26–42. 36.  This is referencing an earlier song on which Beyoncé was featured. See Destiny’s Child, “Bills, Bills, Bills,” The Writings on the Wall (Columbia, 1999), CD. 37.  “Vogue” was the first single released from Madonna’s second soundtrack album. See Madonna, “Vogue,” I’m Breathless (Warner Bros., March 27, 1990), CD. 38.  Holly Hughes and David Román, eds., O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance. (New York: Grove Press, 1998), 5–6. 39.  Quoted in ibid., 123. 40.  Another term in queer vernacular, “butch queen” refers to cisgender gay men who oscillate between masculine and feminine characteristics (i.e., a plain ole gay man). 41.  A hashtag on Twitter that went viral in early 2017. Teen Vogue celebrated the hashtag. See “Twitter Users Celebrate Identity with #blackgayslay Hashtag,” Teen Vogue, February 11, 2017, https://www.teenvogue .com/story/twitter-users-celebrate-identity-blackgayslay-hashtag.

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42.  “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” The Feminist Wire, October 7, 2014, http://www .thefeministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2/. Initially I found this quote on the BLM official website, but after further review it was omitted. I recovered it here. 43.  John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: the Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: Free Press, 2003), 299–300. 44.  Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 185. 45.  Moonlight, Barry Jenkins, dir. (A24, 2016), DVD. 46.  Moonlight’s (2016) Oscar wins for Best Supporting Actor, Best Picture, and Best Adapted Screenplay can be found via the Academy of Motion Pictures & Sciences website (www.oscars.org). 47.  Orange Is the New Black, Jenji Kohan, creator (Netflix, July 11, 2013), www.netflix.com/title/70242311. 48.  Laverne Cox’s Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actress-Comedy Series for Orange Is the New Black and her win for Outstanding Special Class Special for Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word can be found via the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (www.emmyonline.com/academy). 49.  Laverne Cox, Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word (New York: Logo TV/MTV, 2014), Video.

Bibliography “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” The Feminist Wire, October 7, 2014, http://www.the feministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2/. Bailey, Marlon M., Butch Queen Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance and Ballroom Culture in Detroit. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013, 76. Beyoncé. “Formation” [Music video]. Directed by Melina Matsouka. YouTube. December 9, 2016, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDZJPJV__bQ&t=76s. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993, 185. Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: BasicBooks, 1994, 244–245. Cucinella, Catherine, and Renée R. Curry. “Exiled at Home: ‘Daughters of the Dust’ and the Many Post-­ Colonial Conditions.” MELUS 26, no. 4 (2001): 197–221. D’Emilio, John. Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. New York: Free Press, 2003, 6. hooks, bell. “Moving beyond Pain” [Blog post]. May 9, 2016, http://www.bellhooksinstitute.com/blog /2016/5/9/moving-beyond-pain. Hughes, Holly, and David Román, eds. O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance. New York: Grove Press, 1998, 5–6. Jackson, Jonathan David. “The Social World of Voguing.” Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement 12, no. 2 (2002): 26–42. Merriam-Webster [Post]. Twitter. February 7, 2017, https://twitter.com/MerriamWebster/status/8290562 49467637760 Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 4. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009, 11. Mya, Messy. “Booking the Hoes from New Wildin’.” YouTube. 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =daKqgdcypTE Ninja, Willie. Paris Is Burning. Jennie Livingston, dir. Off White Productions, 1991. DVD. “Throwing shade.” Urban Dictionary, October 5, 2010, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term =Throwing%20shade. “Twitter Users Celebrate Identity with #blackgayslay Hashtag.” Teen Vogue. February 11, 2017, https://www .teenvogue.com/story/twitter-users-celebrate-identity-blackgayslay-hashtag.

12 • CENTERING BL ACKNESS THROUGH PERFORMANCE IN EVERY 28 HOURS S H O N D R I K A M O S S- B O U L D I N

Every 28 Hours was a project organized as a direct response to the state-sanctioned injustice of Black people being killed in America.1 On August 14, 2014, there was a police killing of an unarmed African American teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. Equally disturbing was the decision of the police to leave Brown’s dead body to lay in the streets for hours, allowing members of the community to witness the disrespect and devaluing of the Black body. This disregard of the Black body is a leftover legacy from slavery when Black people were deducted as chattel instead of being seen as human beings. The treatment of Brown’s Black body, and other national incidents like Ferguson, have contributed to the trauma and outrage of the entire country. The details of Brown’s murder were and are still unclear but what was and is still clear is the blatant disregard of his Black life. His murder ignited a series of protests in Ferguson and throughout the country which were mostly spearheaded by the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM). These large protests lasted for weeks and people from across the country mobilized in Ferguson. The outrage that ignited several thousand people to gather in Ferguson challenged the police brutality against Michael Brown and the manner in which other unarmed Black people have been victimized in this country. This outrage served as fertile ground for producer and theatre-maker Claudia Alick to use Ferguson as the foundation for her vision, which eventually became known as Every 28 Hours. In August of 2014, Alick created a project called the Ferguson Moment in collaboration with producers and administrators from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; Alison Carey, Mica Cole, and Sharifa Johka, artists from St. Louis and the rest of the United States, including Megan Sandberg-Zakian, Tlaloc Rivas, Jacqueline Lawton, the Theatre Communications Group, Katy Rubin, Danny Bryck, Rebecca Martinez, Jacqueline Thompson, Don McClendon, Shanara Gabrielle, Chris Hanson, Andrea Parnell, Ron Himes, and others. As news of Michael Brown’s death came forward, these theatre-makers connected with other artists in Ferguson and across the nation to serve, collaborate, and witness this injustice through theatre in a three-day performance exchange. 2 In 2015, Alick took advantage of the momentum from this event and collaborated with Dominic D’Andrea, artistic director of the One-Minute Festival, the largest drama festival in the country. 3 Together they created a new model to develop the collection of short plays, attracting a range of award-winning playwrights, such as Lynn Nottage, Nambi Kelley, and Tarell Alvin McCraney to contribute to the collection. Alick consulted with Soul Touchin 191

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Experiences, Kriphop Nation, the Art of Hustle, Better Youth, Inc., Artistic Logistics, the Network of Ensemble Theatres, Tectonic Theatre Project, Bonnie Metzgar, Families United for Justice, Forced Trajectory Project, APIs for Black Lives (Asian Pacific Islanders for Black Lives St. Louis), and other activists, producers, and media experts to build a process with an intersectional lens that was as inclusive as possible. With a national advisory committee, they refined models to allow the work to spread and continue across the country. This chapter details the origin of Every 28 Hours, the purpose of it, and the progress of this ongoing project. In addition, I use my participation as an organizer and director in the third phase of Every 28 hours to highlight ways in which theatre can be used as exchange of collaboration, service, and affirmation. By focusing on the experiences of African Americans, Every 28 Hours centers the African American experience in their own story. This is an effective model to perform, to witness, and to affirm not only African Americans but the entire American community. From the beginning, Every 28 Hours was grounded in three phases that involved community-building using performance. The first phase included a weeklong residency for all artist participants, including the actors, producers, and several playwrights in St. Louis, to establish the framework for the project. During this phase, time was spent contacting playwrights across the country and collaborating with thought leaders to develop the process with Claudia Alick and Dominic D’Andrea. Phase two involved the St. Louis community as the foundation to develop writing and recruit artists and community members to stage the readings. St. Louis producer/ director Jaqueline Thompson led a weeklong residency that included actors, playwrights, and thought leaders in St. Louis. This residency served as the foundation to develop writing, recruit artists, and stage the first readings. The third and final phase included a national outreach of over thirty engagements during October 2016, with a collaboration between theatres, artists, police, civic leaders, and people in the community. All participants volunteered their time and donated proceeds to racial justice organizations. After completion of these phases, Claudia Alick has taken up the charge to continue this work with her transmedia social justice arts organization Calling Up! As executive producer of Every 28 Hours she facilitates continued engagements across the nation on a “Pay What You Can” model as part of the organization’s philosophy of radical generosity. Anyone who is interested in performing these plays may still sign up and produce them. In Every 28 Hours, we can experience both dimensions of non-Black actors in a private space by having private conversations and dismissing race and/or racism. We also see the public pain concerning the value of Black lives. In the introduction section of the clumps, each play focuses on establishing the foundation of the play and its title, Every 28 Hours. The title, Every 28 Hours, reflects the stunning statistic from Arlene Eisen’s report Operation Ghetto Storm, which stated that every twenty-eight hours, a Black person is killed by police, a security guard, or a vigilante.4 The continuous violence on the Black body has conjured up memories in the Black community and the entire American society that cannot be ignored. Every play focuses on this alarming statistic and seeks to debunk arguments and excuses that many people use when talking about the Black Lives Matter movement, such as I am not Black in America and, therefore, this does not concern or affect me. Even though I concentrate on the plays I directed in the introduction (Excuses) and the finale (Unknown Hundreds), it is pertinent to know that Every 28 Hours consists of nine clumps that engage a myriad array of aspects: Clump One: Introduction, Clump Two: Race, Clump Three: Police, Clump Four: Community, Clump Five: Protest, Clump Six: History, Clump Seven: Mothers, Clump Eight: Youth, and Clump 9: Finale, which includes Unknown Hundreds by Nikkole Salter. Each one of these clumps brings to the forefront various aspects of



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what it means to be Black in America and challenges us to reflect on the intersectionality of each clump. These clusters must be performed in their entirety and take approximately one to three minutes to perform and are not viewed as separate entities, but intersect with one another to bring a profound experience to the participants, including the actor, director, and audience member. The clumps are performed in the order listed above without an intermission. It is the producer’s choice whether they announce the clumps or different titles while the piece is being performed. I will discuss specifically the following plays: Excuses, All Convenience, Outside a Small Circle of Friends, and Unknown Hundreds.

Artivism According to the Every 28 Hours dramaturgy packet, artivism is defined as “an attempt to reflect the totality of this history in the making. We do not see the plays themselves as an act of activism or protest performance; we aimed to create the plays in a framework that was socially just.”5 Artivism is unlike the term protest theatre that implies centering the person or system that one is fighting against. In an interview I conducted with Claudia Alick she discussed the significance of “consciously making sure that theatre makers are consistently checking themselves to make sure that they are not making decisions based on a white patriarchal system.”6 Every 28 Hours wanted to ensure that the African American experience in this country was not marginalized; therefore it sought to make clear the horrific epidemic of devaluing Black lives in our country for centuries. Some people have described Every 28 Hours as activism, but this diminishes the power of activism. These plays are in conversation with activism and they encourage everyone involved to become an activist. However, it is misleading to equate theatre-making to activism. The term activism also does not capture the unique genre of performance and its impact on our everyday life. However, artivism does imply enacting action for others instead of staying complacent. If we begin to use artivism as a model, we will not only promote activism, but we can move toward a healing that includes an affirmation that our lives are of value. As long as we have lived in this country, African American people have used art, particularly performance, to express resistance to the mistreatment of our people in this country. The application of artivism to embody African American experience and protest is the future for theatre of social change. By using the truth of our ancestral and present memory, artivism theatre presents an honest experience by inviting the audience to become part of this reality by treating them not as an audience but a community of witnesses. We can accomplish this by creating “absence of concept of privacy,” a term introduced in Zora Neale Hurston’s prolific essay The Characteristics of Negro Expression. Hurston describes the absence of the concept of privacy as “nothing being kept a secret . . . they [there] is no reserve. . . . An audience is necessary as part of any drama.” 7 Hurston’s insights highlight that private acts are often made public by the performer, and the performance act of performing in public community acts as a bond with the audience and the performers. This dynamic allows the performers and the audience to interact with one another by making the often private act of racism public. It also reminds us that the drama is heightened when an audience exists to witness the scenario.

Black Lives Matter I was drawn to Every 28 Hours from the moment I met Claudia Alick, one of the cofounders of the collection, at a Theatre Communications Group (TCG) conference where she was leading

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a session discussing the production, and I knew I had an opportunity to make a difference through theatre. I was searching for a way to express my frustration, fear, anger, and indignation on the way African American people are targeted in our country. Every 28 Hours examined the impact of memory on the Black body through performance. This project was therapeutic for me because the plays acknowledge one of the most significant steps in the quest for healing in trauma: the acknowledgment that the event of violence occurred in the first place. Participating in Every 28 Hours led me to discover a few things: it allowed people to understand the truth by presenting it in a public space, and it helped people who experienced trauma an opportunity to contribute to the conversation. Besides having the historical memory of the active terrorism that has been brought upon African Americans, there has been a barrage of assaulting images broadcast through the news and social media. We all watched in disbelief while Trayvon Martin was put on trial for his own murder. No one could make sense of how a citizen could decide that Trayvon, a teenage boy, could be a threat to a grown White man. We cannot escape the terrorism that is derived from the way White society negatively views the Black body. In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehsi Coates challenges us to think about the impact of racism. He states, “But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”8 Every 28 Hours does not allow us to gloss over the injustice, inhumanity, and repeated aggressions on the Black body and this collection of plays presents the historic and present violations that African Americans have to endure as a daily existence in America. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which began after the not guilty verdict for Trayvon Martin’s murderer, and the Every 28 Hours project capitalized on the power of social media which has allowed people to mobilize quickly and effectively. BLM also encouraged people to think about other challenging ways to confront racism and critically examine our existence. Every 28 Hours allows the actors, the producers, and the audience to experience these images and its impact. It addresses the passive and aggressive forms of racism and the contradictions that African Americans must reconcile on a daily basis. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander reminds us why racism is so problematic to address in our country: When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and “whites only” signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, goodhearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners—and wished them well—nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation. . . . Our understanding of racism is therefore shaped by the most extreme expressions of individual bigotry, not by the way in which it functions naturally, almost invisibly (and sometimes with genuinely benign intent), when it is embedded in the structure of a social system.9

Alick further offers that racism is embedded in our society and reveals the lies of White supremacy.10 It’s more difficult to forget about the facets of racism with the documentation of social media. People can find out in record speed the names of other unarmed African Americans who were and are being murdered. The BLM movement also challenges the way we interrogate



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race and representation since the creators are uplifting and centering blackness as a form of political resistance. Alick states, “We are in a time of change for the U.S and the reflection on this current Civil Rights Movement is exciting because of the power and number of talented voices collaborating. Our project is informed by thoughtful leaders in activism, performance, civic leadership and communications.”11 This production allows for artivism and the African American experience to be the center of community engagement by focusing on the complexity of the Black body. In his book Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body, Harvey Young discusses the impact of the duality of the Black body in society. Young asserts, “Black bodies have projected upon themselves a series of contradictory images premised upon the disjunction between their daily lived realities and societal assumptions, the myths, of the black body.”12 This quote speaks to the beginning of Every 28 Hours and this sets the tone for the production. It still allows the participants to center blackness by encouraging other voices. Young’s quote disarms excuses and empowers the actors and the audience to be committed to this community. Some people are quick to say that they are not affected by racism if they are not part of the ethnic group that is being discriminated against. In my many years working as an artist-scholar and being engaged in social justice work, I would often encounter people dismissing their inherent White privilege by saying, “I’m white and I won’t be affected by this.” Excuses by Ova Saopeng forces us to examine the consequences or the dismissiveness of feeling complacent regarding racism.13 The play reads as follows: (Actor 1 walks on stage and begins and is interrupted by other actors.) ACTOR 1: Every 28 hours . . . ACTOR 2: It’s better in America than in my home country. ACTOR 3: I’m not black. I’m Asian. ACTOR 4: It’s not my problem. It’s a black and white thing. ACTOR 1: Every 28 hours in America, a . . . ACTOR 2: Black? I’m not black, I’m African. ACTOR 3: So what, nothing’s going to change. ACTOR 4: There’s a Japanese sheriff. ACTOR 1: Every 28 hours in America, a black person gets killed . . . ACTOR 2: Really? Where did you get that data? ACTOR 3: It’s not my neighborhood. ACTOR 4: Wrong place. Wrong time. ACTOR 1: Every 28 hours in America, a black person is killed by the police. ACTOR 2: Police are getting killed too. The police have a hard job, too? ACTOR 3: I don’t know enough about the court case. ACTOR 4: They’re all criminals anyway. Do they really matter? ACTOR 1: Every 28 hours in America (beat) we lose a piece of ourselves.

This last line really captures the way the actors and audience are not able to dismiss the reality of what’s occurring in America, because in our community, we are all affected by the violation. When I directed the opening of Every 28 Hours with the piece Excuses by Ova Saopeng, I made sure that I had an ethnically diverse cast and I decided to place them on the stage and in the house in order for their words and actions to impact the audience. I placed actors strategically throughout the theatre: in the aisles, upstairs in the balcony, in front of the stage, and

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onstage. By placing them offstage, the audience is forced to engage with the actors and not dismiss their truth. Unfortunately, many people mistake that centering blackness means that Black people disregard others who are not African American. This is not the case. In the plays and in the dramaturgy packet of Every 28 Hours, there are several examples that question this theory. For example, the packet counters the all lives matter to the Black Lives Matter argument repeatedly. The plays challenge the reader, audience, and actor to be aware that every time one attempts to center blackness, some people who are not African American try to center themselves by countering with phrases such as “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter.” In Claudia Alick’s piece All Convenience,14 she challenges this notion of All Lives Matter versus The Black Lives Matter movement. Alick applies the metaphor of a convenience store to challenge the arguments that are often generated when discussing the BLM movement or racism in general. In All Convenience, there is a gathering of actors trying to put out a convenience store fire; while they are meeting there is some confusion about the urgency of the fire and if the fire really needs to be extinguished. In the beginning of the play, an actor comes running in to tell the rest of the cast that there is a fire: ONE Help, fire! Help! fire! TWO Slow down. Why are you yelling?

Later in the play the actors ask: FOUR Are you sure it wasn’t accidental? (Coughing) Lightning starts fires too.

They continue the conversation to discuss and examine every aspect of the fire—while there is a fire burning. ONE What are you doing? TWO I’m hosing down the 7-11. THREE The 7-11 is not on fire. FOUR That’s good. I’m on board with the whole fire is bad thing, I just don’t agree with yelling about it. ONE It’s the Quick Trip that’s burning. That’s the wrong convenience store. TWO All convenience stores matter! THREE All convenience— FOUR All convenience—



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ONE I can’t breathe. TWO I can’t breathe! THREE I can’t breathe! ALL I can’t breathe! (Stage is covered in so much smoke nothing is visible any longer. The world is on fire.)

In her play, Alick demonstrates how ridiculous it is to waste time talking about the problem when there is urgency in addressing the problem immediately. If we don’t address the issue, then we risk more damage happening and that is what has been happening with Black lives in America. Because we waste so much time discussing or avoiding the problem, the extermination of Black lives keeps increasing. In addition, Alick is evoking the famous last words of Eric Garner—“I can’t breathe!”—which serve as a double meaning to the play because the remaining characters cannot breathe as well. This positions the audience to make the connection between what the actors are experiencing while remembering and reflecting upon Garner’s death. Every 28 Hours captures the daily contradictory realities that African Americans live within every day. In the play Outside a Small Circle of Friends by Prince Gomolvilas, we see a non–African American couple at home, watching television being bored surfing through the channels, while the African American chorus count from one hour to twenty-eight hours. Once they reach twenty-eight hours, there is a loud stomp/bang to signify the loss of life. Both of these actors simultaneously stomping while the chorus is counting exemplifies the duality of our lives. It also makes us question White privilege by interrogating the reality of how can you live your life without acknowledging the pain and violence that is happening around you? The production continues to interrogate these themes through the other clumps and finally it culminates into the finale, Unknown Hundreds by Nikkole Salter. Unknown Hundreds15 challenges the audience to reflect on the many unknown people who have lost their lives and wanting the insanity of all these unnecessary deaths to end. In my production, we brought all of our actors back on stage (we had close to 100 actors) chanting, “No justice, No peace!” until everyone returned to the stage. It was powerful to see everyone come together from diverse backgrounds and evoke those words. Salter begins the play from the beginning of time, naming historical figures but constantly acknowledging that there are many other figures whose lives are unknown because they were lost to state-sanctioned violence. She continues acknowledging the lives of the unknown with each decade until our current year, demanding, “WILL THIS EVER FUCKING STOP?” while others continue to whisper, “Unknown.“ It is powerful to watch the performance of the actors and the audience witness and acknowledge the “unknown” because it reminds us of the need to acknowledge the loss of Black lives due to this senseless violence. Unfortunately, when we were preparing for this event we saw this statistic play out on social media with the well-publicized murders of several African American men. Alton Sterling was shot and killed by Baton Rouge police officers (July 6, 2016), Keith Scott was killed by police in Charlotte, North Carolina (September 20, 2016), and Terrance Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma (September 16, 2016) was murdered by the police. Every 28 Hours also documents

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state-sanctioned violence by allowing people to add local and national names to the final piece, Unknown Hundreds. This gives the performers ownership by naming some of the unknown. With each murder, the community feels victimized repeatedly with the numerous names and the ones who are unknown. It was and is traumatizing. In the book black looks: race and representation by bell hooks, hooks speaks about the traumatizing effects of marginalization of Black people and asserts, “A culture of domination demands of all its citizens self-negation. The more marginalized, the more intense the demand. Since black people, especially the underclass, are bombarded by messages that we have no value and are worthless, it is no wonder that we fall prey to nihilistic despair or forms of addiction that provide momentary escape, illusions of grandeur, and temporary freedom from the pain of facing reality.”16 Ending the production with this piece validates our pain and anger and calls for action for some next steps. One of the production requirements is community engagement after the performance. In the Atlanta production, we chose to organize a panel of African American community members that ranged from artists to a psychologist. Having the community engagement aspect allows us to keep the conversation going about what action to take, whether it’s about self-care or social justice.

Reflections This production made me more aware and satisfied that everyone worked collaboratively and unapologetically to make sure that we were always centering blackness. Even though my production and artistic team were ethnically diverse, we managed to make every decision from that framework. This made it easy to form alliances with members of the Atlanta community from a variety of ethnic and professional backgrounds and this resulted in us forming the Atlanta University Consortium (Spelman College, Morehouse College, and Clark Atlanta University), Actor’s Express, and the Alliance Theatre, along with independent artists, which collaborated to produce Every 28 Hours. This new form of artivism in theatre for social change encourages these types of alliances to form within one’s own community. What I appreciated most from this experience was the way that the members of the community who were not Black decided to support this project in many ways that did not include centering themselves. For example, Freddie Ashley, the artistic director of Actor’s Express, chose to help me find Black directors in Atlanta to direct each clump instead of directing one of the plays himself. He also did not try to take charge of the community event. Instead there was a collective element that allowed everyone involved to work collaboratively. According to Alick, his stance was not unique with most of the theatre-makers engaged in this project. I would argue that the nature of this project makes it impossible for you to continue to engage in certain supremacist behaviors. What’s most powerful about Every 28 Hours is that it is constantly being revised and adapted to suit the needs of the community. It is healing and affirming to recognize that Black people have justified pain, anger, sadness, frustration, contradictions, and helplessness as we try to navigate the inherent racism in our daily existence. In the last piece, it is encouraged to substitute local deaths that happened in addition to the national names to engage each individual community. There is an oppositional tension regarding the question Do Black lives matter? Yes! Black lives do matter and they have value. However, there is an irony of questioning if Black lives truly matter, then why do we have to state it?



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Maybe stating that Black lives matters is not addressing White dominant culture at all. Maybe it was formed to affirm that Black people in America know and need to hear it as a mantra for our own self-healing. Hearing and seeing these staged readings allow us to examine the presence of the Black body not only on stage but in everyday life. In the end, I realize that Every 28 Hours generates more questions than answers, but I think that is the point. What happens to our stories if we don’t tell them or tell our stories honestly? How can theatre move the conversation? How can we bring the fire this time? I believe embracing a new term and definition of the way African American performance can uplift blackness by centering Black people and Black culture is a powerful form of resistance. With Every 28 Hours we present the truth of our history in a very honest way and challenge all involved to be accountable for a solution. It does not stop with the end of the production because the performance is the entry point into greater issues. Providing an outlet for more opportunities for artivism would be a great beginning to capturing the significance of African American theatre for social change while providing an outlet for healing and empowerment.

Notes 1.  In this chapter, I will use Black and African American interchangeably as a person of African descent who is also American. 2.  See Every 28 Hours Plays, About Us, 2019, www.every28hoursplays.org/about. 3.  See One Minute Plays, About, 2019, www.oneminuteplays.com. 4.  Arlene Eisen, “Operation Ghetto Storm,” issued by Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, April 2013, https:// www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/Operation-Ghetto-Storm.pdf. This is a 2012 Annual Report on the Extrajudicial Killings of 313 Black People by Police, Security Guards and Vigilantes. See “#Black Lives Matter: The Birth of a New Civil Rights Movement,” The Guardian, July 19, 2015, http://www.theguardin.com/world/2015 /jul/19/blacklivesmatter-birth-civil-rights-movement. 5.  Martine Green-Rogers and Claudia Alick, Every 28 Hours Dramaturgy Packet, 2016. This packet is provided to the producer once they are approved to stage the piece. The piece is not published. 6.  Claudia Alick, interview by author, 2017. 7.  Zora Neale Hurston, The Sanctified Church (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1981), 60. 8.  Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Random House, 2015). 9.  Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012). 10.  Alick Interview, 2017. 11.  See www.every28hoursplays.org 12.  Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 23. 13.  Every 28 Hours, 2016. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16.  bell hooks, black looks: race and representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 19.

Bibliography Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2012. Alick, Claudia. Interview by D. S. Moss-Bouldin. January 21, 2017. Alick, E. C. Every 28 Hours Plays. 2016. Unpublished. Alick, Claudia and Martine Green-Rogers. Every 28 Hours Dramaturgy Packet. 2016.

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“#Black Lives Matter: The Birth of a New Civil Rights Movement.” The Guardian. July 19, 2015, http://www .theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/19/blacklivesmatter-birth-civil-rights-movement. Coates, T.-N. Between the World and Me. New York: Random House, 2015. Every 28 Hours Plays. n.d. http://every28hoursplays.org/about. hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. Hurston, Zora. Neale. The Sanctified Church. New York: Marlowe & Company, 1981. One Minute Plays. About. 2019, www.oneminuteplays.com. Young, Harvey. Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013.

13 • DANCING FOR JUSTICE PHIL ADELPHIA Embodiment, Dance, and Social Change JULIE B. JOHNSON

Notes from the First Dancing for Justice Philadelphia Solidarity March December 13, 2014: Feet to pavement, hands held high. Singing for justice over honks and distant pedestrian chatter. Slow rotations in a community clump. Dirge on Broad Street, crouching low steps side to side. Onlookers joining in, we double in size before we reached City Hall. Adinkra symbol in Dilworth Park. Tears and names . . . so many names. Circle dance, jumping in, letting go, being consumed in the moment. Laying prone in the grass amidst wind-blown protest signs.

Reflecting on the collective embodiment of the first Dancing for Justice Philadelphia solidarity march—on moving with nearly 100 Philadelphians crouching down low with our hands behind our backs as we steadily moved toward City Hall in the freezing December air—I think about transformation and how change at the level of the body might lead to social change. Artistic director of Dancing While Black, Paloma McGregor (2013) explains that “dance practice is fundamentally a transformative act: an idea becomes an action becomes a practice becomes a way of being. The change is incremental over time.”1 I understand “ideas” to include embodied knowledge created by somatic/sensory experience. What we see, hear, taste, touch, smell, and how we move, our felt experience, produces knowledge. Sense perception is our first point of participation in the world and in each other’s existence; it builds pathways toward interpersonal connection. 2 Dancing for Justice Philadelphia is an initiative grounded in the ethos that embodied experience catalyzes transformative processes of ideas into action, action into practice, and practice into a way of being in the world, individually and collectively. Idea. Action. Practice. Change. I use these terms to organize my thoughts on Dancing for Justice Philadelphia’s first solidarity march on December 13, 2014. I 201

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emphasize sensory perception and embodiment, placing my lived experience of the march in conversation with theories from the disciplines of dance, theatre, Black performance studies, and African diaspora studies. I situate myself in this work as a Black woman with multiracial parentage (an African American father and a White European American mother), and as a dance artist and educator focused on the intersections of creative practice, community interaction, and social justice. My parents’ dedication to service, education, arts, and community shaped my worldview. And my father’s genealogical interests, which led him on an intensive search for our family’s African roots, fanned the flames of my own desire to investigate the ways in which African diaspora movement aesthetics are inscribed in my body. I understand African diaspora movement aesthetics as an ever-emerging and evolving practice, informed by history and tradition, propelled by contemporary interests and innovation, shaped by social structures and environments, and driven by daily lived experiences. In this chapter, I draw from my own lived experience of participating in Dancing for Justice Philadelphia, particularly the first solidarity march in 2014, to examine how this initiative transforms an idea into social change, beginning with embodied knowledge. I connect the idea, action, practice, and change journey to participants’ individual and collective embodiment of African diaspora dance and cultural practices to mourn, heal, and resist. Dancing for Justice Philadelphia builds on the work of artists and practitioners of social justice movements of the past, particularly those who manifested artistic and cultural practices as integral to resistance against marginalization and survival amid racial oppression. It reflects the messages of self-sufficiency and self-determination central to the Black power and Black Arts movements of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as those of the artists who established African diaspora dance practices in Philadelphia as a means of cultural empowerment prior to, during, and after these social justice movements. 3 Thomas DeFrantz (2002) cites art historian Richard J. Powell’s assertion: Many artists viewed the recuperation of “black” as a mark of identity during the 1960s as an “emphatic proclamation of an oppressed people’s psychological reorientation.” In dance, this decidedly nationalistic reorientation emphasized connections between everyday experiences and art-making to embrace multiple movement idioms and a range of expressive approaches in the representation of “blackness.”4

The Black power and Black Arts movements emerged from the civil rights movement of the 1960s in the United States. The Black power movement was a call to action focused on igniting change from within the Black community, connecting political action to self-determination. The Black Arts movement was one response to this call in which an entire realm of artistic and cultural practice and production blossomed—in the form of dance, poetry, literature, music, visual arts, and more—that served to reflect and mirror the complex landscape of Black experiences, envision a new future, and inspire change. 5 Black performance theory as put forth by dance scholars DeFrantz and Gonzalez (2014) echoes this sensibility, framing Black performance as a process, rather than a fixed product, articulating and excavating an ever-evolving and expanding web of experiences across the African diaspora. They expound that such a process entails mining “the coded nuances as well as the complex spectacles within everyday acts of resistance by once known a/objects that are now and have always been agents of their own humanity.”6 Through this lens, Black performance is understood as a radical act, centered on embodiment and lived experience. My own lived experience of the first Dancing for Justice



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solidarity march provides an entry point into the analysis of how the embodiment of African diaspora dance and cultural practices can trace the transformative journey of idea into action, practice, and, ultimately, change.

