Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics 9780813588544

Citation preview

Black Movements

Black Movements Performance and Cultural Politics

S oy i c a D i g g s C o l b e r t

R u tg e r s U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Colbert, Soyica Diggs, 1979–­author. Title: Black movements : performance and cultural politics / Soyica Diggs Colbert. Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016033726| ISBN 9780813588520 (hardback) | ISBN 9780813588513 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780813588537 (e-­book (epub)) Subjects: LCSH: African American theater—­History. | Performing arts—­United States—­History. | African Americans—­Civil rights—­History. | Civil rights movements—­United States—­History. | African Americans in the performing arts. | Civil rights movements—­History. | BISAC: PERFORMING ARTS / Theater / History & Criticism. | ART / Performance. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies. | ART / Art & Politics. | ART / American / African American. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Black Studies (Global). Classification: LCC PN2270.A35 C65 2017 | DDC 792.089/96073—­dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016033726 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2017 by Soyica Diggs Colbert 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 Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. 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.rutgersuniversitypress.org Manufactured in the United States of America

For Rodger

Contents

Introduction: Webs of Affiliation

1

1

Flying Africans in Spaceships

23

2

Trapping Entanglements

58

3

Prophesying in Octavia Butler’s Parable Series

104

4

Marching

142

5

“Why do you look for the living among the dead?”: Locating the Future of Black Studies

168

Acknowledgments 179 Notes 181 Bibliography 205 Index 219

vii

Black Movements

Introduc tion Webs of Affiliation

Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down. —­Robin D. G. Kelley

What histories and ideologies must be affirmed and what other ones denied for a slave to become a superhero?1 The filmmaker Quentin Tarantino’s slavery revenge fantasy Django Unchained (2012) offers a response to this question. It features a fearless black outlaw who has earned his freedom from slavery by accumulating value working as a bounty hunter.2 Set in the antebellum period, the film depicts the eponymous protagonist, Django ( Jamie Foxx), as he learns the rules of bounty hunting from his mentor, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz). Schultz explains that bounty hunting, like slavery, is “another flesh economy.”3 The comment predicates Django’s freedom on his participation in activities that perpetuate the power dynamic of slavery. Instead of dismantling a system of domination, Schultz gives Django the opportunity to shift from being dominated to dominating others. His apprenticeship prepares him for his final mission to rescue his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), from her cruel slaver, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). But accomplishing his quest to save the damsel in distress does not distinguish his journey. Rather, all the choices he makes to position himself as the hero enable the final fantastic scene of triumph, in which he rides off on a horse with Broomhilda.4 1

2

Black Movements

Tarantino’s superhero figure demonstrates a swagger born out of the character’s separation from and participation in the dehumanization of the enslaved.5 Although he plays the role of a black slaver only to enact a stunning ruse on Candie, Django, well armed and trained to defeat an army of men, looks on as dogs eat black men alive, slaves beat each other to death in hand-­to-­hand combat, and house slaves enforce brutal punishments on their fellows. By the film’s end, Django kills Candie, enacts revenge on the servile head house Negro (Samuel L. Jackson), shoots and kills the mistress, dynamites and burns down the big house, and frees himself and his wife. Through his transformation, he embodies not only the fantasy of black revenge but also the liberal ideal of unfettered agency.6 As a prototypical black superhero, Django’s masculine authority delimits the regulatory force of his status as chattel.7 Throughout the film he shocks many onlookers as a black man riding a horse and brandishing a gun, but their surprise often gives way to disdain when he exercises the relative authority of a free black man over his enslaved counterparts, admonishing them and directing their actions. His ability to secure his freedom through his exceptional performance as a bounty hunter and his deadly reconciliation of his and his wife’s suffering satisfies investments in a particular brand of American masculinity—­part savior, part hero—­that, I argue, is available to black men in greater abundance in the post–­civil rights era.8 This era has emerged alongside theories of poststructuralism, which render race a non-­ material construction in which new architectures of blackness emerge, making it multiple and sometimes unlinking it from the past. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., said in a Time magazine interview about the film 12 Years a Slave (2013), “we have the best of times, and we have the worst of times. We have the largest black upper-­middle-­class in history, but we have the largest black male prison population. . . . So it’s like we have two nations within the black community. So how did we get here?”9 Tarantino’s film suggests that we got here through the cruel embrace of liberal ideals of individualism that predicate black liberation on the replication of racial dominance and heteronormative performances of gender.10 Although set in the antebellum period, Django Unchained offers unfettered individualism to its male protagonist as a remedy for the burdensome legacy of slavery—­at once a comforting and a deceptive remedy. Tarantino and others have crafted satirical and fantastical postmodern renderings of black history that, as forms of future-­oriented remembering,

Introduction 3

contribute to imagining how freedom may coincide with blackness in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries.11 Providing another lens through which to see how we got here, Spike Lee uses the documentary form as a mechanism to awaken the past—­to engage with it and breathe new life into histories that might serve as the fertile ground for black freedom dreams to develop. His 4 Little Girls (1997) offers an entry point into the civil rights movement by way of the Birmingham campaign and, in particular, the devastating violence enacted in the Sixteenth Street Church bombing. Situating Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair as martyrs in a campaign for social equality, the film memorializes the movement as much as it mourns the victims of gratuitous violence. Lee’s documentary remembers four innocent girls with distinctive personalities, hobbies, and family relationships. It also demonstrates that black suffering pervaded the Birmingham campaign. As a result, 4 Little Girls suggests a way forward that requires living with the dead while not distinguishing oneself from them. To live with the dead, however, is not the same thing as to be bound by death. Living with the dead allows an individual to incorporate and move forward with those she has lost. Conversely, being bound by death inhibits the growth of the subject. Although a subtle distinction, the notion of living with death versus being bound by it serves as a tipping point for artists navigating black cultural politics in the post–­ civil rights era. Lee’s act of memory humanizes individuals who participate in collective dissent and reminds the viewer that leadership appears in the form of female children and male adults. Beginning with a tribute to Collins, Wesley, Robertson, and McNair, the film intersperses descriptions of the four girls with recollections that chronicle the launch and development of the Birmingham civil rights campaign. The film first depicts male leadership and then disrupts the familiar rendering of patriarchy, revealing that children became the foot soldiers of the local movement. The juxtaposition of adult male leadership with female children heightens the sense of shock and terror that the bombing produces. The film mourns their lives and their potential—­what they are and what they could be.12 Lee’s documentary leverages the innocence of the children to draw attention to the ethical demands of the civil rights struggle. Near the end of the film, he makes the bold decision to show the girls’ autopsy photos. Carol

4

Black Movements

Denise McNair’s father tells viewers that he remembers seeing a piece of concrete lodged in his daughter’s head. Then the film cuts to an image of the young woman’s mutilated body, proof of the violation. McNair’s mother says that she remembers going to identify the body and demanding to see her daughter. After leaving the morgue she went to her mother’s house and “when I got in there I couldn’t stop hollering; I couldn’t stop screaming. And I can just see myself sitting in the chair, being so upset in a place that I wanted to rub but couldn’t rub it.”13 Cutting from reactions to the bombing and still photographs, the film riffs on what Fred Moten describes as “the mo(ur)nin(g)”—­part moaning, part mourning, part morning—­that the photograph of lynching victim Emmett Till produces.14 Heightened by the soundtrack, the dirge-­like sequence produces sadness, sympathy, and outrage. Aliyyah Abdur-­R ahman’s Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race forcefully argues that black girlhood often represents a cultural impossibility as blackness comes to stand in for an absence of innocence. In the documentary, the innocence of the girls transfers to the innocence of black people who are simply demanding equality. The expansion of freedom emerges by way of a collective composed of individuals who linger simultaneously with suffering and the possibility of a new day. Tarantino’s film is an act of fantasy; Lee’s film is an act of memory. Both, however, circle around the historical (slavery and the civil rights movement) and theoretical (black performance theory in the context of poststructuralism) touchstones of this book. In the wake of the purported failures of race-­ based collective movements of the twentieth century (such as the civil rights movement and postcolonial movements in Africa and the Caribbean), I analyze how artists and activists of the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries use the freedom movements of earlier historical periods as ways to imagine a more democratic society now and in the future. Like Tarantino, some create fantastic reworkings of the past, while others, like Lee, seek to re-­create the past as a site of instruction for the present. Black Movements explores how post–­civil rights black performance and cultural production becomes legible, possible, and generative as a result of its relationship to prior moments and modes of cultural production. The return to slavery as a historical touchstone has little to do with recovering the slave’s past, as Toni Morrison describes in “Sites of Memory.”15 Yet even though Django Unchained tells us little about slavery, it offers great insight into early twenty-­first-­century cultural production. If Django

Introduction 5

Unchained qualifies as an act of memory, it does so as a deliberate act of counter-­memory that situates identifying as a triumphant black subject in opposition to identifying with the conditions of the enslaved. In the hands of Tarantino, however, the imagination functions to make available certain forms of masculinity to black men that have remained limited to them due to the shadow of slavery. Django Unchained does share with 4 Little Girls a depiction of disposability that relates to the treatment of the enslaved, and I mention both films here to highlight how artists imagine, use, and call forth performance practices to constitute racial identity and interrupt the dehumanization of black people. My book explores representations of blackness that disrupt equating blackness with objection, while examining the possibilities and dangers that representations of black suffering provide. Django Unchained demonstrates the risks of embracing the lure of a black superhero whose presence perpetuates the myth of individual exceptionalism and reinforces systems of domination. In contrast, 4 Little Girls offers the possibility of remembering forgotten histories. While the seductive lure of forgetting empowers individuals to a point, Lee’s film reveals that the choice to think through and with the past enables a more expansive rendering of freedom predicated on an active engagement with the regulatory forces that circumscribe agency. All of the chapters in Black Movements consider how artists devise strategies, some more successful than others, to disrupt the equation of blackness with suffering. I use the word movement to mean “a change in position,” place, or posture.16 Political movement can be defined as “a series of actions on the part of a group of people working toward a common goal.”17 Black movements are embodied actions (a change in position, place, posture, or orientation) that draw from the imagination and the past to advance political projects. This last term encompasses the multiple meanings of movement while retaining the temporal qualities of blackness as performative. The black movements that I explore occur within a social context in which the idea that the consolidation of repeated actions (performance) over time constitutes identity (racial and otherwise) is routinely accepted.18 Judith Butler argues in “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” that history and temporality produce gender as a performative—­the crystallized, hailing, regulatory power of identity categories and social positions. Performance constitutes the actor because it renders the individual answerable to the nature of the role he or she inhabits, which, as Butler explains,

6

Black Movements

becomes sediment as performatives. Performatives, such as gender roles or other identitarian categories, and “reiterations of stylized norms, and inherited gestural conventions from the way we sit, stand, speak, dress, dance, play, eat, hold a pencil and more,” exert social force through the perception of their stability. But performatives accrue value in reiteration of performance.19 Butler’s formulation depends on temporal accumulation. Over time, the appearance of identity flattens the “internally discontinuous” aspects of gender in order to produce continuity.20 Joseph Roach offers a similar rendering of the term performance, explaining “that [it] offers a substitute for something else that preexists it. Performance, in other words, stands in for an elusive entity that it is not but that it must vainly aspire both to embody and to replace.”21 The filling of the vacancies, as he explains, never amounts to a perfect replica. Although it is easy to analogize Butler’s rendering of gender performance to race, the preface to the 1999 edition of her book Gender Trouble warns against such easy alignments. Her admonition gives us room to consider how the performances that constitute blackness disrupt the accumulative time associated with gender performance because theories of gender performativity do not account for the temporal incongruence of blackness. My book contends that performances, which constitute blackness, operate within contrapuntal time. Post–­civil rights artists make use of the temporal specificity of performing blackness by crafting webs of affiliation, which offer contexts for rethinking blackness in the past, present, and future. If identity functions as an accumulation that desire ushers forth, then historical misreadings of blackness have grave implications for contemporary performances. Such a rethinking of the relationship between performance and blackness is particularly important in a historical context in which individual striving, particularly on the part of President Barack Obama, have been exploited to counterbalance histories of antiblack racism. Ruminating over how performance constitutes the affiliation formerly known as race is not simply a form of nostalgia; instead, it provides an opportunity for responding to racism because it acknowledges the sociality of racial identity. Artists and activists have explicitly and implicitly linked their actions to prior enactments to create what I call webs of affiliation to combat and, in certain cases, foster antiblack racism. Black movements function through webs of affiliation. I use the word web to draw attention to a form of temporality that is not linear and therefore does not follow a progressive narrative

Introduction 7

or understand the past as before the present. Webs of affiliation connect performances in the present to those enacted in the past but not through a direct line. Black movements occur in time but also shape our relationship to time, and temporal play distinguishes the cultural production I explore in this book. Temporal multiplicity—­that is, time working in counterpoint rather than linearly—­gives artists and activists in the post–­civil rights era greater flexibility in shaping their relationship to blackness and how it functions and relates to the categories of the human and the citizen. Black Movements explores how artists actively engage with certain pasts and jettison others to remember, revive, and reimagine political movements that seem to have stalled. These moments of engagement create webs of affiliation, and in this book I show that they occur through speech acts, mimicry, oral expression, and acts of disruption.

Blackness in the Post–­Civil Rights Era The work of black cultural producers as historical agents in the post–­civil rights era confronts the troubling dichotomy of the hero and the slave that the social, cultural, and political shifts of the late twentieth century have installed. Like the black superhero at the center of Tarantino’s film, President Obama (standing alongside other black superstars such as Oprah Winfrey, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Robert Johnson, Tyler Perry, Jay-­Z, and Beyoncé Knowles) personifies the possibility that an exceptional individual can move beyond the equation of blackness with slavery, a burdensome inheritance that limits personal striving. Obama’s presidency calls attention to how black excellence functions as a twenty-­ first-­century aspiration that is supposed to unlink the individual from his or her limiting past. Yet as my parenthetical list suggests, a number of late-­twentieth-­century figures held similar positions of achievement that distanced them from the burdens of blackness. The pull of liberal individualism on black people intensified after Jim Crow, and the victories of the civil rights movement enabled them to occupy social, educational, and professional spaces that had been less available to them during Jim Crow. While scientific advancements also contributed to the transformation of racial categories in the late twentieth century, my focus in this book is on how social and cultural practices inform, intersect, and reflect political

8

Black Movements

imaginaries and practices. By the end of the twentieth century, as a result of shifting understandings of blackness and changes in the apparatus that regulate black people, blackness began to appear to be a chosen affiliation rather than a biological inheritance.22 As Jacquelyn Dowd Hall expertly argues in “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” predominant narratives of the civil rights movement marked a political decline after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. After a season of moral clarity, the country is beset by the Vietnam War, urban riots, and reaction against the excesses of the late 1960s and the 1970s, understood variously as student rebellion, black militancy, feminism, busing, affirmative action, or an overweening welfare state. A so-­called white backlash sets the stage for the conservative interregnum that, for good or ill, depending on one’s ideological persuasion, marks the beginning of another story, the story that surrounds us now.23

In Black Movements, I take up “the story that surrounds us now,” considering the multiple ways that artists working after the classical phase of the civil rights movement (beginning with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and ending with the passing of the Voting Rights Act) have taken up the unfinished business of advocating for uniform protection of civil rights, not just singular, individualized cases of redress. Of course, this analytical move does not mark the end or completion of civil rights movement strivings or suggest that the fifty years under consideration reflects a singular political, social, or cultural project. The civil rights movement emerged out of political exigencies that informed the shape of a diverse set of practices that emerged according to Hall, in the 1930s and continued for decades. While some of the desired outcomes of the civil rights movement still remain unaccomplished, the aesthetic and political imaginary (a binary I trouble throughout) of black movements has produced shifts following the classical phase. The artists I explore in this book range from Octavia Butler to Kanye West and from Toni Morrison to Beyoncé Knowles. Although they have flawed, limited, and incomplete visions of how to further the political projects of the mid-­twentieth century, their choice to align with various and distinct black freedom dreams marks a resistance to blackness as a deathbound

Introduction 9

position to be overcome through the acquisition of wealth and power or as a position of ontological impossibility under any circumstance. According to Abdul R. JanMohamed, “the death-­bound-­subject’s ‘life’ is thus defined by the need to avoid the possibilities of life as well as the possibility of death. This is the aporetic zone occupied by bare life, a zone between the status of ‘flesh’ and that of ‘meat,’ neither quite alive nor quite dead.”24 Black movements prove that, although black subjects live under the threat of death, they do not necessarily “avoid the possibilities of life.” Although Black Movements situates its claims within the era after the classical phase of the civil rights movement, I resist arguing for a definitive break between the political aims of black freedom movements of the early and mid-­twentieth century and those of the late twentieth century. Post, in my formulation, indicates coming after, but it does not deny how ongoing acts of memory inform the historiography—­the process of shaping historical narrative over time—­and feed into understanding what came before.25 I am more invested in exploring how artists negotiate the shifting social landscape over the fifty-­year period than in offering a uniform depiction of how black movements operate in the post–­civil rights era. I use the term post–­civil rights era to indicate a shift in political, discursive, and quotidian experiences of blackness that I link to the end of de jure segregation and the emergence of poststructuralism and multiculturalism. I do, however, aim to hold on to the ongoing salience and expansiveness and diversity of civil rights projects and resist reconciling them to a project to end segregation. The more expansive vision that I explore emphasizes the humanity of black people and realizes that black freedom movements encompass international and feminist projects. The practices call attention to visioning as a creative and critical practice that requires an understanding of the political as constituted in artistic work; such an understanding troubles the dichotomies of politics and aesthetics and of reason and unreason.26 Conceptualizing black freedom as unfolding through repeated embodied movements also puts pressure on periodization; take, for example, the relationship of black internationalism to the classical phase of the civil rights movement. Hall explains the domestic as well as international aims of what she calls the “long civil rights movement,” spanning from the 1930s to the 1970s. She challenges nationalist historiographies that posit that the juridical victories of the civil rights movement resulted from international pressure on the United States to appear more democratic. The historiographies

10

Black Movements

contend that the U.S. government conceded to some of the demands of civil rights activists because the nation saw equal rights as a weapon in its Cold War campaign against the Soviet Union.27 Rather, she argues, “seen through the optic of the long civil rights movement, . . . civil rights look less like a product of the Cold War and more like a casualty. That is so because antifascism and anticolonialism had already internationalized the race issue and, by linking the fate of African Americans to that of oppressed people everywhere, had given their cause a transcendent meaning.”28 Black internationalism served as the context of the civil rights movement, placing the global experience of black people at its center. Understanding that the civil rights movement is constituted, in part, by a set of practices that result from a web of affiliations rather than from a national causal dynamic buttresses Hall’s claim for the mutuality of the civil rights movement and black internationalism. The persistence of black internationalism during the classical phase of the civil rights movement highlights a longstanding antagonism between the aims of black freedom movements and the positions of the state expressed through the rhetoric of antiracism that emerged during the Cold War. Due to the civil rights movement, writes Roderick A. Ferguson, “the U.S. nation-­state would achieve new levels of freedom and secularity. Indeed the transformation that took place on campus yards would help to make the rearticulations of minority difference into the general presuppositions and elements of U.S. liberal capitalism.”29 As a result, antiracism became incorporated into the national logics of U.S. democracy and capitalism, producing “successive official antiracist regimes” particularly “liberal multiculturalism (1980s to 1990s), and neoliberal multiculturalism (2000s).”30 The operation of these official antiracist regimes required incorporating individual people of color into existing institutions organized in opposition to their thriving. Official antiracist regimes demanded that forms of blackness be untethered to the history of capital that distinguishes black life in the Americas. Jodi Melamed describes the incorporation of antiracist social movements into the state project of multiculturalism, beginning in the 1970s. “Liberal multiculturalism would signal the moment in which state and capital would use antiracism to forestall the redistribution of resources to economically and racially disenfranchised communities,” while neoliberal multiculturalism was “a means of using difference to foster capitalist distribution while

Introduction 11

curtailing social redistribution for underrepresented folks.”31 In order for the United States to incorporate the antiracism of the civil rights movement into a national project, the national rhetoric had to forget the critique of capitalism and the allegiances cultivated through black internationalism.32 The periods of multiculturalism that followed the classical phase of the civil rights movement have designated the geographical and ideological parameters of black freedom struggles, demarcating which issues, concerns, and ways of being are of the past and which are of the present. Conversely, through webs of affiliation, black movements cut across these periods to reorganize subjects’ relationships to pasts and reimagine ways of being in the present and future.

On Agency: Opting In or Out of Blackness The social, economic, and political gains of the civil rights movement did not, on their own, install post–­civil rights negotiations of blackness. Philosophical shifts also played a role in understandings of blackness as deathbound. Following Frantz Fanon’s assertion in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) that “the black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man,” blackness has been understood as a category of nonbeing or being for another.33 In his analysis, black people exist only in service to white people but never for themselves; they are objects in the social drama but never subjects of it.34 Fanon’s statement appears again and again in discussions of black ontology, as does consideration of his anecdotal description of alienation via his “corporeal schema.”35 Responding to the utterance of a child calling, “Look, a Negro!,” he examines how he has come to stand in for a transhistorical manifestation of blackness. “I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors.”36 As Fanon theorizes it, his blackness emerges in relationship to the child’s singling him out, noting his difference. The child transforms him into an object in service of the child’s desire for legibility. The child’s exclamation also provides an understanding of “the effects of that gaze” and insight into the gazer.37 Fanon’s recounting of black ontological impossibility also establishes a relational aspect that situates ontology as a dynamic. In his rendering blackness appears to be a result of misreading that does not account for his present embodied reality but projects a mythic

12

Black Movements

history onto him. The white onlookers’ process of denying present actions and substituting past mythologies challenges the accumulative principle at the heart of theories of performativity and calls attention to how blackness as a performative operates across real and mythical time. Fanon’s account of the black man in relation to the white man teaches us as much about ontology as it does about the violence that makes a black person legible and recognizable to a white onlooker. Although Fanon may seem to leave little hope for the appearance of the black man in the eyes of the white man, his work does allow for the emergence of a black person in the eyes of another black person. It also leaves room to consider how black people anticipate misreadings of their actions in order to craft liberatory performances of blackness. Fanon’s description emerges through disaffiliation, a practice that post–­ civil rights black artists use to redefine blackness. In “The Case of Blackness,” Moten reads possibility rather than foreclosure in Fanon’s text. “It seems to me that this special ontic-­ontological fugitivity of/in the slave is what is revealed as the necessarily unaccounted for in Fanon.”38 Moten’s interpretation reorients the conversation from the possibility, or lack thereof, of black ontology to the contexts under which one may ascertain it. His provocation reaffirms the importance of perspective in deciphering whether blackness can appear outside of the context of the white gaze and the necessity of examining and framing an epistemological problem. The analysis makes clear that colonial framing does not preclude but may occlude black social life. The child’s exclamation demonstrates how blackness as a relational performative links Fanon to a history that he cannot escape. Manifestations of blackness in the years following the classical phase of the civil rights movement have made the pull of history more malleable, but many purchase such freedom by buying into the promise of the individual. Through disavowal, artists construct a remedy for the seemingly unusable pasts that constrict Fanon.39 But such a remedy, impossible within the colonial context that shapes his text, emerges as an option only in the post–­ civil rights era and depends on theories of individual will that poststructuralism makes available. Such a remedy also situates Fanon as a recipient of history rather than in relationship to history, a temporal configuration that post–­civil rights artists also reimagine as they construct blackness. The late-­twentieth-­century turn toward black achievement as a remedy for suffering specifies but does not singularize the context of an ongoing

Introduction 13

dynamic of sly black performance. Throughout Black Movements I consider black performance in two ways. First, it expresses a theory of social life: that the ontological status of blackness may be found in the archive and repertoire of black expressive culture. I examine both the archive and the repertoire for evidence of the ontology of blackness and the manifestation of black social life as the basis for artistic and political action. Second, it corresponds to practices that emerge in aesthetic and quotidian expressions that affirm the ontology of black people as beings who resist, innovate, live, thrive, suffer, and die. Finding common ground with Afro-­optimists, I contend that black performance provides a mechanism to create, even within contexts of suffering and illegibility; it never loses sight of those contexts. Assumptions about the relationship between liberal individualism and agency inform the way in which blackness operates in the post–­civil rights era. According to the logics of liberalism, when people do not act to claim their freedom, they forfeit agency by not taking personal responsibility.40 Liberalism purports to endow individuals with unceasing access to the unfolding of freedom. As David Eng writes, “economists and legal scholars tend to view choice as the very definition of (neo)liberal freedom.”41 The call for black subjects to take personal responsibility for their living conditions in the late twentieth century is linked to assumptions that individual will governs agency and that the refusal of agency is akin to an ungrateful child’s unwillingness to do chores and therefore actively contribute to the maintenance of the house. The child wants to live in the house, make a mess, and refuses to clean up after him or herself. As such, the child’s living conditions should rightly be curtailed to align with this unwillingness to participate in sustaining the household. Never mind that the house has a leaky roof, cracked windows, and paper-­thin walls that prevent the child from sleeping at night. Responsibility must be evaluated within the social and temporal contexts in which it is called forth. The cultural production I call black movements temporalizes blackness, situating black performance, whether virtuoso or mundane, within the structures and strictures of its production. Nevertheless, as critics, we must consider how a group of artists have collectively attempted to attenuate the hold of blackness, rendering it a choice rather than an inheritance, because such a gesture provides insight into the operation and production of blackness in the post–­civil rights era. Writing about post–­civil rights black artists, Frank B. Wilderson III suggests, “It is not that one must gain recognition as an artist, but that one must shake free

14

Black Movements

of niggerization.”42 In the groundbreaking collection of post–­civil rights era visual art, Freestyle, shaking free becomes shaking loose. Thelma Golden’s introduction to the volume, “Post  .  .  .  ,” serves as a touchstone for many examinations of black artistic production in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. She explains, “A few years ago, my friend, the artist Glenn Ligon, and I began using the term post-­black. . . . [It] was shorthand for post-­black art, which was shorthand for a discourse that could fill volumes. For me, to approach a conversation about ‘black art,’ ultimately meant embracing and rejecting the notion of such a thing at the very same time.”43 In Golden’s description, black art becomes a moving target, an ephemeral category that may appear and disappear at any given moment. The belatedness of blackness signals the availability of the term for reinterpretation, use, regulation, and transcendence of the limits of historical racialization. The post–­civil rights era opens up blackness to temporal play that secures and disrupts lines of affiliation across generations. Blackness as racial inheritance, a traumatic burden, or a state of being property forecloses such temporal play. Throughout Black Movements, I distinguish between inheritance as a practice that lays claim to the subject and affiliation, which the subject actively creates. Post-­black demonstrates flexibility with the past and an ability to affirm and deny relationships that have come after the period known as the Black Arts Movement. Golden’s term draws attention to the instability of blackness, making her introduction a useful point of reference in discussions of black art and culture in the late twentieth century, which often seek to consider the racialized term’s contemporary operation. Equally powerful, although less often cited, is Hamza Walker’s essay “Renigged,” also in Freestyle, which tells the story of how the author “became black.”44 “Renigged” draws attention to his conscious but historically motivated decision to identify as black despite the racial designation’s pejorative connotations. The act of becoming black entails claiming a certain history and rejecting another. Walker’s choice, however, is a far cry from the racial primal scene described in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk. Here, Du Bois recalls that his entrance into double consciousness was prompted by a white classmate’s refusal, with a glance, to accept his gift. It also differs from the ideological regulation of the Black Arts Movement as expressed in Amiri Baraka’s introduction to Black Fire, which argues that blackness is a political category.45 Walker’s essay communicates the perception that

Introduction 15

he chooses instead of being chosen and that the choice amounts to a fundamental shift in the operation of blackness. Du Bois describes an interracial exchange whereas Walker depicts an intraracial one, emphasizing the notion that choosing a racial designation did not function with the same fluidity in 1903 as it did in 2001. The manifestation of black cultural production in the twenty-­first century is distinctive from earlier instantiations because blackness has become understood as a choice rather than a demand. The desegregation that resulted from the civil rights movement, along with late-­twentieth-­century theories of individual animations of power (Michel Foucault) and identity ( Judith Butler), have coalesced to produce this phenomenon. Yet even though theories challenge the idea of unilateral power or fixed identities, they do not account for the limits of any single individual who is working to transform a regulatory system. Contemporary artists who identify as black do not all identify as black artists. Nevertheless, across identifications, many share a desire to jettison the objectification associated with the slave as commodity. Some do so for the purposes of interpellation into the mainstream, whereas others do so because they do not buy into the totalizing narrative of objection. Throughout Black Movements, I consider how artists working after the classical phase of the civil rights movement intertwine, first, the impossible and visionary nature of aesthetics and, second, the probable and pragmatic aspects of politics. The intertwining of politics and aesthetics diminishes the distinction between what Kenneth Warren describes as direct African American political action and indirect cultural politics. Following Warren, Gene Andrew Jarrett summarizes, “Direct African American political action acknowledges, in Warren’s words, that ‘race . . . is at bottom a problem of politics and economics—­of constitution making and of wielding power legislatively and economically in order to mobilize broad constituencies to preserve an unequal social order.’ ”46 Conversely, “indirect cultural politics . . . operate ‘outside the political realm of direct representation—­whether one did so literally, sociologically, philosophically, administratively, or philanthropically.’ ”47 While Black Movements is primarily concerned with indirect cultural politics, it does insist on a relationship between direct and indirect action. I also examine embodied practices that are at once political and aesthetic to consider how performance functions to rework epistemologies and ontologies. Politics proper are consigned to the rational and reasonable, as J. A. Mbembé critiques in “Necropolitics,” but aesthetic production maintains

16

Black Movements

the capacity to imagine the unreasonable and impossible in order to open political possibility to reason and to what western episteme may categorize as unreason.48 Aesthetics’ ability to engage with the impossible and unreasonable also allows the artist to illuminate the cross-­purposes of desire and outcomes that perpetuate, crystallize, and transform racial categories. Therefore, black movements exist at the cusp of social legibility, gesturing toward the impossible while referring to the probable. Expressing innovation and pragmatism, they often appear to be the “threshold of revelation.”49 Uncovering and revealing the history of slavery and colonization in the Americas has enabled limited means of redress in the twentieth-­first century. Nevertheless, many of the twentieth century’s black political movements seem to have run their course, if we are to believe that these freedom movements exclusively aimed at giving black people in the United States legal means of redress and black nations in the Caribbean and Africa independence. The post–­Jim Crow, post-­apartheid, postcolonial era has ushered in a purportedly colorblind society, and, along with it, an assault on race-­based forms of knowledge production and coalition formation. In the twenty-­first century, race is said to no longer function as an explicit marker of second-­class citizenship, notwithstanding the abundance of evidence that suggests otherwise. In the late twentieth century, race purportedly went underground. Yet racialized language and race resurface (albeit subtly) in, for example, discussions of the Trayvon Martin shooting that focus on his hoodie (an object of clothing that anyone can choose to wear) rather than on structural racism. The constructed and historically ambiguous status of blackness reveals itself again in discussions of the epidemic proportions of incarcerated black and brown people that highlight the individual’s poor decision making rather than the criminalization of blackness. Likewise, evaluations of black independence struggles in Africa and the Caribbean allege that these movements have accomplished nothing more than to create a black ruling class that mirrors the politics of its white predecessor. The constructed and historically ambiguous nature of race also emerges in the mechanisms that artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries use to link to or unlink themselves from black diasporic artistic traditions. Although blackness remains a category closely tethered to physiognomy in terms of its ability to regulate individual identity, the category people of color draws attention to the multiplicity and diversity within blackness. Instead of being primarily a regulatory force (one that chooses the subject), blackness

Introduction 17

becomes a category that individuals opt in or out of. Nevertheless, artists occupy a privileged position because their aesthetic practices actively cultivate the appearance of blackness. Their position enhances the political implications of their acts and situates the activities that this book examines.