The Idea: Black Life Is Tied to All Life On Tuesday, November 25, 2014, a grand jury failed to indict police officer Daniel Pantaleo for killing Eric Garner, an unarmed Black man in Staten Island, New York. This ignited protests around the country, stoking the flames already burning from the similar killings of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Akai Gurley, and others. I remember staring at the television, frozen. My muscles tensed, my skin crawled with a sickening anger and sense of disbelief. This energy had nowhere to go, and the stagnancy made me feel ill. People took to the streets of Philadelphia and so I grabbed my coat and ran nonstop for about twenty minutes until I caught up with a friend in the crowd. I had never participated in a protest march before. I was relieved to have some way to physicalize my emotions and I was warmed by the public display of solidarity and support by so many other Philadelphians. I was grateful to know that I was not at all alone. But for me, this particular protest march felt aimless in its spontaneous eruption of outrage that led us wandering around the city without a determined goal or destination. I noticed in the days after the march that the dreadfully stagnant energy crept back into my body, adding a sluggish weight to my movement as I struggled to perform my daily tasks. A fog muddied my consciousness. Typically routine activities required extra effort. I longed for an outlet, a way to direct or shift this energy. Two weeks later, New York–based artists and educators Brittany Williams and Tamara Williams put out a call on Facebook for dance leaders around the country to join their newly formed Dancing for Justice initiative in a national solidarity march on December 13, 2014.7 They explained on their Facebook event post that the purpose of the march was to demand justice through collective movement, dance together in solidarity, and pay homage to Black unarmed people killed by police, specifically Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, and Tamir Rice. Marches were organized in New York, Tallahassee, Detroit, and Chicago. And in Philadelphia, it was choreographer Lela Aisha Jones who heeded the call. Jones galvanized a team of local collaborators to organize Dancing for Justice Philadelphia (DFJ Philly). I joined the core organizing committee, eager to put my energy to good use, curious to know how this march might be different. DFJ Philly brings together people of various social, professional, and ethnic/racial/cultural backgrounds (whether they identify as “dancers” or not). Now structured as an initiative of Jones’s dance company Flyground, the mission of DFJ Philly is stated on her website: “DFJ Philly exists to continue the conversation on the U.S. racial divide and its potential for continued, contemporary, and grave injustice. DFJ Philly is grounded in a collective understanding that Black life is tied to all life.”8 This mission statement serves as a philosophical connector between DFJ Philly and the Black Lives Matter movement, affirming the value of Black life and making visible the disparate treatment of people of color in the United States. “Black life is tied to all life” sits restless at the end of the statement, determined to prompt a conversation that, according to Jones, has been historically silenced in the United States. The statement serves as an invitation for all people, whether they identify as Black or not, to investigate their relationship to Black life and the ways in which our identities, cultures, and histories are inherently intertwined. Jones explains that Black people’s experiences have been

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muddled up and mixed up inside of all the artistic experiences [in the United States] . . . that are embodied and written and sung, and danced, and painted and drawn and sculpted. So, all of this stuff is mixed up in that and if you look deep enough into almost any of it, you’re gonna find the Blackness in it. . . . Everybody here is tied to Black life. Whether they want to have that be a conscious experience is their choice, really.9

DFJ Philly makes space for this investigation by foregrounding participant embodiment and centering African diaspora dances, cultures, and experiences in every event while welcoming all to participate.

The Action: Marches, Performances, and Community Workshops Since its inception in 2014, DFJ Philly has worked to provide multiple spaces where community members can process and mourn the daily violent acts against people of color made overwhelmingly visible by social media, investigate their complicity in upholding racist structures, and discuss individual and collective strategies to dismantle systems of oppression. Thus far, DFJ Philly has held two public solidarity marches, two pop-up performances (making appearances at dance concerts at the request of local producers and artists), and four community gatherings/workshops. Additionally, DFJ Philly has collaborated with local arts organizations to host an Understanding and Undoing Racism Workshop facilitated by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB), a national organization that focuses on understanding what racism is, where it comes from, how it functions, why it persists, and how it can be undone.10 As a whole, DFJ Philly makes space for perspectives and dialogues otherwise overlooked, diminished, skewed, or silenced by dominant oppressive narratives. We can examine, express, and embody our own and each other’s stories, and the ways in which we understand these stories in the context of blackness and/or racism. DFJ Philly’s first action, the solidarity march on December 13, 2014, set the foundation for ongoing practice in which we engage in multimodal embodied interactions—moving, writing, talking, observing, singing, and dancing—that center African diaspora dance practices, cultures, and experiences.

The Practice: Embodying the African Diaspora “African diaspora” refers to African-derived cultures as they have developed beyond, and in relation to, the African continent. “Africa,” more than a continent, is a complex and continuously reconstituted idea based on race, colonization and decolonization, economies, nations, and ethnicities, and so “African diaspora” becomes an equally unstable concept.11 Africa is both a material and imagined space, and is described by Malawian historian and literary critic Paul Tiyambe Zeleza as a “physical, political, psychic, and paradigmatic reality for the peoples who live within or are molded from its cartographic and cultural boundaries, who themselves are subject to spatial shifts and historical transformations.”12 The term African diaspora denotes a process of migration, a spatial construct, and a periodization that is complex and convoluted. Its location, scale, and temporal boundaries are not fixed—the “what” and “who” of the African diaspora shift and are multiple.13 As such, I employ a framework of diaspora that is multicentered, overlapping, multidirectional, and generative, and therefore understand African American and/or Black experiences as relationally multifaceted, multicentered, and mobile.14



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“African diaspora dance” then, is not a label intended to homogenize dance forms associated with the African diaspora, nor does it suggest that dance practices fit into any linear structure of time or space that expands out from the continent of Africa. Rather, “African diaspora dance” can be understood as a realm of practices encompassing complex relationships of vast and overlapping dance practices that reflect temporal, geographic, and cultural intersections of expression within and beyond Africa. DeFrantz and Gonzalez (2014) examine such relationships through the lens of Black performance theory (BPT), which they explain as “an enterprise of labor and the senses” that encompasses ongoing, evolving, and experimental processes (rather than fixed products).15 These processes are enabled by “black sensibilities, black expressive practices, and black people,” whether Black bodies are present or not.16 The organizing committee of DFJ Philly consists of a diverse group of dancers, artists, cultural organizers, educators, and community members who situate themselves across a broad spectrum of social identities in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. In early conversations around organizing the first march, it was agreed that the purpose would be to mourn and honor Black lives lost to police violence, rather than to protest unjust policies. To mourn and honor requires locating one’s personal relationship to the dead, and to the circumstances of their deaths, thereby shouldering a sense of responsibility on ourselves. We cannot ask the world to change before we change ourselves. The committee also agreed that organizers of color should be placed at the forefront of leadership and decision-making. This, Jones explained, is how the mechanisms of African diaspora dance and cultural performance manifested as the philosophical and choreographic framework for the march. The march itself builds on a deep history of processional traditions within the diaspora in which funeral parades are a practice of simultaneously mourning and celebrating the dead. Jazz funeral parades and second line culture prevalent in New Orleans, for example, are rooted in the dance and music of African slaves in Congo Square.17 A band leads the funeral procession with mourners following behind, dancing along the way. In similar fashion, our march was led by an ensemble of percussionists. These musicians were members of the Philadelphia capoeira and the West African dance communities, playing West African and Afro-Brazilian instruments such as djembes and birimbaus. Jumatatu Poe, a choreographer, performer, dance educator, and artistic director of idiosynCRAZY Productions, contributed a slow dirge movement inspired by the New Orleans funeral parade tradition. It was a short, repetitive phrase easily learned by participants regardless of their experience with dance training. Dance journalists Ellen Chenoweth and Gregory King collaboratively wrote an article, “When Dance Has a Voice,” about the first DFJ Philly solidarity march that was first published by the Atlanta-based online dance journal thINKingDANCE. They described the dirge movement as follows: To say we marched is not accurate. We traveled as much as possible in a sequence of steps: 8 counts with our hands up, 8 counts holding parts of the body as if wounded, 8 counts hunched over with our hands behind our backs, the final 8 counts bringing our hands to our chests. A dirge is song of grief intended to accompany a funeral, and as we mourned the lives of people of color who have been gunned down senselessly, we stepped from side to side with hands raised above our heads. The music guided us as our hands made contact with our bodies until they were behind our backs. This unison action physicalized the despair of seeing innocent lives

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disregarded. On the downbeat of the drums that accompanied us the entire length of the march, we moved our hands from our chests defiantly, sending the energy towards the heavens. These 32 counts were repeated on and off from Federal Street to City Hall.18

The “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture was a jarring experience for me. I was acutely aware of my rotator cuff muscles in my shoulders tensing and starting to burn from fatigue, yet I was reticent to put my arms down even for a second. This pain meant I was alive, and it seemed a very small tribute to those whose lives were so tragically taken. When the choreography called for me to bring my hands down and behind my back, the release of my shoulder muscles was a relief, yet the simulated handcuffed position was a sobering reminder that discriminatory and violent policing is a reality. Touching and holding different parts on my body took on different meanings each time we performed this section. At times I was affirming my corporeal self, my existence, my humanity. At other times, I was addressing where the stories of Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and so many others lingered in my body, where the narratives of oppression dwelled. My shoulders, my chest, the back of my neck, my stomach; with my hands I mapped the rage, confusion, fear, and sorrow. In the moments between our dirge dance, Poe’s voice, amplified by a bullhorn, led us in song. “I Can’t Breathe” was written by the Peace Poets— a group of artists, educators, and organizers, all men of color from the Bronx, New York. The title reflects Eric Garner’s dying words as police officers strangled him in an illegal chokehold. We sang in call-and-response form, repeating Poe’s lead verse by verse. Call-and-response is understood as a “major characteristic of African musical idioms” and well represented in African American music and dance forms.19 This communal protest song was written with the intention of being sung at rallies and marches.20 It encapsulates Garner’s story and reflects a tone of vehement dissent against violent and unjust policing. Its simple lyrics and minimalistic melody make it likely that all able participants could catch on to it and follow along.21 I still hear my brother crying, “I can’t breathe” Now I’m in the struggle saying, “I can’t leave” Calling out the violence of these racist police We ain’t gonna stop till our people are free We ain’t gonna stop till our people are free

More than a recounting of the tragic event, the song transports us to the time and place of Garner’s death, evoking and invoking memories of his dying words as if we were there. Because the moment of his death was recorded and made available for public viewing via social media and news outlets, it is easily conjured in my imagination. His words, and the image of him lying on the ground, are still crystal clear in my memory to this day. The lyrics create a performative act, compelling the singers to manifest a relationship with Eric Garner (“my brother”), and with each other. Patricia Hill Collins explains that, historically, the political and economic oppression of Black people in the United States cultivated a connection between “family” and “community” as means of solidarity and support. 22 In regard to African diaspora dance practices, Yvonne Daniel refers to this as “fictive kin.” African diasporic experience and wisdom are embodied in music and dance practices that have been used by Africans in the Americas to “save and protect their individual spirits, their dignity as humans, and their sense of a cosmic family.” 23



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Along these lines, the use of the words we and our people in the Peace Poets’ song place us in community with all those marching, singing, and dancing alongside of us, and those we imagine who are doing the same around the country. This physical and emotional interchange allows for participation that facilitates embodied connection and supportive empathic exchange that may contribute to one’s perception of “community” within this moment.24 At two points along our route, we gathered together and stood in what Anita Gonzalez might call a “community clump,” further promoting a sense of togetherness.25 Gonzalez explains that such a choreographic device manifests solidarity among the participants through close physical proximity and the sense of touch, a heightened sense of awareness and connectedness, a collective intelligence from which they can assess each other’s (and their own) “emotional temperature” in the moment. 26 We huddled close together with other participants in the middle of Broad Street, and again on the sidewalk in front of the University for the Arts, both occasions momentarily impeding pedestrian or motor traffic, requiring us to stay committed to being together in this formation despite the pressure from the inconvenienced public attempting to get around us. This exchange cemented my resolve to be with my fellow DFJ Philly marchers, this contingency of friends and strangers, all willing participants unified in this physical and visual demonstration of our communality.27 We marched, danced, and sang our way through the central courtyard at City Hall and arrived at our final stop, Dilworth Park, located on the west side of the grounds of City Hall. Once there, dance educator and choreographer Jeannine Osayande directed us into another group formation. Osayande has conducted extensive research of Ghanaian dance and culture, and through her travels to the country, she has developed deep ties with Ghanaian artists and dance scholars. She led us into three concentric circles representing the Adinkrahene symbol. Adinkra symbology is a form of cultural knowledge and expression, first developed by the Akan people (specifically the Asante) of Ghana, dating back to the seventeenth century. 28 Each adinkra symbol conveys a specific message. The referent term, àdìn ` krá, which means ‘bidding farewell/goodbye’ in Akan, is composed of two words; dì ‘to eat’ or ‘to discuss’ and `n krá ‘message.’ From the literal meanings of the individual words making àdìn ` krá, it is important to note that each of the symbols involves recognition and acknowledgment of [a] specific message. That is, the purpose of àdìn ` krá is to send particular messages across and so it is important that each message is understood by target recipient(s). 29

Adinkrahene is said to be the chief adinkra symbol, its simple form the inspiration and possibly the foundation for the other symbols. It represents leadership, greatness, and achieving goals. 30 While in the Adinkrahene formation, we performed a simple unified movement phrase that Osayande quickly taught us, with the outermost and innermost circles rotating one way and the middle circle rotating the opposite way. I didn’t know its meaning at the time of the march. But I felt a sense of purposeful determination in the movement phrase we performed while in this formation. With percussive energy, we shot our hands up to the sky—right, left! We bent our knees and slowly melted down to touch the grass, and quickly shot our hands back up toward the sky and stood tall. After performing this movement, it came time to directly confront the purpose for our gathering by acknowledging the lives of so many men and women of color killed by police violence. We formed one large circle, and I noted a stark shift in energy as Jones called out the names of seventy people, one by one. This practice echoes an African diaspora ritual practice stemming

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from cultures throughout West Africa, known as the pouring of libations, in which water is poured onto a plant while speaking aloud the names of ancestors. As Jones slowly walked the perimeter of the circle, we followed each name in call-and-response form with the affirmation “Your life matters, rest in peace.” Jones’s voice cracked with emotion and tears flowed, as they did for several of us. Once the names of the deceased were spoken, we were invited to enter the circle to move in whatever way we desired. 31 The circle is an important element of African cosmology and provides a space in which people can support each other, observe each other, and be observed. 32 In terms of African diaspora dance practice in the United States, the circle has its roots in the ring shout, a sacred dance created on plantations by enslaved Africans that retained elements of African ancestral ceremony. 33 It was a means of forming a “cultural oneness” that suggested a “certain wholeness that encouraged the spirit of community.”34 Standing body to body around the circle’s edge in Dilworth Park, we could see ourselves as a collective and understand ourselves as a “whole.”35 Participants entered and exited the circle alone, or with others, improvising dances and moving in whatever way they felt compelled. Jones referred to this moment as “shedding,” a term she borrows from percussionists that describes a state of consciousness while playing (or dancing) in which one can “let go” and release tension, emotion, and inhibition. I saw people dance with abandon, seemingly without concern for conforming to any particular aesthetic, moving with great intensity of emotion. A friend entered the circle and headed toward me with a signature Lamban movement (a traditional African rhythm associated with Mandinke culture of the Old Malian Empire, with contemporary iterations prevalent across the African diaspora). I felt drawn to jump in and join her, feeling as though I was riding a wave of energy that sent me careening around the circle. I let go of that movement as I felt the rage and hurt pulsate out through my arms as they sliced through the air. The moment is a blur in my memory now, but I do recall arching my back and lifting my sternum toward the sky. I dropped down to the ground and jumped back up into the same arched position. I stood still. I was mourning the lost lives. I was mourning the illusion of safety I once felt that now was gone. I was immersed in a sense of loss, conscious of my own loved ones now deceased, as we danced for the dead. After the shedding, we were asked to find a place inside the circle or along its edge and observe a moment of silence. Some lay in the grass as if dead, others stood with their arms up, some sat quietly with their eyes closed. I lay on my back, staring at the sky. We were still and silent for seven minutes, the amount of time Eric Garner lay lifeless and handcuffed, with no attempts of resuscitation. Dance as a medium between life and death, the living and the deceased (or yet to be born), is an element of African diaspora cultural and artistic expression. 36 Honoring ancestors in this context is rooted in African cosmology that understands humanity as existing in four stages: youth, adult, elder, and ancestor (deceased). Each stage plays a role in community life. Ancestors, though no longer physically present on earth, guide us and pass along wisdom, and so we honor them and show our gratitude in a multitude of ways, including music and dance. 37 I now understand the entire march as a “dirge,” a powerfully universal practice of lament. Otto Karolyi states, “Lament is a universal expression of humanity. But so is defiance, the metamorphosing power of hope.”38 Our danced gestures were a collective embodiment of the stories of those killed. We sang a song of derision, we stood together in solidarity and defiance. We called the names and honored those who transitioned to ancestors too soon. Making space for this ritual felt to me like a collective renunciation of unjust violence. Through our lament,



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we are powerful. Embodying mechanisms of African diaspora cultural and artistic expression served as a performance/performative act of resistance. And through this lens, then, I understand this march to be a mode of activism, a practice of social justice.

The Change: Transforming an Idea into Practice Within the long U.S. history of public marches as a form of activism, people have gathered in spontaneous eruption of outrage, as organized efforts to disrupt the status quo, as memorials to fallen victims, and more. Marches carry meaning for its participants. Collective effort to effect change begins with embodiment, putting our bodies to work toward achieving a shared goal. DFJ Philly is grounded in the understanding that the shared practice of dance as a means to enact individual and collective agency—agency to mourn, heal, and resist—is a transformative act. When we move together, we build empathic bridges to each other’s experiences. When I dance with a fellow participant, it becomes a foundation for us to learn more about each other. We can find ways in which our experiences of that particular movement intersected or diverged. Dancing together generates questions: What did the movement feel like? How did I manage the challenge of that particular movement? What issues did negotiating my body through that movement raise? We can begin to contemplate how our individual experiences of that movement might be tied to our historical experiences of living within our social and cultural bodies. These questions have powerful potential to illuminate how we are situated within a collective of both common and divergent lived experiences, and how we can navigate within each other’s existence. Chenoweth and King’s alternating prose in their article “When Dance Has a Voice” reflects their unique embodied emplacement as a self-identified Black man and White woman, respectively. Chenoweth writes: The organizers of color decided to have the whole group embody the same movements. I’m a white woman, and as I lay down in front of the steps at University of the Arts, I let myself sink into the ground, and felt the deaths of murdered black citizens with my whole body in a visceral, powerful way. I understand other decisions, but was glad I was able to participate in this expression at this particular action. Sensitive to critiques [about white participation in protests for/by people of color], I never put my hands up during a previous march. I appreciated that it was clear here that everyone was expected to take part in the set choreography—including this gesture— and that this was a decision made by leaders of color. 39

This passage demonstrates the capacity for our embodied participation in shared practice to forge pathways of understanding and contribute to the generation of new knowledge. Ideally, the process of moving our bodies together creates opportunities to revel in shared histories, celebrate differences, and acknowledge and negotiate tensions or conflicts—a very utopian notion indeed. Our investment in this process is based on the shared imaginings of an ideal future that operates in opposition to reality—racial equality. We contribute individual labor toward collective effort to achieve this ideal.40 Participants in the march sought to mourn together with

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others, to raise public awareness, and to ultimately heal the racial divide. While this utopian ideal has yet to manifest, we can direct our labor toward this potential in the effort to make it so. This is the essence of the utopian performance theory as discussed by theatre scholar Jill Dolan: that the shared imagining of an ideal reality (or future reality) can inspire action toward bringing it to fruition.41 In the Dancing for Justice Philadelphia solidarity march of 2014, we labored together on Broad Street from South Philadelphia to City Hall. We foregrounded African diaspora dance practices as a means to mourn Black life lost to police violence, as well as to affirm and celebrate historically marginalized narratives, including the ways in which all participants’ lives (regardless of how they racially identify) intersect with Black sociocultural experiences and contexts. Black performance theory and utopian performance theory intersect with the understanding of embodied engagement in cultural modes of production as a reciprocal process in which we shape and are shaped by each other’s lived experience. As such, centering the vastly diverse embodied realities of those who identify or are socially identified as Black and our intertwining relationships serves as a wellspring for embodied social change, a source of collective empowerment and self-determination.42 DFJ Philly brought together people of disparate social backgrounds who recognize the importance of centering and connecting to Black lived experiences, who are invested in contributing to this process and to countering hegemonic narratives that feed the racial divide with our own stories. We conveyed through creative practice what our bodies know, that Black life is tied to all life. With this march, we initiated the incremental transformation of this idea into action. And with this action, we generated and engaged in a practice of embodying African diaspora dance and cultural experiences. Individual participation in this practice opens pathways to experiencing a collective embodiment—intersubjective relationships formed through the multimodal components of the march—our dancing, gesturing, walking, singing, standing together in a clump, moments of stillness and silence, and calling of names.43 Through this collective embodiment we learn with and through others as a social body, which is vital to understanding and communicating our own ever-shifting identities in relation to the world and people around us—our individual and collective power to mourn, heal, and resist.44

Notes 1.  Paloma McGregor, “Dance and Civic Engagement,” in A Working Guide to the Landscape of Arts for Change

(Animating Democracy: A Program of Americans for the Arts; 2013), 3, https://www.fivecolleges.edu/system /files/Dance%20and%20Civic%20Engagement_%20Paloma%20McGregor.pdf 2.  David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996). 3.  Lisa Collins and Margo Crawford, New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Thomas DeFrantz, ed., Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); Philadelphia Folklore Project, “Honoring Ancestors: Notes from an Exhibition,” Works in Progress 26 (2014):1–2, 4–7, 23–25; Richard M. Juang and Noelle Morrissette, eds., Africa and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History (Santa Barbara, CA, ABC-CLIO, 2008). 4. DeFrantz, Dancing Many Drums, 6–7. 5.  Juang and Morrissette, Africa and the Americas. 6.  Thomas DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez, eds., Black Performance Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 4. 7.  Though Tamara Williams and Brittany Williams share the same last name they are not related. 8.  Lela Aisha Jones, “DownHome/HomeGrown,” Flyground, www.flygroundera.com.



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9. Ibid. 10.  The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, Undoing Racism, http://www.PISAB.org. 11.  Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-

sity Press, 1993); Giovanna Washington, Performing Africa: Memory, Tradition, and Resistance in the Leimert Park Drum Circle (PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2013); Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “African Diasporas: Toward a Global History,” African Studies Review 53, no. 1 (2010): 6. 12.  Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “African Diasporas: Toward a Global History,” African Studies Review 53, no. 1 (2010): 1–19. 13. Ibid. 14.  Carol Boyce Davies, “Beyond Unicentricity: Transcultural Black Presences,” Research in African Literatures 30, no. 2 (1999): 96–109; Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. 15.  DeFrantz and Gonzalez, Black Performance Theory, viii. 16.  Ibid., 1. 17.  Jacqui Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 180; Daniella Santoro, “The Dancing Ground: Embodied Knowledge, Disability, and Visibility in New Orleans Second Lines,” The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, ed. Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, et al. (Oxford: Oxford Handbooks Online, 2015), 307. 18.  Ellen Chenowith and Gregorey King, “When Dance Has a Voice,” thINKingDANCE, 2014, www.thINKing DANCE.net http://thinkingdance.net/articles/2014/12/20/3/When-Dance-Has-a-Voice/. 19.  John M. Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981): 55. 20.  Felicia Miyakawa, “‘I Can’t Breathe’: Protest Music Now,” The Avid Listener, May 4, 2015, http://www .theavidlistener.com/2015/05/i-cant-breathe-protest-music-now.html. 21. Ibid. 22.  Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000). 23.  Yvonne Daniel, Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomble (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 64. 24.  Judith Hamera, Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference, and Connection in the Global City (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 25.  Anita Gonzalez, “Urban Bush Women: Finding Shelter in the Utopian Ensemble,” Modern Drama 47, no. 2 (2004). 250–268. 26.  Ibid., 257. 27.  Ibid., 256. 28.  Charles Marfo, Kwame Opoku-Agyeman, and Joseph Nsiah, “Symbols of Communication: The Case of Àdìn ` krá and Other Symbols of Akan,” Language Society and Culture 32 (2011): 63–71. 29.  Ibid., 63. 30. “Adinkrahene,” West African Wisdom: Adinkra Symbols & Meanings, 2007, http://www.adinkra.org/htmls /adinkra/adin.htm. 31.  Excerpts from the writing on the next three pages will also be published by Julie Johnson in the forthcoming book Hot Feet and Social Change: African Dance and Diaspora Communities, edited by Kariamu Welsh and others, (University of Illinois Press, 2019). The title of the chapter is “From Warm Up to Dobale: Embodying ‘Community’ Meaning in a West African Dance Class.” 32.  Andrea-Latoya Davis-Craig, Building Community: African Dancing and Drumming in the Little Village of Tallahassee, Florida (PhD dissertation, Florida State University, 2009); Kariamu Welsh, personal communication, 2016. 33.  George W. K. Dor, West African Drumming and Dance in North American Universities (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014); Lynne F. Emery, Black Dance: From 1619 to Today (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Book Company, 1989); P. Sterling Stuckey, “Christian Conversion and the Challenge of Dance,” in Dancing Many Drums, 39–58. 34.  Stuckey, “Christian Conversion and the Challenge of Dance,” 44. 35.  Ibid., 39–58. 36.  Tracy Snipe, “African Dance: Bridges to Humanity,” in African Dance: An Artistic, Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, ed. Kariamu Welsh Asante (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1994), 63; Efia N. Dalili, “More

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Than a Sisterhood”: Traditional West African Dance in a Contemporary Urban Setting (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1999). 37. Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility; Dalili, “More Than a Sisterhood”; Daniel, Dancing Wisdom; Yaya Diallo and Mitchell Hall, The Healing Drum: African Wisdom Teachings (Rochester, NY: Destiny Books, 1989). 38.  Ottó Károlyi, Traditional African and Oriental Music (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 50–51. 39.  Chenowith and King, “When Dance Has a Voice.” 40.  Jill Dolan, “Utopia, and the ‘Utopian Performative,’” Theatre Journal 53, no. 3 (2001): 455–479; Gonzalez, “Urban Bush Women,” 249–268; Judith Hamera, “Dancing Other-wise: Ethics, Metaphysics, and Utopia in Hae Kyung Lee and Dancers,” Modern Drama 47, no. 2 (2004): 17. 41.  Dolan, “Utopia, and the ‘Utopian Performative,’” 455–479. 42.  DeFrantz and Gonzalez, Black Performance Theory. 43.  Paul Jordan-Smith and Laurel Horton, 2001; Hamera, “Dancing Other-wise” 172–206; Hamera, Dancing Communities; Dorothea Hast, “Performance, Transformation, and Community: Contra Dance in New England,” Dance Research Journal 25, no. 1 (1993): 21–32. 44.  Rebecca Norris, “Embodiment and Community,” Western Folklore 60, nos. 2–3 (2001): 115.

Bibliography “Adinkrahene.” West African Wisdom: Adinkra Symbols & Meanings. 2007, http://www.adinkra.org/htmls /adinkra/adin.htm. Chenowith, Ellen, and Gregorey King. “When Dance Has a Voice.” thINKingDANCE. 2014, http://thinking dance.net/articles/2014/12/20/3/When-Dance-Has-a-Voice/. Chernoff, John M. African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Collins, L., and M. Crawford. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Collins, Patricia H. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2000. Dalili, Efia N. “More Than a Sisterhood”: Traditional West African Dance in a Contemporary Urban Setting. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1999. Daniel, Yvonne. Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomble. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Davies, Carol Boyce. “Beyond Unicentricity: Transcultural Black Presences.” Research in African Literatures 30, no. 2 (1999): 96–109. Davis-Craig, Andrea-Latoya. Building Community: African Dancing and Drumming in the Little Village of Tallahassee, Florida. PhD dissertation, Florida State University, 2009. DeFrantz, T. “African American Dance: A Complex History.” In Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance, edited by Thomas DeFrantz. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, 3. DeFrantz, Thomas, and Anita Gonzalez, eds., Black Performance Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Diallo, Yaya, and Mitchell Hall. The Healing Drum: African Wisdom Teachings. Rochester, NY: Destiny Books, 1989. Dor, George W. K. West African Drumming and Dance in North American Universities. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014. Dolan, Jill. “Utopia, and the ‘Utopian Performative.’” Theatre Journal 53, no. 3 (2001): 455–479. Emery, Lynne F. Black Dance: From 1619 to Today. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Book Company, 1989. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Gonzalez, Anita. “Urban Bush Women: Finding Shelter in the Utopian Ensemble.” Modern Drama 47 (2004): 249–268. Hamera, Judith. “Dancing Other-wise: Ethics, Metaphysics, and Utopia in Hae Kyung Lee and Dancers.” Modern Drama 47, no. 2 (2004). 290–308.



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Hamera, Judith. Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference, and Connection in the Global City. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Juang, Richard M. and Noelle Morrissette, eds. Africa and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2008. Károlyi, Ottó. Traditional African and Oriental Music. London: Penguin Books, 1998. Malone, Jacqui. Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Marfo, Charles, Kwame Opoku-Agyeman, and Joseph Nsiah. “Symbols of Communication: The Case of Àdìn ` krá and Other Symbols of Akan.” Language Society and Culture 32 (2011): 63–71. McGregor, Paloma. “Dance and Civic Engagement.” In A Working Guide to the Landscape of Arts for Change (Animating Democracy: A Program of Americans for the Arts), 2013, 3.Norris, Rebecca. “Embodiment and Community.” Western Folklore 60 (2001): 111–124. The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. Undoing Racism. n.d., www.PISAB.org. Philadelphia Folklore Project. “Honoring Ancestors: Notes from an Exhibition.” Works in Progress 26 (2014.): 1–2, 4–7, 23–25. Santoro, Daniella. “The Dancing Ground: Embodied Knowledge, Disability, and Visibility in New Orleans Second Lines.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, edited by Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, et al. Oxford: Oxford Handbooks Online, 2015, 307. Snipe, Tracy. “African Dance: Bridges to Humanity.” In African Dance: An Artistic, Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, edited by Kariamu Welsh Asante. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1994. 63–78. Stuckey, P. Sterling. “Christian Conversion and the Challenge of Dance.” In Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance, edited by Thomas DeFrantz. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, 39–58. Washington, Giovanna. Performing Africa: Memory, Tradition, and Resistance in the Leimert Park Drum Circle. PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2013. Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe. “African Diasporas: Toward a Global History.” African Studies Review 53, no. 1 (2010): 1–19.

14 • A CONVERSATION WITH FREDDIE HENDRICKS OF THE FREDDIE HENDRICKS YOUTH ENSEMBLE OF ATL ANTA S H A R R E L L D. LU C K E T T

The Freddie Hendricks Youth Ensemble of Atlanta (YEA), now known as the Youth Ensemble of Atlanta, was founded in 1990 in Atlanta, Georgia, by Freddie Hendricks and several of his artistic colleagues, including Debi Barber, Charles Bullock, and S. Renee Clark. The ensemble served as an artistic space primarily for African American and Black teens of the diaspora to create theatre. Using devising as their central creation tool, the youth ensemble developed and performed over seven full-length musicals under the artistic and creative direction of Freddie Hendricks. Many of the ensemble members went on to become generative, well-known artists, such as Emmy Award–winner Kenan Thompson of Saturday Night Live; Emmy-nominated Kelly Jenrette for her work in The Handmaid’s Tale; Tony-nominated Sahr Ngaujah for his role as Fela Kuti in Fela! by Bill T. Jones and Jim Lewis; Tony-nominated Saycon Sengbloh for her role in Eclipsed by Danai Gurira; Broadway artists Ronnie Campbell, Justin Ellington, and Jahi Kearse; Kandi Burruss of Xscape and the Real Housewives of Atlanta; and Ailey II guest choreographer Juel D. Lane, to name a few. The ensemble’s most notable production is arguably Soweto, Soweto, Soweto: A Township Is Calling! (Soweto), which has been performed on four continents. Developed during 1990–1992 in response to apartheid, Soweto is still performed today by the Youth Ensemble of Atlanta. Hendricks wrote the first thirty minutes of this ninety-minute piece to provide a solid outline, and then the rest of the piece was devised by the ensemble. In relation to my research on the Hendricks method, an acting methodology rooted in Hendricks’s techniques and processes and codified by me, I have had the opportunity to interview Hendricks formally and informally on several occasions. The interview included here took place in 2012 when I was investigating the semiotics and devising process in Soweto.1 During the interview, I further learned how YEA served as a space where youth could access their artistry and help shape the ways in which they understood themselves in relation to the world. Hendricks and I also discussed the transnational exchange that took place between YEA and young theatre-makers in South Africa when Soweto was performed in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2000. Armed with a deep understanding of 214



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the ever-shifting political climate, in this interview Freddie Hendricks provides a glimpse of what artistic practice and cultivating global exchange has looked like in the context of activist art-making with the Freddie Hendricks Youth Ensemble of Atlanta. Luckett: What was your goal while devising Soweto, Soweto, Soweto: A Township is Calling!? Hendricks: Change was the agenda. If you put something out in the world, it catches. I believe with all my heart that we were instrumental in bringing awareness to the national community about apartheid in South Africa. And I am grateful that we were even a part of the many groups and organizations that helped bring light to apartheid in South Africa and its impact on its citizens.2 Luckett: Do you think that by performing in Soweto, the young Black actors developed a better sense of identity and pride in America? Hendricks: I know we had discussions like that before. Whether you wanted to be called Black, African American, or whatever, but I don’t know. I have no idea how they felt, but I’m sure [performing in the show] did. Luckett: Can you talk more about the writing and devising process in creating Soweto? Hendricks: It’s like the first thirty minutes of it I wrote it myself and then the rest of it became like an outline, which the ensemble filled in with monologues and scenes. First, I started telling them about [apartheid] and they knew nothing about it at first. So, I started to teach them about [apartheid], what I knew, and by that time I knew a lot because I studied a lot about apartheid and South Africa so I knew quite a bit about it. So, we sat around and we talked about what it’s like to be oppressed and of course they began to compare that to slavery and I said yes, it’s very similar to slavery but it’s still lawful in South Africa and then they got it. They said oh, okay I get it. We would get together in rehearsal and we would sit around and we would discuss the issues of apartheid in depth. The discussion had to be in depth so their minds would be on nothing but that. Then they divided into groups and decided what they wanted to do. The rehearsal process was so free that if they decided they just wanted to write a monologue, they could write a monologue. And you know I would give them the format or structure that I wanted. And then I would give them assignments to go out and bring in whatever they wanted to. There was no limit. Whatever they found on South Africa they could bring it in. I didn’t care if it was a map and they wanted to get up and show somebody where South Africa is on a map and tell us what relation it is to other African countries. Whatever they wanted to do they could, and from there I would say ok, we have that, now I want to make something from that. Some of the kids brought in monologues, but there was always a structure and they just filled it in with monologues. Like, if Sahr Ngaujah3 was there and he was doing a particular monologue, the monologue that he did was different from the monologue that was done when he left. When Duain Martyn4 came in, he performed the monologue that he wrote because I had him write it. That’s part of the educational process, or that was a part of my process, for them to grow as artists. Luckett: Why do you think it was important for the ensemble to write their own material? Hendricks: It was important for them to write it because to me it was educational. It was all about them. To get them to learn something. To get them to grow. I always wanted them to be better than me, you know. For me, it wasn’t about me receiving any credit for it. I had the

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outline already and I knew where I wanted to put the monologue and I said now you give me the monologue. Of course, I detracted and I subtracted and I added things to the monologue and the monologue grew within the rehearsal process but it was a collaborative thing. It was the same process with the songs and that’s the way I wanted Charles5 to work with the choreography. That’s the way I wanted whomever was doing the music at the time to work. We had a lot of musical directors to come in and I said this whole process has to be collaborative, otherwise the young people, they’re getting nothing from it. Because everything I do, I just wanted it to empower them and to change their lives. That was the important part. That was one of the reasons why before I would send them off to write, or to collaborate with each other, we would have an in-depth conversation and the conversation might last three or four hours. We would have a conversation about whatever it was and we would talk about it and there is no right or wrong. There was no right or wrong. It was just what you felt because I feel that’s the only way people can build self-esteem and even build the muscle of creativity that’s within themselves. They have to believe that they’re okay. They have to believe that they’re special. Luckett: Were there any apprehensions about performing in South Africa in 2000? Hendricks: No. Luckett: Did the ensemble feel odd or uncomfortable because they were portraying the actual lived experiences of many of the audience members? Hendricks: There’s a line in the beginning of the play that says, “It is easy for us Africans in America to stand up here and try to tell you what apartheid in South Africa is like, right? No!” Boom. There you go, we answered the question. “It is not easy for us to stand up here and try to tell you what it is like.” We are affecting an accent. The script is like a class in itself. So when we went to South Africa the people were blown away because a lot of the kids didn’t even know about it, their own history, they would come up and say thank you for teaching us about what happened ten years ago or five years ago. The little kids were like, oh wow I didn’t know my mom went through this. It was crazy. And it was so wild. An incident occurred in South Africa that I think really, really stuck with the American kids. We were stopped at a roadblock and asked for our passports. I mean apartheid was over, but the World Cup was there and a lot of protests were happening at this particular time and we were stopped. I had to get off the bus and talk to the police because our managing director had left all of our information at the hotel. They wanted to know who we were and where we were going. So, we had to ride with them to the police station. They got on the bus with guns and everything. So, the American kids said oh wow. It all became a bit realer, a bit more realistic. Seeing somebody get on a bus with a gun or dogs and ask for your identification. And that’s a scene in the play also. They held us for like two to three hours, but then we were let go. And [YEA] went and turned it out the next day. 6 I think we did three shows in one day because the response was so big. We were only supposed to do two shows. The second show was over but then a busload of kids that had driven from another part of South Africa to see this show came and they’re all standing out there. I can remember looking out from the balcony at them and their blue and white uniforms and it kinda reminded me of the kids from my vision,7 so I said we gotta do this show. So, the kids put on the wet costumes and they did it.8 Even till this day I have kids in South Africa that are really doing well because we were involved in a lot of workshops over there and I actually wrote a four-tosix-page letter of instructions for a few of the kids on how to start their own theatre companies and they did.



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Luckett: Can you talk about the differences and similarities between the Soweto performances in America and the Soweto performances in South Africa? Hendricks: It’s always been received well. [The show] made people interested. It made people do the same thing I did when I first heard about apartheid. I need to go and look this up. I need to go and investigate or look this up for myself and see what is really happening in South Africa, and that was the reason for the piece, to enlighten people. That’s the reason why I do my art. I mean what is art for if it’s not for people to be enlightened. I can’t remember a time when we did Soweto and we didn’t get a standing ovation and tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of love and just curiosity about the piece. I think that’s why we put change into the world along with Sarafina,9 along with Mbongeni10 in South Africa who did Sarafina. I think, through our art, I think we helped change the apartheid movement. I really do. I really believe that. Because we put all of that out into the universe. Luckett: When the show was performed in South Africa was there any kind of connection that took place between South Africans and citizens of Atlanta, Georgia? Hendricks: It was a huge connection because the people couldn’t believe that there was somebody else that cared enough to even tell their story. That was one thing I would get from some of them. They would say, “What? You mean you care about that situation? Why are you doing this? I love you. I’ll never forget you as long as I live.” Those were some of the comments we used to get, especially from some of the people that were youth in 1976 in the youth uprising. They would come up and they would say it’s hard to believe that people are remembering our story and telling our story from another country. They said we could have never fathomed that something like this would happen so they were thrilled. It was nothing but love and positivity. You know sometimes I might have felt a bit apprehensive because I wanted to tell [their story] right. I wanted the accents to be right. I didn’t want it to be off-kilter. Not only did doing Soweto change me and other artists that were involved in putting up the show and doing the show, but it helped change the lives of some of the people in South Africa that saw the show. It gave them a piece of their history that I guess, maybe they didn’t talk about anymore. Because even now, like in America, if you look in an American history book, how many pages are there on slavery? You know you try to forget those particular things. The people that are writing the books, they didn’t want to put [slavery] out there, so it’s like some of the kids said, I didn’t even know this happened. That was one thing I couldn’t believe. Some of the younger South African kids who were maybe like seven, eight, or nine said this. And I guess the parents, I don’t know, maybe they were ashamed. You know I think they should have been proud to tell their kids about their history. Because my belief is you can’t grow and have a productive future if you don’t know about where you came from. If you don’t know about your past. Luckett: Were there conversations had between the American youth and the South African youth? Hendricks: I just remember it was just the usual thing. You know when I would stand up in front of [the South African youth] they would be quiet and listen. It was just like teaching anybody else. One thing I noticed is that the harmonies they had were totally different than the harmonies we had in America. The workshops were fantastic because I got a chance to know several kids who lived in South Africa. As a matter of fact, a lot of them slept in our rooms at the hotels. They didn’t want to go home. They just wanted to be around us.

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Luckett: What do you think is the overall message you wanted YEA members to embrace after performing Soweto? Hendricks: I wanted them to learn everything. I wanted them to learn about themselves. Because if you’re gonna learn about another culture, if you’re gonna learn about South Africa, why can’t you learn about yourself? I wanted them to be empowered, to think that they could be empowered to change their situation and if you change your situation you can change your world and if you change your world, you can change the world. I just wanted them to be empowered. Although this moment in South Africa started with kids wanting to march peacefully, holding up signs for better education, look what it turned into. So, I just wanted them to see that once you have any kind of commitment to something you can make a change, you can change your life. You can become a doctor, you can earn a PhD, you can create records, you can be in a dance magazine, you could be teachers. If this [change] can happen look what can happen for you. Freddie Hendricks, of Atlanta, Georgia, is a 1976 graduate of Lincoln Memorial University. He was born in Rome, GA in 1954. Hendricks is the founder and former artistic director of the Freddie Hendricks Youth Ensemble of Atlanta (YEA). As one of Atlanta’s international artist groups, YEA has performed in Belgium, Holland, South Africa, and China. His work inspired the formation of the Youth Ensemble of Soweto (YES) in South Africa. Hendricks has created over twenty critically acclaimed productions that tackle contemporary issues such as child abuse, teen pregnancy, HIV and AIDS, youth violence, and apartheid. His critically acclaimed production of What’s Going On?, a tribute to Marvin Gaye, toured Europe for six months. Hendricks has performed on many stages across the country, though his greatest joy comes from his work with youth. A leader in the arts for decades, Hendricks was honored as a distinguished teacher of America in Washington, DC, by President Bill Clinton in 1996 and 1998. He was awarded the Abby Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts in 2002. Hendricks was also the 2012 Alumnus of the Year at Lincoln Memorial University. Hendricks, a humble and honest creator, has trained several film, television, and Broadway artists, such as Kenan Thompson, Charity Jordan, Sahr Ngaujah, Saycon Sengbloh, and Kelly Jenrette. Hendricks remains an innovative and inspiring artist. Art must have a purpose to be great, and Hendricks’s purpose is to create art that inspires positive social change and that leaves a legacy.

Notes 1.  This interview was originally published in Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre, and

Performance 4, no. 2 (2017). Reprinted with permission, http://continuumjournal.org/index.php/115-volumes /issues/vol-4-no-2/4-2-articles/182-on-process-in-soweto-soweto-soweto-a-township-is-calling 2.  This interview was conducted and recorded in 2012; however, this piece of information was ascertained during a phone interview with Freddie Hendricks, October 15, 2009, Atlanta, GA. 3.  Sahr Ngaujah eventually went on to star in Fela! on Broadway as Fela Anikulapo Kuti. 4.  Duain Richmond Martyn went on to star in the 2013 national tour of Fela! playing Fela Anikulapo Kuti. 5.  Charles Bullock is the resident choreographer for YEA. 6.  Saying “turned it out” is another way of saying “they did an awesome job.” 7.  Freddie Hendricks is referencing a vision that he had as a young adult in which he saw a sea of kids outside of his window reaching for him and asking him to save them. This moment sparked his work with youth. 8.  The costumes were in the process of being washed for the next day’s performances.



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9.  Sarafina! by Mbongeni Ngema is a musical about the uprising of youth in Soweto against apartheid, premiering on Broadway in 1988. 10.  Mbongeni Ngema is the playwright and screenwriter of Sarafina!.

Bibliography Hendricks, Freddie. Interviewed by Sharrell Luckett. Columbus, Georgia, 2012. Hendricks, Freddie. Phone interview by Sharrell Luckett. Atlanta, GA. October, 1, 2009. Luckett, Sharrell. “On process in “Soweto, Soweto, Soweto: A Township is Calling!”” Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre, and Performance 4, no. 2 (December 2017).

15 • THE CONCILIATION PROJECT AS A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT Behind the Mask of Uncle Tom-ism and the Performance of Blackness J A S M I N E CO L E S A N D TAW N YA P E T T I F O R D -WAT E S

The mission of The Conciliation Project (TCP) is to promote, through active and challenging dramatic work, open and honest dialogue about race and systemic oppression in order to heal from its damaging legacy. As a company, TCP is committed to the long, arduous process of conciliating our past, in order to build our future together. Our name intentionally incorporates the word conciliation rather than reconciliation, because in regard to the racial history of the United States, we must acknowledge that we cannot redo something we have never done before. Conciliation is the process of winning over from a state of hostility. We know we must engage in the process of recognition, acknowledgment, and humility in order to heal the traumatic wounds of the past. TCP has created a repertoire of original work that has been extremely successful in engaging audiences in difficult dialogues and in-depth, authentic conversations about race, institutional bias, and systemic oppression. uncle tom: de-constructed became our signature piece and remains a part of our repertoire today.

Overview The foundation of The Conciliation Project as an activist arts organization, emerged in response to the process of interrogating the performance of blackness through black-face minstrelsy, specifically the legacy of uncle tom-ism1 in performance and social expression. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, presents a false premise of the “good master” and the “good slave”, as contrasted with the “bad master” and the “bad slave.” The legacy of black-face minstrelsy infected the cultural landscape with grotesque portrayals of exaggerated Negro caricatures based on the characters created in Stowe’s novel. The minstrel caricatures find their origins within a White supremacist framework that has historically captured a false perception of blackness and commoditized it, while at the same time, Black people perfected, articulated, and regenerated it, within the context of performance and culture. The created caricatures of Uncle Tom, Mammy, George, and Topsy, were contrasted with the likes of the benevolent goodness of Massa Arthur Shelby, and the villainous greed of Simon Legree. Behind these masks 220



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festered the disease and dysfunction of a White supremacist patriarchy, that would lay the foundation of a construction of blackness that would be entertaining, instructive, and demonstrative for the American public for the next hundred years and beyond. Interested in further exploring the caricature of Uncle Tom, I brought it into the classroom when I (Pettiford-Wates) taught at Seattle Central Community College in 2001. I challenged students to interrogate the character of Uncle Tom as a social justice experiment, and we devised the formative work uncle tom: de-constructed. This work led to the establishment of the group known as The Conciliation Project, a social justice theatre company, now based in Richmond, Virginia, whose mission is to promote through active and challenging dramatic work, open and honest dialogue about race, racism, and systems of oppression in America, in order to heal from their damaging legacy. The devising process took on the deconstruction of the Uncle Tom myth, to expose the mask of uncle tom-ism as a constructed performance of blackness deriving from a White woman’s fantasy. In James Baldwin’s 1985 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” he addresses what he determines to be the tragic flaw in Stowe’s novel—“what constriction or failure of perception of brutality—unmotivated, senseless—and to leave unanswered the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds?”2 Further, this exploration would ultimately expose the ways in which blackface and minstrelsy codified blackness as a creative weapon to diminish, ostracize, and marginalize Black people. While this practice simultaneously constructed a false expression of the Black race and culture as inferior to the White race, it also propagandized the demeaning and grotesque mimicry of blackness that became the most popular form of entertainment in America for decades. The vestiges of minstrelsy and blackface hang around the entertainment industry like old familiar ghosts to this day. This historical performance tradition continues to inform the dramatic arts industry and yet its origin and historic, political, and social impact remain hidden just beneath the surface. And just like a cancerous growth, it continues to influence the performing arts and the role they play in shaping our racial and cultural perceptions of Black people. This chapter interrogates the historic legacy of uncle tom-ism by using a performance methodology called ritual poetic drama within the African continuum. 3 The devised work uncle tom de-constructed, a ritual play, revealed to the collective of artists that this work must continue and thus The Conciliation Project is committed to unpacking the legacy of racism in the Confederate South and beyond. Jasmine Eileen Coles, performance artist and company member, was one of the earliest members of TCP when we moved from Seattle, Washington, to Richmond, Virginia, after I took an academic appointment at Virginia Commonwealth University. Jasmine’s perspectives are included within this chapter. As one of the founding ensemble members, Jasmine’s point of view draws particular attention to the significance and impact of ritual poetic drama as a methodology and the formative role TCP’s practice and pedagogy has played in the development of emerging artists and practitioners.

To Begin The establishment of Uncle Tom troupes and blackface minstrelsy, as traditional entertainment and a foundational American performance model, find their origins in southern culture. While teaching coordinated studies in 2001, at Seattle Central Community College, an eclectic group of student artists gathered to discuss devising a piece of theatre using Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin as an inspiration. The coordinated studies4 model used an

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interdisciplinary approach to learning; in this case, the class included theatre, sociology, and creative writing. It consisted of a group of student participants of various ages, races, and identities. We gathered to deliberate over the proposed drama and numerous themed approaches. Collectively, we determined that the most engaging aspect of Stowe’s developed characters, within the context of the novel, was the iconic title figure, Uncle Tom. Interrogating who and what Uncle Tom has come to represent in our contemporary society, was the focal point of our devising process. As we continued to engage in a lively discourse, a student very innocently asked, “This may be a stupid question but . . . well . . . how are we going to do Uncle Tom, or de-construct Uncle Tom when there are no Black people in this class?” That was a very good question and one I had not previously considered, oddly enough. There were people of color among the students in class—Latinx, East Asian, Pacific Islander, and White, but no Black students had registered for the course. Thinking for only a few moments, I impulsively blurted out, “We are going to do a minstrel show!” The students’ faces reflected mass confusion and horror—after all, a minstrel show was not a familiar or studied discipline or genre within the teaching of traditional theatre practice. In fact, some had no idea what a minstrel was or what the implication of actually “doing” a minstrel show meant. I could see from their expressions that they were collectively asking, “Why would we want to do a minstrel show?” It was clear to me, if not to the students at the time, that it absolutely made sense to study minstrelsy. Minstrelsy was a part of the theatrical continuum within the United States; it gave birth to vaudeville, the follies, and the variety show genre, which were all precursors to the great American musical theatre tradition and the comedy dramas to follow. 5 And yet the study of minstrelsy was missing from the study of theatre, as if the form itself were an inconvenient truth that had to be intentionally removed so as not to recognize the debt taken and owed in its acknowledgment. We studied minstrelsy, and collectively authored a new work using a new acting/performance methodology called ritual poetic drama within the African continuum (RPD). We devised uncle tom de-constructed in 2001. The cast wore complete minstrel costuming and full traditional blackface. We created a minstrel version of whiteface and the white-faced minstrel as a complement to the black-faced minstrel. There was one group of white-faced minstrels and a different group of black-faced minstrels. The goal in creating the white-faced minstrel was to create the same type of buffoonery, outrageous stereotype, caricature, and one-dimensional portrayals of Whites as there were for Blacks in the classic minstrel period. The cast was completely covered and dressed androgynously, so that we could cast completely outside of race and gender. This was an essential, element due to the immediate assumptions we (as an audience) are accustomed to making regarding race, sex, and gender identities. Since we were performing race, class, and gender within the context of minstrelsy, it was imperative that all the performers were seen as their minstrel embodiment, without the additional preconceptions that are drawn when we see a person’s color, race, or assumed gender. We needed our audiences to begin only with the mask we had created for them to see—nothing more and nothing less. This grand experiment and the responses it engendered needed to be as free from our tainted cultural assumptions as possible. So what the audience is at first exposed to is a minstrel troupe of painted faces, black and white, completely covered and bound by the costumes they are wearing to perform, to entertain, without any one thing that might distinguish them one from the other except by the color of the mask they are wearing.



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The following is a brief segment of a scene where the stage is divided in past and present, and we superimposed a traditional slave auction block on top of a contemporary sketch of the collegiate football combine where young high school students are being “auctioned” off to the highest bidder. First, we have a commercial break within the frame of the classic minstrel show.6 Theme music is playing Announcer: And now we return to our regularly scheduled programming. Brought to you today by our sponsors COON CHICKEN INN, the tastiest, juiciest, crispiest chicken ’dis side ob’ de Mississippi. COON CHICKEN INN . . . now das’ good eatin’. And now back to the story. Our main characters, Sambo the willing slave . . . Sambo: Das’ me! Announcer: . . . and his benevolent Master Simon Legree . . . Simon: (grotesque laugh) Announcer:  . . . frozen in time as we join Coach Imyomassa . . . Coach: (blows whistle) Announcer: . . . and his black assistant, Coach Satchmo Whipyaright . . . Sambo: Das’ me too! Announcer:   .  .  . watchin’ a prospective recruit, Workhorse Cooney, running through his paces. Coach: Talk to me, Sancho, who’s our number one prospect? Sam: Well Mas’r, I’ll tell you, Workhorse Cooney is the class of the bunch, no doubt about it. He got legs that couldn’t hardly be held by iron shackles, and his arms, whoo-boy, his arms look like he bin workin’ out with Atlas hisself. Coach: Is he quick, Sammy? Sam: Is he quick? Quick ain’t even the word. Coach, he moves like the great North Wind done got trapped inside his body, ain’t no such thing as a hole with Workhorse at rover. Yes Mas’r, we get Cooney this year, we might be looking at the National Championship come January. Coach: But tell me, Stumpy, and I want you to be honest now, how’s his attitude? You know I don’t like them strong-headed types. And you know them big, strong, athletic, jigga— excuse me, Snoopy, young fellows, tend to be all out for themselves. Sam: I know Mas’r, but you know I can keep that type in line, you taught me real well. Coach: Well then call this Cooney over, Slappy. Sam: Hey Cooney, c’mon over here boy, I got somebody want to meet you. (Cooney comes over.) Workhorse Cooney, meet the coach. Coach: Hey there, Workhorse, name’s Coach Imyomassa, the fellas call me Mas’r for short. Workhorse: Pleased to meet you Coach . . . I mean Coach Mas’r. Following this excerpt the scene repeats as a minstrelized slave auction, during which there is a “tear.” 7 A tear is a convention that intentionally disrupts the construction of the mindless, subservient “darky,” who is dependent upon the benevolence of his White superior. During the tear, the Black slave chorus speaks directly to the audience and unequivocally claims their humanity, their history, their determination to be free, and the recognition that their enslavement will not determine their story—past, present, or future. The caricatures of blackness are systematically torn asunder throughout the play using the tear, intentionally demonstrating for the audience the process of deconstructing the Uncle Tom mythology and the superseding

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Figure 15.1. Three minstrel caricatures from the play uncle tom: de-constructed. Workhorse Cooney work-

ing out for college recruitment as the Coach and Satchmo Whipyaright size him up. Left to right: company members Joseph Carlson, Denver Crawford, and Jeremy Morris. Photo by Olivia Luna. Reprinted by permission of the Conciliation Project, www.theconciliationproject.org.

racial constructions of Black people and the performance of blackness that mythology created. The Coach/Slave Master are White minstrels and the Workhorse Cooney/Sambo & Satchmo Whipyaright are Black minstrels. The Sambo character is an archetype rooted in the minstrel caricatures incubated by the Uncle Tom troupes of the nineteenth century. He is a type of “uncle” in that he is devoted to his master. The master is always right and never wrong. The White man is always in good standing with the Sambo and Sambo is often “used” as an example for other more independent-minded Blacks to follow. The Sambo exemplifies a dependency on his White superior. The evolution of the Sambo into more contemporary times is the character in the sketch called Satchmo Whipyaright. Satchmo is a little more entertaining for his White superior. They can laugh and joke together as if they are “friends” but only to a point. While Satchmo exhibits all of the character traits that the Sambo has, he is also an intense enforcer and not afraid to use violence to keep wayward or independent-minded Blacks in line. Satchmo Whipyaright will insure that the Black subservient character knows his place and stays in it. The function of the extreme satire combined with the stylized, and overt minstrelization of these two corresponding scenes was chilling and created overt and visible responses from our audiences. There was a complete recognition of the correlation drawn between the two scenes and the systems they described. Whereas today most people, regardless of race, can admit the heinous inhumanity of the institution of slavery, it is not always conceivable to recognize that the vestiges of that same institution continue to be systemically active within contemporary



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Figure 15.2. Five minstrel caricatures from the play uncle tom: de-constructed in scene titled “Put Me on the Black with My Boy.” Left to right: company members Alexandra Bern and Denver Crawford (White minstrel caricatures), and Jasmine Eileen Coles, Joseph Carlson, and Jeremy Morris (Black minstrel caricatures). They are performing a classic minstrel dance as an interlude after the Black caricatures have performed “TEAR,” illustrating a woman’s son being sold on the auction block. Photo by Olivia Luna. Reprinted by permission of the Conciliation Project, www.theconciliationproject.org.

institutions, cultural norms, and practices. The vestiges of systemic oppression live on in organizations that find their roots within the institution of chattel slavery. The NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association), is illuminated by the preceding, whereby “recruited athletes” are used by academic institutions in the multibillion-dollar industries of college football and basketball to bring schools lucrative financial gain, allowing coaches to be paid millions of dollars and selling high-priced tickets, luxury boxes, and memorabilia worth millions without sharing those profits with the young athletes whose talents, name recognition, and jerseys the institutions seem to own. Dave Zirin, sports writer and commentator, and Michael Bennett, NFL player, coauthored a book titled Things That Make White People Uncomfortable, in which they interrogate both professional and collegiate athletics and the systemic inequities that exist in both. It remains a “hot topic” among many sports writers, critics, and athletes. The question of exploitation within the NCAA is a contentious one, and many tout the fact that student athletes receive scholarships for their educational expenses in exchange for participation on the athletic field of play. Zirin contends that sometimes life may not be fair, but the business practice of the NCAA is at its core unethical. Reactions to the book, although mixed, have been predominantly supportive of the characterization Zirin and Bennett make of the ways in which collegiate athletics exploits the talents of student players. Advocates and supporters have weighed in with comments. For instance, Senator Corey Booker calls the book “a searing indictment of the power and

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exploitation of college athletics.” Former college players interviewed for the book referred to their experience playing college athletics as a “plantation-like” system and becoming a “slave” for the love of the game.8 Another critically acclaimed book on the topic written by Joe Nocera and Ben Strauss, titled Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion against the NCAA, which is centered on the case of Ed O’Bannon, a former UCLA basketball player who led the Bruins to a National Championship in 1995, further illuminates the argument. In the years after O’Bannon left college, he realized that the NCAA was profiting from a video game using his image and he sued. The lawsuit resulted in an unprecedented antitrust ruling that challenged the core value of collective bargaining and the right of the student athlete to have fair and equal access to those rights within the marketplace. NFL running back Adrian Foster, of the Miami Dolphins, commenting on the book states, “When I was in college, I felt like an indentured servant, exploited and controlled by all the people who were getting rich off my labors and talent.”9 The excerpted mirrored scene was designed to challenge the audience to look beyond the selected perceptions of history as traditionally taught, and to recognize that institutional systems of oppression have remained intact with the passing of time. It appears those same systems have merely transformed into other iterations, which are perhaps, by the insidious nature of their metamorphosis, even more deadly than those that came before.