Black Performance Revisited Black Movements analyzes specific historical conditions of black performances enacted or archived during the post–civil rights era to show how black performance evokes black political practices. As such, it participates in the project of black performance theory, which “decipher[s] the imperatives of blackness [and] translat[es] the meaning of blackness by excavating the enlivening enactments that sustain blackness, . . . locating them within the generative force of performance.”50 In The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler explains the constitutive nature of performance to the individual, his or her role, and the site of the performance, whether on a stage, in a museum, or on a street corner.51 Performatives and archives remember and regulate these live and ephemeral phenomena. As Anita Gonzalez explains, “performance . . . involves enactment, re-­creation, or storytelling. Performers present humans in relationship to the exceptional circumstances that surround them. Even as performance centers in living beings and concrete experiences, it is also a metaphoric, or symbolic, iteration of life.”52 D. Soyini Madison gives a similarly capacious definition, locating performance, as do I, in the repertoire and the archive: “Performance constitutes forms of cultural staging—­conscious, heightened, reflexive, framed, contained—­within a limited time span of action from plays to carnivals, from poetry to prose, from weddings to funerals, from jokes to storytelling and more.”53 Both definitions suggest that performance exists in the live event and in the detailing of the live event, within poetry and metaphor. Conversely, Thomas F. DeFrantz asserts that “performance emerges in its own conscious engagement, and it is created by living people. Of course, some will argue that ‘texts perform,’ or ‘music videos perform,’ which may be true, but for my sensibility, performance involves subjectivity occasioned by action born of breath.”54 While I do not suggest that texts perform, I do argue that representations of performances function as a part of the archive of a performance and expand the social, imaginative, political, cultural, and aesthetic

18

Black Movements

possibilities of the enactment. To represent the oral quality of storytelling in the novel, as Toni Morrison does in Song of Solomon (1977), is to provide insight into the particular characteristics of black expressive culture. I examine the interplay between performance, performatives, and archives to decipher how black movements persist, circulate, and reimagine themselves. Performatives link the actor to other actors, to the social field, and to the history and future of the performed act. Nevertheless, the mandate of liberalism to focus on volitional action, on self-­help and self-­determination, also leaves room for demonstrating how performance studies (a field that examines the relationship between individual action and the constitution of the public sphere) helps to decipher the current manifestations of race-­based bodies of knowledge. In Cities of the Dead: Circum-­Atlantic Performance, Joseph Roach defines the process of surrogation as “how culture reproduces and re-­creates itself.” In the life of a community, the process of surrogation does not begin or end but continues as actual or perceived vacancies occur in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric. Into the cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure . . . survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates. Because collective memory works selectively, imaginatively, and often perversely, surrogation rarely if ever succeeds. The process requires many trials and at least as many errors. The fit cannot be exact. The intended substitute either cannot fulfill expectations, creating deficit, or actually exceeds them, creating a surplus.55

Roach argues that social organization summons individuals to play roles that then constitute the social sphere, either reproducing or disrupting it but never perfectly replicating it. He contends that social memory informs the choice of surrogate and the effectiveness of the act of surrogation. Therefore, the process of selection manages the desire to link past and future social structures. The act of surrogation negotiates not only the difference in actors but also the shifting relationship among actors and, by extrapolation, social shifts as well. Through the process of surrogation, the individual not only participates in crafting the social sphere but also demonstrates how performance perpetuates temporal links and disruptions. Although Roach focuses on filling gaps that occur in the present, I go further, considering how artists use contemporary performances to fill historical gaps as well.

Introduction 19

Acts of surrogation negotiate the matrices of desire that encourage or discourage modes of performance; the desire to keep things the same or, conversely, the hope for change; the desire to leverage the regulatory force of race toward coalition formation or to subvert the limitations of racial sameness that often manifest as national, gender, and sexual normativity. The performances, which require creative political vision, emphasize the constitution of competing desires, such as practices that seek freedom in the midst of enslavement, peace in a sea of violence, and wealth in the midst of poverty. Understanding how individual acts contribute to political movements through the constellation of enactments that rub up against, undermine, sidestep, or call attention to hegemonic social conditions gives black movements their force. Black movements are embodied actions that participate in political movements by creating links across time and space, thus disrupting the accumulative force of blackness when it unfolds in linear time. From the high-­stepping strut of the marching band, to the militarized formation of parade participants in Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, to the playful yet mournful stride of jazz funeral musicians, to the civilly disobedient steps of civil rights activists, marching functions as a political act and an aesthetic form. Marching exemplifies the physical, temporal, geographical, and political unrest at the heart of black movements. By considering the way in which certain performances call prior ones into being, black movements point to not only geographical connections and divisions but also temporal ones.

Webs of Affiliation Rather than understanding the black nationalism of the Black Arts Movement as a failure of assimilation in the civil rights era (that is, rather than understanding history as a sequential or an ongoing repetition of cause and effect), black movements call for an understanding of the simultaneity of, for example, assimilationist and nationalist desires. Take the Harlem Renaissance, when the New Negro ideal existed alongside Garvey’s vision for the Black Star Line. This juxtaposition suggests that the historiography of the period need not be understood as an unfolding but as a web of

20

Black Movements

affiliation. Such a spatial representation requires a rethinking of how we narrate and make legible black cultural traditions. The ways in which artists restore and attenuate relationships to the past are central to the cohesion and incoherence of blackness. The chapters in this book explore embodied movements captured in bodies, images, words, film, and sound. Each chapter has much in common with the genealogies of performance that Roach describes in Cities of the Dead; that is, it considers how embodied movements enable memory and imagination, pasts and futures. While all of the futures advanced through black movements are not aimed toward liberation from race-­based oppression, the active remembering of the past produces a web. Thus, black movements not only act to transmit memory but also have a historiographical function. Although Black Movements intervenes in discussions of tradition, I view the creation of connections as a process that recurs through restored behavior, which fundamentally renders the process multi-­temporal. Nevertheless, my thinking engages with debates in black literary studies that often accrue around the formation of traditions. The African American literary tradition, as Cheryl Wall argues in Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition, “inevitably derives from a racial identity that its authors are presumed to share.”56 In What Was African American Literature, Kenneth Warren calls attention to how the shifting definitions of race before and after Jim Crow create presumptions within the authors as to their relationship to the tradition. Noting the dangers of canon formation, Wall recounts black feminists’ reservations about the term tradition, including Mary Helen Washington’s reading of it as a mechanism to exclude black women and Hortense Spillers’s formulation of “‘tradition’ for black women’s writing community [as] a matrix of discontinuities that partially articulate various periods of consciousness in the history of an African-­ American people.”57 Given the sometimes exclusionary function of tradition, I find Wall’s description of “the web of tradition” useful because it offers an ever-­evolving spatial model that moves in multiple directions and recalls the narrative web of the Anansi tales as well as the informational web of the Internet.58 In “Diasporic Spidering: Constructing Contemporary Black Identities,” Nadine George-­Graves offers a theory of black diaspora based on “an active process.”59 Through “a concept of spidering that is distinctly performative,” she argues, “the web of stories that Anansi spins serves as a metaphor for

Introduction 21

the ways in which we remain connected to people over time, geography, cultural differences, and so forth.”60 Her definition of diaspora engages with the process of self-­fashioning and the ways in which, following Brent Hayes Edwards, we may come to understand the term as a practice of exchange rather than a location.61 My conception of webs of affiliation builds on Edwards’s notion of exchange but also diverges from Edwards in that I consider how the emergence of diaspora in embodied practices functions as a mode of politics. Although the majority of subjects that I explore in Black Movements are African American, the performances they enact or cite are often diasporic in that their practices create a web of affiliation with practitioners in the Caribbean and Africa. As I have already said, webs of affiliation connect performances in the present to those enacted in the past that may otherwise go unnoticed and secure them as historical, creating “a backward glance that enacts a future vision.” 62 According to Walter Benjamin, “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”63 The artists stage moments of recognition because in order to glimpse the flashes of black pasts one must learn how to see in the dark and listen to the “lower frequencies.”64 Black movements “call on the past, to animate it, understanding that the past has a performative nature, which is to say that rather than being static and fixed, the past does things.”65 Black artists remember lines of descent not only to call attention to the workings of historiography but also to chart ways forward. Thus, each chapter of Black Movements considers how the threat of death and dying (literally, socially, and metaphorically) informs the practices of black artists whose work conceptualizes blackness and the human as a foundational category for the citizen. The chapters consider the movements as well as their representations, demonstrating how the archive and the repertoire together focus attention on modes of being and behavior that enliven political practice. My choice of performances corresponds to how the acts of memory negotiate the presumption of black subjects as death-­bound. Although there are several examples of performances that communicate conceptions of blackness as nonbeing, I focus on those that present and produce black life and living as parts of webs of affiliation. Chapter 1 engages explicitly with the question of how the legacy of slavery and the persistent devaluation of black life shape the form and function of black movements, exploring how storytelling functions as a political strategy

22

Black Movements

to counter the objectification of the transatlantic slave trade and its aftermath. Chapter 2 considers the processes of entrapping as a gender-­inflected movement, analyzing how late twentieth-­and early twenty-­first-­century visual and dramatic performances that make reference to Saartjie Baartman (displayed as a freak in nineteenth-­century Europe) and Josephine Baker (an early-­twentieth-­century performer often associated with animals) function as seductions that reposition black women in relation to the human. Chapter 3, which examines how liberal individualism and neoliberalism discourage black movements, is organized around two questions: what factors enable belief—­spiritual, political, or personal—­to flourish or languish; and how does the nature of belief inform an individual’s ability to use the prophetic, as the “predictive function” of “critical intelligence,” toward a more expansive experience of freedom?66 Chapter 4 brings my study full circle by examining marching as a political practice, a mode of mourning, and a form of spatial disruption. As such, it functions as a critique of individualism that denies human connection across time even as it serves to model citizenship. Chapter 5 examines the possibility of living after death, contending that black movements may not only weave webs but also build bridges over historical and physical ruptures.

1 • Flying Africans in Spaceships

The hip hop artist Jay-­Z describes a life span prematurely cut short yet still vital: “And they say by 21 I was supposed to die / So I’m out here celebrating my post-­demise.”1 Flying through the valley of the shadow of death; flying like I’m dying; flying that is dying: dying becomes flying in many black diasporic representations of the Flying Africans narrative, a way to repeal the death sentence that the Enlightenment has handed down to black people in the Americas through the dehumanization of blackness. The theme of death in life and in life after death permeates the Flying Africans narrative, which contains four pivotal moments: a depiction of exhausting labor, a confrontation with a brutal figure expressing coercive power, an enunciation on the part of an African gifted with supernatural powers, and a vision of an African or a mass of Africans flying away. The Flying Africans narrative is fundamentally about theft of life from the social and physical death of slavery. By stealing away individuals that slavery stole, flight reverses the theft of bodies. In content and form, the narrative demonstrates a theory of the human that allows for a rendering of black social life. Black people may appear as nonbeings, inhuman, pure labor in the context of the slave system depicted in the Flying Africans narrative. The narrative suggests, however, that they possess the power to interrupt the finality of death.

23

24

Black Movements

In the post–­civil rights renditions of the narrative explored in this chapter, artists depict flights as acts of relation that connect the actor to specific diasporic pasts in order to enliven those pasts and draw from their political force in the present. Black people’s exclusion from the liberal human is the afterlife of slavery. The transatlantic slave system’s attempts to transform beings into physical laboring objects produced blackness as inert bodiliness and informed beliefs about who can and cannot produce universal knowledge and who has the right to live. While this study does not focus on modes of cultural expression that remember slavery, it does consider how slavery instantiates an order of the human. Blackness, through its exclusion from the liberal human and the cybernetic posthuman, draws attention to the limitations of idealizing disembodied knowledge. Such idealization disregards the process of knowledge production that a performance studies approach allows. In How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, N. Katherine Hayles explains, “Identified with the rational mind, the liberal subject possessed a body but was not usually represented as being a body. Only because the body is not identified with the self is it possible to claim for the liberal subject its notorious universality, a claim that depends on erasing markers of bodily difference, including sex, race, and ethnicity.”2 The purported social death of black subjects that resulted from the transatlantic slave trade coincided with the theorization of the disembodied human that Hayles describes. Any claim to liberal subjectivity on the part of the black subject in the late twentieth or early twenty-­first century must take place within the historical context of either death-­bound blackness or postracial universalism. In this chapter, I examine how black performance distills a rendering of the human that emerges along the continuum of word and speech. Such an elaboration of the human affords black people access to life after the social death of slavery and within the afterlife of slavery. The social death and afterlife of slavery constitute the normative sociality of black people; therefore, in order to understand how black performance constitutes identity, one must first explore the contexts that enable black ontology. In articulation, the Flying Africans narrative extends black life by demonstrating the interplay between the living and the dead and showing how the living may revive histories, narratives, and practices that seem to have passed on without leaving a trace. Articulations of the Flying Africans narrative, as an act



Flying Africans in Spaceships

25

of memory, demonstrate that producing webs of affiliation through speech acts and oral expression serves an ontological purpose because it enables the proliferation of black being. Webs of affiliation not only reveal black subjectivity but also perpetuate it by enabling artists to account for the specific contexts that threaten black life. The webs are points of connection and sources for new threads and extensions. The relationship between content and form or information and substrate draws attention to the interplay between ontology and epistemology. Hayles’s study seeks to correct “the erasure of embodiment” that “is a feature common to both the liberal humanist subject and the cybernetic posthuman.” She argues persuasively, “For information to exist, it must always be instantiated in a medium.” 3 Consequently, the desire to access context while eliminating the form—­the body—­would hinder analysis and impoverish the content itself. Hayles demonstrates the interrelation of form and content, a well-­known assertion in literary studies, but how does it apply to embodied modes of expression? As I noted in the introduction, there is an ongoing debate in African American studies about the ontological status of black people in general and the enslaved in particular. Recently, the sides of the debate have been categorized as Afro-­optimism versus Afro-­pessimism. Representing a viewpoint within Afro-­optimism, Fred Moten’s In the Break suggests that the beating of an enslaved woman, Aunt Hester, as depicted in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, produces a scream that is omitted from the narrative but that in expression disrupts the reduction of black people to commodities. Representing a viewpoint within Afro-­pessimism, Frank Wilderson III’s Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms makes the case for the ontological impossibility of black subjects. While I agree with Wilderson that European humanism does function as a bankrupt terrain for black people, I disagree with his claim that no black philosophical traditions exist within which to establish the ontology of blackness. Rather, a turn to aesthetic traditions that appear in the archive and repertoire as silences, absences, and so-­called irrational expression work alongside rational disembodied modes of knowledge production to prove the ontology of blackness. Although Hayles offers a useful argument for the interrelation of information and substrate, the examples and theorists she uses to make her case often embody white masculinity and therefore implicitly undercut her critique. Alexander G. Weheliye takes her to task for presenting the posthuman as “the white liberal subject in techno-­informational disguise.” He

26

Black Movements

continues, “Hayles reinscribes white masculinity as the (human) point of origin from which to progress to a posthuman state.”4 The debates over the category of the posthuman call into question what or who qualifies as a universal source of knowledge. What lives qualify as tragic, what narratives articulate a human condition, and what actions instantiate individuals as subjects and citizens? Weheliye’s critique of the prototypical substrate of universal knowledge enables a theorization of the human that takes into account the social and physical death of black folk as instrumental in articulations of liberal notions of the human. His analysis also leaves room to examine the incompleteness of black death. The Flying Africans narrative recurs across time and space and, as a black movement, seeks to triumph over black death—­the reduction of black people to only death-­bound materiality. Through the representation of resurrection, the narrative communicates the act of transfer central to storytelling. The term resurrection refers to the refusal to relegate to the dead a set of practices and ways of being, but also it calls attention to the transformation of materiality. Though the term conjures a specifically Christian set of beliefs, it is also a feature in depictions of zombies, vampires, and Frankenstein’s monster. I use it here as a way to focus on how we can understand performance as occupying a liminal position between the material and the immaterial—­as embodied yet ephemeral. The both-­and status of performance offers insights into how black cultural workers have brought the category of the human back from the dead. Disrupting the purportedly natural progression of each performance and performer toward death is central to the intervention of the narrative. The Flying Africans narrative appears in the archive and repertoire of black performance, from ethnographies of the story to songs. Each recounting of the narrative that I explore in this chapter gestures toward or encompasses the oral quality of storytelling, drawing attention to the embodied nature of iteration as an essential part of the narrative.5 There are no recordings of formerly enslaved Africans recounting the narrative; but by reconnecting to the oral quality of storytelling, we may understand the flight at the heart of the narrative as opening an entry into a tunnel rather than producing a hole or a loss. In these terms, the flight comes to represent the extension of life rather than the finality of death. Understanding the oral quality of the written narratives also troubles the primacy of the written and places it in relation to other sources of knowledge.



Flying Africans in Spaceships

27

The Flying Africans narrative offers insight into the production of embodied remains that seemingly leave no trace and the repertoires of utterance that sustain them. The narrative enacts black embodiment via the storytelling and exemplifies disembodied black voices via its instantiation in print and digital media. Its hybrid nature, at once written and oral, shows how performance theory offers insight into the function of blackness within freedom movements. Performance theory provides an epistemological framework of absence and presence, materiality and immateriality, that attends to the ontological specificity of blackness in the post–­civil rights era.6 In Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, Rebecca Schneider outlines the debates that emerged in response to Peggy Phelan’s influential study of performance, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. Schneider explains, “In Unmarked, Phelan is invested in mining the immaterial conditions of live performance and though she problematically links the immaterial with disappearance, giving away a deeply Platonic investment in vision/blindness as the privileged way of knowing, she usefully asks: ‘what would it take to value the immaterial within a culture structured around the equation “material equals value”’?”7 Phelan is referring, in part, to the value ascribed to material remains as evidence of history and productivity and visual evidence as an esteemed form of proof. Following Phelan and returning to Hayles’s analysis, she argues that the production of the cybernetic posthuman relies on immateriality, which restricts the circulation of race to the body. In embodied and disembodied form, the Flying Africans narrative functions as a racialized conduit, which situates certain practices as the manifestation of blackness whether or not those practices emerge in the repertoire or are referred to in the archive. The debate over the status of the cybernetic posthuman, as I outline in here, does not allow for the mutuality of embodied and disembodied expression within a single substrate, but the Flying Africans narrative requires such mutuality. The Flying Africans narrative began as an escape story that enslaved and formerly enslaved Africans told. Across time, it has invested and divested the human with meaning through acts of innovation and appropriation. By looking at different articulations of the narrative in the late twentieth century, we can see how it serves as a source for imagining futures within the black diaspora that are predicated on understandings of the human that exceed the physical instantiation in the body. These post–­civil rights articulations also show how certain reiterations of the narrative constrict the

28

Black Movements

transgressive nature of the content. In such cases, the narrative describes psychic and social death rather than the psychic, social, and physical death of slavery. I focus here on versions that simultaneously foreground embodied and disembodied blackness via print and music technologies, thus highlighting how black cultural makers’ early articulations of the posthuman (the disembodied voice) resurrect the human through an act of exchange. To see how black subjects undo “the Cartesian mind/matter dichotomy,” that “preserves the idea of the liberal subject, represented as having a body, but not being a body,” one must consider the strategies that black people use to reshape physical boundaries of the body and resituate it in space and time.8

Orature Through storytelling, energy, breath, air, smells, and narrative are exchanged. Listening to and incorporating information physically change brain tissue; therefore, in the act of storytelling the teller changes the physical body of the listener. Similarly, muscle memory produces bodily knowledge. Therefore, to approximate the storytelling style or the cadence of a particular singing style, the voice must shift shape and reform its physical properties. In black literary studies, theorists continually argue over the relationship between oral and written narrative, or what I am describing as the simultaneously embodied and disembodied quality of the Flying Africans narrative. Debates concerning the privileging of oral versus written modes of expression reflect a deeper impulse to affirm how black writers advance Enlightenment notions of the human through the creation of the disembodied text or to demonstrate black cultural workers’ distinctive cultural contribution through the disruption of the textual with the oral. Key figures in the debates, including Madhu Dubey and Harryette Mullen, question the tendency of Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., to privilege orality. West, for example, argues, “The ur-­text of black culture is neither a word nor a book, not an architectural monument or a legal brief. Instead, it is a guttural cry and a wrenching moan.”9 Performance theorist D. Soyini Madison concurs: “Locating and representing the range of sounds more than the literal word was ‘the signifying difference that made the difference,’ the distinction between how black folks described the world and how others described it.”10 Mullen cautions, however,



Flying Africans in Spaceships

29

that “any theory of African-­American literature that privileges a speech-­based poetics, or the trope of orality, to the exclusion of more writerly text will cost us some impoverishment of the tradition.”11 Meta Du Ewa Jones and Brent Hayes Edwards find middle ground between orality and textuality, noting their mutuality.12 Similarly, Gayl Jones asserts, “Not every literature admits the influence and validity of its folklores and oral tradition in its literary criticism, yet all literatures have an essential connection with orality; indeed one might say that the foundation of every literary tradition is oral, whether it is visible or invisible in the text.”13 Jones’s comment points to a fundamental rupture at the site of the text, which enables a rethinking of the textual and its relationship to performance. The formal attributes of a work of art inform how the tradition and its texts and practices and practitioners accrue value. Jones’s comment, by recognizing the mutuality of the oral within the written, anticipates the Kenyan novelist, playwright, and essayist Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s use of the term orature, which accounts for orality, textuality, and performativity within modes of expression. The term was coined by the Ugandan literary theorist Pio Zirimu and developed by Ngugi. According to him, Zirimu developed the term to distinguish between oral and visual narratives. Ngugi builds on and differs from Zirimu’s theorization, describing orature as “a total aesthetic system.”14 He clarifies, “Orature transcends the narrow binaries of the written and the oral that condition so much of anthropological and literary thought today. It suggests a transcendence over both the purely oral, the purely literary, and the purely performed.”15 The term erases the space “between speech and writing, performance and print,” presenting “these channels of communication” as they “constantly overlap, penetrate, and mutually produce one another.”16 Troubling the nature of the text as a disembodied form gives life to performance as an echo. Ngugi’s intervention has been useful to many scholars, including Joseph Roach, as they form methodologies to explore embodied modes of expression, whether live or archival. In Cities of the Dead: Circum-­ Atlantic Performance, Roach details the applicability of the term orature across time (from an interpretation of the Declaration of Independence to late-­twentieth-­century celebrations of Mardi Gras in New Orleans) and space (the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Haitian Revolution). He explains that the flexibility of the concept comes from the way in which “orature comprises a range of forms” and “goes

30

Black Movements

beyond a schematized opposition of literary and orality as transcendent categories; rather, it acknowledges that these modes of communication have produced one another interactively over time and that their historic operations may be usefully examined under the rubric of performance.”17 Roach strategically foregrounds performance in his interpretation to clarify how orature moves beyond the literary-­orality divide. Although he does not indicate the source of perpetuation, his theory of surrogation enables an understanding of performance as an activity that creates links among communicators. He also makes a temporal argument, asserting that the modes of communication—­the voice or the text—­constitute one another over time; in other words, they continue to inform one another even in the wake of a performance. At the same time, the surrogation enables a consideration of the differentiation among performances. Thus, if the Flying Africans narrative, in content and form, serves as evidence of black social life and its perpetuation, then changes to its content and form offer insights into the nature of black life and living as well as into threats of death and dying. The Flying Africans narrative inspires cultural memory through sound—­ “I’ll Fly Away”—­and sight as it draws attention to a “‘singing’ impulse in black literature,” emphasizing the way in which sound echoes in the ear, on the page, and in different spaces.18 Some of the earliest enunciations of the narrative resound in late twentieth-­century and early twenty-­first-­century literary representations of the black diaspora and music. The early iterations established a political practice embedded in the formal attributes (embodied and disembodied aspects) of the story. In this chapter I begin with the early iterations and attend to their attributes and then demonstrate what is being remembered and forgotten in the post–­civil rights’ renditions. Iterations of the Flying Africans tale skate along the performative edge of orality and textuality, creating formal qualities that intervene in theories of the human based on disembodied forms.

Defying the Social Death of Slavery in Early Iterations The fluidity of life and death are expressed often in Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes, a collection of folklore



Flying Africans in Spaceships

31

compiled in 1940 under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). It contains several early Anglophone versions of the Flying Africans narrative, including the ones that inspired Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.19 As Stephanie Smallwood notes, many of these tales reveal “the underlying logic found throughout traditional African systems of thought: that the sacred and the secular, the physical and the metaphysical were not separate spheres but rather integrally together and manifest in the material world.”20 The WPA project attempted to capture stories that would have otherwise remained absent from the archive. At the same time it pinpointed a signature attribute of the Flying Africans narrative: its inability to fully capture the story. The narrative makes explicit the epistemological implications of orature as a system that disrupts the text as a totalizing form of knowledge. In one version included in the book, a narrator, Tonie Houston, describes an African, Solomon Jones, who departed “for his native land, some five or six years ago” and has not been heard from since.21 The book juxtaposes Houston’s description of Solomon’s disappearance with a depiction of ritual, including a circle dance and the beating of the drums of death to summon “the ‘settin-­up’ or wake.”22 The circle dance creates a communion among the living and the dead, which ruptures the seeming finality of physical death. The juxtaposition of narratives suggests that in flight Solomon has conquered the death knell of slavery. In Song of Solomon (1977), Morrison picks up on the ability to conquer death through flight but focuses on manifestations of social death in the late twentieth century rather than the physical deaths experienced as a result of the transatlantic slave trade. The storytellers in Drums and Shadows embody a seeming paradox: the pursuit of freedom in physical death through the act of narration. The syntax and spelling throughout the book draw attention to the narration as a speech act. One of the storytellers, however, Paul Singleton, foregrounds sound in his recounting. Singleton, who claimed to have been brought to Savannah in 1869, recalls two stories told to him by his father: the first about people who could fly back to Africa, the second about enslaved Africans drowned in a creek: “Dey say yuh kin heah um moanin an groanin in duh creek ef yuh goes neah deah tuh-­day.”23 Moaning and groaning communicates pleasure and pain. The phrase captures the nexus of life and death; it calls for sensory engagement, for listening to the written word. The depiction of sound insists on dynamic listening.

32

Black Movements

Extending the formal distinctions of Drums and Shadows, “All God’s Chillen Had Wings,” included by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps in their collection The Book of Negro Folklore (1958), places the Flying Africans narrative in “the sea islands and out-­of-­the way places in the low country” as it produces traces of the oral and the acoustic in the text.24 While the narratives from Drums and Shadows foreground how orature expresses the ontological status of black subjects being expressed in word and deed, “All God’s Chillen Had Wings” follows the structure that governs most iterations of the Flying Africans narrative: arduous physical labor, a clash with a brutal figure expressing regulatory power, the expression of an African gifted with spiritual power, and an individual African or group of Africans flying away. Set on a plantation, the tale describes an overseer who uses his lash to strike a young mother for falling down from exhaustion. The young woman seeks council from an old man, but “the driver [cannot] understand what they said.”25 The narrator’s inability to translate the conversation between the young woman and the old man places the reader in the same position as the overseer; we do not have access to the words they exchange, which limits our information and calls our attention to the acoustic difference produced by the old man and young woman. In this case, the narrative marks the sound by complete silence in a method that produces an effect similar to the juxtaposition in Drums and Shadows of stories of flight and ones of physical redemption through spiritual transcendence. At the same time, the structure of the narrative varies from those in Drums and Shadows by including artistic interpretation. In Hughes and Bontemps’s story, the acoustic dissonance results from the overseer’s linguistic difference, which is analogous to the reader’s alienation. The text includes this productive alienation to limit the impulse to claim mastery of the Flying Africans by codifying the occurrence in narrative. Instead of allowing the reader to assume a comfortable place of dominance, the text disrupts his or her ability to access the words fully—­to hear what was said or even gain a translation that approximates literary and acoustic fullness. The configuration draws attention to narrative’s ability to shape the relationship with the audience as a refusal. After establishing the limited yet influential power of the reader-­listener, “All God’s Chillen Had Wings” creates another moment for improvisation, one that exemplifies the qualities of orature. Anticipating that the young woman would fall again, “the driver came running with his lash to drive her on with her work, [so] she turned to the old man and asked: ‘Is it time yet,



Flying Africans in Spaceships

33

daddy?’ He answered: ‘Yes, daughter; the time has come. Go; and peace be with you!’ . . . and stretched out his arms toward her . . . so. With that she leaped straight up into the air and was gone like a bird, flying over field and wood.”26 The ellipses invite speculation or, as Jennifer DeVere Brody writes, the addition of  “supplements to the printed matter in/of the text.”27 The shift in the voice—­from the old man to the narrator—­suggests that he or she describes the old man’s and young woman’s actions. What does the old man do or say to prepare her for flight? Does the language that the ellipses mark indicate instruction or a demonstration? The text leaves ambiguous the old man’s words and the possible motion of the two bodies as it creates physical space on the page for these possibilities. According to Brody, “ellipsis can be read as a site that invites improvisation: one might say that the ellipsis as a present figure of absence is paradoxically more meaningful, rather than meaningless . . . as the marks that hail the reader as a participant, inviting the audience into imaginative engagement with the text.”28 The absence presents the reader with a challenge to listen to the echoes that linger and continue to produce improvisation in African American cultural productions. The punctuation enriches “our understanding of how the vocal and the visual are performed across the geographic space of the page.”29 Through the use of ellipses, “All God’s Chillen Had Wings” demonstrates black movements, inserting an absence that requires readers, from their points of geographic specificity, to translate the action and fill in the gaps. Moreover, the ellipses hail the reader and therefore implicate him or her in a politics of transforming death, whether physical or social, from a final conjuncture to a detour. In “If You Surrender to the Air: Folk Legends of Flight and Resistance in African American Literature,” Gay Wilentz establishes a central tension among theorists and writers about whether the Africans actually flew away or committed suicide, foregrounding the implications of material evidence on interpretations of the story. Michael Gomez’s historical study Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South argues that the Flying Africans narrative serves as evidence that Igbo’s enslaved Africans from the Bight of Biafra and West Central Africa committed suicide in larger percentages than did other slave populations. He uses the narratives collected in Drums and Shadows as evidence to indicate that early populations of enslaved Africans along the Georgia coast came from “the Gambia River and Niger sections; later the coast from the Congo River to the southern end of Portuguese West Africa.”30 He

34

Black Movements

asserts that these later populations were known to commit mass suicide by drowning and take part in individual acts of disappearance—­so much so, he argues, that South Carolina planters refused to purchase Igbo captives. A radical disruption of biopolitics, the mass suicide of Africans from the Bight of Biafra and West Central Africa challenged the American slaveholders’ “power and . . . capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”31 Even though, as Gomez argues, contemporaries knew that the Flying Africans committed suicide, the act reflected a will to resist and “contained within it the seed for regeneration and renewal.”32 The choice, then, to tell the story in the order recorded in Drums and Shadows and “All God’s Chillen Had Wings” affirms a process that perpetuates black life under the shadow of death. Whereas the narratives participate in compiling written histories that solidify modes of knowledge production, the breaks in the texts (whether sonic or punctuational) call attention to an alternative epistemology crafted in exchange and its refusal.

Gendering Flight The mediums in which contemporary artists choose to remember the Flying Africans narrative communicate the ruptures from which not only a racialized but also a gender-­specific human may be spoken. The Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat’s short story “Nineteen Thirty-­Seven,” from her acclaimed cycle of stories Krik? Krak! (1995), also emphasizes the mode of storytelling as an essential aspect of the freedom drive that underpins flight as a conduit for black life.33 Her story, too, situates oration as a critical stage in the realization of flight. Danticat’s narrative focuses on the cultural conditions that hamper women’s flight and the social codes that mark women who fly as dangerous. In the aftermath of the classical phase of the civil rights movement, the emergence of third-­wave feminism extended the freedom dreams of activists. Therefore, understanding how articulations of the Flying Africans narrative in late twentieth and early twenty-­ first centuries have reinvigorated the black freedom movements of the mid-­twentieth century requires attending to how they negotiate gender. In “Nineteen Thirty-­Seven,” Josephine, the protagonist, cultivates the power to fly by remembering the tale her mother has told her. The story exemplifies the possibility of transmitting a liberating narrative from one generation



Flying Africans in Spaceships

35

to the next, even in the face of a purportedly shameful legacy. The story begins with Josephine going to visit her mother, Défilé, in jail and ends with the protagonist recounting her memory of the story her mother told her about the first time Défilé flew. Danticat’s story situates the flight, its context, and the ones that fly as part of a series of actions that enable black womanhood to appear and disappear. The name of the protagonist’s mother purposefully calls to mind the legendary Haitian heroine “Dédée Bazile—­also known in popular folklore as Défilée-­la-­Folle (‘Défilée the Madwoman’),” marking the illogic of black womanhood within the context of liberal humanism.34 As Jane Evans Braziel explains in “Défilée’s Diasporic Daughters: Revolutionary Narratives of Ayiti (Haiti), Nanchon (Nation), and Dyspora (Diaspora) in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!,” Défilée “was born to slave parents near Cap Français. She later followed the revolutionary troops of Dessalines as a peddler; after Dessalines’s death and dismemberment, the slave girl gathered together and buried the remaining parts of his body (the corps de Dessalines).”35 The narrative asks the reader to note the historical references that “Nineteen Thirty-­Seven” makes through the naming of the protagonist’s mother and the title of the story. Danticat purposefully shortens the name of her character to render questionable the systems of knowledge production that render Défilée-­la-­Folle. Such assignations, I will argue in chapter 3, are necessary to understand the social limitations placed on the black citizen and how women function, nonetheless, to extend democracy. “Nineteen Thirty-­Seven” opens with the short sentence “My Madonna cried.” With this line, the story establishes the importance of a particular historical order that links the protagonist to an insurgent past.36 We learn that the Madonna that Josephine brings with her when she visits her mother, who is imprisoned for allegedly killing a baby, belonged to Josephine’s “great-­great-­great-­grandmother Défilé.” Défilé herself had received the statue from “a French man who had kept her as a slave” (34). Through the placement of an object, the story creates a direct line of descent from the historical figure Défilée-­la-­Folle to Défilé and Josephine. It also connects Josephine and her mother to the 1937 massacre that will become the central focus of Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998). Josephine describes her ritualized walk to her mother’s prison: “I chose to go barefoot, as my mother had always done on her visits to the Massacre River, the river separating Haiti from the Spanish-­speaking country that she had never allowed

36

Black Movements

me to name because I had been born on the night that El Generalissimo, Dios Trujillo, the honorable chief of state, had ordered the massacre of all Haitians living there” (33). Josephine’s reflection reveals her intimacy with and distance from the massacre. It also establishes the power of speech acts to shift the social order. The ritualized act of memory she undertakes—­that is, placing her body along the path that her mother had walked—­establishes her connection to the horrific events. Braziel explains, “In 1937 the Dominican dictator Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, or ‘Jeffe’ as he was commonly known, ordered the slaughter of thousands (some scholars estimate scores of thousands) of Haitian cane laborers working in the Dominican Republic; as the massacre began, many escaped, though seriously wounded, fleeing the state military violence and crossing the Massacre River and Haiti’s eastern border.”37 Défilé, unlike her mother Eveline, survived the massacre. The story describes the events: “From the Haitian side of the river, [Défilé] could still see the soldiers chopping up her mother’s body and throwing it into the river along with many others” (40). Défilé’s survival leads to another set of tragic circumstances when she finds herself spending the last days of her life starving to death in a dank, dark cell. The generational shift also affects Josephine, placing her in the position to remember the experiences of her mother and grandmother. The experiences do not become Josephine’s own, and the temporal divide restricts her relationship to the events until she enters into an act of imagination. “Nineteen Thirty-­Seven” also begins by establishing two critical silences that draw attention to the text as a limited source of knowledge. The formal attributes of the text situate it within orature because, as in a performance, it calls attention to the audience’s role in shaping the text. First, the narrator notes that her mother forbade her to say the name of the Spanish-­speaking country on the other side of the Massacre River. Later she reveals, “Ever since the morning of [Défilé’s] arrest, I had not been able to say anything to her. It was as though I became mute the moment I stepped into the prison yard” (36). Told in the first person, the narrator’s description of herself as mute in the presence of her mother establishes the narrative voice as it draws attention to the words she finally utters to her mother, a question: “Manman, did you fly?” (43). Although the acts of naming that open the story seek to assert a certain presence, the story establishes a critical absence not only in the archive but also of a repertoire of action that the protagonist must claim as her legacy.



Flying Africans in Spaceships

37

The journey that the story describes is not one of simply historical recuperation (of telling a story lost to the annals of history); instead, it recalls the pursuit of survival strategies—­flights—­that link Josephine to an insurgent past. By referring to the histories of the Haitian Revolution and the 1937 massacre, “Nineteen Thirty-­Seven” situates itself as a recuperative story. But instead of trying to fill the narrative and textual gaps in such vast histories, it offers a consideration of the practices that enable the telling of women’s stories and in that way functions as an act of orature. The archeological performance of gathering remains and the oral practice of recounting the story create the narrative arc of the text. As Dwight Conquergood explains, Ngugi’s concept of orature creates “that liminal space between speech and writing, performance and print, where these channels of communication constantly overlap, penetrate, and mutually produce one another.”38 Through channels of communication, the flights become interwoven with the storytelling to produce a mode of practice that reshapes the possibilities of black life and living in the present and our understandings of black life and living in the past. Orature adds to and troubles written histories, which enables imagining futures for the human and the citizen based on historical practices that would otherwise remain opaque. Just as words constitute subjects, so, too, do actions. As Rocio G. Davis and Nick Nesbitt note, the title of Danticat’s cycle inscribes it in an oral history enacted through a syncopated relationship between speaker and audience that exists in the moment of articulation of the call, “Krik?” and extends into the future, anticipating the response, “Krak!” Exemplified in the familiar call and response phrase “Krik? Krak!,” “you urge the person to tell the story by your enthusiasm to hear it.”39 Adding an additional temporal dynamic to the nature of the voice the cycle produces, Davis quotes Danticat, who explains, “‘I look to the past—­to Haiti—­hoping that the extraordinary female storytellers I grew up with—­ the ones that have passed on—­will choose to tell their stories through my voice. For those of us who have a voice must speak to the present and the past.’ ”40 Similarly, to learn the lesson that her mother imparts when they visit the Massacre River, Josephine must embrace the flexibility of temporality that accompanies the formal innovations of Danticat’s cycle. The emergence and attention to Josephine’s voice in the story emphasize how speaking constitutes the narrative and how the “spoken word” qualifies “as always ‘an event, a movement in time.’ ”41

38

Black Movements

On the final page of the story, the narrator recalls a conversation with another survivor, named Jacqueline. The narrator causes a temporal disruption to “Nineteen Thirty-­Seven” when she calls attention to her narration as repeating and recounting rather than describing events as they unfolded: Then the story came back to me as my mother had often told it. On that day so long ago, in the year nineteen hundred and thirty-­seven, in the Massacre River, my mother did fly. Weighted down by my body inside hers, she leaped from Dominican soil into the water, and out again on the Haitian side of the river. She glowed red when she came out, blood clinging to her skin, which at that moment looked as though it were in flames. In the prison yard, I held the Madonna tightly against my chest, so close that I could smell my mother’s scent on the statue. When Jacqueline and I stepped out into the yard to wait for the burning, I raised my head toward the sun thinking, One day I may just see my mother there. “Let her flight be joyful,” I said to Jacqueline, “And mine and yours too.” (49)

Josephine resurrects her mother’s flight, which establishes a fissure between what came before and after (as do b.c. and a.d.)—­a break in time that must be accounted for in and through the return. What I call an act of resurrection, which features a return of the dead, enacts a shift in time that is partly continuous with what came before but nevertheless changes the way we understand historical time as linear and positions black performance as a force that produces connectivity and disruption. Josephine recalls the story of her flight in an act of memory, which, as Édouard Glissant details, requires a transposition of temporality: “Memory in our works is not a calendar memory; our experience of time does not keep company with the rhythms of month and year alone; it is aggravated by the void, the final sentence of the Plantation. . . . What still remains, is the dark side of this impossible memory, which has a louder voice and one that carries further than any chronicle or census.”42 For Glissant, the radical rupture enacted by slavery rearranges time and sets black people in an alternative relationship to temporality, which informs the structure and content of black movements. The radical temporal departure, for him, marks an opportunity for “genesis, creation.”43 The story begins with silence and ends with the recounting of a story that foregrounds the act of telling as the force



Flying Africans in Spaceships

39

that frees the protagonist to take up the practice of flight. Through the act of telling, flight becomes realizable. Although personal and related to Josephine’s witnessing her mother being beaten and dragged off to prison, the silence that engulfs the protagonist at the opening of the story also reflects the general prohibitions against women’s flight. Josephine describes the process of memory—­filtered with other perceptions of women in flight—­that leads her to recall her mother’s description of the flight that saved Défilé and her unborn child. When Défilé entered the prison, Josephine explains, “the guards shaved her head every week. And before the women went to sleep, the guards made them throw tin cups of cold water at one another so that their bodies would not be able to muster up enough heat to grow those wings made of flames, fly away in the middle of the night, slip into the slumber of innocent children and steal their breath” (37–­38). In the guards’ estimation, the blood of lost compatriots, of Défilé’s mother and Josephine’s grandmother, becomes dangerous, consuming flames that enable these women, these “Lougarou[s]/witch[es]/ criminal[s]!,” to steal the lives of innocent children (39). Attempting to reconcile the competing narratives that inform Josephine’s perception of her mother, she asks accusingly, even though she knows that her mother is innocent, “Manman, did you fly?” Josephine notes, “She did not even blink at my implied accusation.” Defiantly, Défilé responds, “Oh, now you talk,” and continues: “All the women who came with us to the river, they could go to the moon and back if that is what they wanted” (43). Answering the question with an assertion of power, she reminds her daughter of the context of her flight and the practice of memorial that sustains it. Wilson C. Chen notes that Danticat “associates the lougarou with transgressive female figures and emphasizes the normative gender and cultural assumptions behind common accusations. . . . The imputation of this identity has a policing function, for it seems to target women who transgress—­fearful figures who violate masculine expectations and thereby incite public fear and anxiety.”44 The women who return to the river, to the site of trauma, have the power to “go to the moon and back if that is what they wanted.” Josephine includes the competing narratives that inform her ability to remember her mother’s flight and recall the story her mother taught her. Orature relieves the tension between the competing depictions of women in flight (of women bathed in blood and women with threatening wings of fire) because the tension emerges by

40

Black Movements

way of the divisions between literary and oral modes of narration. Orature enables analysis of evidence embodied in repertoires of performance and the documents of the archive, producing reading practices that draw from multiple forms of evidence.45 Such practices allow embodied performances to fill the gaps left in the archive and give context to liberatory practices that emerge out of traumatic histories. In depicting women who can fly as participating in a collective act of memory, Défilé links her action to that of her namesake and great-­great-­ grandmother. As Braziel suggests, “Danticat’s refigurations of Défilée—­in her namesake descendant Défilé in the story ‘Nineteen Thirty-­Seven’—­ ritualize and memorialize this revolutionary woman, as Défilée did the remains of Jean-­Jacques Dessalines.”46 Défilée functions as a model of historical practice that situates attending to remains as a revolutionary practice. Colin Dayan confirms, “A woman’s lamentation converts a sudden gruesome act into a long history of penitential devotion.”47 Danticat redirects Défilée’s act from one geared toward reconstituting the nation to an embodied action that may resituate women as history makers. Imagining a future for Défilée that does not depend on the constitution of a nation-­state and the limitations of a colonial archive, Danticat’s story locates an insurgent impulse in the actions of a purported madwoman and resurrects her performance in the person of Défilé. In so doing, Danticat not only extends Défilée’s legacy but also offers a reading of the archive that depicts one of Haiti’s forgotten heroines as necessarily mutually constituted by the repertoire of flight. Défilé furthers Défilée’s tradition and, unwittingly, that of Défilée-­la-­Folle, returning to the river to remember those lost and locate the ability to fly. Josephine says, “We came from the bottom of that river where the blood never stops flowing, where my mother’s dive toward life—­her swim among all those bodies slaughtered in flight—­gave her those wings of flames. The river was the place where it had all begun” (41). To learn the lesson of flight, Josephine must narrate a story that defies the popular perception of women’s insurgency and attunes her ear to the lessons of her ancestors passed through her mother’s stories. She must remember that, as Danticat has written elsewhere, “in Haiti people never really die.”48



Flying Africans in Spaceships

41

Blackness As Baggage That Prevents and Enables Flight The folktales and “Nineteen Thirty-­Seven” seek to manage the persistent threat of physical death, but other versions of the Flying Africans narrative contend with social and psychic death in the late twentieth century. For instance, Morrison’s Song of Solomon depicts the coming of age of Macon Dead III, also known as Milkman, whose ambivalence about death situates him as a figure capable of depicting how “death harbors within itself the presencing of Being,” to quote Martin Heidegger.49 Through her depiction of Milkman, Morrison reconfigures the Flying Africans narrative in order to give her protagonist tools to manage the psychic death that is ubiquitous to his era. Song of Solomon, which may be Morrison’s most male-­centered novel, depicts Milkman’s maturation as he goes on a journey associated (from his childhood experiences) with flight and that requires him to come to terms with how women enable his “mortiferous self-­knowledge,” to borrow a phrase from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.50 At age four, when Milkman discovered “that only birds and airplanes could fly—­he lost interest in himself.”51 His attempt to regain that interest sparks a quest that occupies the remainder of the novel and ends with his embracing his ability to ride the air. Despite its departure from earlier representations of flight as a mechanism to evade physical harm, the novel uses the entwined oral, textual, and performance practices that are constantly at play in revisions of the Flying Africans narrative to demonstrate how flight may also function as a practice of psychic preservation. Implicitly engaging with the shift in U.S. social space from visible regulatory forces (segregated spaces) to invisible ones (the rhetoric of person responsibility), Morrison demonstrates how the formal attributes of the narrative evolve to facilitate the ongoing necessary force of the Flying Africans’ resistance to black death-­boundness. Moreover, even though the entire narrative appears in the form of a novel, Song of Solomon evokes embodied action and demonstrates the qualities of orature. Establishing the “‘singing’ impulse in black literature,” Pilate, Milkman’s aunt, sings in the opening pages, “O Sugarman done fly away / Sugarman done gone / Sugarman cut across the sky / Sugarman gone home” in front of the hospital in which Milkman is born (6).52 Hearing the song, his mother, Ruth, goes into labor. Pilate’s refrain ushers Milkman into the

42

Black Movements

world and echoes throughout the novel. One might say that his core being is infused with music. In an interview with Claudia Tate, Morrison has explained her desire to “rewrite, discard, and remove the print-­quality of the language to put back the oral quality, where intonation, volume and gesture are all there.”53 She clarifies a concern with performance—­intonation, volume, and gesture—­to which critics have not given sufficient attention. By calling attention to the play within the page, she reinforces her ongoing desire to cultivate an audience that participates in her acts of creation and hears the changes in volume and intonation. The innovation at the heart of storytelling, Morrison suggests, requires a relay between novelist and reader that recalls her own childhood experiences of listening to the radio. She writes in “The Reader As Artist”: My own reading skills were enhanced in schools, but my pleasure in, my passion for the art of reading came long before. It came in childhood and it began with listening. Not only was I a radio child who grew up in the decades when radio was paramount . . . I was also surrounded by adults who told stories, reshaped and solicited them from each other as well as their children. . . . Listening required me to surrender to the narrator’s world while remaining alert inside it. . . . In listening and in reading, it is when I surrender to the language, enter it, that I see clearly. Yet only if I remain attentive to its choices can I understand deeply. Sometimes the experience is profound, harrowing, beautiful; other times enraging, contemptible, unrewarding. Whatever the consequence, the practice itself is riveting.54

Morrison’s exposition of the fundamental relationship between writing and listening informs how we hear Pilate’s singing in the beginning of the novel. As a thematic element and a formal practice, her song establishes a critical acoustic theme reinforced by the visual display that encourages the reader to fill in the sound toward which the sonic references gesture. The performance occurs for the reader who fills in the silences with sound, mirroring the way in which as Morrison developed reading habits that relied heavily on her “own imagination to provide detail; the specific color of things, the feel of the weather, the space characters occupied, their physical features, their motives, why they behaved as they did, and especially the sound of their speech, where so much meaning lay.”55 She invites her reader to participate in forming a critical imagination at the center, a practice that is both



Flying Africans in Spaceships

43

political and aesthetic. In the novel, the music functions as a surrogate for the flying, soliciting the reader’s participation, just as the absences in the folktales and “Nineteen Thirty-­Seven” invite participation and the potential for black life post-­demise. In the opening scene of Song of Solomon, Mr. Smith, a minor character, commits suicide by flying from the cupola of Mercy Hospital. His physical mutilation introduces the material consequences and political potential of flight as it draws into focus characters who will test the strength of their wings. Although Mr. Smith’s action does not garner much attention (“not more than forty or fifty people showed up”), he hopes it will be “interpreted as a radical gesture demanding change, an alternative way, a cessation of things as they are. He does not want it understood as a simple desperate act, the end of a fruitless life, a life without examination, but as a deep commitment to his people” (xiii). Morrison’s words draw attention to his intent to use flight to disrupt the tragic nature of death and transform it into a “radical gesture demanding change.” The flight nullifies “the power and capacity” of the state to decide “who may live and who must die,” expanding the temporal configuration of the community from among the living to among the living and the dead.56 Morrison’s choice of language clearly indicates how embodied acts inform politics through negotiations with and of others. All of the performances of flight depicted in Song of Solomon imply a type of death. Mr. Smith, Solomon (Milkman’s ancestor), Pilate, and Milkman himself must give up parts of themselves, what Morrison eloquently describes as “that shit that weighs you down,” in order to fly (179). The second half of the novel clarifies the life-­and-­death stakes of learning to ride the air. Here, Milkman begins a journey in search of family treasure—­gold—­going first to Danville, Pennsylvania, and then to Shalimar, Virginia, the home of his ancestors Solomon and Ryna. He believes that discovering the gold will grant him financial autonomy and therefore freedom. In the post–­civil rights context of the novel, his world vision builds on the expanded economic opportunities available to African Americans after Jim Crow, which also constricts the kinds of freedoms he aspires toward outside of financial advancement. Throughout the novel, Milkman financially depends on his father, Macon Dead II. Before he leaves on his journey he complains to his friend Guitar, “I don’t want to be my old man’s office boy no more. And as long as I’m in this place I will be. Unless I have my own money” (222). Milkman’s focus on material gain limits his plan to

44

Black Movements

undercut the regulatory conditions that produce him and distracts him, for part of the novel, from learning his familial history. To transform who he is and who he can become, he must negotiate the ways in which his family’s past informs how he acts and interacts in the present. Yet Milkman’s tendency to concentrate on the past instead of the future allows him to cultivate a different system of values and embrace his ability to confront what encumbers him, even his physicality. Milkman’s self-­ interested individualism dies as a result of the cultural primal scenes he faces in the South and enables him to participate in an alternative rendering of black social life heard in Pilate’s song. He addresses an overlooked southern past in order to embrace a more freedom filled future. During his journey, Milkman discovers that his famed, flying great-­ granddaddy’s self-­ interested pursuits had devastating consequences. According to the myth, Solomon takes off and leaves his wife and twenty children, a departure that has particular gender implications. The novel suggests that it creates the conditions for his wife Ryna’s heartrending screams, which later become associated with the moaning and groaning of Ryna’s Gulch. While discordant, the screams contextualize and contest the pursuit of liberal individualism that Solomon’s gender privilege affords him. While both Ryna and Solomon leave legacies of the flight, their different registers—­one visual, the other one sonic—­inscribe a critical difference that informs the histories that Milkman chooses to claim and the ones he decides to leave in the past. Focusing on this gender dynamic prompts an investigation of the implications of visual versus acoustic performance in the novel because gender stratifies each type of performance. Solomon leaves a visual legacy, whereas Ryna produces an acoustic one, yet the two are mutually constitutive and each is destructive. The gendering of sight and sound has a long history in western thought, which Spivak locates in Ovid’s depiction of Narcissus. In her essay “Echo,” she considers the way in which Echo both constitutes and leaves room for the deconstruction of narcissism in Sigmund Freud’s “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” Spivak questions the Freudian attribution of narcissism to women, emphasizing that “Narcissus was a boy,” and she uses Ovid’s “The Judgment of Tiresias” as an introduction to her essay. In Ovid’s tale, Jove and Juno call on Tiresias, a transsexual, to settle a dispute: who gains more pleasure out of sex, men or women? Tiresias had been turned into a woman as punishment for interrupting the copulation of two snakes. Using



Flying Africans in Spaceships

45

knowledge obtained from his transformation—­from man to woman—­he repeated the act and turned back into a man. However, because he now retains the knowledge of his experience, he can never return to his original form and must live with the death caused by self-­knowledge: the death of his inaugurating maleness. Tiresias’ status makes him a fitting arbitrator for Jove’s and Juno’s dispute because it foregrounds the death that accompanies Narcissus’ self-­knowledge. Narcissus becomes so consumed with himself that he is limited to an autoerotics that results in his daily death. Serving as an interpreter, Echo enunciates and disseminates the knowledge that has served to destroy him. Spivak mobilizes the well-­known correlation of death and self-­knowledge by questioning what role Echo plays in the unfolding of the narrative. She determines, “Echo in Ovid is staged as the instrument of the possibility of a truth not dependent upon intention, a reward uncoupled from, indeed set free from, the recipient.”57 Echo bears witness to Narcissus’ undoing. But given the nature of Echo, the context in which she operates provides the possibility for upsetting the subjection she inscribes.58 At the same time, the dynamic created by Narcissus and Echo extends beyond the individual death that they each suffer. Spivak’s deconstruction enables a philosophical departure that correlates with the fugitivity of stolen life that Milkman enacts by attending to the lower frequencies of his aunt’s melodic singing. Through interpretation, Spivak calls attention to the power of echo, which is held within the narrative of Narcissus but resounds with the interplay of a prior relationship that may enable a reevaluation of relationality. She offers, by way of her return to Narcissus, a reversal, even as her narration participates in the subject formation that she deconstructs. Simultaneously, her return produces a departure by way of the echo that cannot be contained within the frame of her narration or any other, thus registering a critical difference at the site of subject and object relations. In an echo, Echo no longer must find herself in relation to Narcissus but can be a being unto herself. Analogously, the echo produced by Ryna’s Gulch in Morrison’s novel marks an absent presence; it reminds the listener of the eerie sound of Ryna’s voice, which is no longer accessible. As Michael Awkward contends in Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Positionality, Morrison emphasizes the individual nature of Solomon’s flight and its legacy by not only having him leave Ryna and all but one of their children but also entwining Milkman’s journey with the

46

Black Movements

abandonment of his cousin/sister, Hagar. By the end of the novel, Hagar has died; and when Milkman learns of that death, he (unlike Solomon) recognizes his culpability because he sees the parallels between his and his ancestor’s pursuits. As Josephine must in Danticat’s story, Milkman must engage with a past that is not his own in order to make use of his present. Solomon’s past does not become Milkman’s personal history, but it serves as a scene of instruction nonetheless. In the last sequence of the novel, Pilate returns with Milkman to Shalimar to bury her father’s remains. The ambiguous relationship between flight and death, however, disrupts this moment of reconciliation. Coaxed by betrayal and necessity, Guitar follows them to the South. Firing a bullet intended for Milkman, he instead shoots and kills Pilate. In this way Guitar places Milkman in the position of a spiritual steward who must now tend to his aunt’s and his grandfather’s remains. Milkman sings a version of Pilate’s song, “Sugargirl don’t leave me here / Cotton balls to choke me / Sugargirl don’t leave me here / Buckra’s arms to yoke me,” as he caresses his dying aunt, bringing the acoustic arc of the novel full circle and indicating his ability to put into practice the lessons he has learned. Rising, he calls out, “Guitar!” “Tar tar tar, said the hills,” resonating with the deconstructive power of echo. His former friend steps forward as Milkman leaps toward him. “As fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheeled toward Guitar and it did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother. For now he knew what Shalimar [Solomon] knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it” (337). The final lines shift the implications of the Flying Africans narrative once again. In the tales told in Drums and Shadows the narrators represent those who flew away as transcendent; here, the novel indicates surrender. Milkman, who throughout the novel sarcastically quips he’s already “Dead,” indicates the limited possibility made available by Solomon and Ryna. His final performance depends on a literal difference enabled by acoustic disruption that reads dissonance, if ever so slight, into his flying. Although his perspective shifts, he nevertheless must answer for the gender hierarchies that enable individuals with patriarchal privilege to enjoy approximating individualism. While Solomon’s flight attempts to sever ties, it also creates a connection across time that Milkman must negotiate. Even though Solomon acts out of self-­interest, Ryna’s scream produces the disruptive force of echo, multiplying and distorting an individual act into a collective endeavor.



Flying Africans in Spaceships

47

To understand the implications of reading the collective legacy of Solomon and Ryna’s stories requires understanding how the novel functions through orature. Milkman’s flight remembers Hagar, Solomon, and Pilate, marking the mutuality of their journeys and the possibility of flight as a collective movement.

Technologically Assisted Flight and the Futurity of Blackness In Song of Solomon, the echoes from Ryna’s Gulch and Milkman and Guitar’s battlefield work alongside the reverberations from the radio in the local barbershop to establish the political and ethical implications of Milkman’s flight as a negotiation of death and a repudiation of black death-­ boundness. Morrison briefly recounts how some of the men in Milkman’s community learn of the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, who was lynched in Money, Mississippi, after being accused of whistling at a white woman. Morrison mingles the disembodied radio voice that spews into the barbershop with the sounds of muttering patrons and a whistle from the lips of a boy from the North who is known to stutter. Her novel disrupts and distorts the sound of the story, filtering the news through an announcer who “had only a few speculations and even fewer facts. The minute he went on to another topic of news, the barbershop broke into loud conversation” (80). In many black neighborhoods, the barbershop serves as a center of political and social debate, hence the comedic critique of cultural affairs in director Tim Story’s 2002 eponymous film.59 Although many critics have noted how the voices in Morrison’s barbershop create knowledge, I also want to point out how the novel uses the technology of the radio to draw attention to the process of filtering disembodied sound. The “muttering” heard alongside the radio alters the sound, creating a dissonant cacophonous critique. It reshapes the transmission; it registers anger and pain; it distorts the initial sound and ruptures acoustic singularity. The relay between the radio and the mutter also foreshadows the dynamic relay of sound that reverberates in the music of George Clinton and his bands Parliament and Funkadelic. The musicians demonstrate how ostensibly disembodied forms may work alongside embodied ones to extend and expand freedom movements.

48

Black Movements

Oral expressions link flying Africans in spaceships to the Africans flying from the brutality of chattel slavery. The affiliation reveals the page, studio, and the stage as spaces for the contemporary performer to participate in an alternative articulation of the human that produces a more robust black social life and critiques the limitations of liberal humanism. The 1974 cult classic film Space Is the Place presents Sun Ra’s central aesthetic and political preoccupations with black ontology as indecipherable on the planet earth. “Part documentary, part science fiction, part blaxploitation, part revisionist biblical epic,” it focuses on black liberation, depicting the battle for blackness between Ra and another man of African descent, the Overseer.60 In the final sequence the film troubles the relationship between racial identity and political affiliation when the Overseer’s lieutenant, Jimmy Faye, visits Ra’s spaceship. Ra informs Jimmy (also played by a black actor) that he will take his blackness with him to outer space; and sure enough, Jimmy remains on earth, but his blackness goes with Ra. To enact the liberation of blackness, Ra produces a temporal reorientation. He explains in the opening scene: “Consider time as officially ended. . . . We work on the other side of time.”61 A similar sentiment emerges in his artful resistance to a linear history of his musical development. Rather than positing a linear notion of time, his theory, as expressed in Space Is the Place and his musical recording practices, position past, present, and future as points of interrelation that consistently rework one another. The film presents Ra’s battle with the Overseer as a quest to redeem the world, unlike the nationalistic desire of the Black Arts Movement. Ra suggests that instead of understanding black folk as late (Ra is always late for public appearances), undeveloped, or on the wrong side of the digital divide, we should understand that black political practice requires syncopation. Transitioning from scene to scene with the sometimes melodic, sometimes dissonant, and sometimes bebop-­influenced singing of June Tyson, the film presents time as relational, similar to the changing tempo of a band. The mix of word, song, and filmic devices, such as the cut, that move the audience through time and space also foregrounds the ability of orature, as an aesthetic system, to represent black life and living by animating and integrating different forms of cultural production. Ra’s film not only tests the limits of white liberal legibility but also highlights black people’s own investment in the organizing logics of liberalism. In one scene he goes to a local community center in Oakland, California,



Flying Africans in Spaceships

49

where he confronts the skepticism of a group of teenagers. He says, “How do you know I’m real? I’m not real. I’m just like you. You don’t exist in this society. If you did, your people wouldn’t be seeking equal rights. You’re not real. If you were, you’d have some status among the nations of the world. So we’re both myths.”62 Anticipating George C. Wolfe’s depiction of black history as myth and madness in The Colored Museum (1986), Ra taps into a long history of belief that renders black life illegible and impossible. He continues, “I do not come to you as a reality, I come to you as the myth because that’s what black people are, myths. I came from a dream that the black man dreamed long ago. I’m actually a present sent to you by your ancestors. I’m going to be here till I pick out certain ones of you to take back with me.”63 The illegibility of blackness does not eviscerate the prophetic ancestral mission that Ra seeks to complete. The film reveals black belatedness as an injurious mythology countered by the lower frequencies. The lower frequencies correspond to a particular register of sound that expresses the underbelly of American life—­the funk. George Clinton’s music is infused with the funky sound of the underground beats that make people move. He developed two funk bands, the Parliaments (eventually renamed Parliament) in 1952 and Funkadelic in 1968, that reflected a new musical direction. He innovated a genre—­funk as an outgrowth of rhythm and blues—­that shifted the visual and acoustic landscape of the late 1960s. Abandoning the well-­fitted suits associated with suave Motown performers, Parliament (most of whose members were also part of Funkadelic) wore trash bags, diapers, and space-­age metallic costumes to emphasize the extraterrestrial nature of their grooves. In the 1950s, Sun Ra’s Arkestra had introduced the space-­age style, which also influenced the styling of Patti LaBelle’s group LaBelle. Reversing the gender dynamic of Echo and Narcissus, her styling has drawn attention to the interplay between black women’s vocality and the adornment of the body. Styling functions as yet another technology that shapes the body as a substrate for the production of the human, in this case through music. The styling of all of these groups draws the machine into relation with the human, anticipating the hybridity of the digital age and claiming a space for black bodies within the technological future. Black style has played an important role in LaBelle’s reorientation of temporality, working in concert with the reclamation of black beauty in the late twentieth century and acting as a precursor to the adornment of

50

Black Movements

Figure 1.  Left to right: Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash, London, March 11, 1975. Photograph by Michael Putland. Getty Images.