Cycles of Deconstruction and Audience Response uncle tom: de-constructed was originally created in seven cycles10 with a brief interlude between Cycles 4 and 5. There was also a Prologue and an Epilogue as part of the play. During the epilogue, the actors unmasked, completely exposing themselves, and spoke as themselves, confessing to the audience the “truths” they discovered about the privileges of having white skin, or the dis-privilege that was inextricably bound to not having white skin. For each performer, the process of “stepping out” of these minstrelized caricatures created a measurable change and an increased knowledge of the self, the citizen, and the artist. Instantaneously, “stepping out” inspired a need to DO something with that knowledge. It allowed each actor/artist to approach the audience with a type of authentic humility and embrace a sincere level of compassion for the “other.” As the actors unmasked and began to speak from the authenticity of the journey they had just taken and shared, the audience began to recognize that this was not the ending they were expecting. This is not what happens in the traditional theatre when a performance comes to a close. The audience’s response was astounding, compelling them to share their own stories of disbelief, recognition, confession, and apology. Audiences so believed the grotesque characterizations of blackness that were created, that they were in absolute shock that there were no Black people on the stage. They began to see their own relationship to race, racism, prejudice, and institutional bias. They believed the lie of Black inferiority and White superiority as told through the minstrel caricatures presented. The immediate response was full of raw and uncensored emotion. People wept as we passed out tissues. They talked to us, and we asked them to talk to one another about what they had witnessed that night. A White woman asked how it felt to play a Black person and someone else shouted from the audience, “Those weren’t Black people up there!” A company member agreed and explained they were only performing blackness, and what has become a false perception of race through caricature. The



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actor admitted the entire process was painfully illuminating. The process of dialogue and interrogation without the mask became a part of the TCP facilitation process at the close of each performance. Engaging the audience immediately and actively before they could put their defenses back up, or recover from a state of vulnerable availability was key to the success of our postplay dialogues. After we asked the audience to symbolically wipe off their own masks, we designed a process whereby we gently led them into small group and large group dialogue using improvisational performance games and prompted cues to facilitate optimum engagement of audience members. The public support for the play and the open honest dialogues it inspired created the desire among a committed group of people to find a viable way to continue the play and the conversations it promoted. The collective community support ultimately birthed a nonprofit theatre company dedicated to creating dramatic work that challenges and dismantles systemic oppression through the emotional connection it makes and the authentic conversation it inspires.

The Conciliation Project Goes South From 2001 through 2004, TCP continued as a nonprofit social justice theatre company, embedded within the Drama Department of Seattle Central Community College in Washington State. The company’s home was the Little Theatre Off Broadway, and the liberal college’s administration, faculty, and student community embraced it. We engaged the greater Seattle community in continuing performances, dialogues, and workshops in undoing racism. The progressive leanings of the Pacific Northwest demographic mostly supported the work we were doing as we continued to devise “new works” exploring race, racism, and systems of oppression using the history and legacy of the United States with regard to its people of color. In 2004, as we began work on the intersectionality of sex, gender, and race in a new piece titled Global SeXXXism: un-wrapped, I was offered a position as head of performance at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Although I was moving on to another institution, there was no reason that the work of The Conciliation Project could not continue. We agreed that I would return from time to time and continue to contribute to the company’s work in Seattle, and also do the work in Richmond. I could not pass up the opportunity to connect the mission and the dedicated process of dismantling racism and systems of oppression to a region of the country that, one could argue, was the actual birthplace of institutionalized oppression through the implementation of chattel slavery as the engine of its economic success. The first enslaved Africans landed in the United States on the shores of Virginia, a state that went on to become one of the largest slave-holding states in America. I left the company in capable hands in Seattle and moved to Richmond. The move was more difficult than anticipated; TCP and I struggled through the adjustments of distance and time for the first year. In the following year a small group of ten company members decided to uproot and follow me to Richmond. Five of them registered at Virginia Commonwealth University as undergraduate theatre majors and effectively transplanted the core of TCP to Richmond. It was “as if ” we never skipped a beat. The students/activists/artists began to recruit other student/activists to become a part of the mission and work of The Conciliation Project and the work began to take root in Richmond. We began confronting race and racism within the corridors and edifices of the Confederacy. It was extremely uncomfortable and not without the uncertainty that comes from taking great risks. These risks yielded both

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small victories and at times, tremendous loss. It was, and continues to be, a struggle on many levels. However, the work of TCP has made an important contribution to the arts in the region and the engagement of artists at the intersection of activism that is necessary for community engagement and transformative change.

An Interlude: The TCP Process from a Performer/ Choreographer’s Perspective—Jasmine Eileen Coles, Performance Artist and Company Member In 2005, The Conciliation Project moved to Richmond, Virginia, to begin deconstructing the history of the Confederate South, when Tawnya Pettiford-Wates (“Dr. T”) joined the faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University where I was enrolled as a student. From performers such as Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, who appeared in several of Richmond’s minstrel shows, to the history of Richmond’s slave trade, there was a massive amount of deconstructing that needed to be done. Minstrelsy as a traditional entertainment and performance model connects directly with TCP’s use of satire to convey direct, potent, and entertaining work. The first production in Richmond of uncle tom de-constructed was the fall of 2006, inspiring both conversation and controversy. Later in the year, Dr. T created a class that devised and developed a new work, P.I.C.: The Prison Industrial Complex. This experience gave me and several other students of color an opportunity to create work from a place of self-actualization. It was the first time in my life that I could bring my whole self to my performance work and process. My first experience as a performer with TCP was in the show Global Sexxism. Experiencing the process of working in a communal and collective way was rewarding as a woman of color because I was able to contribute my truth to the process. Although the script was created before I joined the cast, the process of ritual poetic drama lends itself to new, fresh, and relevant stories within the framework of the script. I felt included and creatively valued. This developing non-Western approach to performance work viewed stories cyclically. The evolution of life, death, and transformation offered me revelation. As I cultivated my work with TCP for the next ten years, I emerged as a choreographer and created a training program that would prepare the ensemble artists for their journey in all TCP productions. The training program was designed to assist the artist in building physical, emotional, and spiritual stamina with fellow ensemble members, and to help holistically prepare their mind, body, and spirit for the work. Artists must develop the physical and mental capacity to be a healthy vessel for the stories they will inhabit in all TCP productions. Preparing for uncle tom: de-constructed is a spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical experience. Before beginning the process, the ensemble participates in a ritual calling upon Ancestors to guide and support them as an ensemble throughout the working process. The process uses additional rituals such as openings and closings to create a sacred and brave working environment. Openings consist of activities/exercises that involve the entire ensemble and focus on the content of the work. Closings involve collective reflections on the work. In preparing for uncle tom: de-constructed, the ensemble undergoes a boot-camp style training regimen that expands their physical, emotional, and spiritual capacity. This boot camp includes meditative journeys inspired by ritual poetic drama using content from the script to explore the characters and circumstances of the script. During the process, journaling is used as a tool to tell personal stories in the voice of the characters the artists play as well as in their own authentic voice. The following is an excerpt from the uncle tom boot camp outline.



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I m m er si ng t h e Actor s i n t h e Ph ysica l Proce ss of E x pl or i ng t h e Wor l d of M i nst r e l s y 1. Preparing the Mind to Prepare the Body The following exercises utilize the power of breath, setting intentions, and affirmations. a. Strength-Building Balancing Poses. While holding poses that engage more than three muscle groups, the ensemble is asked to bring awareness to their thoughts and examine the truth versus the lies we tell ourselves. b. High-Intensity Interval Training: While doing intense cardio exercises the ensemble participate in activities that reflect the circumstances of the caricature uncle tom. c. Slow Calisthenics: While isolating major muscle groups, the ensemble begins to repeat lines from the script to engage in the psyche of the uncle tom caricature. 2.

Exploring the Body of Minstrel Caricatures The following exercises are presented as if in a minstrel factory that creates caricatures. Through the use of improvisation and photos of classic images, the body of the caricature is constructed, allowing each individual artist acting as a minstrel to embody these classic caricatures and give authenticity to each. These are imposed physical distinctions between Black and White in keeping with minstrelsy and the caricature as constructed within a White supremacy framework. a. Black Caricature. Seen as less than with an asymmetrical body frame, lower to the ground, grotesque facial expressions, and overextended fingers. b. White Caricature. Seen as superior with a straight torso, body upright, chin up, chest out, long and tight facial expressions.

3.

The Voice of the Minstrels: Dialect The following exercises are presented as if in a classroom setting with the use of improvisation and activities that explore the vocal qualities of these caricatures. a. Black Caricature. “A, B, C, duh, puppies.” This activity allows the artist to read the letters and directly connect them to the dialect. Actors speak slowly with an exaggerated style of poor articulation and lower sounds. b. White Caricature. Higher in pitch, articulation is clear, crisp and clean.

Learning the Process of Becoming a Minstrel Caricature Once we were able to express our reservations and fears about minstrelsy and blackface, we addressed the performance of race on stage and the anxiety surrounding it. The ensemble is required to read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel and recontextualize it. Most had only heard of the novel but never read it as a part of their secondary education. Others had read it at one time, but couldn’t really remember it. What most people remembered was that Harriet Beecher Stowe is always characterized as a good Christian woman with good intentions. She hated slavery and called it both an abomination and against the laws of God. All of these assertions were ones that I had heard and believed to be true from discussions in my secondary school American Literature class. However, I had not adequately considered that those discussions were decades prior to the changes in my recognition and perception of race, class, and culture, and how those perceptions had been transformed by my lived experience as a Black woman. Upon rereading Stowe’s novel, my immediate response was a type of revulsion at all of the signs and symbols of overt White supremacy that were ensconced within each page of the book and the unmitigated White benevolent savior overtones with which the author spoke.

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It seemed to me that Stowe makes certain to deify herself within the narrative she writes, while expressing a deep sorrowful sadness for those on whom her story focuses. All of the Blacks within Stowe’s novel are one-dimensional caricatures, broadly drawn, whom she “pretends” to know, in her fantasy world. Through her benevolent, mostly sympathetic White characters, she develops her story like a young child “playing house”; she fantasizes about the compassionate humanity of the Whites and fetishizes the deficiency of such humanity within the Blacks. Stowe splays out in melodramatic sequences the innermost thoughts, feelings, and emotional turmoil of plantation life, intentionally elevating the Whites as saviors, in their attempt to embrace and lift up the poor degraded Black race, because the Blacks are, by birth and nature, the lowly, victimized, and downtrodden heathen Africans. She speaks with absolute conviction and draws conclusions she has no standing to make as if it is empirical fact instead of creative fiction. Although she may in fact have had the best of intentions, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s characters, beginning with Uncle Tom, Mammy, and Topsy, laid the foundation for the archetypal caricatures on which the American blackface minstrel tradition was built and by which it flourished throughout the United States and the world. Dr. T Interjects. Stowe lays the foundation, but the actual popularization of Uncle Tom as a minstrel show came about with George Aiken. He adopts Stowe’s novel and exaggerates the characters into minstrel characters onto the stage. It is his theatrical adaptation that actually popularizes Uncle Tom as a minstrel show, oftentimes called Tom shows. It is the translation from the page (a literary text) to the stage (a dramatic text) that brings the minstrel characters into fruition. This supports Jasmine’s focus on the physical embodiment of minstrel caricatures through the boot camp training model. Jasmine’s Reflections Continue. We did not know what we were about to create by interrogating the character of Uncle Tom as drawn by Harriet Beecher Stowe, but we did know it was a daunting task. We knew we were entering into a deconstruction of race, racism, and the distorted realities of racial identity and coded behavior in which we all participated. We also recognized that the process would be painful and stretch each of us beyond our limits, confronting our own perceptions, misconceptions, and, ultimately, questions regarding on what ground we stood within the context of claiming our collective history, ultimately challenging us to reckon with and decide what responsibility we were willing to take. We had to embrace our fears and insecurities and unpack them each and every day. It was like making a big mess in the middle of the floor, with each of us taking turns sitting in the messes we made, and then being willing to pick up after one another. Diving into the process of preparing to perform uncle tom: de-constructed was terrifying because we had to confront the created realities in which we live. We each had to acknowledge the part of our reality that is embedded in the lie of Black inferiority and White superiority. Although I felt anxious, I also felt safe and protected in the process. Dr. T Interjects. Facing obstacles within the creative process is always a part of the work. However, when the creative process is entangled within the complexities of a deeply racialized history embedded within a patriarchal and White supremacist cultural continuum, navigating the obstacles that are both individual and communal becomes an essential component of the work itself and the creative process. Here is where Jasmine and I illuminate some of the major



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reoccurring obstacles ensemble members face as we engage in the training and rehearsal process specifically for uncle tom: de-constructed. The Obstacles The work of deconstructing racism, racial biases, and our own emotional blocks in regard to both, is difficult. Although the company members were willing participants in this arduous process, the extent to which the uncovering and unpacking progression would affect them personally was, at times, overwhelmingly difficult. This work struck a core nerve with each and every artist who participated in it. The fundamental beginning of drama (story) is conflict. The essence of conflict is obstacle. The question is, what is in the way of achieving your objective? We have condensed the primary conflicts/obstacles encountered in preparing artists to do the work of performing “uncle tom” into five thematic areas: 1. Perceptions 2. Wounds

3. Authenticity

4. Transparency 5. Struggle

Perceptions—Obstacle 1. The White student artists, as well as any people of color within the acting company who were assigned to play Black minstrel caricatures, had the huge task of dealing with their lack of knowledge about Black people and culture as well as their miseducation and distorted perceptions of blackness. The controlling images of the Mammy, the Sambo, the Pickaninny, the Uncle, and the Coon have not at all been put to death, but are, in fact, embedded in the geocultural fabric of the American society and psyche. In response, a comprehensive list of suggested readings, films, and documentaries serves the company dramaturgically in the development of the Black minstrel characters and grounds them in the history of the period. Unlike those who originated these grotesque and demeaning caricatures to oppress, marginalize, and destroy anything of value, respect, or esteem within Black people or culture, TCP’s goal is to deconstruct those controlling images and to use them as tools of transformation and change within the framework of our devised deconstruction of Uncle Tom and the minstrel performance. Unpacking the racial legacy of the performing arts industry in America allows performers to confront their own perceptions and misperceptions of race and racial identity in performance. The mask of dual consciousness, as defined by W.E.B. Du Bois,11 that is always worn by the Black performer in White spaces, is not only unfamiliar to the White performer but is, in effect, invisible to them and, therefore, there is a level of inequality that remains present whether within the rehearsal space or upon the stage in performance. The recognition of the mask routinely worn by Blacks in White spaces is a revelatory moment for most White ensemble members and usually calls for further discussion and unpacking. Making ensemble members aware of the double bind the Black artists find themselves in, whether performing blackness through the minstrel caricatures or performing as a White minstrel caricature, is a painful discovery for many people, Black and White. However, the conflict for the artist of color holds a complexity that is multidimensional within the realm of staged performance and real-time lived experience.

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The work on the development of uncle tom: de-constructed was tedious and broad in scope to include sociology, history, arts, literature, and culture. Within the devising process of the ritual poetic drama methodology we created family groups and divided up our reading list. Each family presented the material and content and then prompted us to write after each presentation. Ultimately, the extreme deficiency we found within our individual and collective understanding of America’s racial history, systems of oppression, and pervasive White supremacist and Eurocentric cultural practice and standards was profoundly impactful. It informed our work, our process, and illuminated the problematic nature of using the extreme satire of minstrelsy as a complex and nuanced performance practice. Regardless of the obstacles that inevitably arose, the company’s work effectively served as a critique of our society at large and the cultural lens with which we view the “other” and ourselves. The Wounds—Obstacle 2. As a community committed to this project, we had to deal with the traumatic effects of institutional racism. Before we could begin to unpack the historic legacy of racism and its traumatic effects, we had to define exactly what racism is and what it is not. In interrogating the performance of blackness, one must also effectively contrast that performance with the institutional design of whiteness. There was as much of a sense of betrayal as there was of recognition as we grappled with what was true and what was false about the narratives we had been told and what we chose to believe about race, racism, and oppression within the American narrative. In connecting with our individual experiences and collective narratives around exactly “when” we became aware of race and how it is used as a social construct and tool of oppression, we were challenged by what we were learning. For many, this was truly their first exposure to either the fact of race or the interrogation of its impact. Deep pain was evident and even deeper was the sense of denial as our common and persistent companion. We continued to unpack and disclose our sincere inadequacy, regret, ignorance, and disbelief. These were the wounds of betrayal we all had to face. The wounds of regret and acknowledgment of events from the past of long ago, as well as those events of just moments before, took up space in the room. Because we continued to develop community trust and build bonds of interdependency we were able to carry on, even through the outbursts of anger and rage. Rage toward the ignorance and denial and anger at the complete oblivion and complicity we continued to recognize. Whether willingly or not, whether with intentionality or absolute oblivion, we all participated in systemic racism and oppression as either objects and/or objectifiers within a sociopolitical construct from which we could not extricate ourselves. Authenticity—Obstacle 3. Guilt and shame enter the room almost immediately. The White minstrel caricature/actors struggle with the legacy of whiteness and White patriarchal oppression as a tool of power, privilege, and domination. The Black minstrel caricatures/ actors struggle with the pain of being commoditized, objectified, and drained of all human dignity while watching the Whites basking in the privilege of intentional oblivion. There is a cycle of recognition, acknowledgment, hope, disappointment, despair, and rage that continues throughout the process of devising, rehearsal, and performance. Unpacking and acknowledging that cycle is an essential part of the process in maintaining the integrity of the work and the mental, physical, and spiritual health of the performers involved. It is difficult to be authentic when one is struggling with the process of “becoming.” Becoming aware, becoming responsible, becoming honest, and becoming acquainted with the truth of a history you



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either thought you knew or never really wanted to know. TCP participants struggled every single day as we were confronted with our own complicity in the struggle for racial justice and equality. Our own denial of oppression and the role we played in maintaining it, whether as a part of the dominant group or the “other.” Truthfulness was required from each and every member of the ensemble. That was much easier for some than for others. As we were becoming our authentic selves, the ones who were striving for a quality of “being” real or genuine and not false, we discovered how important that authenticity was when in the pursuit of real change and actual transformation. Transparency—Obstacle 4. The group of student artists who originally participated in the process of creating uncle tom: de-constructed courageously tackled the historic legacy of race, racism, and systems of oppression through an emergent process using ritual poetic drama. None of us knew what we were entering into nor did we intend to establish a social justice theatre company. We struggled with the topic, the content, and one another throughout, and without any conscious effort whatsoever, we birthed a consciousness and a commitment to the work of undoing racism and systemic oppression in America through the challenge of artistic expression. One of the recognized elders of our larger community, Abena Joan Brown, founder and president of the Ebony Creative Arts Foundation, of Chicago, Illinois, shared with me, in an interview I (Pettiford-Wates) conducted with her in 1991, “History has been written. It is consciousness that must be born.”12 The Struggle Continues With each new TCP production of uncle tom: de-constructed and new work devised through the ritual poetic drama process, we struggle. That breathtaking and devastating moment remains the same each time a new group of artists strut onto the stage in the personae of their Black and White minstrel caricatures. We are all terrified—what if the audience is repelled by the attempt, or do not connect with the satire in a way that illuminates their understanding of how race affects our national culture in extremely destructive ways that diminish all of us as human beings? What if we are completely misunderstood and we ignite a race riot instead of a community dialogue that promotes healing, not harm? So many questions and so many terrified warrior artists who are willing to be transparent and put themselves on the line and in the line of fire each and every time. The moment that continues to inspire and ignite the deep conversations with audience members after each performance of a TCP work is the moment the ensemble begins to take off their makeup and costume pieces in full view of the audience. They stop acting; they shed the character, the minstrel caricature, and the performer and become authentically the self that is transparently revealed. They are transformed by the journey they have just taken and share publicly with the audience. They undress and allow the audience to see their naked vulnerability as people. Each cast member speaks in soft tones their truth, as they understand it to be. In the beginning we used the lines of Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”: “I was taught to see Racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible Systems conferring dominance on my group.” “I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.”

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“I am never asked to speak for all the people of my race.” “I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my race.” “I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily protection.”

When we perform uncle tom: de-constructed, each White member of the ensemble speaks first . . . and then the confessions keep coming. Often, tears begin to fall like a refreshing spring rain, and spontaneously an actor asks the audience to participate in the confession of any revelations or personal recognitions they might want to share. We hear confessions, professions, proclamations, and expressions of joy, relief, pain, and fear. It is truly cathartic, an acknowledgment that many people have never experienced in mixed company. White people acknowledging that white skin has privileges that brown and black skin does not. It is transformative. The work works in ways that continue to reveal themselves almost two decades after the first performance of uncle tom: de-constructed. Amazingly the power and potency of what uncle tom: de-constructed achieved as a tool for transformative change and open and honest dialogue about racism and systemic oppression launched both a social justice theatre company and an emergent methodology for the practice of art at the intersection of activism. And Finally . . . What makes the work of TCP most effective in social justice work and social change initiatives is the ability of the dramatic arts to empower disenfranchised or marginalized communities and to facilitate a process whereby those communities tell their own stories regarding important issues that significantly impact them. Bringing those collective voices out through story/drama and performance from the margins to the center of community-engaged dialogues designed to create change and transformation initiatives from within the community itself has enabled The Conciliation Project, using the ritual poetic drama process, to continue to engage diverse communities in transformative healing and direct action from 2001 to the present. The work is emergent in ways that reflect the various communities with whom we collaborate, and it seems that each time, with each encounter, the work continues to generate more work. The company has been performing uncle tom: de-constructed for over seventeen years and the process we developed to devise and create the play, including all of the dramaturgy, internal and external personal exploration in racial trauma, systems of oppression and privilege, healing, community building, and trust exercises, continues to inform our labor each time we introduce a new group of artists/activists to The Conciliation Project, and specifically to the formative work uncle tom: de-constructed. This signature piece of work inspired a group of people to found a company dedicated to uprooting and breaking down systemic and internalized racism. The ongoing deconstruction of the character Uncle Tom from Stowe’s post–civil war novel has become the foundation of our repertoire. We have an expression within the TCP community: “Consciousness is Temporary.” We must continue to dedicate ourselves to the intersections of art and activism, digging even deeper, listening harder, and holding on to the ideals of community-based leadership and collective collaborative work. Change is possible, and we are going to explore all the opportunities we can find, while collaborating with others, in order to make CHANGE happen for as long as it takes. Transformative change is the goal, and healing the traumatic and historic legacy of America’s racial dysfunction and the destructive impact it continues to have on our culture and our lives



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is a necessary first step in moving forward with an inclusive and empowering model. We must be courageous enough to conciliate our past, in order to increase the possibility of building our future . . . together.

Notes 1.  Uncle tom-ism is the created behavior and the intentional physicalization of giving deference to White

people by purposefully lowering your own status in order to elevate theirs. It is the basic nature of an uncle tom caricature to engage intentionally in the aforementioned behavior and to always construct White people as superior to Black people in everything. This farcical deviant trait was created by H. B. Stowe in her creation of Uncle Tom in her nineteenth-century novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In creating the play uncle tom: de-­ constructed, we agreed that the character was a “constructed thing” without human dimension, not an actual person. Therefore, we intentionally do not capitalize the name of uncle tom as a “proper name.” 2.  In focusing our interrogation on the character of Uncle Tom himself, and the other misshapen perceptions of blackness drawn by Stowe in her many invented caricatures of the “colored race” within the novel, we began to unravel a legacy of performance of blackness, based in fantasy, fetish and the objectification of Black people that would become the basis for the American performance tradition of blackface minstrelsy. 3.  The use of ritual poetic drama within the African continuum (RPD) is a methodology which emerged out of a series of studio experiments I conducted between 1989 and 1992—“Revision: Towards a Re-connection of the Dramatic Artist with the African Origins of the Dramatic Form.” The methodology embraces the African origins of the dramatic form and is grounded in African-centered practice and definition of ritual and story/drama and community. The work is more fully illuminated in an anthology. See “Ritual Poetic Drama within the African Continuum: The Journey from Shakespeare to Shange, in Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches, ed. Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer (New York: Routledge, 2017), 110–115. 4.  Coordinated studies is a learning community that is designed to integrate two or more academic disciplines in a cooperative teaching and learning environment. Coordinated studies takes one of several approaches to linking courses and course work around a common theme that allows students and teachers to experience greater depths of teaching and active learning. 5.  Marlon T. Riggs’ video docudrama Ethnic Notions explores the formative role blackface minstrelsy played in what has become known as the American musical theatre tradition. “Ethnic Notions” examines anti-Black stereotypes and caricatures that permeated popular culture in the antebellum period through to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. See Riggs, Ethnic Notions [Video docudrama], http://newsreel.org/video /ethnic-notions. 6.  Excerpted from uncle tom: de-constructed, a ritual play in seven cycles. The excerpt is from Cycle 4, “The Freeman’s Defense.” Collectively authored by the Coordinated Studies Class, Winter Quarter 2001, Seattle, WA, https://www.theconciliationproject.org/. 7.  A tear is a device we use within our plays that is a violent ripping away of the perceived reality of the “performance,” allowing the audience to experience an actual reality. The style becomes very realistically played and the audience is allowed inside the private thoughts, feelings, and expressions of the minstrel caricatures to experience their authentic selves “as if ” there were no mask at all. 8.  Quoted in Michael Bennett and Dave Zirin, Things That Make White People Uncomfortable (Chicago: Haymarket, 2018), 22–23. 9.  Quoted in Joe Nocera and Ben Strauss, Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion against the NCAA (New York: Penguin Group, 2016). 10.  We used cycles rather than scenes to identify how the play was delineated in order to more fully disconnect from a Western theatre model and more intentionally embrace the form and methodology of ritual poetic drama within the African continuum. Additionally, the ideology of oppression as a cyclic continuum could be more effectively demonstrated by way of using cycles as an ongoing and infinite journey rather than a finite and linear one. 11.  Dual consciousness or double consciousness is a sociological theory and term first expressed by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois illuminates the term thus: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.  .  .  . One ever feels his

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twoness, an American, a Negro, two souls, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover, 1994), 5–6. 12.  This quote is taken from an interview with Abena Joan Brown, founder and artistic director for ETA in Chicago, Illinois on April 19, 1991. I interviewed her on site in her office.

Bibliography Baldwin, James. “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” In The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985. New York: St. Martin’s/Marek, 1985, 23–37. Bennett, Michael, and Dave Zirin. Things That Make White People Uncomfortable. Chicago: Haymarket, 2018. Boal, Augusto, and Charles A. McBride. Theatre of the Oppressed. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2013. Bracey, John H., Sonia Sanchez, and James Edward Smethurst (Eds.)/ “Towards a Black Aesthetic.” In SOS/ Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014, 151–156. The Conciliation Project. Conciliation. 2019, www.theconciliationproject.org. Darder, Aantonia. Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love. New York: Routledge, 2017. Du Bois W.E.B. Souls of Black Folks. New York: Dover, 1994. Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. “First Premises of an Africanist Aesthetic.” In Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and other Contexts. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1996, 12–19. Heddon, Deirdre. Devising Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Johnson, E. Patrick. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Malone, Jacqui. Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Nocera, Joe, and Ben Strauss. Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion against the NCAA. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2016. Pettiford-Wates, Tawnya. “Engaging Rites of Passage in Performative Texts: Using Ritual Poetic Drama as an Applied Theater Practice.” In Multiethnic American Literatures: Essays for Teaching Context and Culture, edited by Helane Adams Adrone. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014, 224–225. Pettiford-Wates, Tawnya, “Ritual Poetic Drama within the African Continuum: The Journey from Shakespeare to Shange.” In Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches, edited by Sharrell D. Luckett, with Tia M. Shaffer. New York: Routledge, 2017, 106–122. Riggs, Marlon T. Ethnic Notions. Directed by M. Riggs. California NewsReel, 1987. DVD. Wilson, August. “I Want a Black Director.” Spin Magazine (October 1990) 70–73.

BL ACKBALLIN’ A Play R I C K E R BY H I N D S

Winner of the 1996 ASK Theatre Projects Playwriting Award

Cast DOWN—Black Male, peak athletic age STICK—Black Male, peak athletic age HOOP—Black Male, peak athletic age JAB—Black Male, peak athletic age COACH—White Male, peak coaching age MASCOT—White Female, All-American age

Setting A football field, a baseball diamond, a basketball court, a boxing ring

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Scene 1 (In the dark we hear “the ocean,” vast and ominous, masquerading as a cheering throng—which is what it quickly becomes—thousands of fanatics cheering for their team, and then cheering for the Greatest Coach Of All Times. The rousing beat of Queen’s “We Will Rock You” rockets the fans’ enthusiasm to a feverish pitch. Just then, MASCOT dashes into the audience/fans—like mascots do—and encourages them to join it clapping and stomping to the now blaring beat. As the lights rise: COACH ascends from “the ocean” proudly holding his award: GREATEST COACH OF ALL TIMES. As he quiets the crowd, he continues to rise revealing his platform: FOUR NAKED BLACK ATHLETES; DOWN, STICK, HOOP, and JAB. Their bodies branded with athletic logos, team and school names. They are four. They are one)

COACH Thank you, thank you, thank you all very much. Thank you. Today as I stand here before you at the pinnacle of my success, at the apex of my achievements, I am humbled; humbled, not only by your recognition, but by the realization that any accomplishment of this magnitude is ever attained alone. There have been many, far too many to mention; names, faces, numbers, all permanently etched on my mental clipboard. Those who have contributed to this day in one way or another. (From the pile, DOWN and HOOP raise their heads and glare menacingly at the audience) I have found that the heaviest load to carry in this life is that of unfulfilled hopes and dreams, the baggage of years of “almosts” and “might haves,” of “could haves” and “would haves,” of “too longs” and “just shorts.” That weighs on a man and with time bends a once straight back towards its inevitable and final destination, dust to dust. Thusly, I have dedicated my life to aiding those who have dreamed these dreams in the attaining of the same. (From the pile, STICK and JAB raise their heads and glare menacingly at the audience) I have dedicated myself, my very existence to the guiding of those poor souls languishing in the dark ages of mediocrity into the edifying light of self-realization and self re-creation . . . To make the rough places smooth, the crooked places straight and all flesh shall see it together. To reward every man with just reward for just work . . . (A hauntingly sorrowful moan emanates from the ATHLETES as they place the speaking COACH on the bow of an ancient rowboat) COACH There is a place for all of us in this world, a place where we belong. A hand for a glove, a ball for a bat, a mule for a plow, a head for a hat, a deer for a doe, a heave for a ho. (The ATHLETES take their seats in the ancient rowboat and instinctively, naturally, begin to row. COACH’s speech transforms into his giving them the “ole heave-ho.” The ATHLETES’ moan slowly transforms into a response to COACH’s commanding “heaves”) COACH Heave! ATHLETES Ho!