Janelle Monáe as android.64 The styling from LaBelle’s 1975 tour features LaBelle herself in a metallic ribbed breastplate, cuffs and a headpiece, and a feathered skirt; Nona Hendryx in a white bodysuit with studded appliqués covering shoulders, forearms, breasts, and vaginal area; and Sarah Dash in a metallic bra top and skirt with feathers (fig. 1). All three singers express open-­mouthed joy. The mix of the costumes, their expressions, and their styling creates the sense that black-­and brown-­skinned women are desirable and futuristic. The feathers combined with the metal suggest technologically assisted flight, an attribute they share with the performers in Parliament. In Parliament’s performances the choice of costume, the use of the Mothership, and the sounds of the music make material the notion of past as present-­future. The sound, style, and set disrupt the regularity of time. Although presented as “a neutral and universal substrate,” the regularity of time enables the operation of the progressive narrative and renders webs of affiliation less legible.65 Progressive time masks the dialectical and co-­temporal relationship between European modernization and slavery. According to Elin Diamond, “not all the world was moving at the same pace. The eighteenth century accelerated imperial aggression and codified the slave trade. Progress—­what would be called modernization by the



Flying Africans in Spaceships

51

nineteenth century—­also racialized time. Or, rather, the progress narrative revealed another powerful strand in the temporality of modernity: the time of the other.”66 Marked by rupture, the time of the other draws attention to the suppression of the fissures that delimit and, paradoxically, enable progress. Specifically, two forces contour the time of the other: the stolen’s stealth appropriation of time and the ghost’s persistent production of friction.67 The time of the other explains the experience of black people in the Americas and the way in which time masquerades as a benign quantification of labor and value therein. The Flying Africans interrupt the world of the living but also allow the dearly departed to recoup time. Through the voicing of the narrative, the speaker or singer appropriates time, but these oral expressions do not monopolize the practice of stealing time. Harry J. Elam, Jr., describes such theft as a mode of resistance enacted by enslaved Africans “to possess, control, or master time.”68 He explains that the time of the slave belonged to the master; as a result, enslaved Africans would decrease the proficiency of their labor to counteract their limited access to time. These work slowdowns “became a method of stealing back time and represented a form of what Saidiya Hartman terms ‘stealing away’: ‘Stealing away involved unlicensed movement, collective assembly and an abrogation of the terms of subjection.’ ”69 Through the theft of time, the enslaved individuals advanced a process that resisted their subjection. Though the structure of slavery sought to enact the complete materialization of black people as property, enslaved Africans created modes of resistance that not only reclaimed their alienated parts but also addressed the regulatory forces that enabled their possession. Temporal play manifested in the sound and styling of Clinton’s bands amounts to a reorganization of the modes of producing the human. Musical scholar Ken McLeod’s description of Parliament-­Funkadelic’s distinctive sound jives with their image: “the Afro-­nauts of Parliament-­Funkadelic combined synthesizers, acoustic piano, brass, heavy funk bass and wah wah effects to create their highly layered, otherworldly grooves,” which is not to say that their otherworldly turn did not emanate from deep within the terra firma.70 The layer of sound allowed the band’s music to resonate with R&B audiences while transforming the acoustic landscape. Through the juxtaposition of otherworldly imagery that served as a mechanism of transport and through the creation of a sound that unearths the funk of black life that the middle-­class propriety of Motown has

52

Black Movements

Figure 2.  George Clinton emerging from the Mothership during a Parliament-­ Funkadelic show, Los Angeles Coliseum, June 4, 1977. Photograph by Michael Ochs. Getty Images.

sought to diminish, Parliament mobilizes a latent potential at the core of black culture.71 Discussing the use of space and alien imagery in the work of Clinton, Ra, and Lee Perry, the musician and radio host John Corbett explains, “What [they] do is crazily reappropriate this image and retool it—­transforming the sea-­ship into a space-­ship.”72 Sea-­ships, Paul Gilroy notes, serve as key images of the Black Atlantic because they “immediately focus attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists, as well as the movement of key cultural and political artefacts.”73 In Parliament’s rendering, the imagery of the Mothership attempts to recoup Africa by returning the continent to black Americans through the air, thereby avoiding the brutal Middle Passage. The band included a spaceship as a part of its set during its 1977 concert tour to reconfigure the nature of the concert hall and establish the transitory quality of the music (fig. 2). The sound of the album Mothership Connection allows for the circulation of ideas detached from the ideological restrictions on earth. Clinton’s group claims liberation by technological innovation and manipulation of space.



Flying Africans in Spaceships

53

Space represents an idealized, political alternative to life on earth. As Corbett explains, “with Funkadelic [Clinton] established ‘One Nation under a Groove,’ an earthly, politically grounded type of dancing-­populism or a funky form of black nationalism.”74 The rebirthing of black politics staged in 1970s-­era performances of Mothership Connection (Clinton would emerge from a space pod as Starchild) were supported by Funkadelic’s rendering of black nationalism. The conflation of Africa and space associate the continent with a region free from the alienating effects of being a black person in the United States. The desire to land the spaceship and incorporate the sound it produces into American black culture distinguishes Parliament’s politics from that of other artists of the Black Arts Movement, who, as Corbett has noted, tend to idealize Africa. After Parliament landed its Mothership and before hip hop artist Kanye West imagined his spaceship, Michael Jackson moonwalked across a stage and repositioned the body as capable of flight. On May 16, 1983, in front of 47 million viewers of the telecast Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, and Forever, Jackson performed his hit single “Billie Jean” to a cheering audience and brought the house down as he performed what would become his signature move. “[He was wearing] . . . short pants and silver socks” “designed to display his footwork. The black sequined jacket and famous glove were his embellishments. Screams erupted from the audience as Jackson filled a bridge in the music by gliding effortlessly backward.  .  .  . Then he spun around three times, dizzyingly fast, bent his knees and arched onto his toes.”75 As he deftly slid across the stage, giving the appearance of moving in two directions at once, he recalled the supernatural power of human flight, which questions the limitations of the material body. Jackson’s moonwalk did precisely what the body is not supposed to do, disrupt the linearity of time by moving backward as he moved forward. In doing so, he challenged the solely material quality of the body and, through indirection, registered it as constituted through movement that resets time. Jackson’s flying feet freed up space for the black body to fly, or at least to walk on the moon. Although the moonwalk is associated with and was perfected by Jackson, his autobiography, Moonwalk, states that the dance “was already on the streets by this time [1983], but I enhanced it a little when I did it. It was born as a break-­dance step, a ‘popping’ type of thing that black kids had created dancing on street corners in the ghetto.”76 Jackson attributed his knowledge of the moonwalk to hip hop street performers, but the jazz musician

54

Black Movements

Cab Calloway (1932), the mime Marcel Marceau (1940s), the tap dancer Bill Bailey (1955), the godfather of soul James Brown (1980), and the hip hop dancer Jeffrey Daniel (1982) also moonwalked.77 In crafting himself as a part of a particular urban tradition, Jackson also called attention to the performance practices that black people produce, which participate in the elevation of bodies through machines. Yet instead of depending on the intervention of a device, he transformed his body into the device that renders the superior operational capabilities generally attributed to mechanical labor. His signification on the robotics of hip hop dance opens up the possibility for understanding the black body as ubiquitously cyborgian and therefore mutable, self-­generative, transformative, and innovative. Clinton and Parliament have extended the web of the Flying Africans narrative, which troubles the primacy of the disembodied text as a source of knowledge by demonstrating how musical artists incorporate disembodied technologies into their embodied practice. The sound that Parliament produces works alongside its imagery; the sound of LaBelle situates the black body as central to the production of knowledge and the expression of the human. Although Clinton produces a dancing populace in which men dominate, his sound and imagery do not preclude a woman artist such as Monáe from webbing a line of affiliation that specifies the particular ways in which women participate in sidestepping the commodification of blackness. The notion of using technology as a mechanism to fly filters into hip hop artists’ embodied movements. In an interview with Mark Dery, Tricia Rose discusses their use of dance known as “the robot.” She argues for “an understanding of themselves as already having been robots. Adopting ‘the robot’ reflected a response to an existing condition: namely, that they were labor for capitalism, that they had very little value as people in this society.”78 Kanye West’s debut album, College Dropout, similarly decries alienated labor and incorporates bitter irony with notions of transcendence. It achieves the qualified investment in and critique of transcendence by flight through juxtaposition. One hears a troubled call and response in the placement of “I’ll Fly Away” and “Spaceship,” the fifth and sixth songs on the album.79 As the title indicates, College Dropout questions the expectation of benefits associated with the attainment of a college degree and, by extension, the Protestant work ethic. Similarly, “Spaceship” casts doubt on the possibility of any form of transcendence in the absence of material gains. Although West makes no explicit references to Morrison, the imagery



Flying Africans in Spaceships

55

of freedom as a commodity remerges, but in this case the Flying African boards a spaceship. Nevertheless, Song of Solomon and “Spaceship” do not present total disillusionment but ambiguity because they insert acoustic disturbances that brush against the action. College Dropout offers sarcastic, biting references to the Flying Africans narrative. West’s rendition of “I’ll Fly Away” establishes the instability of the narrative, even as he transforms it into a new millennium’s technologically empowered pursuit in “Spaceship.” With the simple accompaniment of a pianist, two vocalists (Tony Williams and Deray) sing Albert E. Brumley’s “I’ll Fly Away.” The voices begin in unison and then break off, creating an echo effect. The choice to use solo piano intensifies the datedness of the song and draws attention to the innovations in “Spaceship.” Mixing a sample of Marvin Gaye’s “Distant Lover” with a doo-­wop chorus, the gospel-­ influenced refrain “heaven knows,” and a heavy drumbeat, the song draws attention to what is lost and what has the possibility of emerging within a consumer culture that creates perpetual dying. As McLeod writes, the negotiation of past and present “allows for a type of aural time travel. With sampling technologies, black artists can juxtapose decades—­old speeches by Martin Luther King or loops from James Brown against contemporary tracks. Thus such technology has allowed these artists to intertextually signify a collective notion of African-­American historical memory.”80 West’s choice to include the traditional gospel sound of “I’ll Fly Away” suggests an effort to fit his work within a particular genealogy that serves as a meeting ground for the secular and the sacred.81 Such a move draws attention to the Flying Africans narrative and how it functions as black movement, even in its most recent renderings, which require contending with multiple configurations of black death and dying, particularly in a worldview that allows for the mutuality of the living and the dead, the metaphysical and the physical. Performed with GLC and Consequence, “Spaceship” bemoans the low-­wage exploitation of workers at the Gap. The album as a whole questions the benefits of playing by the rules, suggesting that doing so results in psychic death. The song begins with West crooning, “I’ve been workin’ this graveshift and I ain’t made shit / I wish I could buy me a spaceship and fly past the sky.”82 He intensifies the imagery of death conjured by truncating graveyard shift into “graveshift” in the gap between the fourth track, “All Falls Down,” and the fifth track, “I’ll Fly Away.” As the outro to track 4 fuses into the intro of track 5, a voice says, “This graveshift is like a slave ship.”83

56

Black Movements

The song likens the labor that the speaker performs at the Gap (which presumably does not take place at night and into the early hours of the morning because he cites his interaction with customers) to the floating casket that many slave ships became as they traveled through the Middle Passage. The reference to slavery strengthens the connection of the spaceship as appropriated slave ship that is also present in Parliament’s imagery. The hyperbole of the reference also calls attention to the danger of weakening the historical specificity of slavery to describe transhistorical experiences of oppression. Importantly, West depicts psychic and social death as a result of alienated labor and not the additional physical death many enslaved Africans experienced. Nonetheless, even if hyperbolic, his simile points to the continual necessity for flight as a means of revealing the black social sphere. GLC acts as West’s “amen corner” or “hype-­man,” affirming his disdain and longing for liberation. West’s first verse, tonally infused with anger, interrupts the sense of pain communicated by the interplay of his and Gaye’s singing. The sound of West’s music differs from the gospel and R&B from which it borrows because it incorporates angry drumbeats and lyrics with comforting, slightly mournful, melodic samples. The contradiction in his music exists at the level of narrative and sound. The layers of sound in “Spaceship” echo the effect of Drums and Shadows and Song of Solomon. Heard alone, West’s lyrics seem fatalistic, a simplistic investment in consumer culture as a mechanism of escape. West seems willing to commit social and psychic death to commodify and profit from his performance. However, on the track as a whole, there is a genealogy of sound that does not end in a return to Africa or the reclamation of a southern past. It offers instead a temporary hiatus made possible by embracing the contradictions inherent in depicting America as a meritocracy. “Spaceship” confronts the misalliance of effort and reward even as it desires that system. West explains, “Contradiction is part of who everybody is. I am a real person, and I make my mistakes and I laugh and I cry and I smile and I hate and I love. One song is, I love God, and the next song is, Can you come over? That’s how I feel. Sometimes you’re in church, and you’re looking at the girl’s dress right next to you.”84 The song ends with GLC singing, “I wanna fly, I wanna fly / I said I want my chariot to pick me up / And take me, brother, for a ride.”85 Thus, in its latest enunciation, the Flying Africans move from the Gap to the studio, pointing out the limits and possibilities of new millennial black movements when Flying Africans board spaceships.



Flying Africans in Spaceships

57

“Spaceship” depicts the hip hop generation’s sense of limited power and further circumscribes the possibilities for movement depicted in Song of Solomon. West’s humor, bravado, and cynicism disrupt the free flow of hip hop music as a global commodity, yielding certain modicums of power to the lyricist. He notes in “All Falls Down,” “We shine because they hate us, floss cause they degrade us / We trying to buy back our 40 acres / And for that paper, look how low we a’stoop / Even if you in a Benz, you still a nigga in a coupe.” West refers to a coupe, a two-­door vehicle, creating a pun that also evokes the familiar imagery in black minstrelsy of a black man in chicken coop. The all-­too-­easy aural slippage points to the infeasibility of black embodiment ever corresponding to liberal subjectivity. The cultural landscape boasts of being postrace yet still pre-­reparations. The cynicism and humor emerge in defense of what West realizes is the bitter irony of “trying to buy back our 40 acres.” The unfulfilled promise of reparations to black people in the Americas for the trauma suffered due to transatlantic slavery meets consumer culture. And it demands a sense of entitlement, signaled by the word “back,” that covers over the persistent longing for acknowledgment of and concessions for wrongdoing. Moreover, the use of a spaceship critiques the idea of self-­propelled action (for example, of Milkman’s ability to fly by his own volition) and provides a sense of how technological intervention drives consumption and enables flight. West’s lyrics call for his speaker to “buy” a spaceship and fly, making the spaceship a means for him to achieve his particular form of desired heteronormative patriarchy. Although the Flying Africans narrative maintains a political connection, it is only across the difference produced by time and space that the narrative in articulation and song can clear room for alternative modes of homecoming. If we take seriously Fred Moten’s claims that “black(ness), which is to say black social life, is an undiscovered country,” understanding the performance of Flying Africans—­the flight and subsequent narration in prose and song—­as black movements offers a model of discovery that attends to how geographic and temporal difference participate in creating times—­past, present, and future—­and places on earth and in outer space that extend black life and enrich black living.86 Ellipses and echoes mark signs of flights that move us closer to black social life; these flights may be accessed only through movement. Chapter 2 similarly considers the performance possibilities that enable black women performers to confront and innovate alternatives to configurations of the human that exclude them from liberal subjectivity.

2 • Trapping Entanglements

Our visions begin with our desires. —­Audre Lorde

In articulation, the Flying Africans narrative affirms black personhood by transforming ostensibly dead figures into agents.1 Such acts are not immune to appropriation by the forces of capitalism that have historically worked in concert with social desires to objectify black people. The threat of co-­optation and the force of social desire, however, may work both ways—­toward the expansion and foreclosure of black social life. Chapter 2’s argument builds on the critique of the liberal ideal of individualism set forth in the introduction and chapter 1. As I argue, the ideal works to ahistoricize blackness as an ontological position that develops through an antagonistic relationship to liberalism. Instead of posing blackness as liberal humanism’s other, certain distinct practices produce alternative renderings of the human. This chapter examines how black women artists have loosened the entrapment of Enlightenment humanism to reframe blackness. Such reframing requires engaging with the “temporal drag” that informs representations of black sexuality, which constantly pivot from inventive to retrograde.2 Before delving into the particulars, I will begin with an overview of the representational history that frames a series of scenes I will examine. Each scene refers to a performance produced to engage audiences’ pleasure centers. The performances harness the audiences’ desire to frame blackness—­to render it legible, recognizable, predictable, uniform, and consistent so that 58

Trapping Entanglements

59

Figure 3.  “Love and Beauty—­Sartjee the Hottentot Venus. Pubd October 1811 by Christopher Crupper Rumford.” Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

artists may turn the tables on the viewers. Such a strategy does not topple the dynamic of watcher and watched. It repositions the object of observation to a subject orienting the action. The assertion of subjectivity calls attention to the competing desires that undermine black women’s visibility as subjects and affirms the possibility of clearing space for them to emerge as directors of highly choreographed performances.

Figure 4.  Photograph of Josephine Baker in costume. Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

Trapping Entanglements

61

Each scene presents a spectacle. In scene 1, traders parade Saartjie Baartman, popularly known as the Venus Hottentot, around Piccadilly Circus, the heart of London’s entertainment district (fig. 3).3 Baartman, a South African woman best known for her large buttocks and distended labia, was brought to London in 1810 for display.4 In this scene, she is age twenty-­one or twenty-­two, standing four feet, six inches tall. Although she surely possesses other distinguishing characteristics, her behind is the central focus of fascination.5 As a result, the scene and the archival evidence focus the gaze there. Scene 2 operates from a similar point of view, focusing on the body of the performer by means of the often-­invoked image of Josephine Baker posing in her signature banana skirt (fig. 4).6 Because the past is never dead and gone but a continual site of excavation and interpretation, three scenes investigate neo-­primitivism. 7 In scene 3, Adina Porter, wearing a padded suit and little else, appears as the Venus in Suzan-­ Lori Parks’s play Venus (1996) at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York City (fig. 5). In scene 4, Beyoncé Knowles performs on Fashion Rocks, a CBS special broadcast on September 7, 2006, in honor of New York City’s fashion week. She wears a banana skirt and a bejeweled bra top, paying homage to Josephine Baker (fig. 6). In scene 5, Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-­Peña release the documentary film The Couple in the Cage (1992), which chronicles their live performances as natives from an island in the Gulf of Mexico who have been discovered and displayed (fig. 7). These performances emphasize, as Parks has said of Baartman, that “the butt is the past, the posterior: posterity.”8 Thus, in Parks’s bawdy joke, the bottom also occupies space at the top of a new type of generation of genealogy.9 Through verbal manipulation, she renders ambiguous the configuration of “the bottom”—­both a body part and a social and sexual position—­as “humiliated by or used for the pleasure of,” calling attention to what Ann Cvetkovich describes as “the wide range of ways that getting penetrated is experienced, both physically and symbolically.”10 By directing the gaze and manipulating the representation field through her wordplay, Parks leverages the link between the body part and the position to reconfigure the experience of penetration from an act of domination to one of shifting power dynamics. The figures explored in this chapter offer strategies of mediation, not wholesale revolution. Their work merits consideration for the ways in which it demonstrates the human as a category materialized in performances that reconfigure temporal relationships. All of the chapters in Black Movements

62

Black Movements

consider how webs of affiliation trouble linear notions of time. The black movements explored in this chapter also show how embodied acts of memory make history. Parks’s wordplay has material consequences because it draws attention to how her aesthetic practices riff on historical associations to enact historical rifts that, as black movements, render black life legible and possible. In other words, these late twentieth-­century artists transform familiar spectacles into spectacular ones—­gaze-­inducing, distracting, and seductive—­by leveraging the temporal confusion invoked by Parks’s use of cognates to trouble the spatial positioning of black women at the bottom because of their synecdochic representations as bottoms. This linguistic sleight of hand serves as a discursive sign, ensnaring the viewer while revealing the mechanisms that cage black women. The performances manipulate the frame so that the performers can establish trapdoors to escape the degradation of brown female bodies. They offer bodily sovereignty for women of color in the aftermath of the classical phase of the civil rights movement.11 They unhinge black women from histories of objecthood that reduce them to beings for display or nothing more than bodies. They also challenge viewers to see the women differently and recognize their own role as spectators in caging black women through antiquated racial associations. Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? articulates a concern about how artists and critics of the post–­civil rights era hail the past as a mechanism to make legible a tradition that no longer serves a socially distinctive group. Although it focuses on literary rather than performance histories, the book has broad implications for black cultural production. Warren’s critique calls into question the framing of not only literary studies but also ethnic studies and race-­based forms of knowledge production, which, as many argue, also have liberatory aims.12 What Was African American Literature? bookends the African American literary tradition with “inception at the dawn of Jim Crow . . . [and] fulfillment as formalized Jim Crow succumbed to political, social, judicial, and legal pressure and assault.”13 Warren makes a strong case for the fulfillment of Jim Crow and its impact on the social, juridical, and legal landscapes, sharply distinguishing the work of post–­civil rights African American writers from what came before. I, however, see the work of post–­civil rights black artists as more strongly engaged with racial concerns precisely because they are not bound together by law but by chosen affiliation. As I have already

Trapping Entanglements

63

Figure 5.  Adina Porter in the world premiere of Suzan-­Lori Parks’s Venus, Yale University Repertory Theatre, New Haven, Conn., 1996. Photograph by T. Charles Erickson.

argued, subterranean manifestations of racism shift the operation of race but do not obviate the need for racial affiliation as a response to structures of oppression. Shifting desires and racial affiliations map the impact of juridical and social victories such as desegregation on blackness as identification. They also demonstrate a turning point and a call to consider that “the central

Figure 6.  Beyoncé Knowles performing at Fashion Rocks, Radio City Music Hall, New York City, September 7, 2006. Photograph by Scott Gries. Getty Images.

Trapping Entanglements

65

Figure 7.  Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-­Peña perform in Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit, University of California, Irvine, February 1992. Photograph by Catherine Opie.

issue for thinking about political struggle is not, then, located in the determinacies of what changes and what seemingly remains the same but in grasping the challenge of the fact that nothing is static or, from a different direction, that transformation is all there is.”14 The performances examined in this chapter present black representation as a moving target that transforms through repeated acts of cultivation over time and induce afterliving.15 Keeping in mind that the final goal of black freedom movements is not and has never been to establish governmental inclusions or academic departments, civil rights activists have used institutional affiliation as one means among many toward the larger goal of freedom—­to govern the circumstances of one’s life and living, death and dying.16 Suzan-­Lori Parks, Beyoncé Knowles, and Coco Fusco all had the opportunity, as an outgrowth of civil rights activism, to gain affiliation with governmental and institutional programs and departments. Caught in the post–­Jim Crow juridical and political quagmire that the gift of inclusion and the burden of assimilation have created, these artists have not necessarily become permanently snared in the “legacies of U.S. conquest, colonization, enslavement, and neoliberal (‘multicultural’) incorporation.”17 They make

66

Black Movements

use of the double bind of entrapment—­the access of inclusion and the demands of assimilation—­to capture the viewer and expose the unauthorized use of their bodies in the name of so-­called progress. Instead of simply acquiescing to a new millennial version of black exploitation that extends a long history of conquest (in this case, with the promise of monetary gains), these post-­soul women artists actively participate in making webs of affiliation that attenuate the hold of objectified blackness and emphasize the humanism of afterliving. Mimicry specifies the process of affiliation and disaffiliation. The performances draw from what Zora Neale Hurston jokingly describes in “Characteristics of Negro Expression” as “the Negro’s universal mimicry,” which “is not so much a thing in itself as an evidence of something that permeates his entire self. And that thing is drama.”18 Mimicry evidences the conflation of the Negro self with drama, exposing that the Negro only approximates but can never achieve subjectivity within the context of the liberal ideal. Mimicry produces the conflation, but calling attention to acts as mimicry facilitates an understanding of how the ontological status of the performers exists in excess of the desire to see the entire self of the Negro as drama. In other words, just as Hurston’s definition uses irony to undercut the conflation of the Negro with drama while celebrating the Negro’s use of drama, the performances of Parks, Beyoncé, and Fusco present all-­too-­familiar depictions of black womanhood to render them incongruous. Their acts of innovation do not ignore the implications of the contemporary social, political, and economic contexts of neoliberal multiculturalism, a term that describes how the late twentieth-­century operation of capitalism prevents the incorporation of people of color in American institutions. Jodi Melamed defines it as “a means of using difference to foster capitalist distribution while curtailing social redistribution for underrepresented folks.”19 Neoliberal multiculturalism frames the performances and names the contemporary systemic oppression that black movements address through webs of affiliation. The acts of Parks, Beyoncé, and Fusco deftly engage with the limitations that economic, governmental, and educational institutions impose in to produce covert political practices that escape entrapment and summon the cunning that Harriet Jacobs described in her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861). Jacobs’s text narrates her journey from being enslaved to achieving physical freedom.

Trapping Entanglements

67

Along the way, she suffers consistent verbal harassment and physical abuse from her owner; she also incurs the long-­lasting physical injury that results from having to hide in a crawl space for seven years to avoid sexual abuse. Her text describes the artful dance she performs with her former owner to evade capture.20 Jacobs’s iconic slave narrative recounts how for centuries black folk have devised sly mechanisms to escape from seemingly intractable positions of entrapment. Remembering her act of entrapment as an act of freedom demonstrates that being trapped does not always align with being disempowered. Her strategy also draws attention to how misdirection may offer reprieve when there is no way outside and only opacity within the frame. Similarly, Parks, Beyoncé, and Fusco devise performances of entrapment that result in circumscribed escapes, which hearken back to Jacobs’s own “loophole of retreat.”21 Slipping through the purportedly taut knot of assimilated imbrication, these artists delimit the power of representation. This cultural sensibility engenders political possibilities and serves as the basis for delineating a web of affiliation. By drawing from some modes of performance and distancing themselves from association with others, these artists negotiate inheritances as a way to extend the life of black movements, both artistic and political. The question of inheritance draws into view the individual’s relationship with the past. Regarding temporality and history, Warren posits, quoting Ian Baucom, that if one concedes to the “unevenness of time, the uncanny repetitive presentness of the past within the present,” then one “has to be concerned as much with discontinuity as continuity and has to insist on some distinction between past and present . . . It is my contention here that to understand both past and present, we have to put the past behind us.”22 Although I agree with his depiction of the nature of history, I question what it means to “put the past behind us.” Is it possible instead to create strategic lines of affiliation and disaffiliation, understanding that all traditions are manufactured and produced in response to aesthetic, political, and social demands? In addition, what does it mean to put the past behind us when to appear in the social sphere requires surrogation? In this chapter, I study late twentieth-­century black women artists who deliberately disavow a relationship to certain African American pasts in order to frame blackness as a practice of affiliation instead of an automatic inheritance. Their reframing of race demarcates the wrangling over phenotype that preoccupied the

68

Black Movements

early twentieth century, when black freedom struggles developed modes of redress. As race makes new cultural demands, artists develop innovative mechanisms to generate collectivity and to limit the all-­too-­often accompanying sting of racism.

The Liberatory Possibilities of Traditions and Countertraditions The double bind of seductive entrapment enables Parks, Beyoncé, and Fusco to perform acts of historical intervention that resist the notion that women must occupy particular predesignated roles to further collective liberation. They create caged women who use their primitive sexuality as a mechanism for taking ownership of their legally free selves. By engaging with taboo representations of black female sexuality by positioning their bodily presences in relation to recognizable scenes from the past, these artists create continuity with the literary and cultural traditions of the Black Women Writers’ Renaissance of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Speaking of that renaissance movement, Cheryl Wall notes that “the past is an ever present presence” and “the present is eerily continuous with the past.”23 Yet whereas the Black Women Writers’ Renaissance reflected a search for our mothers’ gardens, these later black women artists seem intent on developing aesthetics that continue the process of digging in those gardens, honoring and desecrating practices already begun. The negotiation with, rather than wholesale adoption of, the past creates more nuanced and dangerous expressions of power. The analysis of black women artists’ acts of affiliation and disaffiliation with representational histories of black female embodiment raises a question: what histories should we hold onto and which should we trash? I do not suggest that Parks, Beyoncé, and Fusco have found definitive answers to this question but am interested in how they wrestle with histories that claim them verses ones that they summon. They work within spaces of entrapment to challenge the mechanisms through which black female bodies are objectified (visually, procedurally, economically, ethically) to find loopholes that allow black women to reorganize systems of misidentification that have historically facilitated their exploitation.

Trapping Entanglements

69

The duality of focus (remembering and repudiating) points to another cultural movement, one in the wake of Black Power (1968–­1975) and second-­wave feminism (1963–­1980). Parks, Beyoncé, and Fusco participate in a generational shift marked historically by the challenge to affirmative action in Regents of University of California v. Bakke (1978), in which the Supreme Court rolled back the legal gains of the civil rights movement.24 In Soul Babies, Mark Anthony Neal analyzes the aesthetic shifts that emerged alongside the political and social changes in this era. Instead of trying to speak for the 40 million who died in the transatlantic slave trade (as in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean), these artists began to question the structures in the present that link to and unlink them from the past.25 The shift has augmented the paradigm of the past in the present, an aesthetic that Neal calls post-­soul. Coming of age in the Reagan years, post-­soul artists are producing art that considers everything from shifting categories of race, to globalization, to the commodification of black expressive culture. Assuming that America’s conservative contraction in the Reagan years oriented their understanding of power, language, representation, and nation-­state, I situate the performances of Parks, Beyoncé, and Fusco within this period as I specify their relationship to the colonialist representations of Baartman and Baker.26 The generational shift draws attention to the particularities of the social landscape and the necessity of inventing practices that sustain black life and living because the effectiveness of new ways of being, as mechanisms to expand the freedom of black people, diminishes over time. When challenges to Affirmative Action rolled back the gains made by women and people of color, the political terrain shifted, creating an opportunity for a different type of political activism that acknowledged the individual’s inclusion in the structures he or she was seeking to reform. Neal explains that post-­soul artists began to “tease out radical political and social sensibilities in existing and often problematic (stereotypical) caricatures of black identity. The embrace of the ‘nigga’ by many black youth is one example of these projects.”27 Post-­soul artists co-­opt paradoxically filled spaces, which, for fleeting moments, allow black female cultural workers to emerge as desiring subjects. In the post-­soul era, women artists create female characters that blatantly, irreverently, and sardonically invoke sexually charged images that dare the viewer to participate in the display. The female characters seduce the viewer by presenting familiar and desirable images of black female objectification,

70

Black Movements

but drawing from Harriet Jacobs, the entrapping displays function as sites of freedom rather than bondage. The performances highlight how the desire to objectify black women can booby-­trap the audience. The post-­soul aesthetic reflects James Baldwin’s assertion that “if history were past, history wouldn’t matter. History is present. . . . You and I are history. We carry our history. We act our history.”28 Yet what distinguishes the work of Parks, Beyoncé, and Fusco is the strategic choice to generate genealogies that disrupt the configuration of inheritance, which assumes a passing down from one generation to the next. Black women artists of their era refuse to accept the past as a predetermining factor that assumes that the black subject will claim the inheritances of race (historical, cultural, social, and psychic). This refusal enables alternative relationships to temporality, ones that are open to interpretation, rejection, possibility, and play. The figuring of the present in interpretations of the past enacts an epistemological shift that unhinges connections that have locked black women into place. At the same time, the disruption of inheritances offers a new orientation to race. In What Was African American Literature? Warren points to Trey Ellis’s claims in his 1989 essay “The New Black Aesthetic” about the class-­ based shifts that influence the outlook of a new generation of black writers. Ellis explains: For the first time in our history we are producing a critical mass of college graduates who are children of college graduates themselves. Like most artistic booms, the NBA [New Black Aesthetic] is a post-­bourgeois movement driven by a second generation of middle class. Having scraped their way to relative wealth and, too often, crass materialism, our parents have freed (or compelled) us to bite those hands that fed us and sent us to college. We now feel secure enough to attend art school instead of medical school.29

Ellis names writer Lisa Jones and visual artist Kellie Jones (the daughters of Amiri Baraka and Hettie Cohen), journalist Greg Tate, comedian Eddie Murphy, playwright and director George C. Wolfe, and filmmaker Reginald Hudlin. Age-­wise, Fusco (born 1960) and Parks (born 1963) may also easily fit into this group, but Beyoncé (born 1981) does not. Likewise, Fusco and Parks both benefited from the educational opportunity that Ellis describes as unique to this generation of artists. Fusco earned a bachelor’s degree from Brown University, a master’s degree from Stanford University, and

Trapping Entanglements

71

a doctorate from Middlesex University. Parks graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke College. Yet despite the demographic similarities, neither woman’s work consists of the sardonic parody of racial uplift that epitomizes the work of other NBA artists. What aligns Fusco and Parks with the New Black Aesthetic is a rigorous questioning of the significance of race in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. For example, Parks’s best-­known play, Topdog/Underdog, reimagines the semiotic nightmare of Sam Shepard’s True West, calling into question every identity category of the two characters in the play (including filial status), except for race. Many of the jokes in the play turn on the absurdity of not recognizing the older brother, Lincoln, as a black man. Parks and Fusco do not use race as a mechanism of automatic affiliation but recognize it as a political device that operated in the nineteenth century and continues to find mobilization in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. Race, however, does not define the tradition to which Parks and Fusco belong. Instead, the tradition is marked by both lines of affiliation and breaks. Thomas DeFrantz explains, The break is an unexpected, uncontrollable space. It is where an insistent beat is interrupted by a flash of contradictory rhythmic ideas. . . . The break is the most significant gesture of African American performance, as it contains both the tie to a ubiquitous rhythmic flow and the potential for anarchy and disruption. The break creates a liminoid space that allows attentive listeners to enter the musical dance.30

A rupture in the choreography of movement or the flow of a song, a break may demonstrate individual virtuoso performance, improvisation, and innovation. It may also produce dissonance, distraction, and interruption. A break makes room for individuality within groups as it draws the individual act in relation to the whole performance. DeFrantz continues, “So the break as I conceive it here, then, is a particular aesthetic practice as well as a concept.”31 Entrapping performances snare audiences in a web of affiliations that points to how the disavowal of race as a historically uniform basis for coalition formation is the necessary step for the propulsion of black freedom movements in the twenty-­first century because the disavowal requires careful consideration of interruptions in the pulse, the beat, the flow of history. Building on DeFrantz’s theory of the break, I examine

72

Black Movements

how entrapping performances serve to release black women from their cages by redirecting lines of affiliation and causing temporal confusion. In my formulation, as in DeFrantz’s, the breaks serve as a fundamental part of the ongoing movement.