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COACH Heave! ATHLETES Ho! COACH Heave! ATHLETES Ho! COACH Heave! ATHLETES Ho! COACH Heave! ATHLETES Ho! COACH Heave! ATHLETES Ho! COACH Heave! ATHLETES Ho! COACH Heave! ATHLETES Ho! (STICK, HOOP, DOWN, and JAB jump ship and sink, then just as quickly rise out of the water and strike positions particular to their respective sports) COACH Name? STICK MILLION Sticks!

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HOOP MILLION Hoops! DOWN MILLION Downs! JAB MILLION Jabs! COACH (Indifferent) No buoyancy. (Lights out)

Scene 2 (In the dark we hear . . . )

VOICE (NFL Films style) The gridiron. The myth of the collective. A game of class struggle, collective action, and liberation! (Lights rise on the ATHLETES. They wear harnesses with bits in their mouths, and are pulling COACH who rides a blocking sled like a chariot, onto a football field. He leads them in song) COACH I’m gonna ride . . . ATHLETES Ride the chariot in tha mornin’ lord . . . COACH I’m gonna ride . . . ATHLETES Ride the chariot in tha mornin’ lord . . . COACH I’m gettin’ ready . . . ATHLETES I’m gettin’ ready for the judgment day My lord, my lord. COACH I’m gonna ride . . .



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ATHLETES Ride the chariot in tha mornin’ lord . . . COACH I’m gonna ride . . . ATHLETES Ride the chariot in tha mornin’ lord . . . COACH I’m gettin’ ready . . . ATHLETES I’m gettin’ ready for the judgment day My lord, my lord. COACH Are you ready my brothers? ATHLETES Oh yeah! COACH Are you ready for the judgment? ATHLETES Oh yeah! COACH Do you want to see my Jesus? ATHLETES Oh yeah! I’m ready for the judgment an’ I’m ready to go. (COACH takes charge with a stopwatch in one hand and whistle in his mouth. He blows it. ATHLETES run. They line up again, this time backwards. He blows it. They run. They perform several football maneuvers) COACH SET UP! (Blows whistle—ATHLETES crash into each other) To win this game you must have fire in you! (Blows whistle—ATHLETES crash into each other) And there is nothing that stokes fire like hate! (Blows whistle—ATHLETES craaash) A hate that burns so deep that it transforms you! (Blows whistle—ATHLETES craaash) A hate so strong that it will be passed down through generations!

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(Blows whistle—ATHLETES craaash) A hate so strong that when you’re not hating you’re not even alive! (Blows whistle—ATHLETES craaash) SET UP! (A new drill. ATHLETES line up single file to take handoff from COACH)

COACH (cont’d) GO! (COACH slams the ball in their gut one by one, while constantly talking. ATHLETES grunt in pain, but come back for more) COACH (cont’d) Show me something! This ain’t shit! Show me something! Let me see it! Show me something! Show me something! (DOWN stands at attention. COACH inspects his teeth) COACH (cont’d) Now this is it! This is what I’m talking ’bout! This is what I’m looking for. This is it. (ATHLETES look into DOWN’s mouth) Okay, okay come on! Come on! Let’s see what we got here this year. (ATHLETES introduce themselves to the audience, Bob Hope All-American style) JAB Marlin Briscoe. Denver Broncos. Quarterback. Hallelujah I was converted! (Mouths HI MOM) HOOP Sandy Stephens. Detroit Lions. Quarterback. Hallelujah I was converted! (Mouths HI MOM) STICK Keith Lee. Buffalo Bills. Quarterback. Hallelujah I was converted! (Mouths HI MOM) DOWN First Down. Quarterback. I will not be converted! (No HI MOM) COACH Not with a name like that. That’s the first thing we have to get rid of, all in time, all in time. (Calling ATHLETES to gather ’round) Okay, okay over here, I am your coach. Understand this, everyone needs a leader and for the next four years I’m yours. I’m your daddy, your mammy, your sister, brother, girlfriend, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. You do things my way or you won’t do them for me. Your job, to give me onehundred-ten percent at all times. My job, to turn you into more than you ever thought you could ever be, and then some. And that I will do,



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(Menacingly) or kill you trying. And in the end you will either be dead or on your knees thanking me for giving you life. (COACH proceeds down the line ritually repeating the following while waving his hands in a combination of religious and athletic symbolism) Now. Briscoe, Marlin!

JAB (AS BRISCOE) Yes sir! COACH Judging from your speed, natural instincts, grace, and overall athleticism and by the power vested in me, you are hereby converted to a wide receiver. (Crossing himself. Speaking in pseudo-Latin) En el nombre Halas, Bryant, Lombardi, Rockne. JAB (AS BRISCOE) But I’m a— COACH Stephens, Sandy! HOOP (AS STEPHENS) Yes sir! COACH Judging from your speed, natural instincts, grace, and overall athleticism and by the power vested in me, you are hereby converted to a wide receiver. (Crossing himself. Speaks in pseudo-Latin) En el nombre Halas, Bryant, Lombardi, Rockne. HOOP (AS STEPHENS) But I’m a— COACH Lee, Keith! STICK (AS LEE) Yes sir! COACH Judging from your speed, natural instincts, grace, and overall athleticism and by the power vested in me, you are hereby converted to a wide receiver. (Crossing himself. Speaking in pseudo-Latin) En el nombre Halas, Bryant, Lombardi, Rockne. STICK (AS LEE) But I’m a—

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COACH And ahh, Down, First Down? DOWN Right here! COACH Judging from your speed, natural instincts, grace, and overall athleticism and by the power vested in me, you are hereby converted to a wide receiver. (Crossing himself. Speaking in pseudo-Latin) En el nombre Halas, Bryant, Lombardi— DOWN But I am a quarterback. COACH (Sarcastically) Rockne. I know, I know you’re a quarterback. You’re all quarterbacks. Black quarterbacks. Well, now you’re all not quarterbacks. JAB (AS BRISCOE) But you put us all at wide receiver, what about playin’ time? COACH Playing time? HOOP (AS STEPHENS) We’re stacked at the same position. COACH In football as in life I am a firm believer that the best man will eventually win. The cream will eventually rise to the top. HOOP (AS STEPHENS) Cream . . . DOWN (Wu Tang Clan style) Cash rules everything around me. COACH Okay, I’m going to say this one time and one time only. You’ll get your chance when your chance comes. STICK (AS LEE) Chance? We’re all playin’ the same position, makes no sense. COACH Sense? Let me tell you, all of you something. In my world, that’s where you are now, what makes sense to me is that when I spell T-E-A-M I’m missing something, what?



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BRISCOE/LEE/STEPHENS U-S. COACH “I”! “I” That’s what’s missing, “I” Why? Why miss “I”? Because “I” has no place on my team Got it! JAB (AS BRISCOE) Yes sir. STICK (AS LEE) Clear sir. HOOP (AS STEPHENS)  . . . as a glass ceiling. COACH Good. Then let’s catch some passes! (All but DOWN move) COACH (cont’d) I hope this isn’t a communication problem emerging here son. We do speak the same language. DOWN Not a problem coach. COACH Then we understand each other. DOWN I did not arrive here as a wide receiver. (COACH checks his clipboard) COACH Is that so? DOWN I’m a quarterback sir! COACH Were. Yes, yes it does appear that you were under the belief that you were being brought here for a different purpose, to be a quarterback. But let me explain this to you, you are only here because I brought you here, therefore you will be what I say you will be, and that is a wide receiver. DOWN (Feigned humility) But coach, I’m . . . I can be so much more.

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COACH Look at Briscoe, Lee, Stephens, they’ve adapted excellently. (Looks over at the other ATHLETES throwing football back and forth) DOWN They’re the past. COACH No, that is a pass, that’s a pass. Language son. DOWN They are the past sir. COACH So that makes you then, the present? DOWN The future. Coach. COACH Not my future. (DOWN decides to appeal to COACH’S ego) DOWN COACH I have quickly realized that only with your help can I become more than what I am. Coach, I look at myself and know that you are the only one who can make me a whole man. You alone hold the key that can release me from this prison in which I find myself. And in the end, if I am not dead trying, you will find me on my knees thanking you, thanking you for giving life to me . . . for saving a wretch like me. (COACH considers his options) COACH What the hell, why not? I mean, I’m a man of great reason, that’s what I am, a man of great reason. A great man of great reason. (Checking his clipboard) Well then Down. Future. Quarterback. (Commanding) Quarterback! (DOWN sets the other ATHLETES up) Option left! Can you remember that?! (DOWN runs the “Option” play, pitching the ball to STICK lined up at running back. They set up again) Option right! That’s the other side! (DOWN runs same play to the opposite side) COACH (cont’d) Double option! That’s two!



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(DOWN runs a senseless-looking play then looks over at COACH for instructions. He receives none) I assume you can throw. Then throw! (DOWN lines HOOP and STICK up as receivers)

DOWN Ready, set . . . BLACK twenty-four! BLUE sixty-five! Hut, hut-hut! Hut! (DOWN bullets a perfect pass to HOOP) HOOP COACH Good shit baby! Arm’s too strong. DOWN (cont’d) What?! (DOWN lines them up again) DOWN (cont’d) Hut, hut-hut, hut! (DOWN fires another perfect pass this time to STICK) STICK COACH Yesss! I likes! Crazy feet. DOWN (cont’d) Aw’rite-aw’rite, let’s do it! Come on. Forty-two option keep. (Clap) COACH That’s not how we play the position here. (DOWN calls signals, falls back, fakes the handoff, then runs it himself) VOICE And in a phenomenal display of athletic ability and unadulterated skill, First Down . . . First Down, that right? Yes, First Down has methodically marched this team from his own thirty-five yard line to his opponent’s four yard line, an amazing display of genuine talent! A coach’s nightmare. (DOWN calls ATHLETES to huddle) DOWN (In huddle) Aw’rite check this out, it’s in the bag, no sweat. Y’all know the drill, let’s just do it. Okay, let’s run “blind eighteen,” readyyyy, break. (Clap) Ain’t nothin’ to it. (DOWN calls the signals. Ball is snapped, he falls back for the pass, begins the passing motion, then freezes “statue of liberty style.” COACH takes ball out of DOWN’S frozen hand and tosses it to MASCOT, who is now a WHITE QUARTERBACK)

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DOWN (cont’d) (Frozen) Time out! Time out! (To COACH) What’s up? COACH I can’t do it. DOWN You can’t do it? COACH I cannot, will not, waste all that talent. DOWN What? COACH Son, listen to me. You are just too gifted to waste at quarterback. DOWN But wouldn’t it make sense? COACH You run too fast. DOWN What? COACH  . . . jump too high . . . DOWN What? COACH  . . . throw too good. DOWN What? COACH You are too physically gifted to just waste at quarterback. Just too gifted. You’re undoubtedly a coach’s dream. DOWN (To audience) My daddy told me there was nothin’ I couldn’t do. Back on the block I believed it. (Calls huddle, diagrams play in his hand)



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Keith, you go long pass the Datsun, then cut left . . . Marlin, I want you to curve out, in, then up, like this, like a bell. Don’t go past the street cleaning sign. Lee, block first then just take three steps and turn, you my blitz option, readyyyyy, Break! (To audience) I was always the quarterback, had a good arm, and I liked being the man responsible for what went down in the game and I was good. (DOWN takes snap, falls back, then in perfect synchronicity he is joined by HOOP. This sequence of movement is a “football dance” with overtones of ballet)

VOICE Does it fester like a sore and then run? DOWN/HOOP After I became a high school All-American quarterback, sheet, the world was mine, had scholarship offers coming in from USC, UCLA, Notre Dame, Texas. Problem was, I was too fast, crazy huh? None of them wanted me to play quarterback. Thing was, I had juice and everybody wanted to put me in the backfield; it’s always something: too fast, too athletic, too inexperienced. Too black. (DOWN and HOOP take the snap, fall back, joined by JAB) VOICE Does it stink like rotten meat? DOWN/HOOP/JAB So I turned ’em all down, went to a junior college . . . figured I could prove myself there first then finish up at a major university. Two years All-American, they came callin’ again, even more this time. Still, “You’d make a great running back, defensive back, wide receiver . . .” (Pause) I finally found a university where I could enter as a quarterback. I show up for the first practice in competition with two white quarterbacks . . . the prototype. I got the starting job a few days before the first game . . . Ain’t gon’ never forget it. (DOWN, HOOP, JAB take snap, fall back, joined by STICK) VOICE Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. DOWN/HOOP/JAB/STICK The other team kicked off to us and we ran it back to the twenty-five. I ran over to coach, he gave me the first play, and I started out to the huddle. He grabbed my arm and pulled me back, said, “Hey son, why don’t you sit this one out?” (Pause) I was drafted into the NFL as a defensive back, played for seven years; my final year the team listed me as the third quarterback . . . I never took a snap, but when the program came out with me as a quarterback, I sent it to my dad, called him and said, “Dad, we made it.” DOWN Dad, we made it.

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VOICE Or does it explode?! (With a thunderous stomp, DOWN begins his “FREEDOM STEP,” a traditional black fraternity step, Q-DOG style. Accompanied by the other ATHLETES, DOWN steps as if his life depended on it) DOWN Sun up to sun down Pickin’ that cotton. STICK/HOOP/JAB HUH! DOWN Sun up to sun down Whipped by the massa. STICK/HOOP/JAB HUH! DOWN Sun up to sun down Chains and shackles. STICK/HOOP/JAB HUH! DOWN No more auction block for me. STICK/HOOP/JAB HUH! DOWN No more auction block for me. STICK/HOOP/JAB HUH! DOWN Sun up to sun down Pickin’ that cotton. STICK/HOOP/JAB HUH! DOWN Sun up to sun down Whipped by the massa.



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STICK/HOOP/JAB HUH! DOWN Sun up to sun down Chains and shackles. STICK/HOOP/JAB HUH! DOWN No more auction block for me. STICK/HOOP/JAB HUH! DOWN No more auction block for me. (All but DOWN spot COACH positioning himself on the bow of the boat. He’s had enough! DOWN attempts one last verse) DOWN (cont’d) SUN UP TO SUNDOWN PICKIN’ THAT COTTON (Waits for response to his call) SUN UP TO SUNDOWN WHIPPED BY THA MASSA (Waits for response to his call) SUN UP TO SUNDOWN CHAINS AND SHACKLES (Realizing there will be no response) No more auction block for me No more auction block for me. (DOWN realizes why other ATHLETES have abandoned him. COACH, with just his presence, commands the other ATHLETES back to the boat. A defiant DOWN tries song one last time) DOWN (cont’d) Sun up to sundown pickin’ that cotton. COACH Heave! DOWN Sun up to sundown whipped by the massa. COACH Heave! DOWN Sun up to sundown—

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COACH Heave! (DOWN gives in, but he’s different, his “Ho” is now “Ho-oh” hip hop style) ATHLETES Ho! COACH Heave! ATHLETES Ho! COACH Heave! ATHLETES Ho! (STICK stops rowing) COACH Heave! HOOP (To STICK) Row Niggah! COACH Heave! STICK No Niggah! COACH Heave! JAB (To STICK) Row Niggah! COACH Heave! STICK No Niggah! COACH Heave!



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DOWN (To STICK) Row brotha! COACH Heave! STICK No Niggah! (DOWN offers STICK his football, he opts for a baseball bat and jumps ship. ATHLETES watch in frozen astonishment. COACH glances overboard) COACH Name? DOWN/HOOP/JAB Million Sticks! COACH No buoyancy. (Noticing that remaining ATHLETES are not rowing) Row NIGGERS! (ATHLETES remain defiantly still) COACH (cont’d) Either ROW OR BLOW! (HOOP walks into the next scene)

Scene 3 (In the dark we hear . . . )

VOICE (Resonant) Baseball, as much a part of America as the freedoms we cherish and the liberties we defend. If one understands baseball, one understands America. If you understand baseball you understand America. (We hear: Baseball stadium organ music da, da da-da da-da Charge! Organ plays “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” The MASCOT dashes onto the field and leads the audience/fans in song. Midway through, COACH appears on stage; he stops the song. The MASCOT runs away, as only mascots can, leaving COACH “caught in the headlights” of a CAR composed of the ATHLETES) ATHLETES (AS CAR) Why are there no black managers, general managers, or owners?

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COACH I don’t believe it’s prejudice. I truly believe they may not have some of the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager or perhaps a general manager. ATHLETES (AS CAR) Do you really believe that? COACH Well, I don’t say all of them, but they certainly are short. How many quarterbacks do you have, how many pitchers do you have that are black? ATHLETES (AS CAR) That sounds like the same garbage we were hearing forty years ago. COACH No it’s not garbage. I played on a college team, and the center fielder was black, and in the backfield at NYU was a fullback who was black. Never knew the difference whether he was black or white. We were teammates. So it might just be, why are black men or black people not good swimmers? Because they don’t have the buoyancy. ATHLETES (AS CAR) We don’t float? COACH You’re outstanding athletes, very God-gifted, and you’re wonderful people. You are gifted with great musculature and various other things. You’re fleet of foot. And this is why there are a lot of black major league ballplayers. Now as far as having the background to become club presidents or presidents of a bank, by the way, some of my best friends are . . . black. ATHLETES (AS CAR) Naturally. (In a flash, COACH becomes the UMPIRE. The field is a baseball diamond) COACH (AS UMPIRE) PLAY BALL! (STICK comes up to the plate wearing pieces of baseball uniform: cap, leggings, etc. He swings) COACH (AS UMPIRE) Strike two! (STICK steps in and out of batter’s box, confused) STICK What’d you say the count was? COACH (AS UMPIRE) Strike two! STICK Strike two? That can’t be right.



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COACH (AS UMPIRE) Can and is. STICK But I just stepped up to the plate. (COACH has a counter in each hand, one black and one white) COACH Look here. (Accidentally showing white counter) No. Here. (Showing STICK the other counter) That says strike two. STICK I just stepped up and I got . . . COACH (AS UMPIRE) Two strikes! STICK No way! That can’t be right! COACH (AS UMPIRE) Two strikes on the batter, batter up! STICK This is some bullshit! COACH (AS UMPIRE) This is some baseball, rookie. STICK I know my rights. I ain’t movin’ ’til the count is fixed. (COACH as UMPIRE checks his counters) COACH (AS UMPIRE) You want something fixed? Nothing’s broken. Batter up! (STICK makes his stand outside the batter’s box) STICK I ain’t movin’ ’til the count is corrected! COACH (AS UMPIRE) Is that so? STICK I refuse to continue in this game until I’m counted correctly!

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COACH (AS UMPIRE) Understand this, the game does not stop for you. STICK It’s not just for me. COACH (AS UMPIRE) Not for you, then who? STICK For the game. COACH (AS UMPIRE) For the game? STICK For the game. COACH (AS UMPIRE) I see, so your concern is the game. STICK My concern is givin’ everybody their three strikes. COACH (AS UMPIRE) Listen boy, I’ve already determined that the count is correct. Now you don’t want to go up against me. You don’t want to go up against “us.” What the hell is it you want, huh? You got what everybody else got. STICK Don’t look that way to me. COACH (AS UMPIRE) Well perhaps you’re not looking in the right place. Look at where you are. (STICK looks at batter’s box) COACH (AS UMPIRE) (cont’d) Look around. (STICK checks out his surroundings) Look at yourself. (STICK checks out his branded body) Look. (COACH points out the score board, it displays TWO strikes) Look. (MASCOT enters as a TV reporter) VOICE On the international scene, the influx of Cubans is having a tremendous effect on America’s pastime. A permanent solution is being considered. And in local news, HOLY COW, Million Sticks has two strikes! That’s two!



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COACH/UMP You happy now? Now play ball! Or you are out anyway. STICK How ’bout a little time? COACH/UMP How ’bout batter up. (STICK shuffles back into batter’s box) STICK Yessa boss, whatever you says. COACH (AS UMPIRE) You got that right “Sammie.” Now, play ball! (STICK swings and strikes out) Strike three! Take a walk. STICK No way, that ain’t right and you know it! COACH (AS UMPIRE) All I know is that you struck out! STICK You knew it wasn’t fair! COACH (AS UMPIRE) You agreed to the laws, you play by the rules. You lose! (They argue nose to nose, spit flying) STICK But this ain’t right, it ain’t fair. COACH (AS UMPIRE) Three strikes you’re out! STICK I didn’t get— COACH (AS UMPIRE) Three strikes, that’s what I saw, that’s what I called! STICK You ain’t seen nothin’. COACH (AS UMPIRE) I seen you strike out, that’s what I seen! STICK You ain’t seen shit!

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COACH (AS UMPIRE) I call ’em like I see ’em! The game continues. Now, ROW OR BLOW NIGGER! (COACH as UMPIRE disappears. STICK is still at the plate. HOOP, JAB, DOWN enter as Negro and pre-Negro League baseball players: first base, JAB as BUCK LEONARD. Second base, DOWN as FRANK GRANT. Third base, HOOP as OLIVER “GHOST” MARCELLE. They enter exchanging playful chatter) HOOP (AS GHOST) Fi we sum eid. JAB (AS BUCK) Tle ti no be elik shog. DOWN (AS GRANT) Hunte dan penn ni na sin-sglo-riou spo. JAB (AS BUCK) Back in the day they didn’t let us play in the majors, but they let Cubans in. HOOP (AS GHOST) So to play, the Cuban X Giants passed themselves off as Cubans. Negroes were from New Jersey. JAB (AS BUCK) Made up their own language to conceal their identity: Tle ti no be elik shog. STICK Damn. HOOP (AS GHOST) Here we go batter, hey batter batter. JAB (AS BUCK) Let’s see what you got rookie, lay one down, come on let’s play ball! DOWN (AS GRANT) Come on boy, what you waitin’ for, rain? (STICK tosses up and hits an invisible ball, it is a grounder to DOWN (AS GRANT) who skillfully scoops it up, flings it to JAB (AS BUCK) at second who tags the bag, leaps high in the air, and makes the relay throw to first. STICK, stunned, stands at the plate) JAB (AS BUCK) You outta there! STICK I’m what?! HOOP (AS GHOST) (To STICK) Negro this ain’t no “Fields of Dreams,” best to get on your horse.



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STICK But, what the—? I’m— JAB (AS BUCK) You wastin’ my time for one thing. STICK Your time? And who the hell are you? DOWN (AS GRANT) I hate it when they ask that. HOOP (AS GHOST) Play ball Negro! (Stunned, STICK tosses and hits another imaginary ball. JAB (AS BUCK) chases it down to his right, tosses behind his back to HOOP (AS GHOST) who makes the throw before a still confused STICK decides to run) STICK I— HOOP (AS GHOST) Negro’s ’bout to piss me off. JAB (AS BUCK) Come on now Ghost, give him a chance. STICK Like I said, who the hell—? DOWN (AS GRANT) Don’t ask again please. Every time you do that, little piece of my soul breaks off, disappears forever. HOOP (AS GHOST) Don’t be so damn dramatic! (DOWN, AS GRANT, pulls baseball cards out of his pocket and shows them to STICK) STICK Lou Gehrig, Duke Snider, Dizzy Dean . . . HOOP (AS GHOST) What I wanna know is what you’re doin’ with them in yo’ pocket. DOWN (AS GRANT) What? All I’m sayin’ is if I was one o’ them he wouldn’t need to ask, he’d know. (DOWN, AS GRANT, puts another card in STICK’s face) STICK Dimaggio.

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JAB (AS BUCK) Well, we ain’t them, we’re us, and ain’t nothin’ we can do ’out that now. HOOP (AS GHOST) (Sarcastically) No kiddin’. JAB (AS BUCK) Then let’s do what we’re here to do. DOWN (AS GRANT) Hey rookie come here. Look at this. (Shows STICK his wooden shin guard) STICK You can get those in plastic now you know. HOOP (AS GHOST) Smart ass! DOWN (AS GRANT) You don’t see it. STICK What’s there to see? I see you wearing a wooden shin guard. DOWN (AS GRANT) Where’d it come from? STICK A tree? HOOP (AS GHOST) I say we go. JAB (AS BUCK) We can’t yet, Ghost. DOWN (AS GRANT) Son, who invented the shin guard? STICK What? DOWN (AS GRANT) (About shin guard) This thing. STICK From what I hear it was Bud Fowler, right?



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DOWN (AS GRANT) Is that what you hear? STICK That’s what I heard. DOWN (AS GRANT) Ya heard wrong. STICK So who was it? DOWN (AS GRANT) Me. STICK And you are—? HOOP (AS GHOST) Boy’s slippin’ on his history. (DOWN, AS GRANT, takes off running and slides) JAB (AS BUCK) Niceeee. DOWN (AS GRANT) Who’s responsible for that? STICK The slide? HOOP (AS GHOST) Feet-first slide. JAB (AS BUCK) Feet-first. STICK You? DOWN (AS GRANT) Ya damn right. HOOP (AS GHOST) And that would make him . . . STICK I, I don’t know. JAB (AS BUCK) You don’t know. You don’t know. Stands to reason why you standin’ here arguing with this man ’bout your count.

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DOWN (AS GRANT) Back in the day I played second base for Buffalo . . . ran into a slight problem. Since I was one of the first Negroes—that’s what they called us back then. HOOP (AS GHOST) Negro please. DOWN (AS GRANT) I played second base and no need to tell you, every time one of them crackers—that’s what we called them back then. HOOP (AS GHOST) I’m gettin’ tired of doin’ this shit. DOWN (AS GRANT) Every time one-o-them slid into second they came in spikes up, lookin’ fo’ me, said they was “coon huntin’.” HOOP (AS GHOST) That’s what they called us back then! DOWN (AS GRANT) Left so many pieces of my legs on them fields I had to do somethin’, so . . . (Tapping shin guard) this was it. JAB (AS BUCK) So you see this shin guard was actually invented by Mr. Frank Grant, not Bud Fowler. STICK Grant? DOWN (AS GRANT) Well, it took you long enough. STICK (Trying to place him) Frank Grant, Frank Grant. Chief Tokohama! DOWN (AS GRANT) No! No! No! (HOOP, AS GHOST, and JAB, AS BUCK, laugh) STICK What’s the problem? DOWN (AS GRANT) (Deadly serious) You got the wrong man, rookie.



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JAB (AS BUCK) Listen son, this is Frank Grant, Frank, not Charlie. Frank. HOOP (AS GHOST) Although Frank you might-a-could-a. DOWN (AS GRANT) Sik em sa orgen! STICK I don’t get it. HOOP (AS GHOST) Exactly. JAB (AS BUCK) Charlie Grant, tried to break into the majors as an Indian, Chief Tokohama. DOWN (AS GRANT) They let Indians in, but not Negroes. HOOP (AS GHOST) Feathers, painted face . . . (Imitating stereotyped Indian chant) Woo-woo-woo. Not Indian enough though. DOWN (AS GRANT) That’s Charlie, not Frank. STICK Aw’rite, so Mr. Grant, you came up with the feet-first slide. (DOWN AS GRANT strikes “feet-first slide” pose JAB (AS BUCK) (About STICK’s head) See “Ghost” we up in there somewhere. HOOP (AS GHOST) Barely. STICK Ghost? HOOP (AS GHOST) That’s what the man said. STICK Ghost, Oliver “Ghost” Marcelle.

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HOOP (AS GHOST) Give that man a Watermelon. You got it kid! (To JAB, AS BUCK, and DOWN, AS GRANT) Now let’s get the hell outta here. STICK You hit Oscar Charleston over the head with a bat. HOOP (AS GHOST) Who told you that shit? STICK It’s documented. HOOP (AS GHOST) Can’t nobody prove that I actually made contact. JAB (AS BUCK) Oh believe you me, you made contact. STICK Then you must be “Cool Papa” Bell. JAB (AS BUCK) No, not exactly. HOOP (AS GHOST) That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout Buck, no history. DOWN (AS GRANT) This is Buck Leonard, part of what was the most feared three and four hitters in the Negro Leagues, him and Josh— STICK Josh Gibson. HOOP (AS GHOST) What you know ’bout Josh? STICK I know a little somethin’. DOWN (AS GRANT) Buck, school this boy ’bout Josh— HOOP (AS GHOST) ( Jumping in) Let me tell ’im!



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DOWN (AS GRANT) Tell ’im if you tellin’ ’im then. HOOP (AS GHOST) One day in Pittsburgh Josh hit this ball so hard it just vanished, poof! Next day in Philly this outfielder caught a ball fallin’ outta tha sky. The umpire says to Josh, “You out . . . ! yesterday in Pittsburgh!” DOWN (AS GRANT) Buck, tell the boy some truth ’bout Josh. JAB (AS BUCK) No greater hitter ever held a bat. One day that clown, at Yankee Stadium, knocked a home run into the right-field upper deck with one hand. STICK Man. So tell me this, where is Josh, Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson? How come they didn’t appear to school me? HOOP (AS GHOST) Ungrateful little— JAB (AS BUCK) Son, you got who you needed. HOOP (AS GHOST) Listen kid, we ain’t here for you to be dazzle with, although it wouldn’t hurt . . . or for you to tell your friends that you talked to us. STICK I don’t think that’ll be happenin’. HOOP (AS GHOST) We here to teach you how to play. STICK How to play, Pshew! HOOP (AS GHOST) With that one strike you got on you. DOWN (AS GRANT) We played with the same strike. HOOP (AS GHOST) Had to play with it. JAB (AS BUCK) All of us, from Fleet Walker to Hank.

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HOOP (AS GHOST) Chappie Johnson to Pee-Wee Butts. STICK Strike one. JAB (AS BUCK) We played with it though, played harder and better than most of them white boys. HOOP (AS GHOST) Then and now. JAB (AS BUCK) They’d let us in the league, all them baseball history books would-a been filled wid our faces. HOOP (AS GHOST) Ruth, Mantle, Cobb—racist son-of-a— DOWN (AS GRANT) Would-a been Gibson, Grant, Cool Papa Bell, Rube Foster, Home Run Johnson, Willie Wells, Newt Allen, Bingo Long! STICK Billy Dee Williams!? JAB (AS BUCK) Who? STICK Skip it. DOWN (AS GRANT) Gotta understand what you got, how you got it, and what you gotta do with it. HOOP (AS GHOST) That’s what you have to do. JAB (AS BUCK) This the only place where men of low birth and poor breeding become the idols of the cultured. Now this tha problem you have that we didn’t. We knew where it was that we stood when we stood at the plate. HOOP (AS GHOST) (Reading letter) Dear Mr. Nigger, I hope you don’t break the Babe’s record. How do I tell my kid that a nigger did it? JAB (AS BUCK) There was never a doubt who we were.