Attenuating the Hold of the Venus In Venus, Suzan-­Lori Parks taps into the overstimulation that Saartjie Baartman’s persona produces to resist perceptions of the historical figure as an aberration. Parks’s theater challenges what qualifies as normal and freakish with regard to display, positioning all representation (not just that of the racialized subject) in relation to theatrical excess. The spectacles in Venus draw attention to the contradictory impulses that often inform looking. Harry J. Elam, Jr., and Alice Rayner note the paradoxical perspective that Venus produces: “Her body and its parts are a site of contestation and ambivalence, complicity and shame.”32 These attributes also emerge in the definition of the word spectacle, which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is either a person or a thing on display or “a person or thing exhibited to, or set before, the public gaze as an object . . . of curiosity or contempt, or . . . of marvel or admiration.” The ability to be both a curiosity and a marvel motivates the gaze. The cross-­ purposes of spectacle mirror the mixed responses to Parks’s play, which registers the danger of foregrounding performance as a medium that harnesses the same transgressive energies that demonize black bodies. Jean Young’s and Michele Wallace’s reviews reflect two schools of thought that have emerged in response to the play. Focusing on the 1996 production, Young’s critique hinges on its portrayal of the Venus as complicit in her own objectification and suggests that the play’s focus on the actions of the main character mollifies white guilt to the detriment of a black woman because it implies that the Venus serves as the primary agent of her own oppression.33 In contrast, Wallace argues that the play “actually draws upon a wide range of divergent, comparatively new and unexplored discourses: stereotypes of race and gender in Western culture, the plight of the black female body in representation, and the ethnographic subject of the social sciences as a by-­product of colonial power, wherever there were inconveniently located indigenous populations who couldn’t or

Trapping Entanglements

73

wouldn’t get with the program.”34 In a gloss of this quotation, the black theater and performance scholar Harvey Young establishes the complex stakes of representation that Jean Young does not account for in her dismissal of the play, noting Wallace’s attention to how colonial power has informed modes of spectatorship in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. In my view, these shifts in ways of looking have particular resonance in Parks’s work that must be separated from the theatricality of the early nineteenth century because the technologies of looking and visual landscapes have changed. Although Wallace and Jean Young disagree about the implications of the play, both offer a gloss of Baartman as a historical figure, thus suggesting the importance of knowing the facts. The play, however, resists allowing these facts to overdetermine meaning. As much of the scholarship on Venus details, Baartman left South Africa with a white medical officer named Dunlop and an African named Cesars. The historiography of her life centers around an ambiguity: did she migrate to London by her own volition or in response to the coercion of her escorts? In other words, did she consent? The play depicts this question in a trial scene as a controversy over habeas corpus: the unlawful detention of the Venus. A scene titled “The Venus Hottentot before the Law” mixes imagined testimony from her handlers, her patrons, and herself with quotations from archival documents to demonstrate how the Venus’s stories emerge across time and in relation to varied opinions. When the judge grants the writ and the court calls on her to testify, she says, “The Venus Hottentot is unavailable for comment.”35 Alienating herself from the courtroom procedure and the historical figure, the Venus renders the Venus Hottentot inaccessible. In his consideration of the incorporation of the writ of habeas corpus into western law and the operation of democracy, Giorgio Agamben explains, “The new political subject is already implicit in the document that is generally placed at the foundation of modern democracy: the 1679 writ of habeas corpus.” Nothing allows one to measure the difference between ancient and medieval freedom and the freedom at the basis of modern democracy better than this formula. It is not the free man and his statutes and prerogatives, nor even simply homo, but rather corpus that is the new subject of politics. And democracy is born precisely as the assertion and presentation of this “body”: habeas

74

Black Movements

corpus ad subjiciendum, “you will have to have a body to show,” . . . [which] reduc[es] inclusion and personhood to ownership.36

During the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival, in conjunction with Yale Repertory Theatre’s world premiere (1996), the actor portraying Venus, Adina Porter, wears a padded suit that calls attention to the problem of owning a body that circulates as the property that ratifies white property-­owning subjects. The visible lines of the suit demarcate Porter’s body from a possession and draw attention to how black women’s materialization troubles legal discourse and performance theory. Through artifice Porter resembles the image of Venus that serves as a backdrop (fig. 5). Even given performance theory’s acknowledgment of the social constitution of the body, black people’s “limited access to personhood as property” functions as an aspect of legal and social history that accumulates in the materialization of black women’s bodies.37 By way of the fugitive status of a stateless woman, Parks demonstrates the biopolitics—­“that domain of life over which power has taken control”—­ that override consent.38 As Saidiya Hartman argues, “criminality is the only form of slave agency recognized by law. Thus the fashioning of the subject must necessarily take the place in violation of the law, and consequently, will, criminality, and punishment are inextricably linked.”39 Only by demonstrating the historical dynamics that render the Venus wholly corpus can she function, in Parks’s play, as a questioning agent of history and a political actor. “The Venus Hottentot is unavailable for comment.” Once the character establishes the opacity at the site of her historical namesake, she responds to the court’s questions, which include “Are you here of yr own free will / or are you under some restraint?” She responds, “Im here to make a mint” (75). The character redirects the court’s inquiry to the commodification of black women’s sexuality and highlights the opportunity it provides. She capitalizes on her ability, in the twenty-­first century, to redirect onlookers’ desires by reworking notions of decency and indecency. Instead of appearing as a victim of history, the Venus authors it. By rendering subjectivity contingent on criminality, the play implicitly comments on the materialization of the black subject within the contexts of liberal humanism—­specifically, neoliberal multiculturalism. As I have argued, the emergence of the liberal subject depends on the expression of individual agency. In the case of the Venus, her agency appears by way of consenting to

Trapping Entanglements

75

her own degradation. Raising the issue of consent in an early twenty-­first-­ century context rather than a nineteenth-­century one, the play draws attention to the risk that black subjects will approximate liberal subjectivity. The play complicates the expression of consent, interweaving it into the matrices of unfreedom that distinguish black subjectivity. In order for Venus to speak a true word concerning the Venus, it must trouble the notion of consent, which functions as a right actualized through the rights-­holder’s demand for redress for situations in which consent has been denied. The Venus may be seen as a rights-­holder only when she appears as corpus, which both grants and defers her ability to consent. By creating a rupture at the site of self-­possession, the play positions the Venus as a body whose agency the court has no power to ratify. She exceeds the juridical power of the court because her being marks the limit of the court’s jurisdiction, embodying the limit to its authority that her bodily presence simultaneously authorizes. In other words, she establishes the means by which juridical subjectivity is materialized as she serves as an exception to that materialization through her racial status and lack of citizenship. By calling attention to this rupture, Parks’s play imagines a history for the Venus that enables a futurity that does not rob her of her agency or her ability to function as a political force because she does not appear, then or now, within the frame of liberal subjectivity. Harvey Young offers a compelling comparison of Jean Young’s and Wallace’s critiques of the play and highlights the last sentence as the most important one in Wallace’s review, which states that Parks “actually draws upon a wide range of divergent, comparatively new and unexplored discourses.”40 Why does Wallace make a temporal argument—­“comparatively new”? For most scholars and critics, the examination of stereotypes in relation to representations of black women would seem to be old hat. Wallace, however, suggests that Venus presents these familiar cultural productions in a way that revives interest in these familiar political conversations and inspires a more personal question, as the Negro Resurrectionist does in the play: “who is she to me?” (152). In the play, the Negro Resurrectionist serves as the narrator and therefore has a connection to the audience that the play uses to comment on the role of theater in contemporary society. Not only does he directly engage the audience, but he also does the same work—­as a digger—­that Parks strives to accomplish in her theater. In her essay “Possession,” she

76

Black Movements

explains, “One of my tasks as a playwright is to  .  .  . locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down.”41 Similarly, in an interview published in the Public Theater’s playbill, she says, “I didn’t know anything about [Baartman so] I had to go to the library and dig and dig and dig.”42 Digging is one of her central methodologies, developed to manage the historical weight of the subjects she explores in her theater. She has noted, “Well, I don’t see history as some great and beautiful Persian carpet that’s been Unrolled Across the Floor of Eternity. . . . I really don’t [believe in history]. I know that things happened in the past, but I do think that how they happened is more up for grabs than we are often led to believe.”43 Within the context of such statements, the Negro Resurrectionist is bridge between the playwright and the audience. When he asks, “Who is she to me?” he leverages his status as a connector to emphasize that the audience should understand the Venus in relation to Baartman (fig. 8). In the play, however, his question asks us to reconsider an investment in the notion of the past in the present without a historiography that considers the influence of the present

Figure 8.  The cast of the world premiere of Suzan-­Lori Parks’s Venus, Yale University Repertory Theatre, New Haven, Conn., 1996. Photograph by T. Charles Erickson.

Trapping Entanglements

77

on conceptions of the past. In other words, rather than offering a reading of Baartman that is “deeply interested in restorative justice for her,” Parks’s Venus speculates about Baartman’s life to attenuate her hold on contemporary black womanhood.44 Even by drawing attention to what I interpret as Parks’s demonstration of the limitations of singularly aligning black women’s hypervisibilty with Baartman, I understand the trepidation that such unlinking produces because the attenuation opens the door for forgetting more generally. By no means am I suggesting that scientific racism no longer exists. What I am arguing is that the play provides a strategy for future expressions of black womanhood predicated on how the present reinvigorates the past through acts of active negotiation and not mere acceptance of what came before. Nevertheless, Parks is able to trouble what has become a touchstone of black feminist history precisely because of the black feminist art and scholarship that preceded her work. The function of the play is not to serve history but to serve futurity, to claim what may be gained through selective inheritances. In addition, the Negro Resurrectionist’s question seeks to position the Venus as the locus of historical and personal desire. He justifies his refusal to protect the Venus from physical harm by asking, “Who is she to me?” His question refuses responsibility for her exploitation, creating a comfortable psychic distance between his character and hers, between performer and watcher, between spectacle and audience. The refusal ignores the constitution of the subject through contact with another, which does not assume responsibility but does create an ethical dilemma that may underlie his question. The Negro Resurrectionist’s act of disaffiliation foregrounds the ethical consequences of the Venus’ own attenuated relationship to Baartman. Denying how the suffering of another affects the self implicitly perpetuates the suffering. The question also draws attention to racial affiliation as a presumed mode of coalition formation. The casting of the play takes the issue of raced-­based forms of affiliation a step further, interrogating the historical basis upon which racial affinity rests. For instance, in Richard Foreman’s 1996 production the casting choices pressed audience members to account for how their racialized desires made claims on the past and the present. They also furrowed the brows of the critics. For example, Jean Young found fault with the choice of a black actor for the character of the Baron Docteur, who corresponds to the historical figure Georges Cuvier, a white French doctor who dissected

78

Black Movements

Baartman. At one point, the Baron Docteur responds to whether the Venus’ acumen challenges the hierarchies that underpin scientific racism, noting, “We study a people as a group / and dont throw away our years of labor / because of one most glorious exception” (112). Having a black actor deliver the line creates ironic humor, which enables the audience to focus on structures of power and the way representation circulates within, not instead of, overdetermined racial signifiers. The Venus’ purported exceptionality sets her apart from other black people who, within the logic of the Baron Docteur’s statement, cannot reason. He signifies, however, an additional exception to the rule, drawing the audience’s attention to a general flaw in the law he cites. In the Public Theater production a woman played the role of Baartman’s escort even though the traders who brought the historical Baartman to London and displayed her were men. The play calls into question essentialism based on race or sex in order to, once again, create a break between identity and the body. A similar choice was made in the workshop performance of Parks’s plays, Father Comes Home from War (2009) and The Book of Grace (2010), both staged at the Public Theater. Part 1 of Father Comes Home from War takes place in Texas, and three of the characters are runaway enslaved African Americans who comprise a chorus. Yet two of the actors in the 2009 chorus appeared to be white men (Lucas Papaelias and Frederick Weller), and the other one appeared to be a black woman (Nicole Beharie). The casting choice challenged uncritical alignments of race with the roles of victim and oppressor.45 While critics have questioned Parks’s demonization of black men through the transposition of the race of the Baron Docteur, I interpret the decision as upsetting the connection between the symbolic field designated by race and the bodies that possess it. As Brandi Wilkins Catanese argues, the casting choice “introduces an intriguing array of insight, all related to the fact that the play’s transgressive potential is neither uncomplicated or safe.”46 The transgressiveness of what Parks asks her audiences to witness attempts to challenge cultural laws that prohibit certain social relations based on a predetermined visual field. Although she continues to be taken to task for such attempts, her work offers a more nuanced understanding of the use and abuse of race. Troubling the racial associations of several of the characters and their historical counterparts renders Baartman’s suffering the province of all the characters, not solely her namesake’s.

Trapping Entanglements

79

The critical consideration caused by the casting in Venus draws attention to the relational aspects of race and therefore also raises questions about how the Baron Docteur’s depiction affects the Venus as an unmitigated victim. Jean Young rightly registers unease with the fact that Parks’s play disrupts that representation of Baartman. Likewise, Elam and Rayner begin their examination of Venus by asserting, “If there were ever a plot to evoke pity and fear, it would be the story of Saartje Baartman.”47 I agree with them that her story certainly evokes pity and contend that that Venus must attenuate that overwhelming feeling in order to reorganize the representational field. Parks’s theater disrupts what Hazel Carby describes as “touchiness among feminists about representing black women as complex.” She asserts, “People are happier if you portray them as morally superior because of suffering or victimization. I get irritated by representations of black women from the past that are simplistic—­that deny their complexity, their dangerousness, their refusal to be policed.”48 Carby points to a central concern about the representational power of black women—­in Parks’s case, in an exclusive site of U.S. cultural production: the stage. In the early twentieth century, Langston Hughes eloquently articulated in “The Negro and the Racial Mountain” the artist’s right to create art that functions as a mode of expression untethered to political uplift. Nonetheless, the pull of race’s regulatory force continues to inform the reception of black art. Neither the colonialist renderings of Baartman nor the desire to use her circumstances as evidence of racial violence leave room in the representational field for Parks’s character to emerge as a desiring subject. If the Venus remains tethered to Baartman, she also stays locked in the complicated matrices of the representation of ubiquitously encumbered black female sexuality. Accordingly, the audience’s willingness to transmute the suffering of the singular character to black women as a whole, as evidenced by the reviewers’ comments, reveals the actual stakes of the play as a struggle over habeas corpus—­who shall have the body and under what strictures may it be held?49 Such a shift, temporally and epistemologically, calls into question what types of knowledge representation produces and how such knowledge affects black life and living. To loosen the hold that looking has on the constitution of the body, the performances first evoke looking and then loosen the tie between Parks’s figure and the historical one. In other words, the play must attempt the dangerous work of weakening the link between the main character and Baartman.50

80

Black Movements

Parks does not present a biography but offers a fantasy that augments what she calls the hearsay that constitutes history. In the “Overture” that opens the play, she stages the resurrection of Baartman through a moment that displaces the visual as the only way of knowing the central character. As the Venus revolves visibly on a platform, the Negro Resurrectionist announces, “I regret to inform you that thuh Venus Hottentot iz dead” (3).51 That is, in a play purportedly about Baartman, a play in which the central character is listed in the front matter as “Miss Saartje Baartman, a.k.a. The Girl, and later The Venus Hottentot” the Overture signals the death of the figure in order to give birth to Parks’s creation through resurrection (n.p.).52 Once the Venus is deemed dead, the characters debate as to what killed her until she interjects, “Uhhhh!” (4). Harvey Young describes this moment as “filled with the ‘physicality’ of language” because “Parks incorporates the gestural and physical into her words.”53 The sound of resurrection—­“Uhhhh!”—­ situates Parks’s sample from the life of Baartman within a context that does not privilege the gaze but, as Fred Moten describes, “anticipates a looking that cannot be sustained as unalloyed looking but must be accompanied by listening even though what is listened to . . . is also unbearable.”54 Using language that calls for enactment (onomatopoeia, puns, and homophones), Parks deconstructs looking at Baartman in ways that take place in the absence of other forms of sensory perception. By having the Negro Resurrectionist announce Baartman’s death, the play brings her back to life on its own terms. The Negro Resurrectionist must remind the audience that the Venus Hottentot is dead and that “there wont b inny show tonite” in order to allow the present to intervene and remix western histories of display and the notion of a show. Besides calling to mind the pervasive and longstanding association of black women with display, the reference to the familiar sight of Baartman acknowledges the impossibility of recuperating the historical person, especially given that, as Stuart Hall elucidates, “popular culture, commodified and stereotyped as it often is, is not at all, as we sometimes think of it, the arena where we find who we really are, the truth of our experience. It is an experience that is profoundly mythic. It is a theater of popular desires, a theater of popular fantasies.”55 Parks transforms the dynamic of display into a theatricality that centralizes the exchange of looks in all cultural production. Popular culture exceeds the quotidian in that it stages visually the desires and fantasies that function as the imago of the everyday. Within this

Trapping Entanglements

81

context, it is no wonder that black women artists have turned to modes of display before an audience to engage with identifications of themselves and the way in which they are imagined and represented “not only to the audiences out there who do not get the message, but to [them]selves for the first time.”56

Generative Associations The performance of Venus enables an understanding of the past that creates opacity at the site of the black female body and therefore defamiliarizes hegemonic gazes. Likewise, Beyoncé’s performance at Fashion Rocks evokes a well-­known figure, Josephine Baker. Whereas Parks’s play has made history, Beyoncé’s performance appropriates Baker’s persona to enact a twenty-­first-­century remix that secures her individuality by way of her similarity to and difference from Baker. Like Venus, Beyoncé’s performance of her hit single “Déjà vu” also features bodily excess. It opens with a drawing of Baker in a banana skirt projected onto a screen that then dissolves into the singer’s name, “Beyoncé,” in large script surrounded by clouds. The stage, engulfed with smoke, creates a sense of anticipation. The singer appears on stage; and as she shimmies (sending the bananas of her skirt flying at ninety-­degree angles), she raises her arms to the sky and swings her head back and forth while a backup dancer, in an allusion to Alvin Ailey’s “Revelation,” holds an umbrella over her head. Beyoncé revises Baker’s signature costume; instead of appearing topless, she wears a bejeweled bra, marking the hip hop influence of her fashion choice through an investment in bling and thus pointing to the high price of this new millennial commodification, as did Kanye West in his evocation of the Flying Africans (see chapter 1). The background dancers walk from stage left to right as Beyoncé takes center stage and drops to the ground. She slowly reemerges from the smoke and, calling for the band to begin playing, moves her neck from left to right and thrusts out her behind in a dance made famous in videos of the song “Bootylicious” (2001), performed by Beyoncé’s former group, Destiny’s Child.57 Through her dancing body, Beyoncé confers what Jayna Brown describes as the “wonderful heterogeneity and contradiction” of popular dance. Brown argues, “Forms can be immediately commercialized, yet they are incapable of

82

Black Movements

being owned. They are by definition public and collective, yet they can also be intensely private, articulations of a bodily interiority.”58 Through her movements, Beyoncé generates genealogies, situating herself in a line of black female performers while inhabiting the break as an agent in her self-­definition. Her performance takes place on the tightrope mentioned in Janelle Monáe’s popular song “Tightrope,” drawing from the black expressive practice that functions as the basis of black subjectivity and distinguishing herself from the individuals who enacted such movements. Although Beyoncé’s performance samples from Baker’s, particularly in the opening sequence, it recontextualizes Baker’s in important ways. First, as I said, it calls attention to contemporary hyper-­consumerism and commodification. In the twenty-­first century, the individual may sell or purchase anything and everything, including individual privacy. Consider the many reality television shows that revolve around the lives of ordinary people and their children, transforming footage of American lives into commodities. Second, the performance positions Beyoncé as the director of the show. As Daphne Brooks has convincingly argued, her “lead-­off call” to the band “gives us a taste . . . [of] a vocalist who urgently and masterfully traverses dense sonic arrangements and who fully controls space—­musical, lyrical, and metaphorical—­in deft and unprecedented ways.”59 At the same time, through her costuming and setting she aligns her performance within a familiar mode of bravura seen in many hip hop–­influenced performances. In addition, Beyoncé begins her routine at Fashion Rocks by calling for her fans’ approval, using another standard practice of hip hop performance. Before she begins singing, she asks, “Fashion Rocks, you ready?” and then instructs, “Let’s go get um!”60 The call to arms and subsequent instruction involves the spectators in reforming the parameters of Baker’s iconic image in a methodology similar to the way in which Venus asks spectators to reform Baartman’s. Beyoncé’s call for participation doubles her role in the production; in addition to being the leading lady, she also becomes the director. Parks and Beyoncé share a recurring interest in referring to historical figures within their performative oeuvre. Parks describes her ideas about adapting the Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess into a musical, describing it as “working on a historical artifact,” and about using the historical figure of Abraham Lincoln and the literary figure of Hester Prynne to reshape our understanding of history as a category.61 Catanese describes Parks’s

Trapping Entanglements

83

methodology “as a means through which she gains access to the past (both historical and theatrical) and at the same time takes the liberty of estranging it from itself.”62 Conversely, Beyoncé’s invocation of figures such as Dorothy Dandridge, Etta James, Diana Ross, and Tina Turner smacks of appropriation. Farah Jasmine Griffin argues that “Beyoncé follows in a long line of talented beautiful black women entertainers such as Josephine Baker, Lena Horne, and Dorothy Dandridge.” I, however, contend that she “worries the line” by, as Griffin notes, “reap[ing] the full rewards of her labor and [controlling] fully the direction of her career.”63 Beyoncé’s ability to assume these roles, which stand in tension with her own, also distinguishes her performance from those presented in Venus or in Fusco’s The Couple in the Cage. Appearing as other iconic black female performers shields her from the violence of becoming because her stage persona multiplies her identity rather than assumes it. When she appears on stage as Josephine Baker or Tina Turner, the audience sees Beyoncé as Baker or Turner, enabling her to more easily bring those iconic women into the twenty-­first century rather than having to negotiate the temporal lag of stereotypical associations and latent desires. In addition to shielding herself from the violence of becoming by appearing as a historical figure, Beyoncé also crafts multiple versions of herself. In her November 2008 release of I Am . . . Sasha Fierce, she publicly introduces her alternative persona, Sasha Fierce. Although the singer’s wealth enables what Mark Anthony Neal would describe as a cosmopolitan flow of multiple personas (including Sasha Fierce), the digital age makes available to anyone with an Internet connection avatars instantiated in language.64 Beyoncé clarifies, in a People magazine interview with Emmet Sullivan, that Sasha first emerged during the production of her 2003 hit song “Crazy in Love.” Griffin notes, Unlike her predecessors, she has not been forced to choose between “respectable lady” and “bombshell.” She comfortably occupies both spaces, having selected the persona Sasha Fierce to express the latter. However, that she has chosen two public personas to separately convey her respectable and sexual selves suggests that black women have yet to be granted the full privilege of expressing their sexual agency without paying a price. On the other hand, Beyoncé’s two personas signify an intelligent career choice; she may be able to age gracefully into the more elegant persona.65

84

Black Movements

Savvy and transgressive, Beyoncé’s multiple personas destabilize the one-­ to-­one relationship between public identity and subject. Through identification with a cadre of black women divas and multiple versions of herself, Beyoncé enacts, in Judith Butler’s words, “fantasy or incorporation.” However, it is clear that coherence is desired, wished for, idealized, and that this idealization is an effect of a corporeal signification. In other words, acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce that on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means.66

The performative enacted through bodily movement serves as the sign of ontological incoherence when subjectivity emerges only by way of rational verbal expression. The manifestation of subjectivity through words and deeds disrupts the stability of gender and racial identity because identity not only evolves but multiplies. Taking the logics of identity formulation one step further, the performances in this chapter enable the instability of the individual, not as a racial subject but as a subject in general. Beyoncé may become Sasha Fierce, Josephine Baker, Etta James, or Tina Turner to demonstrate the ontological instability of I. Performatives help to stabilize identity as they reveal the persistent instabilities. In Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities, Neal argues that wealth helps to facilitate the flow of identities and delimit the desire for coherence; but the ability to adopt an alternative self does not function for megastar Beyoncé alone. Nor does the practice of aligning one’s performance with prior enactments through strategic practices of citation. Her wealth and profession do facilitate her multiplicity, given the popular perception of the dubious staged self versus the given veracity of the private self. Beyoncé’s personas call attention to an important question about how she leverages her celebrity to draw attention to the production of subjectivity. In her thoughtful analysis of the performance practices of movie star Anna May Wong, Anne Anlin Cheng challenges prevailing thought in celebrity studies about women of color as stars:

Trapping Entanglements

85

Instead of seeing celebrity culture as a rejection or an obfuscation of the material history of de-­idealized bodies, I take celebrity as a politics of recognition and glamour as a politics of personhood and encourage us to revise some of the deepest assumptions that we have about raced bodies and their presentations. Revising these assumptions will allow us to challenge a racial discourse, both progressive and regressive, that has so long relied on the raced body’s fundamental embodiment.67

Cheng’s assertion recalls concerns about the relationship between embodiment and conceptions of the liberal human (see chapter 1) as they offer new ground to consider the particular implications of celebrity for the production of racialized identities. Beyoncé’s celebrity, like all celebrity, requires “constant self-­ production . . . tied to commodity culture, to the ascension of the public persona, and to the politics of performance.”68 As Nicole Fleetwood explains, following Roderick Ferguson, “the concept of hypervisibility has particular resonance in contemporary popular culture and mass entertainment where the black body as commodity fetish has a heightened salience. As commodity theorists have argued, the commodity fetish masks power relations and historical contexts that produce systems of inequality and the consumption of difference.”69 While Beyoncé does profit from the commodification of blackness, as a cultural performer she calls attention to the labor required to produce the black virtuoso woman performer. Dismantling all claims to the naturalness of black excess—­in terms of the body, talent, and ability to labor—­she becomes different versions of herself through costume and hair changes as well as her intricate choreography and staging. Beyoncé’s association with music royalty solidifies her status as a diva who claims the property of her foremothers, sometimes to their chagrin. (Etta James cried foul when she sung “At Last” to newly inaugurated President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama during the Neighborhood Ball on January 20, 2009.)70 “Diva,” a track on her third solo album, insists that her self-­commodification engenders an ability to accumulate wealth and appropriate agency. As the song engulfs the listener, Beyoncé repeats, “I’m a diva,” to the militaristic percussion that dominates the track and then breaks into a chorus of “a diva is a female version of a hustla.”71 Clarifying the simile through a display of self-­willed power, the first verse asserts directorship of the song in a fashion similar to the opening of Venus.

86

Black Movements

Just as the Venus challenges the notion that there will not be a show, or at least not the show the audience expects, Beyoncé sings, “Stop the track / let me state facts / I told you give me a minute and I’ll be right back.”72 As in “Déjà vu,” the lyrics position the popular sensation as the commander of the performance and situate Beyoncé’s music as being worth waiting for. She responds to the two-­year gap since her last solo album and then breaks into a brash list of accomplishments, similar to what many rap artists produce on their first solo albums, which solidifies her status as “the number one diva in this game for a minute.”73 Bolstering her claim of an extended life span, her lyrical castigation focuses on her market share and her (possibly illegal) wealth: in the third verse she sings, “This is a stick up, stick up / I need them bags, uh, that money.”74 In addition, the song’s title implies anxiety about her age, revealing a sense of vulnerability about being unseated by the next young virtuoso. Like an opera diva who knows her time is limited, Beyoncé seems cognizant of her shelf life, a dilemma that reflects the gender specificity of her hustle because, purportedly, male entertainers only get better with age. The frantic looping of “I’m a diva” that echoes as she sings and the inherent urgency of hustling as a practice reflect her panic about amassing as much capital as possible before time runs out. Neither Beyoncé’s song nor Parks’s play situates the persona of the diva as emancipatory. In one scene in Venus, the Venus offers the Mother-­ Showman, the star’s handler, advice on how to “spruce up [the] act,” a sentiment repeated in Parks’s play Topdog/Underdog. The Mother-­Showman rejects her suggestions and also denies the performer an increase in pay. The Venus argues, “Im thuh one they come to see. / Im thuh main attraction. / Yr other freaks r 2nd fiddles.” The Mother-­Showman replies, “Oh boy: Uh Diva” (53). The demarcation of diva draws on one of Parks’s commonly used discursive strategies, anachronisms, which, in this case, polices a purportedly overly demanding black woman. The term diva first emerged in the late nineteenth century to describe an opera company’s premier female singer. In the play, however, the term is used to disparage the Venus for requesting just compensation for her labor. In the late twentieth century, diva emerged in popular discourse to describe a black woman who refused to abide by the established rules of society, which expected her to display humility and forgo the benefits she deserved. Parks’s anachronistic use of the term, which draws from its

Trapping Entanglements

87

twentieth-­century connotation, demonstrates how the present moment may be used to inform our understanding of the past. What would it mean to imagine Baartman as a diva instead of a victim? What types of possibilities does such an imaginative frame create and foreclose? Even though the appellation has been known to demean black women (recall Star Jones’s unceremonious departure in 2006 from the ABC talk show The View amid claims that she was a diva), the play’s flippant use of diva participates in a larger co-­optation of representational space central to Parks’s drama and the artistic production of self-­described diva Beyoncé.75 Through the terms, the women craft characters that use naming to create fissures that temporarily offer respite from static representations of black women. Due largely to her success, Beyoncé is able to manipulate her relationship to derisive signifiers and the objecthood associated with racialized and gendered identity. Part of the way that she achieves such negotiations depends not only on the production of her celebrity persona but also her management of stage personas. By performing herself and calling attention to the production of self, she highlights the representational fields that objectify celebrity and highlight her separate and relatively private self as wife and mother. Her stage personas do, however, profit from the reformer’s idealized status of wife. Beyoncé’s performance at Fashion Rocks features Jay-­Z, who presents hyper-­masculinity as a complement to her uber-­femininity, elevating the purchase of their normative heterosexuality as an idealized fantasy. Even as her 2013 tour name, “The Mrs. Carter Show World Tour,” draws attention to her as a wife, the marketing discloses an equal investment in the business possibilities made available through partnering with Jay-­Z. By “crafting the self as art and product,” Beyoncé’s movements (to borrow an assertion from Jayna Brown) “prove that a body is never fully containable.”76 The privilege of heterosexual coupling, alongside superstardom, contextualizes Beyoncé’s dangerous play with bondage in the final sequence of her 2013 video “Partition” and the costuming in her 2014 Grammy performance and the opening number of her 2014 On the Run tour performance. Securing her role as producer and performer, to the surprise of fans, her team, and the music industry, she released her fifth self-­titled solo album and first visual album just minutes before midnight on December 13, 2013, without any media preparation. The album certified her independence as an artist and a desiring subject. Introducing her persona Yoncé, the visual album consists

88

Black Movements

Figure 9.  Beyoncé Knowles and dancer performing in the video for “Partition,” from the album Beyoncé, 2013. Screenshot by Soyica Diggs Colbert.

of seventeen videos released along with the music. The visual album presents sexual fantasies that include role play and pole and cage dancing. In the videos and stage performances of songs from the album, Beyoncé reinvigorates questions that emerge in relationship to Parks’s character the Venus. What is the relationship between desire and consent? And are there certain domains that exceed the dynamics of consent? The questions draw attention to how erotics specify black women’s relationship to and distance from the liberal human. The performances that Beyoncé develops in relation to her 2013 album test the strategies that Parks’s play and Beyoncé’s 2007 performance developed to evade the dehumanizing mandate of the black female as prototype for excessive embodiment. The video for “Partition” opens and closes with depictions of Beyoncé as a sultry lady. In the opening scene the camera cuts from the palatial estate where she resides to the interior of the home, finally landing on the songstress enjoying breakfast with her husband. As he reads the newspaper she looks at him intently through her black-­rimmed glasses. She is wearing fire-­engine-­red lipstick and matching nail polish that offer a stark contrast to her crisp white robe, but her jaw-­length blonde bob tempers the sensuality of her glance. A bell rings and Yoncé begins to show herself: the white robe falls open to reveal black and turquoise lingerie. The video emphasizes the production of Yoncé as the fantasy of the sultry wife seated at the breakfast

Trapping Entanglements

89

table by cutting back and forth from one to the other as the song begins to play. The song describes a sexual encounter in the back seat of a limousine between Yoncé and her lover, played by Jay-­Z in the video. The opening lines of the song state, “Driver roll up the partition please / I don’t need you seeing Yoncé on her knees / Took forty-­five minutes to get all dressed up and we aint gonna even make it to this club / Now mascara runnin, red lipstick smudged / Oh he’s so horny, yeah he want to fuck.”77 The video then cuts to Yoncé performing scenes of seduction with Jay-­Z as her audience. She sings ironically, “Private show with the music blastin’,” as she performs for her audience of one and her digital audience of millions. The evocation of multiple audiences functions as another instance of direction through indirection that distinguishes Beyoncé’s persona from the hypersexuality of Baker or Yoncé. Through multiplicity of character, Beyoncé embodies the hypersexual black female figure in order to satisfy her audience’s desire to frame her as she calls attention to the fantasy as a shared one that only emerges by way of Yoncé. The video emphasizes the performer’s multiplicity, featuring several scenes in which the singer appears with a double (fig. 9). Although the video as a whole distances the enactment of erotic pleasure from Beyoncé, ascribing the experience to Yoncé and situating it within the realm of fantasy, the presentation of Yoncé’s double destabilizes the neat dichotomy of Beyoncé and her personas (the fake

Figure 10.  Beyoncé Knowles performing in the video for “Partition,” from the album Beyoncé, 2013. Screenshot by Soyica Diggs Colbert .

90

Black Movements

and the real) and offers the possibility of Beyoncé and Yoncé as identities that both constitute the subject. Near the end of the video for “Partition,” Beyoncé literalizes the caging she evokes in her 2007 performance at Fashion Rocks and explicitly links the depiction of black female entrapment to a sexual fantasy (fig. 10). In the sequence, Yoncé dances by herself and with versions of herself behind ropes that resemble bars as a projection of leopard print spots her body. The use of light projection emphasizes that the fantasy requires a blurring of the distinction between human and animal. The organization of the video, however, leaves open the question of whether Beyoncé evades such blurred lines by establishing her heteronormative and class privilege at the beginning of the video. Conversely, do the depictions of Yoncé unravel the notion of the lady as separate from the freak in order to challenge the demonization of black women’s sexuality and the attribution of hypersexuality? The fantasy at the heart of the video “Partition” reinforces as it complicates the strategies of redirection that Beyoncé develops in earlier performances. Her multiple personas situate the question of consent within the realm of the viewer because the video clarifies that the fantasy belongs as much to the watcher as the one being watched. Along the same lines, Beyoncé’s choice of costume at the 2014 Grammy Awards, where she performed the single “Drunk in Love” from her 2013 album, and the costume she wore to open the On the Run tour, which she headlined with Jay-­Z, make reference to the cage as a form of bondage (figs. 11 and 12). Although Beyoncé’s 2013 album expresses a sequence of sexual fantasies, the costuming presses us to ask, Are there certain domains that exceed the dynamics of consent? The La Perla cage vest that Beyoncé wears in her 2014 Grammy performance builds a bridge between her seductive manipulation of the enclosure in the “Partition” video and the bandit’s mask that resembles a bondage mask that she wears in the opening number of the On the Run tour. The vest perpetuates the fantasy of entrapment but secures it to the body instead of around the body. The costume also makes reference to lingerie and the dancer’s leotard. The multiple fashion influences of the cage vest render it a less forceful evidence of entrapment than does the performance in “Partition,” but read alongside the performance it becomes part of an elaborate staging of sexual fantasy. Likewise, the headgear that Beyoncé wears to open the On the Run tour has multiple fashion referents, most obviously the clothing of banditry and

Trapping Entanglements

91

bondage. In the performance, she also wears a custom-­made Versace leotard with a net vest, fishnet stockings, and work boots. The name of the tour refers to a song on Jay-­Z’s 2013 album Magna Carta . . . Holy Grail, and the two performers present themselves as hip hop’s version of the outlaws Bonnie and Clyde. By itself, Beyoncé’s mask is a coincidental reference to the intimacy between fugitivity and black female sexuality. In the context of her 2013 self-­titled visual album, however, it becomes a more deliberate reference to “sadomasochistic role-­play . . . the conscious assumption of ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ personas that respectively give and receive pain but also the use of props and costuming that suggest specific and social forms of power.”78 Beyoncé’s choice of costume and her use of persona situates her in a negotiation of power relations that police black women’s sexuality. By working at the crossroads of fugitivity and black female sexuality, she calls attention to how present performances engage with and disrupt the operation of historical inheritances as representational determinacy. The crafting of her image as Yoncé enables a consideration of “the entangled histories of race, labor, nationhood, and imperialism as well as sexuality” that problematize black female subjectivity in regard to bondage.79 Interweaving subjection and seduction, the mask leverages the desire to see Beyoncé as a sex symbol in order to highjack the production of identity. The name of the tour and the song she sings with Jay-­Z, “’03 Bonnie and Clyde,” remind audiences that they are witnessing a theft that attempts to ransom black life from objection. Thinking through the depiction of sadomasochism in British filmmaker Isaac Julien’s The Attendant, Christina Sharpe argues: We are called on to think through how and where one finds something like pleasure within these constraints. It is, I think, in the alignment of sexuality and disciplinarity that viewers first read the Attendant’s and the Conservator’s masochism perversely (that is, contrarily) solely through the lens of sexual desire (s/m and aural voyeurism) and not through the characters’ submission to and maintenance of the heterotopic institution of the museum and the ideological and actual structures that continue to hold them in place. The Attendant and the Conservator in their daily lives perform “scenes of subjection.” . . . Sadomasochism appears here in the course of everyday life enduringly and almost invisibly “[in] the everyday routines of domination, which continue to characterize black life but are obscured by their everydayness.”80

Figure 11.  Beyoncé and Jay-­Z performing during the Grammy Awards, Staples Center, Los Angeles, January 26, 2014. Photograph by Cliff Lipson. CBS/Getty Images.

Trapping Entanglements

93

Figure 12.  Beyoncé Knowles performing during her On the Run tour, Sun Life Stadium, Miami Gardens, Florida, June 25, 2014. Photograph by Kevin Mazur. WireImage/Parkwood Entertainment.

Unlike the presentation of domination in The Attendant, Beyoncé’s performances evoke glamour, extravagance, excess, and grandeur. Yet the lure of watching her belies the way she disciplines her audience as a means of mediating pleasure, including requiring audiences to wait for more than an hour to begin a show or demanding that they cheer before she performs.81 The

94

Black Movements

staging of entrapment and bondage in her world of fantasy draws attention to how audience desire produces Yoncé and to the circulation and use of normative modes of discipline and domination. I have already mentioned that Beyoncé’s performance summons the cunning of Harriet Jacobs to form a loophole of retreat with the confines of the garret that she occupies to evade capture by her owner. Beyoncé’s costume references to bondage also risk valorizing “a pleasure in slavery and its representations.”82 As Aliyyah Abdur-­R ahman argues in Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race, “Harriet Jacobs  .  .  . [represents] sexual violence whether threatened or actualized, as the strongest evidence of the destructive force of slavery on the individual, family, and wider community.”83 The regulation of the enslaved through sexual terror explains why sexuality remains a contested terrain within which black women articulate the human. Reorganizing the logics of discipline does not redefine racialized categories formed in relation to domination. Moreover, although the structures of the performance call attention to a consistent doubling that destabilizes subjectivity and focuses attention on ideologies that call for the subjection of black women, audiences consistently read performances against the grain, particularly ones that animate the powerful force of popular culture and thrive on commodification. The strategies that Beyoncé enacts are limited but still important because they activate fantasy to call attention to the erotic domains that are still dangerous for black women in public. The foreclosure of certain realms of desire marks some of the ground yet to be gained. In Beyoncé’s performances of entrapment, the cultural work that occurs depends on the artist’s active engagement with the past to remix it into a form that critically engages with and departs from depictions of Baartman or Baker as pure victims. The performances enable an understanding of the past that disrupts the policing of black women’s bodies, especially given that the performances reveal the futility of assimilating the representation of black women’s bodies into a cultural milieu that defines black women as bodily excess. Given the status of Parks, Beyoncé, and Fusco as cultural workers and performers, “it is important to acknowledge,” as Nicole Fleetwood encourages, “a significant change in the realm of entertainment arts in which many black entrepreneurs and artists are now producers of such goods.” Such acknowledgment does not ignore that “connections can be made between the black body as commodity in contemporary settings and

Trapping Entanglements

95

historical uses of the black body as consumption good.”84 Moreover, the performances undermine U.S. cultural assumptions of white maleness as normal and black femaleness as excess by calling attention to the spectacle that is American culture in general. By locating the process of projection that helps to justify hierarchies in western formations of identity and then blatantly reveling in the bodily, they clear space for black women’s quotidian expressions of bodily pleasure—­though this does come at a cost.

Caging the Viewer For artists to generate genealogies, the representation must stay in motion and draw from an array of sometimes contradictory sources that register black women’s desire, pain, triumphs, and losses. The aesthetic practice of layering enables similarities within differences, a characteristic exemplified in Parks’s play, Beyoncé’s performance at Fashion Rocks, and the documentary film The Couple in the Cage, created by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-­Peña. In 1992, the pair performed an interactive piece, Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit, in eight cities (Irvine, California; Madrid; London; Minneapolis; Washington, D.C.; Sydney; Chicago; and New York). They played the role of natives from an island called Guatinau whom white people have discovered and displayed—­something that western spectators have been doing since the age of Columbus. Locating the practice of intercultural performance with the emergence of the United States, Fusco and Gómez-­Peña decided to recall this painful history in response to the nation’s plans for quincentenary celebrations of Columbus in 1992. What they imagined, as Fusco says in English Is Broken Here, was “a satirical commentary on Western concepts of the exotic, primitive Other,” but it quickly dissolved into a referendum on the politics of display, similar to many of the critical responses to Venus.85 The use of satire links The Couple in the Cage to the work of post-­soul artists. In the late twentieth century, neoliberal multiculturalism became a mechanism to manage the ongoing demands of black justice movements through containment. Fusco explains that in devising the film “we sought a strategically effective way to examine the limits of the ‘happy multiculturalism’ that currently reigns in cultural institutions, as well as to respond to the formalists and cultural relativists who reject the proposition that

96

Black Movements

racial difference is absolutely fundamental to aesthetic interpretation.”86 The performance not only sought to disrupt the practice of making art but also aimed to intervene in the process of interpretation by calling attention to “happy multiculturalism” as a system of value that reinscribed a social order of the liberal human. Fusco writes, “Our cage became the metaphor for our condition, linking the racism implicit in ethnographic paradigms of discovery with the exoticizing rhetoric of ‘world beat’ multiculturalism.”87 She links the art world’s embrace of multiculturalism to modernists’ interest in primitivism; in both cases the other enables artistic production and functions as a source of inspiration while affirming the liberal human as artist.88 The Couple in the Cage attempts to disrupt the inscription of primitivism onto black and brown bodies through its satirical representation of natives and thus calls attention to how audiences produce the human against which the caged black female body is positioned. Intending to be disruptive, the film enacts the misdirection necessary to attenuate the hold of Baartman and Baker through slightly different means from those used in Venus or Beyoncé’s performances. Venus presents itself as a period piece, a drama about another time, and then turns the tables on the viewer by drawing the action into the present through its anachronisms and modes of direct address. The references to caging in Beyoncé’s performance seduce the viewer by placing the singer in an aspirational position from which she then distances herself through the presentation of her personas. The split between person and performer that Beyoncé enacts shows how female identity and sexuality emerge against a backdrop of social expectations that place women in the position of facilitators rather than directors. In The Couple in the Cage, caging establishes ethnic otherness as a performative that the audience produces by participating in acts of explicit domination. Through the interplay of actors and audience, it demonstrates the ongoing negotiation of the human within the contexts of neoliberal multiculturalism. Fusco explains, “The ethnographic exhibitions of people of color were among the many sources drawn on by European and American modernists seeking to break with realism by imitating the ‘primitive.’ The connection between West African sculpture and Cubism has been discussed widely by scholars, but it is the construction of ethnic Otherness as essentially performative and located in the body that I here seek to stress.”89 The history of human exhibition ratifies the difference between the liberal

Trapping Entanglements

97

human, as I discuss in chapter 1, and the performing embodies expression of the other. Fusco’s documentary intervenes in the commingling, in U.S. culture, of race and theatricality by cutting the visual display of the performance with other footage and sound. These manipulations offer yet another aesthetic model of how to counter oppressive modes of representation, not only to reveal their inner workings but also to provide additional space for women of color to occupy within visual culture. The Couple in the Cage opens by foregrounding the postmodern mode of pastiche, streaming together news broadcasts in different voices and languages. The flow of acoustic information accompanies footage of the artists, who are being walked on leashes to a cage as live audience members comment. Thus, in the first few minutes, the film situates the viewer at a layered critical distance that is unavailable to spectators of Parks’s play. As consumers of the film, we watch the live audience watching the performance. Fusco’s and Gómez-­Peña’s performances render the viewers subject to the performers’ gaze and the documentation of the video camera, caging the live audience. As a part of their routine, they perform “‘traditional tasks,’ which rang[e] from sewing voodoo dolls and lifting weights to watching television and working on a laptop computer.”90 The exhibit also enables patrons to pay a small fee to take pictures with them. In a moment caught on film, patrons stand with backs to the cage, rendering them blind to the Guatinauis’ actions. While the customers pose for a Polaroid camera, the Guatinauis stage scenes for a video camera. As a patron stands with back to the cage, the caged pair’s behavior ranges from stoically standing still, to playfully tussling a customer’s hair, to erotically rubbing a patron’s cheek. The position of the patron, in the foreground of the pictures, subject to the control of the native, inverts the customary power hierarchy of European dominance over native subjects. The film emphasizes this inversion by cutting from patrons posing for pictures to footage of people on display as freaks at a Ringling Brothers circus performance in 1930. The film then freezes these images and creates a border around them so that they transform from video images to still-­photo shapes before the viewers’ eyes. Then the filmmakers flash a number of other still shots, including images of Baartman, Ishi (sole survivor of the Yahi tribe of California), and Fusco, with measurements of her body. The sequence draws Fusco into a visual lineage that she reshapes. The shifting and mutation of images questions the relationship between

98

Black Movements

seemingly static notions of representation and their counterpoint in performance. As Diana Taylor notes, “the cage is a performance—­its ontology determines its ephemeral, bracketed nature. It’s an artwork, produced and performed by two artists who went on tour to critique the quincentennial. However, the as of performance signals its other dimension as critical lens, as a heuristic system.”91 At first the patrons assume a certain degree of safety, approaching the cage and paying money for photographs. But once drawn into the performance, they become trapped in the morphing bars of the cage. Fusco and Gómez-­Peña shift the vantage point, rearranging inside and outside, truth and fiction, participant and observer. According to Barbara Kirshenblatt-­ Gimblett, the film “shifts the locus of repudiation and admonishment from the ‘other’ to the practices of othering.”92 Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett’s use of the word practice is key because the language draws attention to the performance practice as a method to unlink the actors from a predetermined genealogy that the film itself evokes through images of Baartman and Ishi. While Jennifer Tyburczy argues convincingly that displays, including Fusco’s and Gómez-­Peña’s, “depend on hegemonic definitions of racial difference embedded in traditional forms of sexual union to construct a paradoxical kind of sexual exoticism characterized equally by desire as by repulsion,” the footage of the display troubles the temporality of the event and complicates the relationship between performer and viewer.93 By compressing time and arranging the order of the footage, the film demonstrates how an archival work can comment on a performance to expose the temporal collapse that shapes the reception of black performance. The performance animates forms of sexual and racial desire that position women of color as “grotesque icons of deviant womanhood in juxtaposition to a superior Western ideal.”94 The film challenges the linearity of comparison, triangulating spectatorship by adding the filmic viewer to the relationship between performer and live viewer, which enables new webs of affiliation to emerge. The Couple in the Cage calls attention to the inheritances that make late-­twentieth-­century people of color appear to be primitive. Although everything about the display suggests that Fusco and Gómez-­Peña are performers, the audience’s response to the performance art documents how racialized performatives toggle back and forth in time rather than function as accumulations of embodied actions over time. The film addresses the

Trapping Entanglements

99

audience’s willingness to collapse visual history rather than account for the devices that frame the performance art, including “a simulated Encyclopedia Britannica entry with a fake map of the Gulf of Mexico showing” the island of Guatinau.95 Racialized performatives emerge in correspondence with the desire to fix black and brown bodies in the past. Therefore, the film must show how the performance art summons the viewer so that the film can unlink the performers from stereotypical pasts. Similarly, Parks’s play cages spectators by calling attention to the audiences’ movement during the play’s intermission. Though the intermission in most plays allows the audience to find respite from the action, the Baron Docteur continues to engage the audience during Parks’s intermission by reading a report about his examination of the Venus. He begins by describing her characteristics but then gives audience members permission to leave: “I do invite you, Distinguished Guests, / if you need relief / please take yourselves uh breather in thuh lobby. / My voice will surely carry beyond these walls and if not / my finds are published” (92). Elam and Rayner rightly note, “The intermission puts the audience in a double-­ bind: it is blind to complicity that is an inevitable part of performance, even if refusing to sanction [the Baron Docteur’s] report, and blind to the avoidance if trying not to listen. There is a measure of self-­deception and duplicity in believing one can escape participation either by staying to listen or leaving.”96 The play makes explicit the mutability of the theatrical space during the intermission, using the same structure of projection used to constrict black women onto the theater audience. In contrast, The Couple in the Cage distinguishes its live audience from its film audience, relying on its live audience to recognize the caging and display of humans as a satirical time warp. To the surprise of the artists, however, many patrons did not get the joke. Fusco reflects, “In the course of developing this piece: (1) a substantial portion of the public believed that our fictional identities are real ones; and (2) a substantial number of intellectuals, artists, and cultural bureaucrats have sought to deflect attention from the substance of our experiment to the ‘moral implications’ of our dissimulation, or in their words, our ‘misinforming the public’ about who we are.”97 In “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” she notes that audience responses varied from enjoyment to surprise and protest. She recalls how easily patrons normalized finding human beings displayed in a cage, particularly given their geographic difference. The

100

Black Movements

response of critics and curators to the misinformation that the exhibition propagates reveals the maintenance of multiculturalism as a system of truth. Although liberal and neoliberal multiculturalism emerge within the contexts of understandings of identity as constructed, the elaboration of multiculturalism, as Fusco explains, installs versions of the liberal human that demand the fostering of the nonhuman other. The truth of such difference becomes ratified in the space of the museum, a house of history that remembers the facts and displays artifacts. Diana Taylor argues, “Museums preserve (a particular) history, (certain) traditions, and (dominant) values. They stage the encounter with otherness. The monumentality of most museums emphasizes the discrepancy in power between the society that can contain all others and those represented only by remains, the shards and fragments salvaged in miniature displays.”98 Through material historicism the museum displays the past as a set of events for its audience to know and consume. The museum known as the Musée de l’Homme is where we find the remains of Baartman after her death and dissection. The Couple in the Cage disrupts the cultural practices of the museum by revealing them as a practice and transforming the museum from an archive to space in which patrons often participate in a repertoire of domination. As Fusco says (and as museums display more broadly), patrons’ responses differ. Nonetheless, the willingness of many to participate in the show is striking, given the relative invisibility of human cages—­prison cells—­in contemporary visual culture. Venus begins and ends with the Venus caged, mirroring the material and symbolic cages in The Couple in the Cage. In Parks’s Fucking A (2000), a character named Canary Mary describes the dynamic of living in a golden cage. Canary. I dreamed I met a lioness / She once lived in the wild / She once hunted for all her food / She once was so self-­styled / She once roamed anywhere she pleased / She once was free and brave / But in my dream she spoke to me / From a gorgeous gilded cage / Her gilded cage was solid gold / The bars shone like sunshine / She’d gone in there all on her own / No one had forced her / This time. / “Freedom,” she said, “aint free at all. / Its price: a heavy wage / And when you find how much your freedom costs / You just may give it up / For a gorgeous gilded cage.”99

Trapping Entanglements

101

The pursuit of freedom, central to black diasporic culture in the nineteenth century, becomes a foregone quest at the turn of the twenty-­first century. In “The Bodies That Were Not Ours,” Fusco charges, “The case of the Hottentot Venus has come to stand for the way European colonial fantasies converge with a nineteenth-­century pseudoscientific obsession with measuring sexuality by the size of body parts.  .  .  . Several decades later, in the 1990s, Suzan-­Lori Parks could create a play about the Hottentot Venus in which the protagonist appears not only to be complicit in her exploitation but enjoying it—­and receive accolades for doing so.”100 The tone of Fusco’s comment reveals her exasperation with the cultural mechanisms that reward representations of black women, positioning them as complicit in and desirous of their own degradation. At the same time, the patrons of Fusco’s The Couple in the Cage register frustration over the structure of the performance (its theatricality, its purposeful artifice) because it challenges them to see the couple in the cage as actors. The film shows and Fusco’s essay describes the outrage of museum patrons and administration who were irritated that the performers had fooled people into granting credence to their story. Perhaps some of the outrage attached to the representation of the Venus and to Fusco’s and Gómez-­ Peña’s performances reflects dissatisfaction with our own ubiquitously truncated access to freedom. Perhaps the resistance reflects an insistence that artists at least imagine a world in which the daunting incursion of the postmodern condition (one that emphasizes fragmentation, dislocation, and mutual imbrication) does not rule the day. However, such representation does not reflect Fusco’s realization that “even though I know I can get out of the cage, I can never quite escape.”101 The cages featured in these performances exist alongside other explicit alignments of black women with animals: for example, Beyoncé and Fusco are linked with monkeys (Beyoncé wears bananas and Fusco is fed them), and the Venus is referred to as a dog. This foregrounds the tension between materiality and the politics and possibilities for representations of the black body. As Patricia Hill Collins argues, Pervasive animal imagery persists within some expressions of contemporary Black popular culture, as suggested by the decision to clothe Destiny’s Child in animal skin bikinis on their [third] album cover.  .  .  . [The image] eerily resemble[s] past practices of associating Africans with animals, particularly

102

Black Movements

apes, monkeys, and chimpanzees.  .  .  . Josephine Baker’s banana dance and Destiny’s Child’s “bootylicious” would be meaningless without this history, even if those enjoying the images do not consciously see the connections.102

But, she cautions, a reinvigorated politics of respectability does not offer an antidote to the historically empowered pull to cleave representations of black people and those of animals. By aligning themselves with animals, the artists make a radical choice to expose a history of dehumanizing associations, using the vulgar to delineate a representational space in which the human abides. Instead of resisting categories used to disempower their foremothers, they freely associate with these images. They emphasize how animals mark the limit of what it means to be human and therefore act as the exception to the rule of humanity that ratifies the very construct. Calling attention to black women’s exceptional status within western representational fields allows Parks, Beyoncé, and Fusco to reposition themselves as definers of the human. The staging and caging of black women’s bodies that these artists create can be understood only within the history of western biopolitics, which denies black women, particularly “exceptional figures” such as Baartman, “the ‘right’ to life.”103 Within the historical frame of inhumanity, Parks and Fusco present stateless women who “lack every protection . . . of rights belonging to citizens of a state.”104 Through the mechanisms of the theater and the camera, they present the black female as both sheer corporeality and agents of history. Their rogue choices may seem odd in a historical moment when women seemingly have more access to equal protection under the law. In fact, Fusco asks a similar question in A Field Guide for Female Interrogators. In that book she describes the horror that accompanied her viewing of the images that emerged from Abu Ghraib, “not only because the US military was implicated in institutionalized torture, but also because women were seen as likely perpetrators of sexual violence.”105 The implication that women may participate in scenes of terror that once dehumanized them suggests a flexibility at the site of gender politics and feminism that ruptures the ability to form coalitions along lines of bodily similarity. The central question that motivates Fusco’s documentary film Operation Atropos is how can we understand bodies that once were victims of U.S. hypocrisy but are now willingly furthering “a dark history of doing

Trapping Entanglements

103

extremely violent things to some people so that others here can be ‘free’?”106 Fusco contends, “It has only been through insisting on the hypocrisy of that double-­standard that democratic practices have been secured, protected, and expanded.”107 Yet to see the appearance of the caged woman, the detainee, in her film, in opposition to the interrogator, misses the way in which the filmic apparatus presents both positions as outside the law, creating juridical loopholes. The early twenty-­first century provides unheralded opportunities for women. Yet their interpolation in state fantasies that ultimately degrade them is nothing new. What is new is women’s ability to affirm or deny those affiliations in order to craft their own political and aesthetic traditions. Although Baartman’s case remains dogged by the ambivalence of consent or what Christiana Sharpe describes as the “double status of subjectification” that produces “freedom within unfreedom,” Parks, Beyoncé, and Fusco craft traditions that reanimate Jacobs’s strategically placed trapdoor to elude the logic of association through blatant acts of exposure.108 For seven years, Jacobs remained concealed just minutes away from her captors in a “small garret. . . . The garret was only nine feet long and seven wide. The highest part was three feet high, and sloped down abruptly to the loose board floor.”109 To avoid capture, “to this hole she was conveyed as soon as she entered her grandmother’s house.”110 For an airhole she carved out a loophole of retreat where she could watch her former owner as she peered out onto the piazza. Through her cunning, Jacobs was able to loosen the hold of slavery. Tapping into this ensnaring mode of escape and transforming it, Parks, Beyoncé, and Fusco create tension between their present display and those of the past by summoning their associations. They demonstrate that black movements do not always find recourse in flight but can also embrace the possibilities that webs of affiliation and disaffiliation introduce. As chapters 1 and 2 demonstrate, artists of different ethnicities produce webs of affiliation highlighting the artistic practices that produce and rethink the human and the citizen. Chapter 3 takes up the question of international circuits in more detail as it considers the mutuality of human and civil rights.

3 • Prophesying in Oc tavia Butler’s Parable Series

Given [the] lack of documentation, speculation . . . becomes the only alternative to silence, secrecy, and invisibility. —­Carla Peterson Later I will get into the facts. That way I can explore two worlds—­the actual and the possible. —­Toni Morrison

Black movements produce epistemologies of black life and living that draw their political force by relating to prior enactments while being future oriented.1 Organized through the spatial apparatus of the web versus the line, the affiliations may appear irrational or illogical within a linear teleology, but the contrapuntal force of black movements disrupts the distinction between rational and irrational by calling attention to competing and coterminous histories of state formation. Octavia Butler, a science fiction writer and a key figure in the black women writers’ renaissance of the late twentieth century, uses the prophetic in her Parable series—­specifically, in her novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents—­by linking her protagonist to the black women prophet Harriet Tubman rather than to the best-­known African American male prophet, Martin Luther King, Jr. Like the mother in Edwidge Danticat’s story “Nineteen Thirty-­Seven,” Butler’s protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina, calls attention to the seductive power 104



Prophesying in Octavia Butler's Parable Series

105

of liberal humanism and the costs women face when they imagine futures that do not replicate preexisting social structures, including historical ones. The connection to the women prophets emphasizes how black movements intervene in the curtailment of the civil rights project, which singularizes and masculinizes the prophet in the figure of King. Parable of the Sower takes its title from a parable told in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The biblical version establishes that, like a seed in the ground, a listener’s ability to absorb a message requires suitable conditions. Used to empower, embolden, energize, and chastise, the parable situates belief at the core of worthwhile human endeavors. In the gospels Jesus describes a man who sows his seed on different types of terrain: Some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up: Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth: And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them: But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.2

The seed, he reveals in Matthew 13:19, is the word of God, and the terrain is the individual as receptacle of belief. The word, as the seed symbolizes, is uniform, indistinguishable, and constant, with the potential to flourish and grow a hundredfold. The variance is the terrain, the receptacle, and the individual receiver of the word. The parable of the sower demonstrates how the operation of the belief informs an individual’s ability to use the prophetic, which is the “predictive function” of “critical intelligence.”3 Belief creates both ways of perceiving and blind spots. Like performance, it functions as a temporal category that draws from the past to inform present understanding. It also informs the outcome of performance because it circumscribes a viewer’s reception of an act and future acts. Therefore, the legibility of the prophetic—­in this case, a future-­oriented speech act—­depends on what the audience has seen and is willing to see and what the audience believes and is willing to believe. Examining the impact of seeing and believing builds on the analysis of the operation of desire to inform the reception of black performance (see chapter 2). The prophetic functions as a mode of performance that expresses

106

Black Movements

black political possibilities in the post–­civil rights era and imagines a more expansive experience of freedom. As Tony Bogues clarifies, freedom operates both negatively and positively. “Negative freedom is about a freedom from, an absence of interference.  .  .  . Positive freedom is about a freedom to and includes issues of self-­realization and mastery.”4 In Butler’s novels the prophetic functions as a mode of articulation that calls for freedom to invent egalitarian modes of communal organization. The prophetic makes use of black performance’s multitemporality in order to anticipate misreadings and misunderstandings of blackness and thereby reposition black people within the public sphere. Like foresight, it sees through the materialization of race to the consolidation of actions in and on bodies, which reinvigorates action. The predictive function draws from the past to shape the future through present articulations. Forestalling the desire to demonize, degrade, and devalue blackness, the prophetic pulls from what was in order to predict, reading the production of blackness as a practice in relation to but not overdetermined by interpretation of acts. While the other modes of black performance I explore draw attention to the incommensurability between theorizing normative identity as performance and theories of black performance, the prophetic exemplifies a practice that depends on and thrives by way of the incommensurability. It makes use of blackness’s contrapuntal time to foresee versions of black freedom. What factors enable belief (spiritual, political, or personal) to persuade or dissuade? And how do the temporal boundaries of belief inform the individual’s ability to deploy the prophetic? In other words, does belief require that the past replicate the present, or does it allow for new possibilities as outgrowths of or radical departures from what came before? This chapter’s argument builds on my overall critique of the liberal ideal of individualism and how it works to ahistoricize blackness as an ontological position that develops through an antagonistic relationship to liberalism. The form of black life that the prophet enriches is unthinkable if black life is reduced to the dictates of European humanism, which is why the character Lauren’s vision eventually falls short in Parable of the Sower. The dictates of liberal humanism render that vision impossible. In other words, she learns she must forgo the battle with death and participate in perpetuating life as a prophet, which requires recalibrating systems of desire that produce disdain for black people. This chapter, like the ones before it, creates international connections among black artists to draw attention to how webs of affiliation



Prophesying in Octavia Butler's Parable Series

107

do not elide differences but forge relations across difference, to riff on Brent Edwards’s explanation of the practice of diaspora.5 It also links the modern prophets to Harriet Tubman as a way to situate the prophetic within black feminism and women-­of-­color feminism, which adds value to black life through practices of memory and innovation.