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DOWN (AS GRANT) (Reading letter) Dear nigger, how about some Sickle Cell? JAB (AS BUCK) What they thought we were. HOOP (AS GHOST) (Reading letter) Dear Nigger, you can hit all dem home runs over dem short fences, but you can’t take that black of yo face! JAB (AS BUCK) When we played we knew, they told us. DOWN (AS GRANT) I hope lightning strikes you for trying to blemish Ruth’s record. JAB (AS BUCK) You get outta yo’ place, you ain’t livin’ . . . here. DOWN (AS GRANT) Dear Jungle Bunny, You may beat Ruth’s record but there will always be only one Babe. You will be just another black (monkey) down from the trees. Go back to the Jungles. JAB (AS BUCK) We never got to be in style. HOOP (AS GHOST) You black animal, I hope you never live long enough to hit more home runs than the great Babe Ruth. Niggers are like animals and have a short life span. Martin Luther King was a troublemaker, and he had a short life span. JAB (AS BUCK) Shit, we weren’t even human. HOOP (AS GHOST) Dear Nigger Scum, the time has come to send the niggers back to Africa, there is an animal shortage over there. You niggers are no good, sorry, dirty as cockroaches and a dead nigger is a good nigger. STICK (Understanding) Strike one. DOWN (AS GRANT) Strike one. HOOP (AS GHOST) Strike one.

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JAB (AS BUCK) Strike one. COACH (AS UMPIRE) Strike one, Batter up! (COACH AS UMPIRE appears, the ATHLETES each pick up a bat and line up one behind the other, ready to swing) COACH (AS UMPIRE) (cont’d) Play ball! ( JAB swings at the air winds up into pretzel) COACH (AS UMPIRE) (cont’d) Play ball! (DOWN swings at JAB’s head, hits it, JAB falls to the ground. DOWN winds up into pretzel) COACH (AS UMPIRE) (cont’d) Play ball! (HOOP swings at DOWN’s head, hits it, DOWN falls to the ground. HOOP winds up into pretzel) COACH (AS UMPIRE) (cont’d) Play ball! (STICK swings at HOOP’s head, hits it. We hear a courtroom gavel bang) COACH (AS UMPIRE) (cont’d) You were born with it NIGGER! (Then: cause it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out, at the old ball game. Gavel again, then . . . ) VOICE Court’s adjourned! (STICK is the only one left standing. He looks at the fallen players, enraged. With a thunderous stomp, STICK begins his “FREEDOM STEP,” a traditional black fraternity step, Q-DOG style. Accompanied by the other ATHLETES, STICK steps as if his life depended on it) STICK Sun up to sun down Pickin’ that cotton. DOWN HUH! (STICK stops. This song won’t work anymore. A new song) STICK That’s the sound of the men . . . DOWN/HOOP/JAB HUH!



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STICK Workin’ on the chain gang. DOWN/HOOP/JAB HUH! HUH! STICK That’s the sound of the men . . . DOWN/HOOP/JAB HUH! STICK Workin’ on the chain gang. DOWN/HOOP/JAB HUH! HUH! STICK That’s the sound of the men . . . DOWN/HOOP/JAB HUH! STICK Workin’ on the chain gang. DOWN/HOOP/JAB HUH! STICK That’s the sound of the men . . . DOWN/HOOP/JAB HUH! STICK Workin’ on the chain gang. (All but STICK spot COACH positioning himself on the bow of the boat. He’s had enough! STICK attempts one last verse) STICK (cont’d) THAT’S THE SOUND OF THE MEN (No response to his call) WORKIN’ ON THE CHAIN GANG . . . (No response to his call) THAT’S THE SOUND OF THE MEN . . . (No response to his call)

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Workin’ on the chain gang. (STICK tries to repeat the previous chant, but is overpowered by COACH’s Heaves)

STICK (cont’d) That’s the sound of the men— COACH Heave! (STICK gives in, but he’s different, his “Ho” is now “Ho-oh” hip hop style) ATHLETES Ho! COACH Heave! ATHLETES Ho! (After a few strokes, HOOP stops rowing; he is advised by the others without missing a beat, to continue—that rhythm thang) COACH Heave! JAB Row Niggah! COACH Heave! HOOP No Niggah! COACH Heave! DOWN Row brotha! COACH Heave! HOOP No Niggah! COACH Heave! STICK Row brotha!



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COACH Heave! HOOP No Niggah! COACH Heave! (STICK offers HOOP his bat. HOOPS opts for a basketball instead, he jumps ship. ATHLETES watch in frozen astonishment. COACH glances overboard) COACH (cont’d) (Indifferent) Name . . . ATHLETES Million Hoops! COACH No buoyancy. (Noticing that remaining ATHLETES are not rowing) Row NIGGERS! (ATHLETES remain defiantly still) Either ROW OR BLOW! (HOOP walks into the next scene, a basketball gym. All lights are down but the one on HOOP and the backboard. He does a reverse dunk, strikes a “shit talkin’” pose. Lights out)

Scene 4 (In the dark we hear that other sports classic: “The Hey Song.” MASCOT dashes on stage—as only mascots can, and whips the audience/fans into a frenzy. MASCOT exits as COACH on a ladder covers up the number “75%” on one side of the rim, and “0%” on the other. We hear . . . )

VOICE Basketball, a game of much fakery and deception. An exceedingly physical game with a violation of the stated laws on every play. Our love for this game reflects at once our love for laws and our desire to resist them. (Task completed, COACH puts the ladder away and blows his whistle. HOOP, STICK, and DOWN are running wind sprints. STICK stops running and speaks directly to audience. The backboard speaks simultaneously. JAB is the BACKBOARD) JAB (AS BACKBOARD) There are thirteen thousand players in the NCAA, there are only sixty-four professional slots to be filled in the NBA. Less than three in one hundred college seniors make it for at least one year in professional basketball.

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STICK (With JAB) Lakers, Sonics, Suns, Kings, Warriors, Clippers, Jazz, Spurs, Rockets, Nuggets, Mavericks, Wolves, Bucks. (Beat) I just wanna buy my mamma a nice house. (STICK rejoins the others running, then disappears) COACH Fortune does not smile at command. She chooses when she will. Blessed are they on whom she smiles. (DOWN stops running and speaks to audience. He is joined by JAB as the BACKBOARD) JAB (AS BACKBOARD) (With DOWN’s next line) The average career span of players at the professional level is only three to four years. DOWN (With JAB) Magic, Knicks, Celtics, Nets, Heat, Sixers, Bullets, Hornets, Pacers, Cavaliers, Bulls, Hawks, Pistons. (Beat) I just wanna buy my mom a nice house. COACH I’m doing more than teaching you to win in sports. I’m teaching you to win in life. (DOWN rejoins HOOP then runs off stage, leaving HOOP running alone. Exhausted, as if ordered, he stands at attention and opens his mouth, COACH inspects his teeth) COACH (cont’d) Hmm not bad, not bad at all. Now let’s see how much work I have to do. (COACH tosses basketball to HOOP who starts ballin’, making shot after shot) COACH (cont’d) One hundred percent all the time! That’s all I ask. No less, no less. (An exhausted HOOP takes a break) COACH (cont’d) You ain’t gettin’ lazy on me now are you son? You don’t seem like the lazy type to me. HOOP No coach. Thanks coach. COACH Listen to me son, you are the one, understand? So you have to ask yourself why you, why not them. (Tosses basketball to HOOP)



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I think I can help you find that answer. Each of us were put on this earth to be the best at something. Most people spend their entire lives searching for that thing, but you, you, you’re one of the fortunate few who’s been given sight. You’ve been shown what you are to be, what you are to do with your life. It’s up to you to accept and use this gift or spend the rest of your life fighting against it.

HOOP So what happens? What happened to the others? COACH Didn’t have what it takes, couldn’t do nothing for them. Lost to their ignorance. HOOP So what happen to them? COACH (Slightly irritated) I just told you. HOOP But where did they go? COACH I . . . ! Son, let me tell you something that my daddy told me at the age of five. If you have to ask, you don’t need to know. HOOP (Confused) What? That makes no— COACH All you need to know is that you’ve got the gift. HOOP The gift? COACH Just one thing we gotta work on first. HOOP What’s that? COACH Your hang time. HOOP My hang time. COACH Exactly, let’s see what you got.

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HOOP Yo, thought you said I had the gift. COACH Let’s go son. Let’s put some air under your feet. (HOOP attempts a dunk, comes up short. COACH times his air time with his stopwatch) COACH (cont’d) (Disappointed) That’s no good! Let’s do it again! (HOOP tries the dunk again. Short!) COACH (cont’d) (Disappointed) And again! We can do this all day. (HOOP tries dunk again. Short!) COACH (cont’d) (Angry) And again! (Exhausted, HOOP tries dunk again. Way short!) COACH (cont’d) (Pissed off) Dammit! Get over here, now! Understand this son, if you have no hang time in the N-B-A you will get no playing time. No hang time, no playin’ time! Son, when you don’t push yourself to the limit you cheat your family, you cheat me, you cheat yourself and ultimately you cheat God, and God hates being cheated. HOOP (Exhausted) I hear you. COACH Do you? Do you?! Let me tell you something son, in this country, when you finish second, nobody knows your name. HOOP I— COACH Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing! HOOP Yeah— COACH Every time you win, you’re reborn; when you lose, you die a little.



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HOOP I— COACH Nice guys finish last! Defeat is worse than death ’cause you have to live with defeat! (HOOP balls) HOOP Got it! (COACH’s next line slowly awakens JAB AS BACKBOARD) COACH You must be prepared to give your all for the team. Better that one should be sacrificed than for the entire team to be destroyed. Gotta give the devil his due. Make a deal with the devil, pay him off with your soul. ( JAB AS BACKBOARD is positioned to block HOOP’S shots. HOOP shoots and is making all of his shots. He doesn’t notice JAB AS BACKBOARD yet) HOOP Ain’t nothin’ to it. (Makes shot) Money time. (Makes shot) Cashhh! (HOOP continues to shoot) HOOP (cont’d) Count it! (Shoots. COACH gets paid) Bucket! (Shoots) Two! (Shoots) Bank’s open baby! (HOOP gets comfortable with the bank shot) HOOP (cont’d) Bank! (Shoots) Money! (Shoots) Bank! (Shoots) Bank! (Shoots)

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Bank! ( JAB as BACKBOARD blocks HOOP’s shot, startling him)

JAB (AS BACKBOARD) (To HOOP) HEY! Bank’s closed! HOOP Yo! What the . . . what?! JAB (AS BACKBOARD) What the what is that the bank’s closed. And from what I hear you need to be workin’ on your hang time anyway. Ain’t that right? (COACH finally notices JAB AS BACKBOARD) HOOP This shit is crazy! JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Ya think maybe? HOOP Oh I got it, I get it, this is some kinda hidden video or something. That’s cool. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) I’m not thinking so. HOOP Whatever. (HOOP shoots and his shot is violently rejected by BACK) JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Dammit! Deaf is what you must be. HOOP Dope is what I am. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Understand this, keep the damn ball off me! HOOP What?! JAB (AS BACKBOARD) (Pointing to ball) Here, let me see that. (HOOP tosses it up to JAB AS BACK who violently throws it at HOOP) Keep the damn ball off me!



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HOOP Yo look, I don’t know what your problem is, but coach said— JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Oh that’s right, coach said . . . can’t think for yourself? So what did coach say? HOOP (Bangin’ ball off BACKBOARD) COACH (Bang!) said (Bang!) for me (Bang!) to put in (Bang!) some more (Bang!) work! (Dunks) JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Aaaaarrrrrrrggggggggg! HOOP Ahh man, you aw’rite? JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Stupid is what you are. This is what I do, understand? What I do, what I will do is that which I do best. I’ve accepted destiny and will reluctantly fulfill it. HOOP You buggin’. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) No, you’re buggin’ me. HOOP Buggin’ you? The hell am I buggin’ you? You’re buggin’ out. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) It’s not gotten through to you, has it? HOOP No, I guess it hasn’t. BACK/JAB You really don’t see. HOOP See what? BACK/JAB What are you doing? HOOP What? JAB (AS BACKBOARD) What are you doin’?

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(Waits) You’re talkin’ to a backboard, dumb ass!

HOOP Yo mamma! JAB (AS BACKBOARD) My mamma? HOOP S’what I said. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) I thought that was what you said. HOOP S’what I said . . . yo mamma! JAB (AS BACKBOARD) I’m certain you ain’t talkin’ ’bout nobody’s mamma when yo’ mamma got teeth on the side of her neck . . . chew like this. (Leans head from side to side in exaggerated motion) HOOP Yeah, well, yo mamma . . . yo mamma . . . sooo fat, she so fat . . . she look like a big-ass tree, talkin’ ’bout . . . leaves me alone, leaves— JAB (AS BACKBOARD) (Serious) My mamma is a tree, punk! HOOP Oh damn! Yeah . . . okay . . . look man or whatever, it’s been lovely but I’m out. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Can’t hang, huh? HOOP Yeah man whatever, I can’t hang, not like you anyway. (Enjoys his own wit) JAB (AS BACKBOARD) That I know. And for that reason I am here. HOOP What? JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Your hang time.



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HOOP Yeah whatever man. I’m sure you’re filled with more knowledge for me, but I think I’m-a just pass on your wood lessons. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Niggahs and flies . . . HOOP Kiss my ass— JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Kiss my glass! HOOP I would, but you’re wood! (HOOP enjoys his own wit, but JAB AS BACKBOARD is hurt by this last comment) JAB (AS BACKBOARD) I can see that. You don’t think I know that? I know that! HOOP (Playfully) My bad. Guess if I was wood I would know too. Hey man— JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Back. HOOP Back? JAB (AS BACKBOARD) That’s my name. HOOP Your name? JAB (AS BACKBOARD) What, I can’t have a name? Just ’cause I don’t wear it on my back. HOOP Whatever, what I do know is that you’re wastin’ my practice time and I need to put in some work. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) You put in some work, Hoop. Ain’t gettin’ nothin’ but tired. HOOP Naw, I ain’t gettin’ nothin’ but paid. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) That so, and exactly how much are you gettin’ paid?

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HOOP I gets paid. (COACH, off to the side, talks to MASCOT who is now the “source of money”) COACH No less than a million if we wear your shoes. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Casssh! How much you get? HOOP Free sneakers. . COACH Two million if we make the tournament. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Count it! How much you get? HOOP Four years of free education at a top university. COACH Four million if we make the Sweet Sixteen. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Money! How much you get? HOOP Free sweats. COACH Five million for the “Elite Eight.” JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Bank! How much?! HOOP Look, even if I don’t make the pros, which I will, I still got my degree. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) You mean graduate? HOOP That’s right. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) See this. Burden of Knowledge. (JAB, AS BACKBOARD, attempts to remove the covering over the numbers placed earlier by COACH) Who can’t have that?!



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COACH Hey, hey what’s going on here?! HOOP COACH, you see that? COACH Couldn’t miss it. You were shootin’ like shit, you expect us to advance to the finals with that crap?! HOOP I’m sayin’ . . . the backboard, didn’t you see it? COACH I see the damn backboard, my question is do you see it? HOOP COACH, I’m sayin’ . . . It was talkin’ to me. COACH Talkin’ to you, huh? HOOP I’m sayin’, the backboard was talkin’ to me. COACH Okay. Well, if that works for you, you listen to it. But from the looks of your last shots whatever it was tellin’ you wasn’t doin’ your game no good. HOOP He was ramblin’ something ’bout gettin’ paid . . . and ahh, hang time . . . and ahh what you were saying earlier about one is supposed to do what they’re supposed to do in life. Destiny. COACH Listen son, let me tell you something that my mother told me at the age of six: Talkin’ to plants and animals is normal; problems arise when they start talkin’ back. HOOP Serious coach, he was talkin’ to me, straight up. COACH Well, next time get some pointers on your bank shot. HOOP Actually Back— COACH Back? HOOP Yeah, that’s his name.

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COACH Told you his name. HOOP Back. COACH Okay that’s it, I think I might have pushed you pass the zone today. Hit the showers, that’s it. And most important, pay no attention to talking backboards! HOOP Naw coach, I’m tellin’ you— (COACH’s next line directed to JAB, AS BACK) COACH Not yet. Too soon! HOOP What? COACH Nothing. Look, you can’t let the pressure get to you like this son. It’s gonna be a hundred times more pressure in the N-B-A. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Niggahs Buy Anything. COACH N-B-A son. HOOP I’m tellin’ you coach . . . COACH Just hit the showers. (HOOP exits. COACH stares at JAB AS BACK. Lights out. In dark we hear . . . ) VOICE Good evening, and welcome to YOU BET YOUR LIFE . . . IS IN JEOPARDY. Today’s players: Coach, the college basketball coach who agreed to house a backboard formed from a lynching tree in his gymnasium in exchange for winning. COACH (To camera/audience) Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. VOICE And Hoop! The number one player on the number one team in the country.



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HOOP (To camera/audience) I just wanna buy my mamma a nice house. VOICE And now let’s welcome our host, the one, the only, Back! (Canned applause) Let’s play, YOU BET YOUR LIFE . . . IS IN JEOPARDY! JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Welcome. You both know the rules, so let’s play! (COACH, BACK, and HOOP are in “game show” formation) JAB (AS BACKBOARD) (cont’d) Let us begin, what, where, why, or when But let me explain like instructions to a game. HOOP Who is K-R-S-One? COACH (To himself) Who is K-R-S-One? JAB (AS BACKBOARD) That is correct. That’s one for the baller. Question number two, what sporting event began in 1875? COACH What is the Kentucky Derby? JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Where? COACH What is Churchill Downs? JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Fourteen of the fifteen jockeys were what? COACH What is black? JAB (AS BACKBOARD) That is correct. Today? How many jockeys in the Kentucky Derby are black? HOOP Zero? What is zero?

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JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Good guess. That is correct. Next question, why is that? HOOP Why is that? COACH Listen to me son, this piece of driftwood is trying to dupe you. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Please phrase your answer in the form of a question. COACH What is . . . this piece of particle board is gonna try to tell you is that like everything else, the reason for the lack of black jockeys is money and racism? JAB (AS BACKBOARD) (Sarcastically) Wrong answer. I was going to tell him that there are no black jockeys because black people don’t like horses. Correction, horses don’t like black folks. Correction, there are no black jockeys ’cause there are no short black people, that’s why there are so many black basketball players. COACH It’s all a game. HOOP So what’s the deal? JAB (AS BACKBOARD) The Negroes in that first derby were doing the same thing you’re doing now. HOOP What? COACH Using their God-given talent. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Working for their masters. COACH God is the master of us all. Ultimately we all work for him. We weren’t put on this earth to have a good time, but to contribute all that is in us. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Soon as the money to be made increased they got rid of (To HOOP) you. COACH You piece of shit!



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JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Wood. COACH Guess if I was useless I would be pissed off too. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) I have use. COACH You’re a wooden backboard in a world of fiberglass. You wanna play? Why don’t you tell him about your family tree? JAB (AS BACKBOARD) My family tree has nothing to do with this. COACH Your family tree has everything to do with this. Now it’s your turn to play. HOOP Family tree, I get it. COACH Your brother Pine. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Who is the baseball bat that hit three homers in the 1978 World Series in the hands of Reggie Jackson? HOOP That’s tight! COACH Uncle Packwood. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Who is part of the Boston Garden’s Parquet floor? HOOP Man! COACH Auntie May. JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Who was the Balance Beam last Olympics? COACH (To HOOP) Get it? This piece of wood grew out of a great family of trees, his problem . . . his purpose.

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HOOP What? JAB (AS BACKBOARD) I asked myself, why me? HOOP I asked myself, why me? JAB (AS BACKBOARD) I was given the burden of sight, shown what I was to be. The burden of knowledge. HOOP COACH said— JAB (AS BACKBOARD) I was given the “gift.” That which I do, I do best. HOOP What? JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Enlighten him . . . Coach. Finish your job. (A muttering COACH goes over to JAB AS BACKBOARD . . . ) COACH  . . . Be prepared to give your all for the team. Better that one should be sacrificed than for the entire team to be destroyed. Gotta give the devil his due. Make a deal with the devil, pay him with your soul. ( . . . and rips off the covering that he pasted on earlier, we see: Graduation rate, White players 75%, black players 0%. COACH turns to leave, throws a basketball to HOOP) COACH (cont’d) The burden of knowledge. (HOOP dribbles ball, positioning himself for one final dunk as JAB AS BACKBOARD’s words hypnotize him) JAB (AS BACKBOARD) Once the veil of ignorance is lifted from the eyes, destiny is inevitable. Unfulfilled, it dangles on the fringes of time like a partially severed appendage. For you, your hang time. For me, my hang time. Our destinies have been inextricably intertwined bringing your untimely end. That which gives me life at once compels me to produce a “strange fruit.” (HOOP drives to the basket and makes a violent dunk, pulls himself up through the rim. JAB AS BACKBOARD produces a Hangman’s noose, slips it around HOOP’s neck and hangs him) JAB (AS BACK) (cont’d) Bank is closed. (Blackout. As lights slowly fade up HOOP, with noose still around his neck, leads the chant and step and is joined by STICK, DOWN, and JAB. With a thunderous stomp, HOOP begins his



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“FREEDOM STEP,” a traditional black fraternity step, Q-DOG style. Accompanied by the other ATHLETES, HOOP steps as if his life depended on it)

HOOP Sun up to sun down Pickin’ that cotton— (HOOP needs a new song) That’s the sound of the men Workin’ on the chain gang— (HOOP needs a new song) You know I’m proud to be Black y’all . . . DOWN/STICK/JAB HUH! HOOP And that’s a fact y’all . . . DOWN/STICK/JAB HUH! HOOP And if you try to take what’s mine I’ll take it back y’all . . . DOWN/STICK/JAB HUH! HOOP It’s like that! You know I’m proud to be Black y’all . . . DOWN/STICK/JAB HUH! HOOP And that’s a fact y’all . . . DOWN/STICK/JAB HUH! HOOP And if you try to take what’s mine I’ll take it back y’all . . . DOWN/STICK/JAB HUH! HOOP It’s like that! You know I’m proud to be Black y’all . . .

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DOWN/STICK/JAB HUH! HOOP And that’s a fact y’all . . . DOWN/STICK/JAB HUH! HOOP And if you try to take what’s mine I’ll take it back y’all . . . DOWN/STICK/JAB HUH! HOOP It’s like that! (All but HOOP spot COACH who positions himself on the bow of the boat. He’s had enough. HOOP attempts one last verse but is overpowered by COACH’s Heave) HOOP (cont’d) You know I’m proud to be Black y’all (No response to his call) A that’s a fact y’all (No response to his call) And If you try to take what’s mine I’ll take it back y’all (No response to his call) It’s like that? You know I’m proud to be black y’all— COACH Heave! (HOOP gives in, but he’s different, his “Ho” is now “Ho-oh” hip hop style) COACH (cont’d) Heave ATHLETES Ho! COACH Heave! ATHLETES Ho! (After a few strokes, JAB stops rowing, he is advised by the others without missing a beat, to continue—that rhythm thang)



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COACH Heave! DOWN Row brotha! COACH Heave! JAB No Niggah! COACH Heave! STICK Row brotha! COACH Heave! JAB No Niggah! COACH Heave! HOOP Row brotha! COACH Heave! JAB No Niggah! COACH Heave! (HOOP offers JAB his basketball. JAB opts for boxing gloves) COACH (cont’d) (Indifferent) Name? ATHLETES Million Jabs! COACH No buoyancy. (Noticing that remaining ATHLETES are not rowing)

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Row NIGGERS! (ATHLETES remain defiantly still) Either ROW OR BLOW! (Blackout)

Scene 5 (In the dark we hear the bell of a boxing ring)

VOICE Boxing, the sweet science. (Lights rise on a boxing ring made up of HOOP, STICK, and DOWN as the corners. The ropes of the ring are tied around their necks, waist, and ankles. They wear “focus gloves” that JAB uses as his opponents throughout. COACH is the REFEREE. MASCOT, now the “Ring Girl,” enters the ring in Bikini and pumps carrying a card that reads: Round 1: HOPE DEFEATED. All opponents are imagined) VOICE (cont’d) In this corner, with a record of twenty-eight fancy suits, one luxury auto-mobile, and fifteen white prostitutes, the first Negro, black, African-American . . . whatever; Heavyweight Champion of the World, Jack Johnson, Johnson! ( JAB AS JACK JOHNSON raises gloved hand) VOICE (cont’d) And in this corner hailing from the heart of America, with a record of no significance, but believing in the superiority of his race as the sole factor needed to defeat the Negro, White Hope, Hope!! COACH (AS REFEREE) Okay gentlemen, you received my instructions in the locker room. I want to see a clean fight. No rabbit punches, no coon punches, break when I tell you to, obey my commands, and protect yourself at all times, do you understand? (To WHITE HOPE) And please defeat this Negro . . . for all of us. I hear their skulls are harder than normal, and their stomachs are weaker than ours. You know. More animalistic, understand? (To both boxers) Very well, gentlemen, touch gloves and come out fighting when you hear the bell. (Bell. JAB leaps up from his stool and begins boxing. His style is all defense, blocking the imaginary punches while throwing very few) MASCOT (AS ANNOUNCER) And here we go. Johnson comes out in his trademark style, shaven head, black trunks, black shoes, and a dark demeanor, as if he had a choice. White Hope meets him in the center of the ring and immediately goes to work. Johnson, the Negro, appears to be allowing Hope to land punches as



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he wishes. We’ve witnessed this tactic before as the Negro Johnson has demolished several boxers looking like White Hope. And there goes Hope to the midsection of Johnson the Negro! ( JAB, AS JOHNSON, speaks with Standard English accent while being hit, but not hurt, by HOPE)

JAB (AS JOHNSON) I find this pugilistic exchange exasperatingly mundane. At will I’m able to defeat, yeah even demolish these endless imitations of champions that I am forced to face. HOOP Come on Negro, do some work! This is boring! STICK Yeah, stick and move, bob and weave, a combination, something. HOOP We gettin’ some action here tonight or what? JAB (AS JOHNSON) Indeed you shall my good man. DOWN Indeed you shall? STICK (To DOWN, imitating JAB) Indeed you shall my good man. HOOP What’s up? JAB (AS JOHNSON) (To the corners) You obviously lack the required insight into Prize Fighting necessary to render judgment as to its validity or to appreciate its profundity. STICK Naw Negro, we just bored! JAB (AS JOHNSON) True greatness lies in a man’s ability to evaluate his surroundings and not merely survive, but excel in them. Observe. MASCOT (AS ANNOUNCER) And there goes Johnson with a left and a right to Hope’s head, a straight right to the chest. and a left hook t’ the body. Looks like Hope might be in a world of trouble. And this is only round one. ( JAB lowers his gloves, stands in front of invisible boxer and is being hit in the stomach) And again Johnson reverts to his defensive style, and hope is wailing away at his midsection, staying away from that thick Negro skull. Smart move

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HOOP What’s up with this? DOWN Is he stupid? STICK Which one? The hitter or the hit-ee? HOOP Why is he just punching him in the stomach? STICK White people. DOWN Yo what’s up Jack, why he just hitting you in the stomach? STICK White Hopes. DOWN Why don’t he hit you upside yo’ head? JAB (AS JOHNSON) In their ignorance, their scientists assert that our skulls are thicker than normal due to our smaller brains. They even say that they are able to prove that our stomachs are also weaker than the norm. More animalistic. HOOP Put him on the canvas! STICK Now that’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout! HOOP Come on man, what you gon’ do?! (Bell. JAB goes to his corner) MASCOT (AS ANNOUNCER) And that’s the end of the first round. And now a public service announcement: “Johnson is black and has more money than is good for a black man. The Department of Justice must aid the ‘white hopes’ in taking away the superfluous cash of the stupidly brazen Negro pugilist . . . Anglo-Saxon America must be relieved of this most dangerous menace to the preservation of its color.” (Bell. JAB returns to his old defensive style) STICK Damn, what happened? He’s back to that ole whack style.



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HOOP Lookin’ like a punk. ( JAB falls against ropes near DOWN) DOWN Come on, you a baaad-ass, Jack! (During following JAB boxes wildly, finally defeating his imaginary opponent) STICK You can raise your head high! HOOP You can make your race proud! DOWN You can hit a white man back! STICK You can raise your head high! HOOP You can make your race proud! DOWN You can hit a white man back! STICK You can raise your head high! HOOP You can make your race proud! DOWN You can hit a white man back! STICK You can raise your head high! HOOP You can make your race proud! DOWN You can hit a white man back! MASCOT (AS ANNOUNCER) And the winner by a devastating knock out, and new Heavyweight Champion of the World . . . HOOP Amaze an’ Grace, how sweet it sounds, Jack Johnson knocked Jim Jeffries down . . .

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STICK Jim Jeffries jumped up an’ hit Jack on the chin. An’ then Jack knocked him down again . . . DOWN The Yankees hold the play, The white man pulls the trigger. But it makes no difference what the white man say . . . HOOP/STICK/DOWN  . . . The world champion’s still a nigger!! JAB (AS JOHNSON) (Holding up one glove. Defeated) Still. A niggah! ( JAB boxes wildly through the following) HOOP No film? DOWN No film? STICK No film? MASCOT (AS ANNOUNCER) This film is a disgusting exhibition. A film of this fight will pervert morals and incite riots. A film of this fight will arouse uppitiness and violence. HOOP Many of the riots followed a similar pattern. They were started by blacks who, inspired by Johnson’s example, refused to shuffle and briefly lifted their heads and raised their voices in pride. MASCOT (AS ANNOUNCER) Because of the disturbances caused by baaad-ass Jack winning the Heavyweight Championship of the World from a white man, they are now seeking to make the playing field more level. Make it fair. As a result, no Negro will be allowed to fight for the Heavyweight Championship for the next twenty-seven years. Race riots are inevitable when a superior people allow “these people” to be deluded and degraded by such false ideals. DOWN In Little Rock, two blacks were killed by a group of whites after an argument about the fight. HOOP In Houston, Charles Williams’s throat was slashed from ear to ear for openly celebrating Johnson’s victory . . . In Roanoke, Virginia . . . In Wilmington, Delaware . . . In Atlanta . . .