Webs of Affiliation among Feminist Women of Color In a 1989 interview about her fifth novel, Beloved, Toni Morrison famously said: There is no place that you and I can go to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves. . . . There is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby. There’s no three-­hundred-­foot tower. There’s no small bench by the road. There’s not even a tree scored, an initial that I can visit . . . in Charleston or Savannah or New York or Providence or better still on the banks of the Mississippi. And because such a place doesn’t exist, the book had to.6

Morrison’s innovation created what she has called a site of memory, which enables her late-­twentieth-­century feminist practice. Her novel does not change the past; rather, it creates a robust relationship to the past, a web of affiliation, that allows the writer and her audience to move forward. Her statement specifies how the multi-­temporality at the heart of women-­ of-­color feminism enables social justice practices in the present. As she describes in “The Site of Memory,” Morrison has used her imagination to craft a relationship to the past that provides a basis for her contemporary feminist project. Morrison’s acts of imagination and creation coincide with the emphasis in performance studies to look to the archive as a source of knowledge and a way to understand the repertoire as a foundational way of knowing. As Carla Peterson argues, “given [the] lack of documentation, speculation . . . becomes the only alternative to silence, secrecy, and invisibility.”7 Within black studies, art shows evidence of a past that does not reduce the twenty-­first-­century black subject to the walking dead. For example, Harriet Tubman’s prophetic vision and her role in the Underground Railroad

108

Black Movements

are one history, among many, that offers fertile ground for speculations about possibilities of black freedom practices in the shadow of death. The multiplicity at the heart of women-­of-­color feminism (multiple temporalities, races, genders, identities, sexualities, and political allegiances) requires participants to focus on how instead of what, on process instead of outcome. Freedom, in this case, becomes a lived and fleeting experience; it occurs in the movements of the artist-­activist but may not be reduced to a list of finite goals. As Grace Kyungwon Hong argues, “women of color feminist practice [is] a methodology for comparative analysis that allows us to relationally understand the possible links between very disparate formations.”8 The act of creating links across and within difference is a crucial mode of knowledge production and a way of knowing. It informs the shape of political projects and offers an alternative method of subject formation. For instance, as Butler’s protagonist Lauren demonstrates an ability to understand and address other people’s desires, to think across different investments, she not only saves her life but also enables her prophetic vision. The prophet, as a mode of women-­of-­color feminist practice, adds value to black life by imagining alternative modes of relation that do not depend on liberalism and its latest incarnation, neoliberalism. Liberalism requires the fulfillment of democracy through the totalizing and unyielding agency of the individual, which manifests itself in neoliberalism through so-­called free market ideology. The notion of freedom without institutional constraints misrepresents the operation of individuals and markets; and although the prophetic exposes the limits of the human as a liberal formation, the political vision that the characters in Butler’s series put into practice is vulnerable to the same shortcomings. As David Scott explains, “certain practices of freedom have been [and continue to be] possible.”9 In the age of Obama, the black male has occupied the emblematic position of exceptionalism, evidence that black identity is no longer at odds with liberal subjectivity.10 In the late twentieth century, however, the black female held that dubious position, in part because she personified intersectionality and the promise of multiculturalism as a fulfillment of the egalitarian promise of U.S. democracy. Hong notes, “In this era, race and gender might seem to have been transformed into yet another kind of commodified difference. Whether it’s the various consumerist deployments of race  .  .  . or the corporate policies that



Prophesying in Octavia Butler's Parable Series

109

specifically and explicitly target racialized women, .  .  .  racialized and gendered difference equals profit in a global economy.”11 Butler’s novels, written during the boom of multiculturalism, present a character, Lauren, who demonstrates the particular limitations that black women must negotiate to enact practices of freedom. In the novels, Lauren learns how to negotiate the constraints that limit exercising agency, most importantly when they coincide with social positions that she desires, including being a mother. Faced with the double bind of entrapment—­the access of inclusion and the demands of assimilation—­Butler uses her Parable series to highlight the loopholes and pitfalls of such positioning in terms of state formation. Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, however, must also be read within contexts that try to delegitimize women-­of-­color feminism. As several critics assert, one of their central concerns is change. In the introduction, I discuss black feminist criticism of the late twentieth century, which helped shape the coalition formation of women-­of-­color feminism. Such cross-­ethnic and cross-­racial alliances risk producing, as Jared Sexton argues, “a problematic of decolonization” when “broached by way of a subsumption of slavery under the rubric of colonialism (simply because slavery was instituted within the colonies), making of slavery one more instance of a general phenomenon—­‘modern terror.’”12 Attempts toward sameness often produce slippage that functions at the expense of historical specificity and undermines competing concerns. Women-­of-­ color feminism does not inherently produce such slippage, but the desire for common ground creates regulatory forces from within and outside the group to conform to a common denominator. Change, a key theme in the Parable series, disrupts the standardization of history and works against the challenge that performances, as acts of memory, make to expand historiographies. Mathias Nilges explains, In The Seeds of Time, Fredric Jameson anticipates precisely this paralyzing effect of “absolute change” on theoretical discourse. It is not surprising, Jameson argues, that a society resting upon the standardization of difference in which seemingly “nothing can change any longer” would create fatalist proclamations such as “the end of ideology” or “the end of history.” . . . Change in [Butler’s] novels is not interesting because it is utopian, but precisely because it no longer primarily functions as the basis for utopian impulses.13

110

Black Movements

Webs of affiliation work to invigorate histories, not flatten them. The points of affiliation serve community and coalition formation but do not seek to erase distinctions. Butler’s novels depict collaboration among peers and demonstrate the dangers of incorporation into communal, local, state, or national bodies that require forgetting one’s differences: race, gender, sexuality, or ability. In the name of institutional incorporation, which functions not only to privilege the subject but also to purportedly protect her from violence, “this ostensibly universal global subject necessarily must erase the histories of exploitation and differentiation that occasioned its emergence, and, in so doing, it resurrects these erased and lost histories.”14 In late capitalism, the state, universities, and institutions use people of color as a sign of the fulfillment of American democracy. While functioning as the guarantor of democracy, the individual must become unmarked, devoid of the racial and gendered specificity that made her an ideal sign. At the same time, she must bear the weight of representing the multiple constituencies for which she stands, serving, say, in the university context, as the representative of diversity on a disproportionate number of committees while functioning as an advisor to students across her identity categories. She must therefore disinherit herself of identity categories as she works toward equal representation of the groups her presence seeks to erase. The double bind of entrapment positions difference as the threat to a more democratic union. But understanding the double bind as a peculiar province of the twenty-­first century forgets black people’s essential role in the nation-­state from its beginning. Women-­of-­color feminism does not require an erasure of individuality or difference. Rather, it insists on understanding how difference functions as a political terrain that supplies evidence for valuation. Arguing for Cherrie Moraga’s centrality to women-­of-­color feminism’s analytic of difference, Hong asserts, “Rather than merely replacing the privileged subject of cultural nationalism, white feminism, or canonical Marxism with ‘woman of color’ as the purest, most revolutionary subject position, Moraga constantly situates the ways that the category ‘women of color’ completely disorganizes the very idea of a stable and knowable identity.”15 In the Parable series, Lauren’s ability to build a movement depends on a vision that understands difference, to quote Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson, as “not a multiculturalist celebration, not an excuse for presuming a commonality among all racialized peoples, but a clear eyed appraisal of the dividing line



Prophesying in Octavia Butler's Parable Series

111

between valued and devalued, which can cut within, as well as across, racial, groupings.”16 The cut, as in psychoanalytic terms, seeks to foreground the individual as capitalist consumer and citizen and undermine difference. The individual exists as a part of the national collectivity because that belonging ostensibly confers the rights that secure individuality. “U.S. narratives of development . . . [have] posited differences and particularities as that which [can] be transcended on one’s way to becoming the possessive individual.”17 Modes of coalition organized around sameness function as a threat to individuation and offer a context with which to understand how webs of affiliation appear illegible. Modes of affiliation render the protagonist indecipherable, not because her expression refuses recognizable language but because it disrupts social logics. Hierarchies depend on differentiation, but differentiation itself does not produce hierarchies. Hong and Ferguson clarify that women-­of-­color feminism relies on the “comparative method” without centralizing an “ideal type,” thus enabling difference without demonization.18 The epistemological lessons of women-­of-­color feminism continue to offer insights for studies of blackness in the twenty-­first century, enabling coalition formation across difference. “Denaturalizing (hetero)normative time, space, and the life achievements they universalize enables us to extend value to—­or at least suspend judgment of—­all kinds of people who live outside the logics of capital accumulation and bourgeois reproduction.”19 Black performance practices from storytelling to prophesying affirm the existence and value of black life, not to achieve a neoliberal subjectivity but to make lives livable in the midst of the afterlife of slavery. By calling attention to Lauren’s blackness, I do not ignore how difference functions in the Parable series or the coalition that Lauren forms, especially given that the series contemplates the unique ways in which women-­ of-­color feminism operates in California. Even as her novels make explicit reference to the history of black people’s exclusion in the United States via references to chattel slavery and the Underground Railroad, Butler is also describing the journey that Lauren undertakes along a colonial path, El Camino Real (the Royal Road), which specifies the political contexts of the protagonist’s trek. In Parable of the Sower, the organizing logics of the landscape express systems of domination. Twentieth-­century California’s version of the Royal Road corresponds, in part, to U.S. Route 101 from Los Angeles

112

Black Movements

to San Jose. Any road under the Spanish crown could be referred to as a “camino real”; the California version, established in the early twentieth century, designates itself the King’s Highway to call forth “Californians’  .  .  . newfound nostalgia for the passing romantic era,” putting it “into a timeline that culminate[s] in their own presence on California’s shores. El Camino Real encourage[s] Southern Californians to put themselves in the padres’ sandals and imagine a direct lineage from the European colonizers to themselves.”20 The act of imagination also cultivates approximate citizens who invest in the promise of democratic citizenship without experiencing it. The transactions that establish land rights also assert a form of citizenship that is tied to being an owner. In 1769, the Spanish arrived in what we now call California en masse, but other Europeans had visited as early as the mid-­sixteenth century. By 1769, in response to Russia’s and England’s interest in the territory, Spain had established missions in Alta California (now California and the southwestern United States). In 1821, Mexico won independence, and Alta California became part of the new nation-­state, which “stepped up economic development in its province of Alta California with a more liberal distribution of land grants. . . . More land became available in the 1830s, as Mexico embarked on a plan to ‘secularize’ the missions, essentially putting them out of business.”21 Mexican independence resulted in a reorganization of power that limited the land rights of European settlers. In 1848, following the Mexican-­American War, Mexico ceded Alta California to the United States. By the mid-­nineteenth century, the missions had fallen into a state of disrepair. The ideological investments of the missionaries fell prey to the developmental interests of the state. Although El Camino Real maps the physical decimation of the Native American population due to Spanish colonization and the logics of imperialism that produce the so-­called citizen, it does so in the name of progress—­as a road designed with the automobile in mind. That is to say, “it [has] allowed Southern California Anglos to pursue simultaneously the seemingly divergent paths to the missions’ past and modernity. Connecting the padres and the people [is] the automobile, a symbol of the modern era.”22 The road’s construction has led to a revival of the missions as tourist attractions and expresses American exceptionalism by linking the development of California’s infrastructure to a history of white supremacy while ignoring the elimination of Native populations.



Prophesying in Octavia Butler's Parable Series

113

Destructive National Desires Through characterization and setting Butler’s novels examine the interwoven and multifaceted structures that make life unlivable in the imaged world of the series. Although futuristic, the series questions the costs of progress as it introduces characters who are walking along the Royal Road. The sojourn calls attention to those whom progress has forgotten, making a structural critique of the physical and philosophical apparatus that underpins citizenship and is central to the workings of neoliberalism. El Camino Real is a site of national memory and forgetting. It inscribes the logics of progress that enable modes of entrapment to flourish. In a related scene, Lauren flees her home in the fictional town Robledo, California, but finds herself in a similar social structure in Humboldt County. The Parable series depicts the competing desirers who facilitate the afterlife of slavery. Parable of the Sower, like the biblical passage, is concerned with how belief enables emancipatory practices and the matrices of desire that yield uneven results. The novel is an allegory for the perpetuation of neoliberal capitalism. Referring to the work of Thomas I. Palley and Antonio Negri, Lara D. Nielsen explains, Neoliberalism proposes a “free” market ideology for reorganizing labor and resource management, [and] finance capitalism is a radicalizing mechanism of income redistribution, transferring income from the real to the financial sector. . . . Antonio Negri suggests, “Today, democracy is no longer faced merely with (and against) landed rent (land and real-­estate)—­but above all faced with financial rent, the capital that money mobilizes, globally, as a fundamental instrument for the governance of the multitudes.”23

In Parable of the Sower, fifteen-­year-­old Lauren plans to leave and eventually must flee the gated community, Robledo, located twenty miles from Los Angeles, where she grew up. The novel spans three years, 2024 through 2027, and details the factors that force her to conclude that she must leave her community before it is destroyed. Robledo’s gates, which have some resemblance to those of American gated communities in the twenty-­first century, are designed to prevent pervasive criminal activity in a world where state law enforcement no longer offers any reasonable means of protection

114

Black Movements

to its citizens. The world outside is so precarious that children no longer go to school and adults rarely leave their neighborhoods to go to work. The socioeconomic paradigm that plagues Lauren’s world is named “Apocalypse.” Also known as “the Pox,” it began in about 2015 and, according to Angelyn Mitchell, [it] was the end result of the economic, political, and environmental matrix produced by the capitalist restructuring and conservative policies that dominated the last twenty-­five years of the twentieth century. The 1980s right-­wing agenda of reducing taxes, expenditures, and bureaucratic oversight . . . finally resulted in a government composed of a weak executive stripped of political power and a military that was little more than a national guard.

The social services that justify the state “such as water supplies and police and fire protection were privatized to serve only those who could afford the exorbitant fees, and entitlements such as basic welfare, health, housing, and education were eliminated as the social contract was canceled.”24 As a result, homeless people litter the streets, and rape victims stumble past, lacking even clothing to protect them from the next assault. The setting resembles a scene from the film The Book of Eli. Lauren recalls, “My stepmother says she and my father stopped to help an injured woman once, and the guys who had injured her jumped out from behind a wall and almost killed them.”25 The dangers of going outside stymie those in any position to help others, and the wall between the community and the outside world symbolizes the structures that make connections across socioeconomic difference dangerous. Such connections present risks that seem to outweigh the benefit of finding solidarity with an injured woman. Butler’s novel draws attention to how the systems that structure society filter perceptions of others. So, in defense, people lock themselves behind massive walls that adults in the community police to guard against intruders. The novel “creates a shock of familiarity rather than estrangement. Butler has identified the walling of communities as a process that is actually and already occurring in contemporary U.S. cities.”26 Although Lauren proactively prepares for the eventual demise of her community by creating a survival kit and practicing her escape, the fires that consume her neighborhood and kill most of her family members come as a surprise. Her shock demonstrates her investment in neoliberal formations



Prophesying in Octavia Butler's Parable Series

115

of subjectivity that promise citizens safeguard in return for taking individual responsibility. On Friday, January 30, 2027, Lauren escapes from her community, set ablaze by individuals high on the latest designer drug, called Pyro, which causes the user to have an orgasmic reaction to fire. She flees north toward “the coastal hills of Humboldt County. The highway—­U.S. 101—­is to the east and north . . . and Cape Mendocino and the sea are to the west” (313). Lauren travels for eight months and collects a community of followers along the way, forming “the crew of a modern underground railroad” (292). Despite the foresight required to steal away and then act as a conductor to secure the freedom and safety of others, she and this crew cannot maintain the fences, borders, and barricades they resurrect once they arrive in Humboldt County and form a community named Acorn (based on a belief system called Earthseed). Parable of the Talents depicts a raid on Acorn, the enslavement of the inhabitants, and the radical vision Lauren must form to secure her escape and the proliferation of her more refined vision. She resorts to a scattering of her disciples, and this is how Earthseed flourishes. Creating a counterpublic that operates in opposition to the dominant cultural values, Butler ends the novel with a diasporic rendering of community, in the sense of diaspora as a scattering and a practice. To understand the nature of Lauren’s vision and evaluate its implications, we must consider how aversion to change limits the prophetic and stifles freedom movements. How does one account for the exhaustion of perpetually working toward a change that, by nature, will remain incomplete? In the series, Lauren is depicted as shortsighted, and her limited vision has deadly costs. Yet investments in notions of liberalism’s future generate insecurities that encourage (and perhaps demand) black cultural workers to second-­guess themselves. Calling on the work of Thomas Holt, David Scott explains, “For Holt, liberalism is not what it takes itself to be in its autobiography—­that is, the unceasing extension of individual freedom. To the contrary, on his reading, the story of liberalism is the story of the simultaneous extension/containment of freedom.”27 To question how the present “exerts a counterdemand, namely the demand to problematize precisely the seeming transparency of these normalized claims to the self-­ evidence of freedom” hegemonized in neoliberalism, one must understand the desire and longing that neoliberalism generates as an unavoidable outcome of black movements.28

116

Black Movements

Parable of the Sower stages several encounters that illustrate how longing for safety, familiarity, sameness, and predictable outcomes after exercising agency enables individuals to craft dangerous fantasies about their current social situations. Lingering doubts about the future of the current structure of existence encourage Lauren to share her survival strategies with her childhood friend Joanne. Lauren explains, I’m trying to learn whatever I can that might help me survive out there. I think we should all study books like these. I think we should bury money and other necessities in the ground where thieves won’t find them. I think we should make emergency packs—­grab and run packs—­in case we have to get out of here in a hurry. Money, food, clothing, matches, a blanket. . . . I think we should fix places outside where we can meet in case we get separated. Hell, I think a lot of things. And I know—­I know!—­that no matter how many things I think of, they won’t be enough. Every time I go outside, I try to imagine what it might be like to live out there without walls, and I realize I don’t know anything. (58)

In the midst of Lauren’s laundry list of supplies and provisions, she concludes that the prospect of living outside the wall, of living outside of a community predicated on the return of the “good old days,” one modeled on being able to insulate itself from the national problems “steeped in chaos with relentless poverty and lawlessness” through physical boundaries, will not suffice (343). But her investments in liberal subjectivity prevent her from exercising the critical intelligence to imagine a life outside the wall, from producing a prophetic vision that would enable an alternative future based on a different epistemological orientation to the present. Joanne skeptically says, “Books aren’t going to save us,” but Lauren admonishes, “Nothing is going to save us. If we don’t save ourselves, we’re dead. Now use your imagination. Is there anything on your family bookshelves that might help you if you were stuck outside?” (59). The speculative nature of Lauren’s instruction is critical to the possibilities it engenders. On the surface, her logic follows a familiar trajectory of literacy as the mechanism by which individuals secure their freedom, a model that has its limitations. But she makes a critical leap beyond the mere acquisition of knowledge as the conduit to freedom, insisting that Joanne use her imagination. In doing so, she asks Joanne to tap into what Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., calls the “predictive function of the prophetic.”



Prophesying in Octavia Butler's Parable Series

117

Just as meteorologists gather data to “forecast” weather patterns, organisms gather in relevant data in the context of problem solving to envisage outcomes that will affect them for their weal or woe. Some of us work hard to anticipate the hailstorms in our lives; and others do the same with regards to securing happiness. We in effect run ahead of the actual experience in order to foresee possible consequences. Do I ask her to marry me or not? Should I take this job out of state or should I stay home? Can we grasp the prospects of freedom even as we suffer the brutal violence of the state?29

The quotidian nature of some of Glaude’s descriptions underscores his larger aim—­to democratize the prophetic. Lauren, too, encourages Joanne to see how she may transform her world through an act of imagination. The key is the speculative nature of the way she processes information. The prophetic character of the act of interpretation distinguishes Lauren’s scene of instruction; but as the novel details, social circumstances must first foreclose the liberal subject’s promise of predictable outcomes before she can fully embrace the prophetic. George Shulman writes, “Prophets are messengers who announce truths their audience is invested in denying. Addressing not an error in understanding but a partly willful blindness, they announce realities we must acknowledge if we are to flourish.”30 As Butler notes, “the very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.”31 Lauren asks Joanne to “grasp the prospects of freedom even as [they] suffer the brutal violence of [their] state,” but out of fear, Joanne unilaterally refuses the request.32 The early interaction between childhood friends is one instance among many that situates Lauren’s world making within the prophetic strand of black radicalism. Glaude explains, “‘The prophetic’ . . . [is] a dimension of critical intelligence . . . as conduct directed toward an as-­yet realized present.”33 His use of the word conduct situates the prophetic as a performance, an embodied action that may not only transform the individual but also alter the context within which she labors. Performance constitutes individuals, and over time performances become so recognizable that the actor no longer registers her agency in the act or the potential for the accumulation of acts to transform structures. Glaude’s suggestion draws attention to the ability of performance to transform the conditions of the present and to create the future. Therefore, even though Lauren admits, “I don’t know anything,” the epistemological project in which she invites Joanne to participate

118

Black Movements

provides the potential for knowing that exceeds the limited freedom they experience by being separated from the chaos by a wall. The future-­oriented action aligns with Tony Bogues’s description of prophets. He explains, “As a rule prophets call people to action; they remind them of their condition; they do not speak for themselves, but on behalf of other authorities that they claim hold the nation in judgment. The language of prophecy is poetic and visionary, and is rooted in conceptions of history.”34 Notably, his description of the prophet requires a critical intelligence infused with historical knowledge. Butler asserts, “To try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet.”35 But to read Bogues’s description as oriented toward the past would be a misreading and a misunderstanding of the radical temporality the prophet enables. He explains, “The Africana redemptive prophets narrate a different story and history of colonialism and redemption. In elaborating this narrative they sometimes break from monochronic time frames and develop conceptions and historical narratives that collapse past and present, making no linear chronological distinctions. . . . In such frames history is a now between the past and the future, without transitions.”36 Importantly, as he suggests, the women I discuss in this chapter have a particular vantage point from which to call the nation into question and to critique nation time. In Is It Nation Time? Glaude artfully alludes to the nationalism that informed many black freedom movements of the mid-­ and late twentieth century. In contrast, I am suggesting that nation time within a neoliberal context signals a mode of progressivism that separates the actors from their particular histories (that is, racial or gendered) with the promise of acquiring a national history and participating in a national teleology. Following Walter Benjamin, nation time in this context is homogeneous; it is empty time. Therefore, progressive time signifies value. Part of what qualifies Lauren as a prophet is her future-­oriented vision, which she chronicles as the writer of Earthseed’s scriptures. She uses them to help individuals access their full potential. Fundamentally, however, she believes that individuals must save themselves. Resisting the abdication of power to God, Earthseed’s philosophy argues that we shape God and that the only constant is change. Although drastically different from the Christian understanding of the nature of God, Earthseed builds on the idea articulated in the biblical depiction of the sower parable that the individual’s belief shapes and enables knowledge to flourish. Therefore, in order for



Prophesying in Octavia Butler's Parable Series

119

counter-­epistemologies to grow, we must explore the nature of belief and the apparatuses that sustain it.

The Ruse of Black Exceptionalism Robledo is predicated on a system of isolation that presumes the community will be able to sustain its middle-­class privilege and insulate its members from the social chaos that plagues the scores of homeless citizens outside its gates. “Butler’s version of [a national] breakdown emblematically focuses on the collapse of the broad ‘middle’ of U.S. society.”37 The precarious social situation calls attention to an ongoing dynamic that is exemplified by black culture in the United States but is endemic to U.S. culture in general. Ferguson, Glaude, Nikhil Pal Singh, and Carter Mathes have described the dynamic through a reading of the two sides of Martin Luther King, Jr. For instance, Ferguson argues, quoting Cedric Robinson, “The black intelligentsias of the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa . . . were captive of a dialectic: on the one hand, their continued development was structurally implicated in the continued domination of their societies by the Atlantic metropoles; on the other, the historic destiny of the class was linked to nationalism. Put bluntly, the future of the black middle class was embedded in the contradiction of imperialism.” . . . These contradictions meant that the black bourgeois and intellectual classes would embody an unevenness as they existed both within and outside of Western modernity.38

The unevenness produces a feeling of safety in the midst of all other social and historical indications of danger. At the same time, social transformation, and the danger it requires, marks the only clear path of liberation. The unevenness that Ferguson locates is also a definitive aspect of the black bourgeois and intellectual classes—­“two Kings with two different notions of freedom—­one serving a nationalist discourse and its definition of freedom, the other interrupting that discourse so that other modes of freedom might come forth.”39 Mathes, too, notes a duality in King’s position. Remembering the prophet’s more radical self, he points to the potentially disruptive power of black social movements. Speaking from Jamaica. King said,

120

Black Movements

I must honestly say to you that I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and racial discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to religious bigotry. I never intend to become adjusted to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, and the self-­defeating effects of physical violence. . . . Through such maladjustment we will be able to emerge from the deep and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man and to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.40

His vision is prophetic in that it taps into a historically based critical intelligence to proffer a future based on engaged human action. Such visions must also account for the inherently pragmatic pull of political movements aimed toward the transformation of the nation-­state. The prophetic emerges at the margins, from a site of unreason when understood within the contexts of liberal rationality. Once the prophetic vision becomes incorporated within the state, it transforms essentially. The prophetic is conduct that seeks to transform but not to sustain the state. What Mathes describes as a vacillation between “longing for disruption” and “the sense of familiarity” resonates with Lauren’s position throughout Parable of the Sower. 41 Even as she treks toward northern California, homeless and destitute, she reflects, “We were always, it seemed, looking for walls to shield us. Was it better to have them and perhaps get trapped against them or to camp in the open and be vulnerable on every side? We didn’t know. It just felt better to have at least one wall” (205). Walls, which serve as a metaphor for the state, help to produce psychic coherence because they enable the individual community member to participate in a fantasy of protection, which she knows is hollow but which she nevertheless clings to because the alternative is unthinkable. The promise of incorporation as full citizens has been a central strand of black political struggles in the United States since the Cold War, but African Americans have been denied even this narrow conception of freedom, one predicated on the individual liberties afforded by a capitalist democracy. Yet the seemingly state-­authorized inclusion of a few exceptional black figures has hinted at the possibility of a more universal inclusion. The longing for the ideal of inclusion became more palpable after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ended de jure segregation and offered black people



Prophesying in Octavia Butler's Parable Series

121

a legal remedy for discrimination. Armed with the apparatus of the state, ending discrimination became the responsibility of the individual citizen. At least two ideological investments produce the longing for citizenship that inspires black people to invest in the ideal of national belonging. The first is an investment in American exceptionalism, which, according to Donald Pease, “operates less like a collection of discrete, potentially falsifiable descriptions of American society than as a fantasy through which U.S. citizens bring these contradictory political and cultural descriptions into correlation with one another through the desires that make them meaningful.”42 The U.S. fantasy unifies desire, to varying degrees, rather than experience. Therefore, vastly different experiential realities of national belonging rooted in long histories of exclusion may exist alongside the compulsion to reach for the American Dream—­the fantasy of national belonging expressed as a full conferral of civil and human rights. For a black person who desires inclusion as a citizen to cohere, she must constantly hinge together competing and contradictory desires and realities to make the pursuit of the U.S. ideal legible and manageable. The second investment is a desire for a state of forgetting, which functions through acceptance of the ideal of American exceptionalism. According to Pease, forgetting “suppl[ies] its adherents with the psychosocial structures that [permit] them to ignore the state’s exceptions.”43 The pursuit of black citizenship in the United States requires a peculiar set of disavowals that demands an understanding of race as something the individual may surmount. The black person must temporarily forget “the state’s exceptions” to its democracy when it comes to the rule of black bodies. From slavery to the political, governmental, and environmental structures that enable the afterlife of slavery (experienced, for instance, in the manmade devastation of Hurricane Katrina), black subjects supplement the process of disavowal by affirming their class, educational, geographical, or familial privilege.44 The individual’s ability to distance herself from the history of collective discrimination that fundamentally is not a respecter of persons (by imagining herself in a privileged position) not only reinforces the logics of neoliberalism but also frees her from the weight of abject blackness. Nevertheless, black women’s simultaneous visual association with blackness and femaleness places them in a precarious position of affiliation even as race and gender increasingly become matters of choice for bourgeois

122

Black Movements

subjects in the twenty-­first century.45 Black women bear a particular weight in the roles their communities and nation ask them to play. Most women, whatever their race, must continually figure out how to manage multiple roles simultaneously—­how to, at minimum, be a “twofer.” During the 2012 presidential campaign, for instance, CNN contributor and Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen charged that Ann Romney (wife of the Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney) had “never worked a day in her life.” The comment ignited longstanding debates about women’s labor, particularly considering Romney’s status as an affluent white woman and the mother of five sons. Whereas Rosen ultimately opted for political expediency, apologizing for her comment instead of offering a detailed consideration of her assertion, pundits questioned the relationship between labor and compensation and the value inherent therein. Political scientist, public intellectual, and liberal talk-­show host Melissa Harris-­Perry commented on her MSNBC show, “If raising five kids isn’t work, then what is? Really, what do we consider women’s work?”46 She launched into a statistical analysis of the roles women play in the workforce and the labor they perform in the home. Perry asked her guests why U.S. culture values middle-­class women’s choice to be stay-­at-­home mothers whereas poor women are demonized and punished via welfare-­to-­work legislation for choosing to do the same. By representing black women as “welfare queens” in the 1990s, commentators once again singled out poor mothers of color as the source of national crisis, and these women are still forced to make their overworked bodies do additional work to justify their industriousness. When they attempt to occupy the spaces of their affluent white female counterparts, they are policed. Women of color cannot assume national privileges because the welfare queen is a symbol of a long history of disavowed black mothering. In other words, in the twenty-­ first century, class may offer relief to women of color but only at the expense of historical disavowal. Ann Romney’s race supplements her privileged labor position, but black women, wealthy or not, must negotiate competing racial, gendered, and class-­based affiliations that inform the nature and value of their labor. These negotiations occur within a long historical context that puts pressure on the comforts of class-­based forgetting. In the Cold War years, the limits of black women’s inclusion as citizens often appeared as disruptions to domestic tranquility. As Jennifer James argues in a reading of Gwendolyn Brooks’s novel Maud Martha (1953),



Prophesying in Octavia Butler's Parable Series

123

The “regulatory demands” of heteronormative families had particular implications for black women. Because they were, from the onset of slavery, needed as both laboring machines and “sexual latrines,” the dominant culture generated an amalgam of cultural, medical, scientific, and sociological “evidence” declaring that black women’s gender and sexual “abnormality” precluded them from fully inhabiting the category “woman.” Deemed physically malformed, genitally excessive, and sexually deviant, many black women sought to destigmatize their bodies by adopting the dominant culture’s “feminine” paradigms, striving to present themselves as physically and morally fit for domesticity. . . . The domestic served as space where black women could also “rehabilitate” [their bodies].47

James connects black women’s exclusion from the domestic sphere in the mid-­twentieth century to the policing of sexuality fundamental to the institution of slavery. Making that connection does not render the historical moments identical but calls attention to a repeated process of forming national identity predicated on modes of racial and sexual exclusion from the body politic. Slavery structured national belonging as a process of exclusion, which even in the aftermath of the peculiar institution requires bodies to undertake acts of rehabilitation to make themselves worthy of inclusion. In the mid-­twentieth century, James argues, black men undertook this process, in part by joining the armed services, while women aspired toward domestic ideals. Although the mechanisms that ensure the cohesion of the heteronormative domestic ideal have shifted (for example, from the welfare-­to-­work legislation of the Bill Clinton era to the so-­called war on women that emerged as a point of contention in the 2012 presidential election), the regulatory structures still support the nation-­state. That is to say, national belonging depends on the exclusion of bodies that are “physically malformed, genitally excessive, and sexually deviant” because they refuse to conform to the singular identity that is U.S. citizen but call attention to their difference.