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STICK In Louisiana, three blacks were killed by white assailants . . . DOWN In New York, one Negro beaten to death . . . MASCOT (AS ANNOUNCER) There will be a Great White Hope! STICK  . . . In Shreveport, Louisiana three Negroes killed . . . MASCOT (AS ANNOUNCER) There will be a Great White Hope! HOOP  . . . In Uvalda, Georgia, three Negroes killed . . . MASCOT (AS ANNOUNCER) There will be a Great White Hope! (Pause) It’s obvious that this film has not been properly edited in order to produce the desired result. A true American champion. Once it has been properly recreated the public will then be allowed to view it, no matter how long or Rocky the road . . . HOOP/DOWN/STICK/MASCOT THERE WILL BE A GREAT WHITE HOPE! (Bell. JAB falls to one knee in the middle of the ring. Ring Girl enters ring in bikini and pumps with card that reads: Round Two: AMERICAN HERO. JAB shadowboxes through introduction) VOICE In this corner fighting for the pride of America: HOOP The Detroit Negro . . . DOWN The dusky challenger . . . STICK The colored pugilist . . . HOOP The sepia slugger . . . DOWN The dark dynamiter . . . STICK The dusky David from Detroit . . .

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HOOP Mike Jacobs’s pet pickaninny . . . DOWN The shufflin’ shadow . . . STICK The murder man of those maroon mitts . . . HOOP The tan Tarzan of thump . . . DOWN The saffron sphinx . . . STICK The coffee-colored K.O. king . . . HOOP The Bronx Bomber Joe Louis! DOWN  . . . Louis . . . STICK  . . . Louis! ( JAB stands in his corner: bowed head, lips tight, shoulders hunched. He modestly raises glove) MASCOT (AS ANNOUNCER) And in this corner fighting for the Fatherland and the pride of the Aryan race: Max Schmelling, Schmelling! COACH (AS REFEREE) Okay gentlemen, you received my instructions in the locker room. I want to see a clean fight. No rabbit punches, no coon punches, break when I tell you to, obey my commands, and protect yourself at all times, do you understand? MASCOT (AS ANNOUNCER) And here we go. But first this public announcement: “Joe we need muscles like yours to beat Germany,” Signed, President Franklin Roosevelt. ( JAB, AS JOE LOUIS, boxes in the different corners,each of whom offer him advice) HOOP No soft fights. STICK No fixed fights. DOWN Live and fight clean.



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HOOP Never have your picture taken with a white woman. STICK Never go into a nightclub alone. DOWN Never gloat over a fallen opponent. HOOP Always walk with your head down. STICK Never defeat your opponents too fast or too bad. DOWN We can’t afford another Jack. MASCOT (AS ANNOUNCER) When the Germans heard how badly the Bronx Bomber was beating Schmelling, they cut the radio wires to Germany. Schmelling had some fractures of the vertebrae and badly bruised back muscles by the end of the fight. HOOP (To JAB, AS JOE LOUIS) They didn’t want their people to know that just a plain old nigger man was knocking the shit out of the Aryan race. MASCOT (AS ANNOUNCER) And with a devastating punch, the Bronx Bomber has destroyed Schmelling and with it the myth of Aryan supremacy, just like Jesse Owens did a year and a half ago at the Olympics. Watch out Hitler, here comes America! JAB (AS JOE LOUIS) Today I am an American. DOWN Back of the bus! STICK How many bubbles in a bar of soap? HOOP Whites only! DOWN Segregation today. Segregation forever! MASCOT (AS ANNOUNCER) Today Joe Louis is an American.

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JAB (AS JOE LOUIS) It was my duty as a citizen of this country to . . . HOOP One man, one vote. JAB (AS JOE LOUIS)  . . . rise above the bigotry and apartheid . . . STICK Dred Scott. JAB (AS JOE LOUIS)  . . . to prove that we are just as much of a human as the next man. DOWN Dead Scott. JAB (AS JOE LOUIS) If I can do this, endure this, then I can prove our worth as humans, our value as Americans, then they’ll have no choice but to accept us as equals. MASCOT (AS ANNOUNCER) (Formally) Joseph Louis Barrow’s life was an indictment of racial bigotry. He was a credit to his race, he is to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Usually a champion rides on the shoulders of the nation and its people. In this case the nation rode on the shoulders of its champion. DOWN Ring the bell of liberty for Joe Louis! (The bell is rung slowly, boxing’s salute to fallen boxers) (MASCOT, AS RING GIRL, enters ring with card that reads: Round 3: THE GREATEST. JAB rises up a new man, MUHAMMAD ALI. He wears an Olympic gold medal around his neck, does “Ali shuffle” and begins to “float like a butterfly”) DOWN (cont’d) How does it feel to win something for a country where you can’t eat at the same table with a white man? JAB (AS ALI) The USA is still the best country in the world. (In the following lines STICK, HOOP, and JAB don “southern accents”) STICK Well what d’ ya know, the “Olympic nigger.” HOOP I bet ya my girl would love that there medal.



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STICK Yeah she would. HOOP She shure would. STICK Nigger ain’t suppose to be eatin’ in here in the first place. HOOP Then I figures that there Olympic medal should do just nicely for you breakin’ the law an’ all. STICK Guess we gon’ just have to take it. JAB (AS ALI) (Stops boxing) They trapped us on a bridge my friend and me. Barely convinced them to let us go free. For weeks I had worn it, my symbol of pride Believing I had achieved what had been denied. But now what’s the worth? Now what’s the real cost? So, deep in the Ohio my medal I tossed. Land of the free and the brave and the strong Land where the brave has been slave for too long. ( JAB, AS ALI, boxes. After a few punches . . . ) JAB (AS ALI) (cont’d) What’s my name?! (Shuffles and jabs) What’s my name?! (Shuffles and punches) What’s my name?! (Punch. Makes his way back to his corner) STICK He say it? What’d he call you? JAB (AS ALI) Whatever it was, he’s gonna regret That I ain’t heard my right name yet. HOOP So what you gon’ do? JAB (AS ALI) A left and a right upper cut

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A jab, a hook, then he gon’ be lookin’ up Ain’t real sure but I feel in my gut He gon’ say my right name when I put ’im on his butt. ( JAB boxes) What’s my name? ( JAB shuffles and jabs a few more times, then stands over his fallen victim) Try this, float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.

DOWN/HOOP/STICK Rumble young man rumble! ( JAB, AS ALI, stands in the center of the ring, arms raised in victory) JAB (AS ALI) I am the greatest! I am the greatest! ( JAB leans against the ropes, Ali rope-a-dope style) HOOP So what you gon’ do? They said if you don’t enlist they gon’ strip your belt. JAB (AS ALI) Strip me? Strip me? Listen, It don’t matter if I don’t wear a stitch I’m still the true champ til the day I quit! HOOP What about the belt? JAB (AS ALI) Let ’em take it, the way I figure No Vietcong ever called me nigger. DOWN/HOOP/STICK Ali, Ali, Ali, Ali! (Bell) MASCOT (AS ANNOUNCER) To the thousands at ringside and the millions and millions watching around the world, LET’S GET READY TO RUMBLEEEE! (MASCOT, AS RING GIRL, enters ring with card that reads: Round 4: FINALLY HOPE. Rocky’s theme blares. Hey, THIS IS THE MOVIE! A gigantic poster of Rocky Balboa hovers above the ring. A blindfolded JAB shadowboxes in slow motion. He stops and looks around the ring, confused) JAB (AS ALI) What’s my name? What’s my name?! STICK You are the challenger.



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JAB But what’s my name?! STICK You are the challenger. JAB But what’s my name?! DOWN You’re the challenger. JAB That’s not a name. They took away my name! DOWN You gets no name. HOOP No name. STICK (About Rocky poster) You don’t get one ’til he gives you one. JAB How do I fight without a name? DOWN How do we sing in a strange land? JAB What the hell? STICK Close. Hollywood. JAB (Convincing himself) Okay, okay, I can do this. STICK I don’t know. This is another world, Jab. JAB Naw, naw, naw. (beat) Okay, so how do I fight him? I mean, what’s the game plan? HOOP Truth is, we have no plan.

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STICK No strategy, result’s already in. JAB Already in? I don’t know nothin’ ’bout a fix. I didn’t agree to no fix. DOWN You didn’t have to, you are the fix. JAB This makes no sense. HOOP Don’t have to. It’s a movie. JAB I thought films were outlawed. DOWN That was a long time ago. JAB What about proper editing? HOOP We were cut out where they didn’t want us and spliced in where they need us. JAB What about the desired results? STICK (Points to audience) Their desires will be the result. JAB But they can’t do this to me. I’m real! (Still blindfolded, JAB boxes valiantly, arms flailing at the air) HOOP (Deadpan) Go Champ go. Go Champ go. JAB Hey look, I’m winning! STICK Everybody wins the early rounds. HOOP Apollo Creed won ’em.



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DOWN Drago won ’em. STICK Mr. “T” won ’em. JAB But, they’re not real! DOWN Real to whom? JAB (Pointing at Rocky’s picture) HE’s not real. STICK Image is everything! ( JAB is knocked down several times. He finally can’t make it back up. The CORNERS throw wooden pennies into the ring at him) JAB (To fans from canvas) I am not invisible! (COACH and JAB become characters from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man) COACH What’s that word you say, boy? JAB Social responsibility. COACH What? JAB Social . . . COACH Louder. JAB  . . . Responsibility. COACH More! JAB Respon—

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COACH Repeat! JAB —sibility. COACH Social . . . What?! JAB Equality— COACH Say that slowly, son. JAB What, sir? COACH What you just said. JAB Social responsibility, sir. COACH You weren’t being smart, were you, boy? JAB No, sir. COACH You’re sure that about equality was a mistake? JAB Oh yes, sir. I was swallowing blood. I was swallowing my blood. DOWN I was swallowing my blood. STICK I was swallowing my blood. HOOP I was swallowing my blood. (The CORNERS free themselves from the ropes and join JAB in the middle of the ring. They peel off their brands. COACH positions himself on the bow of the boat. With a thunderous stomp, JAB begins his “FREEDOM STEP,” a traditional black fraternity step, Q-DOG style. JAB, DOWN, STICK, and HOOP step as if their lives depended on it. They incorporate their previous steps. The force of this act rocks the boat until COACH falls over)



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COACH I, I can’t . . . swim! (DOWN, STICK, HOOP, and JAB glance overboard at COACH) MASCOT (AS ANNOUNCER) Name?! DOWN COACH! STICK Ump! HOOP COACH! JAB Ref! DOWN/HOOP/JAB/STICK (Indifferent) No buoyancy. (The ATHLETES finish their peeling then turn their eyes to the boat. They’re different. They board the boat and take their seats and after several failed attempts at rowing they finally achieve a level of unison. HOOP, JAB, DOWN, and STICK row into the darkness together. MASCOT dashes on stage accompanied by that ultimate sports classic “Kiss Him Goodbye” and whips the audience/fans into a frenzy. Curtain. Lights rise again: COACH ascends from “the ocean” proudly holding his award: GREATEST COACH OF ALL TIMES. As he quiets the crowd . . . ) COACH Thank you, thank you very much. Thank you. Today as I stand here at the pinnacle of success, at the apex of my achievements, I am humbled. Humbled, not only by your recognition, but by this realization that any accomplishment of this magnitude is never attained alone. There have been many, far too many. There have been many, far too many. There have been many, far too many. (COACH continues to rise revealing his platform: Naked Black Bodies, BABIES THIS TIME) (Blackout. End of Play)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to the late Carmen Gillespie, the Series Editor who initiated this powerful book project and invited me to serve as editor. Towards the end of completing this book, Carmen Gillespie passed away unexpectedly. We all mourn this loss and are deeply grateful for Carmen’s support along the way. Many of us remember her smile, her hugs, her beautiful spirit, her brilliance, and her strong belief in the importance of this book. Carmen was a champion of excellence and we are all honored to have worked with her in some capacity. Other persons and entities to acknowledge include Greg Clingham, Pamelia Dailey, Michelle Lauver, Bucknell University Press, Rutgers University Press, University of Cincinnati Department of English and Comparative Literature, Amy Pennington, Marianna Vertullo, Jonathan Lassiter, Rahbi Hines, J. Luckett, Jamia Luckett, and Richard Majek. Thank you to Carrie Mae Weems and Rickerby Hinds, who agreed to bless this project with their artistry, and thank you to the chapter contributors for producing important, necessary scholarship. Finally, big hugs to my family and friends who are always present in the work that is most dear to me.

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

S H A R R E LL D. LU C K E T T, PhD, is director of the Helen Weinberger Center for Drama and Playwriting and assistant professor of drama and performance studies in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati. She also serves as Affiliate Faculty in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program, and collaborates with the College-­Conservatory of Music (CCM). Luckett is the author of YoungGiftedandFat: An Autoethnography of Size, Sexuality, and Privilege (Routledge 2018); lead editor of Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches (Routledge 2017), an award-winning book that highlights diverse acting/directing methods rooted in Black American culture; and founding director of the Black Acting Methods Studio, a mobile and online training program in performance theory and practice. A sought-after scholar and artist, Luckett has had residences at renowned institutions, such as the Lincoln Center, Harvard University, and 92Y. Her upcoming research projects engage with transweight celebrity performance and the work of Freddie Hendricks, the Youth Ensemble of Atlanta, and Tarell Alvin McCraney. R I K K I BY R D is a PhD student in African American studies at Northwestern University. She is a writer, scholar, and educator with research interests in Black studies, visual culture, fashion history, and cultural studies. Her research has appeared at Art Basel: Miami and has been published or is forthcoming in various academic journals and books, including BIAS: Journal of Dress Practice, Companion of African American Theatre and Performance, and QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking. She has also written for Teen Vogue, Artsy, and Hyperallergic, among several other media outlets. LU C Y C A PL A N , PhD, is a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University. She is a graduate of the American studies and African American studies programs at Yale University. Her current project, High Culture on the Lower Frequencies: African Americans and Opera, 1900–1940, is a study of radical engagements with the art form of opera among African American performers, critics, and composers. She received the 2016 Rubin Prize for Music Criticism, and her writing has been published in the New Yorker and Symphony Magazine, among others. D O R I A E . C H A R L SO N is a PhD candidate in theatre arts and performance studies at Brown University, where she also earned an MA in history. Charlson’s dissertation research lies at the intersection of migrant labor, dance studies, and performance historiography. J A S M I N E CO LES is a performance artist, educator, and holistic nutritionist and practitioner. She thrives on sharing stories that shift paradigms, ignite change, and cultivate dialogue through themes that unravel the human experience. Aesthetically, her work stems from rigorous intellectual and physical research and is engaged in exploring social issues, wellness, risk, and highly innovative immersive storytelling. Coles’s work is grounded in ritual poetic drama within the African continuum (RPD), a performance methodology created by Tawnya Pettiford-Wates. RPD emphasizes the use of an ensemble and its ability to shape a community through transformative work grounded in revelation. 309

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About the Contributors

FLO R E N C I A V. CO R N E T, PhD, is OSP Faculty for Intercultural Inclusion and Diversity Learning at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina, where she is also affiliated with the Race and Reconciliation Dialogues, Latin American Studies, African American Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies programs. She is senior editor of ATHENA: OSP Research and Literary Journal. Some of her articles have been published in Wagadu, Dutch Crossing, Palimpsest, and Africology journals. A B BY D O BSO N is artist-in-residence with the African American Policy Forum and an independent scholar and sonic conceptual performing artist and activist. Abby founded the Freedom Now Sonic Ensemble, serves on the board of NOW-NYC, and performs with Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter. She received a juris doctorate degree from Georgetown University Law Center and a bachelor’s degree from Williams College in political science and history. Passionate about using music as a tool for empathy cultivation and civic engagement, Dobson creates music to inspire audiences to engage in action to promote transformative social change. See www.abbydobsonsings.com. N E T TR I C E R . G A S K I N S , PhD, attended Georgia Tech where she received her doctorate in digital media in 2014. Her institutional affiliation is Art & Algorhythms. Gaskins’s model for “techno-vernacular creativity” investigates the characteristics of this production and its application in STEAM learning. She blogs for Art21, is the producer of the Peabody Award– winning PBS series Art in the Twenty-First Century, and has published in several journals and books, including “Deep Sea Dwellers: Drexciya and the Sonic Third Space” in Shima, “African Cosmogram Matrix in Contemporary Art and Culture” in Black Theology, Future Texts: Subversive Performance and Feminist Bodies (Parlor Press 2015), and Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness (Lexington Books 2015). RI CKERBY H I N DS is chair of the Department of Theater Film & Digital Production and professor of playwriting at the University of California, Riverside. Hinds has the unique ability to challenge conventional notions of the stage while remaining respectful of its long history and traditions. A native of Honduras, Central America, who immigrated to South Central Los Angeles at age thirteen, Hinds is one of the pioneers of hip hop theatre with his play Daze to Come premiering in 1989. Possessing an MFA in playwriting from UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, Hinds’s work explores the human condition, employing the aesthetics, elements, and rhythms of hip hop culture. In addition to his mission to open up the stage to diverse voices and experiences, Hinds is driven to take theatre to new audiences. Some of his works include Dream­scape, Keep Hedz Ringin’, and Birthmark for the stage as well as the screenplay My Name is Myeisha. G E N E V I E V E H YAC I NT H E, PhD, is assistant professor of Visual Studies at California College of the Arts. She earned her PhD in history of art and architecture at Harvard University with a focus on West African, Black Atlantic, and contemporary art. She serves on the editorial boards of Stella Maris Multidisciplinary International Journal of Academic Research, Chennai, India, Stella Maris College and ab-­Original: Journal of Indigenous Studies and First Nations’ and First Peoples’ Cultures, University Park, Penn State. Her book, Radical Virtuosity: Ana Mendieta and the Black Atlantic, is forthcoming from MIT Press, fall 2019. A M B E R J O H N SO N , PhD, is an award-winning associate professor of communication and social justice at Saint Louis University and the creator of the Justice Fleet, a mobile social



About the Contributors 311

justice museum that fosters healing through art, dialogue, and play. As a scholar/artist/activist, Johnson’s research and activism focus on narratives of identity, protest, and social justice in digital media, popular media, and everyday lived experiences. Their forthcoming book A Great Inheritance uses memoir and self-help education to highlight healthy forms of support for trans and nonbinary folks alongside visionary fiction to speculate on gender futurity as a site of liberation. J U LI E B. J O H N SO N , PhD, is a senior lecturer at Spelman College in the Department of Dance Performance & Choreography and the African Diaspora and the World program. Her work focuses on intersections of creative practice, community interaction, embodied research, and African diaspora movement aesthetics. Julie is a cofounding editor of The Dancer-Citizen, exploring the work of socially engaged artists, and is executive artistic director of Moving Our Stories, LLC, mapping embodied memory and personal narratives as a mode of inquiry, empathy, and empowerment. Julie earned a PhD in dance studies at Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance. J . M I C H A E L K I N S E Y   is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. He began his training in music and theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, and later received a BFA in musical theatre from the esteemed University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. His performance career highlights include a host of regional theatre and national tours which garnered him two Audelco Award nominations for Best Actor in a Musical. Through his collaboration with Camille A. Brown & Dancers, his theatrical contributions were included in the 2014 Bessie Award–winning ballet Mr. Tol E. Rance. Thereafter, he received his MA in performing and media arts from Cornell University. Through this affiliation he presented research and performances at the Black Theatre Network, Association of Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), Hemispheric Institute’s Encuentro (Santiago, Chile), and the Summer Institute in Performance Studies (Northwestern University). Presently, Kinsey is redeveloping his craft through solo performance, interrogating the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. SA M M A NTH A M C C A LL A is a doctoral candidate in English at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. She is a 2018 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Scholars for the Dream award recipient. McCalla specializes in Caribbean literature and culture, and works from a critical race theory framework. At national conferences, she has presented research on diversity in academia and “Standard” American English and Caribbean English usage in U.S. university classrooms. DA N I E L M C N EI L , PhD, is the inaugural Visiting Public Humanities Faculty Fellow at the University of Toronto and associate professor of history at Carleton University in Canada. He has previously held the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Professorship of African and Black Diaspora Studies at DePaul University in the United States, and taught media and cultural studies at the University of Hull and Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. His award-winning book, Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic (Routledge 2011), brings together African and Black Diaspora Studies, Media and Cultural Studies and other related fields of inquiry to map the cultural and intellectual histories of Black identities that work within, across, outside, and against the nation-state. S H O N D R I K A M OSS- BO U LD I N , PhD, is assistant professor in the Department of Music and Theatre at Rhodes College. She is the cofounder of Soulploitation Creative Works, LLC

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About the Contributors

(www.scworks.tv), a multimedia production company based out of Atlanta and Los Angeles. She has taught at several universities throughout the years while also working as a freelance theatre director/choreographer, acting coach, and consultant. Moss-Bouldin earned all of her degrees from Northwestern University (BA, MA, PhD) in performance. In 2018, she was awarded a Mellon research grant to study theatre and performance at Harvard University and she is a proud member of the Lincoln Center’s 2012 Directors Lab. TAW N YA PE T TI FO R D -WAT ES, PhD, is associate professor of graduate pedagogy in acting and directing at Virginia Commonwealth University. Pettiford-Wates is the artistic director and founder of the Conciliation Project, a nonprofit social justice theatre company. She is also a playwright, director, actor, poet, writer/scholar-activist, and teacher. Her television, film, industrial, voiceover, and commercial credits are extensive. Pettiford-Wates is a contributing author in the award-winning Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches, edited by Sharell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer (Routledge, 2017). Her chapter is titled “Ritual Poetic Drama within the African Continuum: The Journey from Shakespeare to Shange.” C A R R I E M A E W E E M S is an award-winning mixed media artist. Through image and text, film and performance, and her many convenings with individuals across a multitude of disciplines, Weems has created a complex body of work that investigates, challenges, and reveals how systems of representation and constructs of power limit and define the depth of our collective history. Weems has received a multitude of awards, grants, and fellowships, including the MacArthur “Genius” grant; U.S. Department of State’s Medals of Arts; Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome; the National Endowment of the Arts; and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, among many others. She is represented in public and private collections around the world. Major solo exhibitions of Weems’s work include Carrie Mae Weems: The Museum Series, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2014), and Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, which also traveled to Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University; Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2013–2014. Weems has been represented by Jack Shainman Gallery since 2008. She lives in Syracuse, New York, with her husband, Jeffrey Hoone, who is executive director of Light Work.

INDEX

2 Chainz, 131 3 Women, 74 “11 Major Misconceptions about the Black Lives Matter Movement,” 117–18 12 Years a Slave, 8, 81 A-One, 114 Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem, 80 abolitionists, 29, 33 Abramović, Marina, 120 adinkra symbol, 22, 43, 201, 207 aesthetics: activism and, 1–6, 55–60; aesthetic echo, 141; dance aesthetics, 55–56; defining, 5; ethnicity and, 58–60; gospel music and, 4–5, 8–9, 127–36 African American activism: aesthetics and, 1–6, 55–60; artivism and, 193–99; arts and, 1–11, 15–24, 152–67, 193–99; bodies as, 6–8, 13–97, 177; civil rights and, 4–7, 30–37, 47–48, 69–79, 152, 184–85, 195, 202–3; defining, 4–5; forms of, 29–38; futurity and, 1–6, 48, 63; gospel music and, 127–36; importance of, 1–11; institutions of, 9–11, 189–235; music as, 8–9, 103–86; performativity and, 46, 52, 58, 105–21; responsibilities and, 152–67; social activism, 41, 63; visual arts as, 5, 8–9, 103–86, 202 African-American Art, 5 African American Art and Artists, 5 African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, The Civil Rights Era, and Beyond, 5 African American arts: activism and, 1–11, 15–24, 152–67, 193–99; aesthetics and, 1–6, 55–60; American art history and, 5; artivism, 193–99; Black artistry, 2–10, 79–80, 107; Black Arts movement, 3, 5–7, 51, 58–59, 128–29, 202; cosmograms in, 9, 139–48; creativity and, 3–7, 152–67, 191–99, 201–10, 214–18, 220–35; importance of, 1–11; philosophy of, 5; responsibilities and, 152–67; role of, 1–11, 152–67; visual arts, 5, 8–9, 103–86, 202 African American culture: celebrating, 1–3; centering blackness, 10, 191–99; global cultures, 52; gospel music and, 4–5, 8–9, 127–36; historicity of, 7; narratives of, 34; representations of, 179; shaping, 51–52, 75 African American Policy Forum (AAPF), 9, 153, 157, 161–63 “African Ceremonial,” 43 African diaspora movement, 10, 202–10 “Africanness,” 106–7 Africa’s Great Civilizations, 3

Afriscape, 143 Afrofuturism, 7, 15–24, 139, 142–47 Aida, 89–97 Aiken, George, 230 Alexander, Elizabeth, 161 Alexander, Michelle, 194 Alfano, Franco, 95 Algarín, Miguel, 51–52 Ali, Muhammad, 76 Alick, Claudia, 10, 191–94, 196, 198 All Convenience, 196–97 Almodóvar, Pedro, 74 alterity, 105–21 Altman, Robert, 74, 77, 79 Amelan, Bjorn, 35 American art history, 5 American Cinema, The, 81 Anderson, Marian, 96 Anderson, Reynaldo, 20 Anderson, Wes, 79 André, Naomi, 90 Angelou, Maya, 35, 47 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 55 apartheid, 10, 214–18 Appeal to Coloured Citizens of the World, 29 Archive and the Repertoire, The, 43 Aristotle, 147 art-activism project, 15, 19, 22–24 artist responsibilities, 152–67 artists, sonic, 8–9, 114, 152–67 artivism, 193–99 Asante, Molefi Kete, 4 Ashley, Freddie, 198 Avery, Marguerite, 91 Baartman, Saartjie “Sara,” 36 Bádéjò, Diedre, 62 Báez, Josefina, 2, 7, 51–63 Bailey, Marlon M., 176, 178, 180 Bailey, Xenobia, 146 Baker, Josephine, 92 Baldwin, James, 71, 80, 152, 160, 163–64, 167, 221 Ball, Lucille, 34 Banks, Daniel, 183 Baraka, Amiri, 71 Barber, Debi, 214 Barre, Anthony, 177 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 2, 8–9, 105–21, 139, 144–45

313

314 Index Baumbach, Noah, 79 Baumgarten, Linda, 29, 32 Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, 31 Bell, Sean, 118 Belton, John, 77 Benga, Ota, 36 Bennet, Wriply, 19, 22 Bennett, Michael, 225 Between the World and Me, 194 Beyoncé, 9, 131, 152, 164–67, 174–82 Beyoncé (album), 165, 174–76 Bible, 129–30 Big Freedia, 9, 174, 176, 178–79, 182, 185 Big Shizz, 131 Biggers, Sanford, 141, 145, 146 Birth of Cool, 30 Black: being, 4–5, 18–21, 30–38, 59–60, 130–34, 184, 191–93; Black identity, 2, 53–54, 62–63; “looking Black,” 2 Black artistry, 2–10, 79–80, 107. See also African American arts “Black Artists and Activism: Harlem on My Mind,” 4 Black Arts movement, 3, 5–7, 51, 58–59, 128–29, 202 Black culture: celebrating, 1–3; centering blackness, 10, 191–99; global cultures, 52; gospel music and, 4–5, 8–9, 127–36; historicity of, 7; narratives of, 34; representations of, 179; shaping, 51–52, 75 Black dandyism, 30–31, 116 black-face minstrelsy, 10, 220–35 Black identity, 2, 53–54, 62–63 Black Interior, The, 161 Black life, 30–38, 160, 191, 203–10 Black Lives Matter movement: anthem for, 175–76; DFJ Philly and, 203; founders of, 184; importance of, 3, 6, 9–10, 36–37; for justice, 152–53, 164–66, 191–99, 203; misconceptions about, 117–18; views on, 30, 36–37, 70, 82 black looks: race and representation, 198 Black masculinity, 8, 16, 105–21 Black Panther, 8, 82 Black Panther Party, 166, 176, 184 Black performance, 5–6, 48, 129–31, 202–5, 210 Black Performance Theory, 2, 5 Black performance theory (BPT), 202, 205, 210 Black performativity, 46, 52, 58, 105–21 Black Popular Culture, 5 Black power, 30, 37, 128, 152, 176, 202 Black radical tradition, 9, 174–86 Blackballin’, 6, 237–305 blackness, centering, 10, 191–99 Blades, Rubén, 51 Blaxploitation, 76, 78, 82 Bledsoe, Jules, 93

Blues for Mister Charlie, 163 bodies as activism, 6–8, 13–97, 177 Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, 185 Bond, Julian, 79 Booker, Corey, 225 “Bootylicious,” 165 Bowie, David, 78 Bowser, Edward, 132 Boyer, Horace Clarence, 128 Bradley, Regina, 166 Braithwaite, Fred, 114 Brooks, Daphne, 156 Brown, Abena Joan, 233 Brown, Eb, 19–20, 22 Brown, Georgia, 79 Brown, Jayna, 90 Brown, Michael, 16, 36, 118, 165–68, 191, 203, 206 Brown, Tammy L., 42–45 Brown v. Board of Education, 128 Brown, William Wells, 3 Bryck, Danny, 191 Bullock, Charles, 214, 216 Bumbry, Grace, 96 Bumpurs, Eleanor, 157 Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, The, 111 Burnim, Mellonee, 129 Burruss, Kandi, 214 Butch Queen Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit, 178, 180 Butler, Judith, 158, 185 Butler, Octavia, 20, 22 Byrd, Rikki, 6, 7, 29–38 Cairo Opera House, 90 Calling Up!, 192 Camacho, Luis Xtravaganza, 181 Camelot, 72 Campbell, Erica, 8, 127–36 Campbell, Ronnie, 214 canonical exception, 7, 15–18 canonical prejudice, 16–18 Caplan, Lucy, 8, 89–97 Carey, Alison, 191 Carter, Beyoncé Knowles, 174. See also Beyoncé Carter, Robert, 94 Cassidy, 118 Castile, Philando, 166 Casting Crowns, 127 Cato, Minto, 96 Cavarero, Adriana, 153 Characteristics of Negro Expression, The, 3, 193 Charlson, Doria E., 2, 7, 41–48 Charney, Leo, 74 Chauncey, George, 180

“Check,” 118, 119 Chenoweth, Ellen, 205, 209 Chicago Civic Opera Company, 96 ChimaTek, 146 “choreo-activism,” 41–48 choreography, 7, 41–48, 175–81, 203–9, 214–16, 228–29. See also dance choreopolitics, 41–48 Christian music, 127–28. See also gospel music churches, 129–35 Cincinnati Union, 95 cisgender identities, 19, 22–24, 177. See also gender citizenship, 52–58, 130–33, 152–67 “Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays,” 159 City Arts, 81 City Sun, 77–79 civil rights: activism and, 4–7, 30–37, 47–48, 69–79, 152, 184–85, 195, 202–3; post-civil rights era, 69–70, 153, 159, 167 Clark, Lisa, 144–45 Clark, S. Renee, 214 Class of ’44, The, 74 Clement, Jennifer, 114, 115 Clinton, Bill, 166, 218 Clinton, George, 145 “Clothes for the People,” 29, 32 Coates, Ta-Nehsi, 194 codes, hidden, 139–48 Cole, Mica, 191 Cole-Talbert, Florence, 92 Coles, Jasmine Eileen, 10, 220–35 Collins, Patricia Hill, 52, 206 Colón, Jesús, 51 Colón, Willie, 51 Coltrane, John, 142, 145 Columbia Journalism Review, 81 Coming to America, 77 Common, 162 communication, system of, 46, 70–71, 127–36 “Conjuring as Radical Re/Membering in the Works of Shay Youngblood,” 63 Contemporary Gospel Music, 128 Conwill, Houston, 9, 139, 142, 144 Cooks, Bridget, 4 Corey, Dorian, 179 Cornet, Florencia V., 2, 7, 51–63 Cosmogramma, 143, 145 cosmograms, 9, 139–48 Cox, Laverne, 186 “Creative Process, The,” 152 creativity: creative processes, 3–7, 152–67, 191–99, 201–10, 214–18, 220–35; intersectionality and, 152–66; for social injustices, 3–7, 10, 191–99, 201–10, 214–18, 220–35

Index 315 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 154–55, 162 Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, The, 69 crookedness, 53, 60–63 “Cross Road Blues,” 142–43 Cruse, Harold, 69 Crutcher, Terrance, 197 Cruz, Gabriela, 91 Cucinella, Catherine, 175 Cullen, Countee, 3 Cullors, Patrisse, 117, 184, 185 Cuntington, Dick, 183 Curry, Renée R., 175 Dabiri, Emma, 139 Daigle, Lauren, 127 Daileader, Celia, 17 Daily Collegian, The, 72 dance: arts and, 3–7; choreography and, 7, 41–48, 175–81, 203–9, 214–16, 228–29; contemporary dance, 141; dance aesthetics, 55–56; dancing for justice, 10, 201–10; diaspora dance, 202–10 Dancing for Justice Philadelphia (DFJ Philly), 10, 201–10 D’Andrea, Dominic, 191 Daniel, Yvonne, 206 Daniels, LaShawn, 131 Danner, Deborah, 157, 158 Danticat, Edwidge, 106 Dark Night, The, 80 Dash, Julie, 174–75 Daughters of the Dust, 174–75 Davies, Terence, 82 Davis, Adrienne, 154 Davis, Angle, 79–80 Davis, Ellabelle, 96 Davy, Gloria, 96 Dawson, Jessica, 112 Dazed, 119 De Palma, Brian, 77 De Sica, Vittorio, 76 Dead Prez, 118 Deeper into Movies, 72 Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart), 105, 109, 115–18, 120–21 DeFrantz, Thomas F., 2, 5, 46, 130, 202, 205 D’Emilio, John, 184–85 Dent, Gina, 5 Dery, Mark, 143 Desiigner, 131 Deterville, Duane, 143, 144 dialects, 133–35 diaspora dance, 202–10 Diaspora Strikes Back, The, 53 Diawara, Manthia, 108

316 Index Dickens, Charles, 70 dikenga, 9, 139–48 dirge, 162, 201, 205–8 “Dirty South” rap, 130–33 discrimination: language discrimination, 127–36; oppression and, 16–18, 154–55; racial discrimination, 16–18, 38, 45; of real and unreal, 61; sex discrimination, 155, 178; violence and, 42, 45, 152, 178. See also segregation DJ Ambassador, 127 Dobson, Abby, 9, 152–67 Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), 71–72 “Doing Intersectionality Research: From Conceptual Issues to Practical Examples,” 155 Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century, 156 Domincanish, 7, 51–63 “Don’t Let Nobody Bother Yo’ Principle,” 154 Doobie Brothers, 127 Dorsey, Thomas, 127 Douglass, Frederick, 94, 95 Drexciya, 145 Drury, Theodore, 91 Du Bois, W.E.B., 3, 71, 75, 94, 231 dual consciousness, mask of, 231–32 Due, Tananarive, 144 Dunham, Katherine, 41–42, 47 Eaton, Clement, 29 Ebert, Roger, 78, 80, 81 Ebonics, 134–35 Eclipsed, 214 Edo king, 105–7 Eidsheim, Nino Sun, 94, 96 Eisen, Arlene, 192 Elder, Lonnie, III, 75 Ellington, Duke, 127 Ellington, Justin, 214 Elliot, Missy, 114–15, 119 Ellis, David, 145, 146 Ellison, Ralph, 71 Ellison, Treva, 20 Emancipation Proclamation, 32, 94 Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body, 195 Empathic Morphology, 146 Empathics, 146–47 Enke, A. Finn, 21–22 Erotic Life of Racism, The, 154 Escape; or a Leap for Freedom, 3 ethnicity: aesthetics and, 58–60; ethicalness and, 69, 75–76; excellence and, 69, 75–76 Every 28 Hours, 10, 191–99

“Everybody’s Protest Novel,” 221 Excuses, 192, 195 “Exiled at Home: ‘Daughters of the Dust’ and the Many Post-Colonial Conditions,” 175 Fabolous, 112 Fahrenheit 9/11, 79 “Fanga,” 43 Fanon, Frantz, 71, 80 Fashion and Race Syllabus, 30 fashion design, 29–38 “Fashioning Freedom,” 32–33 Fauset, Jessie, 3 Ferguson Moment, 191 Ferguson uprising, 16, 118, 165–66, 191 Fernández, Maria “Mariposa” Teresa, 52 film critics, 7–8, 69–83 Fire Next Time, The, 167 Fleetwood, Nicole, 92 Flores, Juan, 53, 55 Flying Lotus, 143, 145 Fontana, Edoardo Ferrari, 91–92 “For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression,” 153 Ford, Tanisha, 30 “Formation,” 9, 165, 174–86 Foster, Adrian, 226 Foster, Susan Leigh, 46 Fraley, Keith, 34, 35 Frames of War, 158 Franklin, Aretha, 127 Franklin, Kirk, 8–9, 127, 136 Franklin, William, 96 Fraser, Sheila, 113 freedom: choreopolitics of, 41–48; designing, 29–38; dreams of, 152; experiencing, 54–63; fashion and, 29–38; gift of, 37; self-liberation and, 7, 29–38, 61–63 Fuller, Charles, 4 Fuller, Samuel, 78 Future, 131 futurity, 1–6, 48, 63 Gabrielle, Shanara, 191 Gambino, Childish, 3 Game, The, 118 Garner, Eric, 36, 197, 203, 206, 208 Garza, Alicia, 117, 184, 185 Gaskins, Nettrice R., 9, 139–48 Gates, Bill, 176 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 3, 18 Gauthier, Christopher, 91 gay communities, 33–36, 71–82, 112–18, 133–34, 175–86

Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940, 180 Gaye, Marvin, 79, 218 Geldzahler, Henry, 111 gender: cisgender identities, 19, 22–24, 177; gender binaries, 20–24; gender fluidity, 8, 15, 22, 109–14, 120–21; gender non-conforming identities, 19–22, 168, 183; reimagining, 7–8, 15, 19–24; transgender identities, 19–22, 186 gender non-conforming (GNC) identities, 19–22, 168, 183 Genet, Jean, 80 Georgakas, Dan, 71 George, Nelson, 141 Ghislanzoni, Antonio, 90 “Ghost,” 166 Giant Steps, 142 Gillespie, Carmen, 6 Gilroy, Paul, 105–6 Givhan, Robin, 35 Global SeXXXism: un-wrapped, 227 “Glory,” 162 Gomolvilas, Prince, 197 Gonzalez, Anita, 2, 5, 202, 205, 207 Goodie Mob, 130 gospel music: aesthetics and, 4–5, 8–9, 127–36; Black culture and, 8–9, 127–36; influence of, 8–9, 127–36; trap gospel music, 4–5, 8–9, 127–36 Gounod, Charles, 96 GQ , 119 Graham, Gordon, 5 Graham, Martha, 47 Grant, Amy, 127 Grant, Oscar, 118 Green, Kai, 20 Greene, Jimmy, 1 Grem, Darren, 130 Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 45, 48, 156 Gurira, Danai, 214 Gurley, Akai, 203 Guzman, Pablo “Yoruba,” 52 Haines, Ashley, 119 Hancock, 79 Handel, George Frideric, 135 Handle with Care, 74 Handmaid’s Tale, The, 214 Hansberry, Lorraine, 153 Hanson, Chris, 191 Haraway, Donna, 21 “Hard Time Blues,” 43, 44 Harlem Nocturne, 45 Harlem Renaissance, 3–5, 41, 45, 51–52 Harney, Stefano, 2

Index 317 Hawkins, Edwin, 127 Hearns, Elle, 117–18 Heart in Motion, 127 Help, 128 Hendricks, Freddie, 10, 214–18 Hendrix, Jimi, 20 Hickman, Craig, 182 Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, 133, 135 Hillsong, 127 Himes, Ron, 191 Hinds, Rickerby, 6, 237–305 hip hop music, 6–9, 60, 69, 78–82, 105–21, 127–34, 141–45, 176–77 Hoban, Phoebe, 113 Holiday, Billie, 75, 154 Holland, Laurence B., 129 Holland, Sharon Patricia, 154, 160 hooks, bell, 52, 153, 174, 198 Houston, Whitney, 154 Hughes, Langston, 3, 41, 44, 92, 142 human rights, 69, 184. See also civil rights humanism, 69, 76–77, 83 Hurston, Zora Neale, 3, 47, 193 Hyacinthe, Genevieve, 2, 8, 105–21 hyperinvisibility, 7, 15–18 “I Can’t Breathe,” 206 “I Luh God,” 8–9, 127–36 “I Shine, You Shine,” 112 Ickes, Harold, 96 identity: Black identity, 2, 53–54, 62–63; cisgender identities, 19, 22–24, 177; gender non-conforming identities, 19–22, 168, 183; trans identities, 7, 15–24; transgender identities, 19–22, 186 “If I Were a Boy,” 165 “ills of society,” 29, 47 Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion against the NCAA, 226 “Independent Women,” 165 inequalities: gender norms and, 60; injustices and, 60, 152; racial inequalities, 41, 96, 231; visualized inequalities, 34 injustices: creativity for, 3–7, 10, 191–99, 201–10, 214–18, 220–35; inequalities and, 60, 152; killings, 10, 16–18, 35–38, 117–18, 134, 153–68, 179, 183–84, 191–99, 203–8; social change and, 6–10, 41–47, 161–65, 193–210, 220–35; theatre and, 10, 191–99. See also justice; social injustices Inner City Voice, 71 International Journal of Fashion Studies, 30 intersectionality, 9, 21, 152–66, 182, 192–93, 227 Investiture of Bishop Harold as the Duke of Franconia No. 2, 112 Isley Brothers, 59

318 Index Jackson, David, 181 Jackson, Isaac, 115–16 Jackson, Jesse, 75 Jackson, Michael, 131 Jafa, Arthur, 113, 174 Jagger, Mick, 78 “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mister Charlie,” 163 James, Sylvester, 20 Jarboro, Caterina, 8, 89–97 Jasiri X, 118 JAY-Z, 106–10, 120–21 jazz music, 41, 75, 127–28, 139, 142 Jean-Raymond, Kerby, 7, 29–30, 35–38 Jeantel, Rachel, 134–35 Jenkins, Kimberly, 30 Jenrette, Kelly, 214, 218 Jessye, Eva, 93 “Jim Crow Train,” 43, 45 Johka, Sharifa, 191 Johnson, Amber, 6, 7, 15–24 Johnson, James Weldon, 162 Johnson, John Rosamond, 162 Johnson, Julie B., 10, 201–10 Johnson, Robert, 142–43 Johnston, Arthur “Art,” 71–72 Jones, Bill T., 214 Jones, Joni L., 62, 63 Jones, Lela Aisha, 203, 205, 207–8 Jones, Louis Clayton, 115 Jones, Martha S., 118 Jones, Sissieretta, 91 Jordan, Charity, 218 Joseph, Kahlil, 143, 174 Journal of Ethnic Studies, 71 journalism, 4, 36, 70–83 justice: Black Lives Matter for, 152–53, 164–66, 191–99, 203; dancing for, 10, 201–10; inequalities and, 60, 152; social justice experiment, 10, 220–35; theatre and, 10, 191–99. See also injustices Kael, Pauline, 71–75, 77, 79–83 Karolyi, Otto, 208 Kearse, Jahi, 214 Keckley, Elizabeth, 7, 29–33, 38 Kelley, Nambi, 191 Kelley, Patrick, 7 Kelly, Patrick, 29–30, 33–35, 38 Khalifa, Wiz, 118 Khan-Cullors, Patrisse, 184 Kids, The, 9, 175, 179, 182–83 “kinesthetic empathy,” 46 King Alphonso, 144

King, Gregory, 205, 209 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 71, 161, 179, 184–85 Kinsey, J. Michael, 4–5, 9, 174–86 Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: Film Writings 1965–67, 72 Klein, Calvin, 119, 120 Knight, Gladys, 127 Knight, JaQuel, 178 Kongo cosmograms, 139–48 Kottman, Paul A., 153 Krishnaraj, Maithreyi, 115 Kun, Josh, 95 Kundera, Milan, 74 Ladies Pages, 32 Lady Sings the Blues, 75–76 L’Africaine, 96 Lane, Juel D., 214 language discrimination, 127–36 Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word, 186 Lavoe, Hector, 51 Lawton, Jacqueline, 191 Lebon, Tyrone, 119 LeCrae, 127 Lee, Spike, 78 Legend, John, 162 Lemonade, 165, 166, 174–75 Lepecki, André, 42–44 lesbian activists, 117, 175 Lewis, Jim, 214 Lewis, Samella, 5 Lewis, Sarah, 112 Lewis, Van Dyk, 34, 35 LGBTQ communities, 117–18, 133–34, 175–86. See also gay communities Liberated Threads, 30 “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” 162 Lil’ Darryl, 132 Lil’ Kim, 119 Lil Wayne, 131 Lincoln, Abraham, 31 Lincoln, Mary Todd, 31–32 literacy: cinematic literacy, 80; ethnovisual literacy, 58; poetic literacy, 58; sociopolitical literacy, 54 “living culture,” 51–63 Livingston, Jennie, 179 Locke, Alain, 3, 92 Lopez, Jennifer, 165 Lorde, Audre, 47, 96, 164 Los Angeles Times, 46 Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, 184 Luciano, Felipe, 52 Luckett, Sharrell D., 2, 10, 214–18 Luther, Martin, 135

MacGaffey, Wyatt, 143 MadameNoir, 134 Mailer, Norman, 71 Malcolm X, 71, 80 Mali, 127 Mallouk, Suzanne, 114 Mandala of the B-Bodhisattva II, 145 mandalas, 143–47 Mandowsky, Erna, 110–11 “Many Thousands Gone,” 160 Marshall, T. H., 159 Martin, Lionel, 78 Martin, Sally, 127 Martin, Trayvon, 118, 134, 183, 194, 203 Martinez, Rebecca, 191 Martyn, Duain, 215 Mary, Mary, 128 Mashramani, Ras, 21 Matsouka, Melina, 177 Mays, Benjamin, 129 McBride, Renisha, 161 McCalla, Sammantha, 5, 8–9 McCarrell, MarShawn, III, 37 McClendon, Don, 191 McCraney, Tarell Alvin, 186, 191 McCune, Jeffrey, 17 McFarlane-Harris, Jennifer, 91 McGregor, Paloma, 201 McIntosh, Peggy, 233 McNeil, Daniel, 7–8, 69–83 McPherson, James M., 129 McQueen, Steve, 81 Mean Streets, 75 “Meaning of American Citizenship, The,” 158 Mecklenburg, Virginia, 5 media studies, 6–8, 16–21, 70–83 “Meditation on Shade, A,” 9, 179–83 MercyMe, 127 Messiah, 135 “Messy Mya, Booking the Hoes from New Wildin,” 177–79 Metzgar, Bonnie, 192 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 96 Miller, George Frazier, 95 Miller, Karl Hagstrom, 93 Miller, Monica, 30 minstrelsy, 10, 220–35 Mir, Claudio, 53, 55 Mitchell, Abbie, 91 Mitchell, Koritha, 160, 163 Moonlight, 8, 82, 186 Moore, Roger, 78 Morales, Iris, 52

Index 319 “More Than a Dreamer,” 179 Morrison, Toni, 79, 164 mortality rates, 159–60 Moss-Bouldin, Shondrika, 6, 10, 191–99 Moten, Fred, 2, 95, 131, 134 Motown sound, 70, 76 movie critics, 69–83 Muñoz, José Esteban, 9, 116–17, 176–77, 180 Murphy, Eddie, 77 Murray, Albert, 71 music: as activism, 8–9, 103–86; Christian music, 127–28; hip hop music, 6–9, 60, 69, 78–82, 105–21, 127–34, 141–45, 176–77; jazz music, 41, 75, 127–28, 139, 142; musical theatre, 214–18, 221–22; operas, 8, 89–97; rap music, 78–82, 105–21, 127–34, 141–45, 176–77; segregation and, 153–54; trap gospel music, 4–5, 8–9, 127–36. See also dance “My Brother’s Keeper,” 157 Mya, Messy, 8, 9, 176–79, 182, 185, 186 National Museum of African American History and Culture, 1 National Review Online, 70, 82 nationalism, 51–63 “Negro Speaks of Rivers, The,” 41, 43–45, 142 Nelson Affair, The, 74 Nelson, Steven, 144 New Cakewalk, The, 144 New Jim Crow, The, 194 New Left, 69–70 New York Amsterdam News, 91, 92, 93 New York Magazine, 80 New York Press, 79, 81 New York Times, 81, 94 New Yorker, The, 72, 79 Newton, Huey, 176 Ngaujah, Sahr, 214, 215, 218 Ngema, Mbongeni, 217 Nicholson, Joseph, 129 Nielson, Erik, 117, 118 Night of the Living Bassheads, 78 Nikos, Ayai, 20, 22 Ninja, Willie, 181 Nka Journal, 30 “Nobody Knows My Name,” 163 Nocera, Joe, 226 Nooter, Mary H., 106 Nottage, Lynn, 191 Nugent, Frank S., 80 N.W.A., 131 O Solo Homo, 182 Obama, Barack, 1, 17, 79, 81, 157, 165, 166

320 Index Obama, Michelle, 164 O’Bannon, Ed, 226 O’Brien, Selwyn, 114 Ocean, Frank, 166 Ogbu, John, 134 “Oh, Happy Day,” 127 O’Jays, 127 Okonkwo, Christopher, 144 Oliver, Denise, 52 O’Neill, Ron, 113, 114 operas, 8, 89–97 Operation Ghetto Storm, 192 oppression: addressing, 4–5; discrimination and, 16–18, 154–55; ending, 202–10, 220–35; racism and, 7, 10, 15–16, 63, 232–34; slavery and, 29–32, 36; systemic oppression, 7, 15–17, 220, 232–34 Orange Is the New Black, 186 “Origen,” 54 Origin of the Milky Way, The, 109–12 Osayande, Jeannine, 207 Osun Seegesi, 62 Out Magazine, 82 Outerspace Visual Communicator (OVC), 146 Outkast, 130 Outside a Small Circle of Friends, 197 P-Funk, 145–47 Pantaleo, Daniel, 203 Paradise under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk, 146 Paris Is Burning, 179–81 Parks, Gordon, 113 Parnell, Andrea, 191 Pasha, Isma’il, 90 Passion of the Christ, The, 79 Patton, Sharon, 5 Patton, Venetria, 144 Peckinpah, Sam, 77 Peebles, Melvin Van, 78 People, 164 performance matrix, 57–58 performativity, 46, 52, 58, 105–21 Performing Remains, 43 Perry, Gill, 115 Perry, Imani, 18 Pettiford-Wates, Tawnya, 10, 220–35 Pharaoh, Shenge Ka, 106, 113–14 Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics, 5 P.I.C.: The Prison Industrial Complex, 228 Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film, 120 Pietri, Pedro, 51 Pimp C, 105, 107 Piri, Thomas, 51

plays: about slavery, 3, 222–29; examples of, 195–97, 223–24, 237–305; publishing, 3–4, 6, 191–99; satire, 222–33. See also theatre Poe, Jumatatu, 205–6 “Poor, Sick, Dreamers and Fools Exile,” 62–63 post-civil rights era, 69–70, 153, 159, 167 Poston, T. R., 94 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 185 Powell, Richard J., 5, 202 “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow,” 135 prejudice, canonical, 16–18 prejudice, racial, 95–96, 226 Price, Leontyne, 89, 93, 96 Primus, Pearl, 2, 7, 41–48 Prince, 20, 113 Public Enemy, 78, 118 “Pursuit of Crappyness, The,” 79 Queen of Sheba, The, 96 queer aesthetics, 9, 174–86 Quest, The, 145 Quiñones, Lee, 114 racism: deconstructing, 220–35; discrimination and, 16–18, 38, 45; ending, 202–10; film critics and, 71–82; oppression and, 7, 10, 15–16, 63, 232–34; prejudice and, 16–18, 95–96, 226; racial profiling, 194–95; tolerance and, 71, 92, 128; understanding, 154–55 Rahn, Muriel, 96 “Rain, The,” 114, 119 Rammellzee, 114 rap music, 78–82, 105–21, 127–34, 141–45, 176–77 Raphaelson, Samson, 77 Ray, Satyajit, 76 Read!: An Experiment in Seeing Black, 17 Reagon, Bernice Johnson, 153, 161 “Real Queer News: Scared Straight,” 183 religion, 3, 128–35, 139–40, 146, 205 Rhea, La Julia, 96 Rice, Tamir, 203 Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920, 133 Ritt, Martin, 75, 76 Rivas, Tlaloc, 191 Roach, Joseph, 45 Robinson, Bill “Bojangles,” 228 Rock, Chris, 77 Román, David, 16, 182 Romanek, Mark, 120 Rooks, Noliwe, 32 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 96 “Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets,” 107, 111

Rubin, Katy, 191 Rudolph, Adam, 142 Rumbaut, Rubén, 53 “Runs the World (Girls),” 164, 165 Rustin, Bayard, 184–85 Said, Edward, 91 St. Lucy, 112 Salmaggi, Alfredo, 92–94, 96 Salter, Nikkole, 192, 197 Sandberg-Zakian, Megan, 191 Sandel, Michael J., 155 Saopeng, Ova, 195 Sarafina, 217 Sarris, Andrew, 77, 80–81 “Say Her Name,” 9, 162–63 Say Her Name movement, 9, 152, 161–64 Schneider, Rebecca, 43 Schomburg, Arturo Alfonso, 51, 95 Schuyler, George, 71 Scorsese, Martin, 75, 76, 77 Scott, Keith, 197 Scott, Travis, 131 Seale, Bobby, 176 Sebastian, Bill, 146 segregation: American segregation, 71, 75, 94–96, 180; in music industry, 153–54; racial segregation, 143, 194–95; of religion, 130; of schools, 128; slavery and, 44–45 self-liberation: fashion as, 29–38; freedom and, 7, 29–38, 61–63; strategy for, 29–38 Self Portrait, 144 Selma, 162 Sengbloh, Saycon, 214, 218 Sewell, Edith Dixson, 96 sex discrimination, 155, 178 Shaffer, Tia M., 2 Shange, Ntozake, 1, 51–63 Sharff, Stefan, 77 Sharpe, Christina, 2 Shephard, Jae, 20 Shire, Warsan, 174 Simien, Evelyn, 155 Simone, Nina, 153, 154, 164 Singer, Fisk Jubilee, 92 Sir the Baptist, 127 Sirmans, Franklin, 106, 114 Sister Paradise, 146 Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination, 159 slave auction, 223–24 slavery: chattel slavery, 44–45, 225, 227; oppression and, 29–32, 36; plays about, 3, 222–29; segregation

Index 321 and, 44–45; sites of, 159; “uncle tom-ism” and, 220–35 Slaves to Fashion, 30 “Slaying ‘Formation,’” 174–86 Smith, Bessie, 163 Smith, Rogers M., 158 Smith, Will, 79, 80 Snead, James, 140 Snorton, C. Riley, 21 social activism, 41, 63. See also African American activism social change, 6–10, 41–47, 161–65, 193–210, 220–35 social injustices: creativity for, 3–7, 10, 191–99, 201– 10, 214–18, 220–35; discrimination and, 16–18, 38, 45; ending, 4–10, 191–99, 201–10, 220–35; oppression and, 7, 10, 15–16, 63, 232–34. See also injustices; racism social justice experiment, 10, 220–35 “Social World of Voguing, The,” 181 society, ills of, 29, 47 society, roles in, 52–58, 130–33, 152–67 Solange, 1 sonic artists, 8–9, 114, 152–67 Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, 5 Sounder, 75 South End, The, 70, 72, 76, 78 Soweto, Soweto, Soweto: A Township Is Calling!, 10, 214–18 Soyinka, Wole, 3 “Spanglish,” 59 Spedding, Emma, 118 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 52 Spy Who Loved Me, The, 78 Star of Ethiopia, The, 94 Star Wars, 74 State of Florida v. George Zimmerman, 134 “stereopsyching,” 76 stereotypes, 15–24, 33–34, 74–76, 114, 130, 154–65, 222 Sterling, Alton, 166, 197 Stewart, Michael, 105–6, 109, 115–18, 120 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 220–22, 229–30, 234–35 Straight Outta Compton, 131 “Strange Fruit,” 43, 45 Strauss, Ben, 226 Stylin’, 30 Summer, Donna, 154 Sun Ra, 139, 142, 145–46 “Supa Dupa Fly,” 114, 119 “Super Power,” 166 Superfly, 113–14 superheroes, 19, 22–24 Surkin, Marvin, 71

322 Index Sweet Jesus, Preacherman, 76 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, 78 T-Bone, 127 Tal, Kali, 21 Tate, Claudia, 156 Tate, Greg, 106, 108, 113, 114, 119 Taylor, Diana, 43 Téchiné, André, 82 Terminator Salvation, 80 terrorist attacks, 16, 79–80 The Conciliation Project (TCP), 10, 220–35 theatre: art of, 163; justice through, 10, 191–99; musical theatre, 214–18, 221–22; performativity through, 46, 52, 58; political theatre, 166; ritual theatre, 3; study of, 221–22. See also plays “‘There Is No Incongruence Here’: Hispanic Notes in the Works of Ntozake Shange,” 51 Things That Make White People Uncomfortable, 225 Thompson, Jacqueline, 191, 192 Thompson, Kenan, 214, 218 Thompson, Krista, 112 Thompson, Robert Farris, 106, 113, 140, 144 Thurman, Kira, 91 Tillet, Salamishah, 159 Time, 93 Tintoretto, Jacopo, 8, 109–13 tolerance, 71, 92, 128 Tometi, Opal, 117, 184, 185 Torres-Saillant, Silvio, 53–54 Toxic, 114 Toy Story 3, 80 tranifesting, 20–21 trans bodies, 19–24, 175 trans identities, 7, 15–24 transformative manifesting, 20–21 Transformers 2, 80 Transfuturism, 6–7, 15–24 transgender identities, 19–22, 186. See also gender Transporter 3, 80 trap gospel music: activism and, 127–36; churches and, 129–35; disapproval of, 4–5; influence of, 4–5, 8–9, 127–36 “Trash, Art and the Movies,” 74 Tropic Thunder, 80 Trujillo, Rafael, 53–54 Tulloch, Carol, 30 Turlington, Christy, 119 Turner, Dennis, 77 Two Can Play That Game, 79 uncle tom: de-constructed, 220–35 “uncle tom-ism,” 220–35

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 220–35 Unknown Hundreds, 192, 197–98 Until the Quiet Comes, 143 Untitled (Fallen Angel), 105–5, 109–13, 120 urbanity, 53–63 Uwumarogie, Victoria, 134 Valdes, Vanessa, 51 Verdi, Giuseppe, 90, 92, 93, 94 Verrett, Shirley, 96 Village Voice, The, 79, 81 visibility, 7, 15–22, 53–60, 156–59, 176–82 visual arts, 5, 8–9, 103–86, 202 “Vital,” 55 vocality, 57–59, 153–56, 163–64 Wagner, Richard, 95 Walker, Aida Overton, 91 Walker, Alice, 164 Walker, David, 29 Wallace, George, 194 Wap, Fetty, 131 Warhol, Andy, 120 “Washington Heights List,” 60 Washington Post, 35 Watson, John, 71 Wattstax, 74 Weaver, Karol, 32–33 Weems, Carrie Mae, 1, 6, 164 Weheliye, Alexander, 128 Weidman, Charles, 47 Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 71 West, Kanye, 8, 106, 108, 109, 118 What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, 155 What’s Going On?, 218 “When Dance Has a Voice,” 205, 209 “When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black Women’s Vocality,” 153–56 White, Armond, 7–8, 69–83 White Dog, 78 White, Graham, 30 “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” 233 White, Shane, 30 White supremacy, 17, 45–48, 78, 156, 164–66, 181, 194–95, 220–32 White, Walter, 3 Whitney, Salem Tutt, 95 “Why We Can’t Wait,” 157–58 Why We Can’t Wait: Women of Color Urge Inclusion in “My Brother’s Keeper” to the White House in Protest, 157–58

Wiley, Kehinde, 106, 109, 112–13 Williams, Brittany, 203 Williams, Hype, 112 Williams, Jeffery Lamar, 118 Williams, Kei, 19, 22 Williams, Sweet T, 72 Williams, Tamara, 203 Wilson, August, 80 Wilson, Darren, 16 Wolfe, Tom, 71 Woolfalk, Saya, 146 workshops, 183, 204, 216–17, 227 Xtravaganza, Jose Guitterez, 181

Index 323 Yarborough, Elizabeth, 92 Yarborough, John Wesley, 92 Yarborough, Katherine, 92, 94. See also Jarboro, Caterina Young, Harvey, 195 Young Thug, 8, 106, 109, 118–20, 123, 131 Youth Ensemble of Atlanta (YEA), 10, 214–18 Youth Ensemble of Soweto (YES), 218 Zackery, Jessie, 91 Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe, 204 Zimmerman, George, 134, 183 Zirin, Dave, 225 Zollar, Jawole Willa Jo, 47