Black Women and the Prophetic Butler’s character Lauren is such a body, for her gift of foresight stems from a medical condition. Born with a delusional disorder called hyperempathy

124

Black Movements

syndrome, Lauren’s disability situates her in a prime position to evaluate and optimize other people’s desire. The condition results from her biological mother’s abuse of a “smart drug” called Paracetco that “was doing wonders for people who had Alzheimer’s disease. . . . It also boosted the performance of ordinary, healthy young people. They read faster, retained more, made more rapid, accurate connections, calculations, and conclusions. As a result, Paracetco became as popular as coffee among students.”48 But as we learn in Parable of the Talents, the addictive drug has side effects for mother and fetus and creates Lauren’s “neurochemically-­induced delusion” of feeling “the pain and pleasure that [she] see[s] others experiencing. Pleasure is rare, pain is plentiful, and, delusional or not, it hurts like hell” (12). Her different abilities give her a heightened sense of the double-­bind of entrapment, making the pleasure of inclusion more intense and therefore seductive and the disciplinary pain of assimilation particularly powerful and restrictive. In a world of pervasive violence, the delusions also sharpen Lauren’s perception and “disable” her from ignoring other people’s suffering. Instead, she incorporates it into her lived experience and attends to the interconnection of individuals that neoliberalism outlaws. Not only does the individualism central to neoliberalism require a denial of interconnection, but it also demands a singular national history that erases differences in the name of patriotism. Therefore, sharing another’s differences calls attention to the inadequacy of citizenship predicated on assimilation and highlights histories that cannot be incorporated into an ostensibly democratic state formation. A gift and a curse, Lauren’s condition makes her what the novel describes as a “sharer,” and it enables her to gather information about others and use it to build a counterpublic called Acorn (13). Instead of yielding to the demands of state incorporation that seek to erase difference, Acorn participates in what Jennifer James calls “a black womanist politics of rehabilitation,” which “forces socially produced disability into view . . . [and] takes society and its harmful institutional practices as the objects in need of repair.”49 The state-­sanctioned admonition to fix the body (say, to coif the hair just so, to undergo invasive and costly procedures such as cochlear implants or rhinoplasty, or to use prosthetics) and assimilate it into the national body is a central concern of both race and disability studies. Challenging the central assumptions of assimilation, James’s “black womanist politics of rehabilitation” reorients the site of repair from the unruly body to the forces and practices that



Prophesying in Octavia Butler's Parable Series

125

name the individual “disabled”; she then calls into question the modes of “correction.” The historical medicalization and pathologization of blackness becomes a protocol for exclusion from citizenship that lingers in the national structure even as the historical contexts shift. James is careful not to conflate disability studies and black studies but to consider their intersection via particular histories, including slavery. Quoting Douglas Baynton, she clarifies that “‘non-­white races were routinely connected to people with disabilities, both of whom were depicted as evolutionary laggards or throwbacks.’ The notion of the black body as congenitally disabled—­inherently defective, afflicted by deformity and disease—­was merely compounded by the attribution of another form of (acquired) disability: the black body as irreversibly impaired by the violence of slavery.”50 Likewise, Butler’s series makes allusions to Tubman and slavery to draw into relation Lauren’s project of national rehabilitation and prior practices. Although Parable of the Talents is careful to not conflate the historical periods, it suggests that slavery is a necessary part of the U.S. Constitution as we know it. Figuring Lauren as a Tubman-­like figure situates her as a part of the underground economy that calls for revisions to the nation-­state. Although Tubman became a popular historical icon in the late twentieth century, she spent a good part of her life as a runaway slave and thus a fugitive, whose seditious actions helped free other slaves. She enacted the prophetic as a conductor on the Underground Railroad in that she materialized an unforeseeable future based on critical intelligence of the past. The prophet exemplifies the contestation surrounding the incorporation of the black subject into the national body. The black woman prophet often expresses the logics of “black womanist politics of rehabilitation,” challenging the idea that the individual needs fixing and instead calling for the ground, upon which the state stands, to shift. Tubman functions as an important figure within the tradition of the black prophet because she occupies multiple subject positions that situate her as an agent of change. Haunting this project, she exemplifies the tension between how black activism and activists are remembered and incorporated into a national memory and the lives they led. According to her biographers, Harriet Tubman (1820–­1913) became a staple figure of American history as the Cold War ushered in an era of multicultural education.51 “The [mythical] Tubman is Moses the Deliverer, but

126

Black Movements

she is a Moses who, unlike the biblical Moses, makes it to the Promised Land and then returns to spy out the land of the enemy, and when the final battle erupts, she is there to give material and spiritual solace to those in need.”52 Although illiterate and disabled by a childhood head injury, she became an exemplar of courage and tenacity; the titular head of the Underground Railroad; a spy, scout, and nurse for the Union during the Civil War; and a champion of justice. Her difference—­her race, gender, and disability—­ render her already-­improbable accomplishments outstanding and worthy of national attention. According to Jean M. Humez, “in the twenty-­first century we continue to be inspired by [this] larger-­than-­life figure [who is] still the most famous African American female hero. In her own day she was called ‘the most remarkable woman of this age’ for her courage and success in guiding fugitive slaves out of slave territory in the 1850s and for her Union army service behind Confederate lines.”53 Unlike many nineteenth-­century black woman figures rediscovered in the late twentieth century, no scholarly biography of Tubman existed until the twenty-­first century, but a few early texts did exist. In 1869, Sarah Hopkins Bradford, a white woman, penned Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, later issuing a revised edition, Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People, in 1886. In 1943, the journalist Earl Conrad did publish a biography, but for decades, these were the only book-­length treatments of her life. Meanwhile, children’s books, visual artistic representations, and filmic and dramatic depictions of Tubman’s life have proliferated. Milton Sernett’s Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History distinguishes the mythical Tubman from the historical one and offers some rationale for Americans’ cultural investment in the myth. In his view, much of it stems from interpretations of her lived experience, and the distinction is one of scale: “The Tubman story that emerges collectively from the new biographies is, as we have seen, a story of diminished numbers. Tubman went on fewer trips than the old myth would have us believe. She rescued significantly fewer numbers than Sarah Bradford claimed. A reward for her recapture of forty thousand dollars, a very sizable sum in the 1850s, probably did not exist.”54 Though the facts of Tubman’s life require further investigation, Kate Clifford Larson’s meticulous study clarifies that she was born in 1822, not 1820, and on Anthony Thompson’s plantation, not in Dorchester County. She had eight, not eleven, siblings; her parents were free, not enslaved, when she rescued them from Maryland; and an overseer, not her owner, threw the



Prophesying in Octavia Butler's Parable Series

127

weight that caused her brain damage. But at least two questions still remain in terms of understanding Tubman as a central figure in the antislavery movement. What limited the production of scholarly explorations of Tubman in the late twentieth century, when black women were in vogue? And what are the costs of figuring her as a prophetic figure, given that the prophetic, as conduct, appears through acts of memory? Sernett suggests that Tubman’s illiteracy, and therefore her inability to write her own story, prevented her from being taken up as a subject of inquiry in the late twentieth-­century. It has also complicated the work of archivists. As Sernett explains, Tubman’s place in the American memory is largely the result of having her story written down by others. While alive, she could shape and influence the public’s perception of her by telling her own narrative. . . . However, after 1913 Tubman’s voice fell silent. The public—­at least, that segment that wanted to recover the life and legacy of Black Moses—­turned to the writings about her created and controlled by others. The problem of listening for Tubman’s voice is still with us, as it must ever be, but it is now possible to recognize and examine the phenomenon of the mediated Tubman.55

Humez argues that Tubman’s skill as a storyteller and her investments in self-­presentation also functioned to craft the mythical Tubman, as many of Bradford’s stories stem from conversations with Tubman. So on one level we must contend with a shortage of archival information. But the lack of information does not explain the cultural investment in Harriet Tubman as a heroic figure. The interpretation of her story exemplifies the management of race and gender in the late twentieth century to incorporate different bodies into the national narrative while emptying them of their revolutionary sting. Such a project not only calls attention to the threat that certain histories pose to the constitution of the nation-­state but also points to so-­called second-­class citizens’ desire for recognition. Like King, Tubman has become a neoliberal project based on hagiography; unlike him, she is difficult to uncover because she was illiterate. It is interesting to consider what performance theory might reveal about King. Sernett distills this tension through an examination of the spate of children’s books dedicated to Tubman. He argues, “As long as Harriet Tubman was rendered primarily as ‘Minty,’ a character in books for children, adults did

128

Black Movements

not need to take her story seriously.”56 The mythical Tubman renders her life story less dangerous as a model of national reform. Yet even popular renderings of her offer a transgressive model of gender performance: “Her celebrity today, as in her own time, also reflects her violation of dominant gender norms. She was one of very few women whose escape from slavery was widely publicized in her own time among antislavery activities, and she was virtually the only woman celebrated as a guide for fleeing fugitives.”57 Though Tubman offers an ideal of womanhood counter to the prevailing ideals of domesticity or the “notion of women as weak and helpless,” she augmented what Michele Wallace calls the “myth of the superwoman.”58 Wallace argues that slavery produced gender ideals along racial lines, including the mythical figure of the strong black woman. So even though, as Wallace argues, Tubman’s activities were anomalous, she comes to signify a type, an ideal, for which U.S. culture asks other black women to account. Categorizing Harriet Tubman as a hero is empowering, seductive, and dangerous. As many scholars of African American biography note, hagiography places historical figures out of reach of the everyday individual and therefore presents their activism as something the ordinary person cannot duplicate. Though inspiring, the presentation of activists as saints can disempower them, calling attention to how a particular black human expands European humanism beyond its temporal and philosophical confines. The demarcation of saint functions as a sign of the limitations of European humanism to account for the invisible, the supernatural, and lower frequencies. Tubman’s greatness may be read as evidence of black humanity even as black people had been denied access to full citizenship for centuries. Tubman was a spy, a scout, and a nurse for the Union, but she was also, legally, a runaway slave. Her contribution to the national narrative must be read in light of her status as a partial citizen and as a demonstration of the limits of citizenship. Understanding Tubman as a prophet requires positioning her as a critic rather than an exemplar of the nation-­state. This approach calls the structure of national belonging into question and therefore highlights her status as fugitive. The prophetic Tubman participated in an alternative sociality via her role as conductor on the Underground Railroad. Her covert actions (traveling at night and connecting to an invisible network of supporters) required her to read her past and possible future against the grain of a presiding national narrative that sought to mediate the secession of states. Even



Prophesying in Octavia Butler's Parable Series

129

antislavery supporters, including Senator William H. Seward, were more concerned about maintaining the nation-­state than about reorganizing the logics of a nation founded in imperialism. Humez details: As Tubman prepared for her last Maryland rescue trip, the nation plunged toward civil war. The election of Abraham Lincoln a[s] president on the Republican Party ticket in November 1860 (backed by all but one of the free states, but with only 40 percent of the popular vote) touched off what historians have called the “secession crisis.” . . . In a desperate effort to forestall further secession, Senator William H. Seward, Tubman’s influential neighbor, introduced a “compromise” bill in Congress on December 24 that was highly conciliatory toward the Southern states. This measure provided for the return of fugitive slaves, the prosecution of those who conducted slaves to freedom, and a congressional guarantee of slavery in existing slave states; predictably, abolitionists were outraged.59

As the history of Tubman demonstrates, mental disability often allows figures access to the prophetic. By upending the organizational logics of governance, the prophet appears to have lost her mind. Thus, in the Parable series, Lauren’s characterization as both prophetic and delusional is commonplace, mirroring the history of the crazy truth teller in black diasporic culture. The mythical Tubman is a sign of American democratic possibility because she is an apparent corrective to the undemocratic practice of slavery and its afterlife. Therefore, her lawlessness mediates against U.S. imperialism. Tubman signifies the possibility of reforming the United States into a more perfect union. Conversely, the prophetic Tubman calls into question the very possibility of a nation-­state founded on the logics of domination and offers instead a set of practices to sustain the lives of those who will not incorporate fully within the state. Serving as a corrective to the dystopic California landscape, Lauren takes on some of Tubman’s attributes. Nonetheless, Butler’s novels demonstrate that the prophetic is not always a liberatory practice and that it exists in relationship to the delusional, particularly when the prophetic figure is black. Butler quips, “I don’t write about heroes: I write about people who survive and sometimes prevail.”60 Inasmuch as blackness always bears the sign of pathology, the black woman prophet must negotiate the burden of psychosis. Butler’s novels explicitly link Lauren to Tubman, as they

130

Black Movements

also connect her to the negotiations that mark the experience of the black woman prophet, exemplified in the life of Nontetha Nkwenkwe. According to Robert R. Edgar and Hilary Sapire, Nkwenkwe “was born about 1875 and grew up in the Toyise location, an imiDushane Xhosa area near King William’s Town, as a century of ferocious warfare between Dutch and British settlers and Africans in the eastern Cape was entering its final chapter.”61 During her early adult life, an influenza pandemic swept across the continents, “leaving an estimated quarter of a million dead in its wake.”62 Nkwenkwe contracted the virus but survived. In the midst of her illness, however, she had visions that became the cornerstone of her prophecy, which drew from “Christian and Xhosa symbols and beliefs” and called her to “spread the teachings of the Bible to the uneducated and preach unity to the chiefs.”63 Instead of espousing a vision that “rejected the European presence and used [the] prophecies to rouse and mobilize resistance, . . . [she] preached a message of accommodation to Christianity and the expanding European presence.”64 Due to the nature of Nkwenkwe’s message, government authorities initially encouraged her sermons, which called for congregants to abstain from alcohol, dancing, loitering, adultery, and witchcraft. Her movement grew in Ciskei, East London, Middledrift, and King William’s Town. On May 24, 1921, a standoff occurred between an independent church group called the Israelites and the police, resulting in the death of two hundred Israelites. Following this incident, known as the Bulhoek Massacre, the government became increasingly anxious about mass meetings of black people. Nkwenkwe’s gatherings sparked concerns, which were bolstered by her efforts to unite educated and uneducated South Africans and “reports that she was antiwhite.”65 Her ability to create unlikely allies signaled her potential danger. “No matter how alarmist the reports about Nontetha, government officials did not operate with a single mindset toward her. Opinion was divided within the different branches of the state—­the South African Police, the Native Affairs Department, the Justice Department, and local magistrates—­ about the appropriate means of dealing with her.”66 The authorities ultimately decided that they could not risk another mass resistance movement, so they isolated the prophet in asylums and refused to grant her a trial. Choosing the ruse of rehabilitation rather than the disciplinary apparatus of the criminal justice system, the state institutionalized Nkwenkwe for much of her adult life. Sequestering her neutralized her and consolidated



Prophesying in Octavia Butler's Parable Series

131

the power of the state. Arrested in December 1922, “she was not tried for any civil offense; instead she was committed to Fort Beaufort Mental Hospital . . . for ‘medical observation.’ ” She was released on January 5, 1923, and recommitted on April 7, 1923, after reports of her “continuing ‘seditious’ activities.”67 On December 4, 1924, Nkwenkwe was transferred to Pretoria Mental Hospital, where she remained until her death on May 20, 1935. As Bogues outlines, the role of the prophet is one of national critique, which usually places her in opposition to governing authorities. The prophet often suffers disciplinary repercussions that seek to undermine the validity of her vision. Understanding prophecy as the unique province of those gifted with exceptional insight undercuts the prophetic as an accessible way of knowing, one that is as available as the sower’s seed. Conversely, it facilitates the policing of individuals who challenge the logics of the colonial state. Bogues asserts, “Those who went against the grain were ‘socially insane’ to the colonial regimes.”68 He explains, “Many of these ‘mad’ figures (Alexander Bedward, a nineteenth-­century Jamaican healer; Leonard Howell, the acknowledged founder of the Rastafari movement; and Nontetha Nkwenkwe, a Xhosa prophetess and healer) attempted to reorder the epistemological rationalities of colonial conquest. They were, in the colonial eyes, unreason as compared to European reason and disciplinary rationalities.”69 The black prophet’s heroic actions must contend with her illegality; consequently, they call attention to the difference between describing, for example, Tubman as a prophet versus a saint and the relegation of Nkwenkwe to the status of madwoman. Moreover, by attending to the manifestation of the prophetic in action, we may read the black prophet alongside her writing, opening up additional understandings of the relationship between archive and the repertoire as a temporal configuration. Notably, in the case of Tubman, the actions of the black prophet are not those of the Moses depicted in Bradford’s biography. That figure inscribes notions of deliverance that suggest freedom as a destination rather than a process. Several critics have linked Lauren to Tubman; but rather than concentrating on the notion of a Christian prophet who is invested in intercessory exodus politics, I want to focus on a web of similarities and differences between the two figures.70 In the biblical book of Exodus, the trajectory from slavery to freedom depends on a linear progression toward a promised land that awaits the enslaved. This gift is based on the benevolence of an outside force and the leadership of a chosen figure who guides others to

132

Black Movements

“the land of milk and honey.”71 In contrast, Lauren’s prophetic vision locates the force to compel individual action within the actors themselves. Parable of the Talents depicts the brutal disciplinary structures she must contend with to disseminate her message and the ways in which her vision prevents her from maintaining a relationship with her brother Marc and her daughter Larkin. Throughout the Parable series, Lauren must choose between her family and her vision; she chooses Earthseed, a decision for which Bankole (her husband), Larkin, and Marc condemn her. In her journey to safety, Lauren compiles a multi-­ethnic, queer community of strangers in direct violation of the rules that apply to the wandering homeless fleeing southern California. While on the road, one should never offer a stranger any kindness, share resources, or adopt the additional liability of children. Yet Lauren violates all of these principles of survival to amass the first Earthseed settlement. By all accounts, as we learn from admonitions in Robledo and from Earthseed members themselves, her actions bespeak unreason, which her disability helps make available to her. Unfortunately, accessing the prophetic through an imaginative composition of community does not shield her from the seduction of familiarity that feeds the replication of western structures of power within postcolonial states. It does, however, prepare her to move across space and time, creating a link to Tubman’s prophetic vision, which (if given a declaration) may adopt the words of Jay-­Z: “Build your fences, we digging tunnels.”72

The Slave Camps Are Still among Us The title of Parable of the Talents is a reference to a well-­known cautionary tale. In a dream, Lauren remembers her father preaching a sermon about this parable, which predicts punishment for individuals who do not use their gifts. Once she awakens, she realizes, “My ‘talent,’ going back to the parable of the talents, is Earthseed. And although I haven’t buried it in the ground, I have buried it here in these coastal mountains, where it can grow at about the same speed as our redwood trees. But what else could I have done?” (21). Parable of the Talents emphasizes that part of Lauren’s “shortsightedness” comes from attempts to protect her family and that her madness emerges with her willingness to sacrifice her family for her vision



Prophesying in Octavia Butler's Parable Series

133

(133). Though she emerges as an outlier in Parable of the Sower—­as the only daughter in her family, the only sufferer of hyperempathy syndrome, and a child too mature for her community—­her difference saves her life. Once she begins to form an alternative community in Acorn, however, she transitions from a crazy truth teller to a threatening leader. Earthseed is based on a set of observations that she develops as a guiding principle for the community she imagines in response to the unsustainable conditions in Robledo. It begins as a prophetic vision in that it is critical of her community, and it imagines a futurity that does not rely on the knowable. Nevertheless, as Parable of the Talents highlights, Lauren struggles to figure out how to lead the people who live in Acorn and how to organize it as the first among many communes that will grow Earthseed. In terms of organization and security systems, Acorn has much in common with Robledo. As Larkin says in Parable of the Talents, “once the members of the group had pooled their money and bought handcarts, seed, small livestock, hand tools, and other necessities, they were almost independent” (23). Mediating the impotence of the nation-­state, Acorn becomes self-­ sufficient. Further highlighting its division from the state, community members construct an apparatus—­a wall—­to guard against intruders. “Cactus by cactus, thornbush by thornbush, we’ve planted a living wall in the hills around Acorn. Our wall won’t keep determined people out, of course. . . . It will make them angry, and perhaps noisy. It will, when it’s working well, encourage people to approach us by the easiest routes, and those we guard 24 hours a day” (28). Nevertheless, Acorn remains part of the state, subject to its laws and policing. This ambiguity calls attention to the hybridity at the core of a community fittingly imagined in California, which in real life exemplifies an amalgamation of people, histories, and cultures that requires the state to create intricate webs of interrelation through the purported common denominator of citizenship. The ideal of citizenship elides historical differences and affirms “the national motto, E pluribus unum.” In the words of Barack Obama, “There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—­there’s the United States of America.”73 A challenge to national unity, the walls used to secure Acorn and Robledo reiterate communal structures predicated on insiders and outsiders. E pluribus unum is a national fantasy that does not reflect citizens’ lived reality but may hold individuals rather than the state accountable for their failure to appear as citizens.

134

Black Movements

The amalgamation within Robledo and Acorn of citizens, geography, and economy details the process of state formation that seeks to either incorporate or demonize differences. Lauren says, “Except for a larger town called Prata, the nearest towns are almost all White. Prata is White and Latino with a sprinkling of Asians. We’re you name it: Black, White, Latino, Asian, and any mixture at all—­the kind of thing you’d expect to find in a city” (43). As Chandan Reddy contends, Acorn functions as a “bordering activity” in “which hegemonic forms assemble their frames. . . . It is only through these bordering activities, reiterated in every instance of mediation, that formalist schemas—­such as universality and particularity, whose effect is to limit the horizon of the political—­are both engendered and endangered.”74 Acorn’s presence perpetuates an alternative mode of sociality that may exist within the state but that endangers the state’s operation because it reveals what the state must exclude in order to function. Chapters 11 through 14 suggest that Lauren has made the wrong decision to remain in Acorn because she is blinded by her desire to replicate the society she knew. Nevertheless, the novel emphasizes that her conduct as prophet does not produce this blind spot but in fact saves her life in the camps. Instead, she underestimates the power and therefore the threat of the incommensurability of her desires. On the one hand, she guards against the philosophical ease of moving to a well-­established community such as Halstead, which seeks to maintain the tenuous hold of the nation-­state by reproducing patriotic belonging. On the other hand, she secures the physical borders of her community with all-­too-­familiar and all-­too-­permeable defense mechanisms. Her understanding of community and how its members should relate to one another is a radical and apparently seditious formulation. However, the structures protecting the community do not account for Acorn’s constitutive difference from and similarities with Halstead and other coastal mountain towns. The structures of the town offer the feeling of protection but no real material fortification, which leaves the inhabitants vulnerable to state forces that deem their mere existence threatening. As an admonition, the parable of the talents introduces a period in Lauren’s life, from September 2033 to February 2035, during which she suffered as a slave at Camp Christian. On September 26, 2033, she records in her journal that “[seven] maggots”—­ “ big, armed and armored, all-­ terrain, all-­ wheel-­ drive vehicle[s]”—­have crashed through the fence protecting Acorn (214, 186).



Prophesying in Octavia Butler's Parable Series

135

Knowing that Acorn’s minor arsenal is no match, she sends out an alarm to the residents. Unfortunately, the call comes too late. By the time the residents scatter, the maggots have fired a paralyzing gas. Armed men gather all of the children of Acorn (who are unable to move), including Lauren’s infant daughter, Larkin. Then they drag the women to one room and the men to another. The assailants fit each adult with a slave collar—­a torture device that never leaves a mark and controls the wearer’s every action. Lauren has some prior knowledge of this imprisonment because her brother Marc has already suffered a similar fate. He explains to her, “They can torture you with it every day. Every goddam day. And you never have any marks to mess you up and drive down your price, and you never die of it. . . . And if we try to find some other way to die, to kill ourselves, they can stop us. The guy with the control unit can play you the way Mama used to play her piano. You get so you’ll do anything—­anything!—­just to get him to let you alone for a few minutes” (130). Lauren realizes, “A collar, my brother was saying, makes you turn traitor against your kind, against your freedom, against yourself. This was what had been done to him” (131). Through the use of the perfect disciplinary device, one that functions to create an apparatus of self-­discipline, the slave becomes a willing participant in her own degradation, humiliation, and abuse. The slave collar incorporates the slave into the logics of the state. It not only forces the slave to self-­police but also has the potential to transform her into a protector of the slaver, a “true patriot” yet a “traitor against your kind, against your freedom, against yourself ” (195). Although physically less violent, neoliberal multiculturalism functions like Butler’s collar does: it makes individuals turn against themselves. The Parable series exposes the complicated web of desire that makes incorporation rather than revision attractive. It also clarifies the regulatory forces ensuring that the state both thrives and prevents modes of insurrection, whether minor (say, the organization of a queer community of color operating on the black market) or major (organized rebellion and demolition of the prison system as depicted in an attempted insurrection at Camp Christian). Lauren’s status as a sharer and her willingness to act as a prophet enables her to experience the pull of desire and the brutality of state regulation almost simultaneously. Her communities’ mitigated incorporation into the nation-­state demonstrates the state’s inability to fully address the persistence of slavery within freedom.

136

Black Movements

In Monstrous Intimacies, Christina Sharpe “account[s] for the long psychic and material reach of [slavery and the Middle Passage], their acknowledged and disavowed effects, their projection onto and erasure from particular bodies, and the reformulation, reproduction, and recirculation of their intimate spaces of trauma, violence, pleasure, shame, and containment.”75 Though she is primarily interested in the construction of bodies and subjects through the vestiges of slavery and the Middle Passage, her work also considers the “reformulation, reproduction, and recirculation . . . of trauma, violence, pleasure, shame, and containment.” As such, it lends itself to a consideration of the recapitulation of communal organizations. Sharpe focuses on how modes of subjection reproduce kinship structures and reformulate power relationships that encumber and produce the longing for freedom. She investigates how amalgamation via incest, rape, and consensual coupling produces racial mixtures that leave a complicated set of inheritances for progeny, who must contend with the circumstances of their conception. Written in and through slaves’ bodies, the violence of slavery has purchase on their futures. The bifurcation of freedom through kinship relationships plays out in the narrative shape of Parable of the Talents. Importantly, Lauren’s inattention to her family functions as grounds for indictment of her vision. Whereas she is the sole narrator of Parable of the Sower, Larkin, Bankole, and Lauren all narrate Parable of the Talents. Their competing voices call attention to the increased demands on Lauren as her community position and personal life shift. Larkin and Bankole depict her as a zealot willing to sacrifice her family in the name of her vision. Lauren’s alienation from her family also highlights the way in which futurity functions in Larkin. Although her narration helps to disseminate the vision of Earthseed, the telling is filtered through bitterness. Larkin knows that the total collapse of society and the decimation of the middle­class have produced her estrangement from her mother, but she resents Lauren’s investments in what seems to be the risky business of Earthseed. She wishes Lauren would bank on the privatized corporate towns that emerge as a response to the chaos and transform the residents into indentured, but relatively safe, servants. Larkin is a sign of the competing desires that complicate Lauren’s ability to function as a prophet and that take on particular force for black women operating under the regulatory forces of racism and motherhood.



Prophesying in Octavia Butler's Parable Series

137

Lauren’s choice to invest in the vision of Earthseed denaturalizes “(hetero) normative time, space, and the life achievements they universalize,” which “enables [her] to extend value to—­or at least suspend judgment of—­all kinds of people who live outside the logics of capital accumulation and bourgeois reproduction.”76 Her seeming overinvestment in Earthseed stands in counter-­ distinction to the role she is supposed to play: that of wife and mother. Examining the romance that accompanies heterosexual coupling and polices U.S. culture, Lisa Marie Cacho explains, “So much of life and its supposedly seminal moments [are] organized according to the universalized expectations of the family and its gendered roles in naturalizing private property (buying your first home), wealth accumulation (passing down inheritance), and the pleasures of domestic consumption (planning weddings and baby showers)—­all of which repackage reproductive labor as the unpaid but rewarding labor of love.”77 When Lauren flees Robledo, she does so with two members of her former community—­Harry Balter and Zahra Moss. As they travel up the California coast, risking death and confronting the worst of human desperation, their bond strengthens, forming a kinship that does not depend on biological reproduction. By the time they settle on Bankole’s land, which becomes Acorn, Lauren and Zahra consider each other sisters. Whereas Bankole sees Acorn as a way station along his journey with Lauren, she considers it home. The stakes of their differing viewpoints intensifies when Lauren gets pregnant. Bankole considers becoming a physician in residence in established towns, while Lauren makes further investments in Acorn, at one point risking her life to save a child and obtain a truck that will allow the community to begin a trading business. Bankole secures a job offer in a town nearby called Halstead. When confronted with the proposition of moving, Lauren refuses, but Zahra counsels her sister-­friend, “You’re crazy as hell. . . . You should go. . . . I’d go to a better place if I could. I got two kids. Where do they go from here? Where’s your baby going from here?” (145). Zahra’s response communicates the logic of inheritance that depends on the replication of the past as a mechanism to secure the future and presumes a progressive unfolding of history. Lauren’s role as leader is a particularly gendered narrative; and like the artists I discussed in chapter 2, she is required not only to forge unlikely lines of affiliation but also refuse inheritances. How can we understand the figure of the female prophet in relationship to gender and racial desires for freedom as well as to the way in which gendered forms of violence function? Zahra’s advice conceives of the future

138

Black Movements

based on an understanding of time as “homogeneous, . . . linear and cumulative.” Tavia Nyong’o explains, quoting Homi Bhabha: “The narrative of the imagined community is constructed from two incommensurable temporalities of meaning that threaten its coherence.” Bhabha accounts for this disjunctive temporality through the interplay of the “pedagogic” and the “performative.” The pedagogic, realist form upon which both the nation-­state and its fantasy of homogenous, empty time rest is unsettled by performative tactics that seize upon national narratives with a disruptive immediacy, tactics that are filled with the presence of the now and that thereby call the bluff of the ruse of postponement. Pedagogic time is a time of training, waiting, and indefinite deferral. It is life lived in the antechamber of history. The performative moment, by contrast, is characterized by what Bhabha specifies as a “repetitious, recursive strategy,” one that refuses gradualism and the reproduction of docile, useful bodies.78

Continuing her resistance to the watching and waiting implicit in pedagogic time, Lauren seeks to enact her future through the performative tactics of the prophetic. She explains, “Halstead is like Robledo with a better wall,” and prefers the limited promises of a relatively secure community with no hope of a more expansive freedom for her child rather than the riskier proposition “of cycling back into some form of yesterday” (145). In framing of Lauren’s options, Zahra implies that her value as a mother fluctuates in relation to how she manages her expectations of the future. Ironically, the lower she sets her expectations, the more value actions as a mother she accrues. Lauren’s refusal to fit the prescribed molds demonstrates her courage and also calls attention to the multiple systems of desire that will haunt her and force her to make the most difficult decisions of her life. Lauren’s embrace of the prophetic provides the potential for her to take hold of freedom, but it also situates her as public enemy number one. Her difference is replicated in Acorn. Not only does physical androgyny facilitate her safe passage on the road (she passes for a man), but it also reflects an amalgamation of gender that informs the community’s organization and ultimately renders her a national threat. Androgyny, luck, and keen awareness of her surroundings and circumstances help prevent her from being raped while migrating to Acorn; but once captured, she knows she will have to “put up with it” (200). Her resolute advice to her fellow detainees



Prophesying in Octavia Butler's Parable Series

139

is mirrored in a journal entry dated December 18, 2033: “Now I have been raped. It happened twice. Once on Monday, and again yesterday. It is my Christmas gift from Christian America” (232). The final sentence of the relatively brief entry betrays her otherwise tenacious demeanor, revealing the bitter irony of her circumstance. Even more revealing, however, is her admission on the next page that although she works hard to avoid other people in pain, “it never occurred to me that I had to protect myself from the pleasures of our ‘teachers.’ ” There are a few men here, though, a few “teachers,” who lash us until they have orgasms. Our screams and convulsions and pleas and sobs are what these men need to feel sexually satisfied. I know of three who seem to need to lash someone to get sexual pleasure. Most often, they lash a woman, then rape her. Sometimes the lashing is enough for them. I don’t want to know this as clearly as I do know it, but I can’t help myself. These men feast on our pain—­and they call us parasites. (233)

Whereas her jailors only enjoy the pleasure of the beating and rape, Lauren, as a sharer, has access to both. Her different abilities enable her deep understanding of the coercive forces (seductive, violent, or both) that prevent citizens from reshaping the nation and encourage them to become incorporated into ongoing systems of power, willfully reproducing them. Participating in neoliberal multiculturalism produces pleasure and pain. Instead of adopting “a black womanist politics of rehabilitation” that “takes society and its harmful institutional practices as the objects in need of repair,” individuals buckle under the weight of state power.79 Lauren’s hyperempathy enhances her androgyny and heightens her vulnerability and resistance. Eventually Lauren and several of the original members of Earthseed rebel successfully against the guards and destroy Camp Christian. Her ability to understand the multivalence of power enables her to cultivate a new vision for Earthseed that depends on her ability to seduce supporters into taking up her cause, “which incorporates [Butler’s] realization of humanity’s intrinsically coercive nature.”80 Once Camp Christian is destroyed and Lauren separates from the remaining members of her community, she realizes that she “must create not only a dedicated little group of followers, not only a collection of communities as I once imagined, but a movement.

140

Black Movements

I must create a new fashion in faith—­a fashion that can evolve into a new religion, a new guiding force, that can help humanity put its great energy, competitiveness, and creativity to work doing the truly vast job of fulfilling the Destiny” (297). To do so, she travels with a woman named Len; and going from house to house, she manipulates people into wanting to help her. Lauren suggests that she is giving people a purpose. The novel justifies her actions by insisting that she never asks people for help but waits for them to volunteer to support Earthseed. Lauren’s charisma, androgyny, and keen awareness of body language take on functions similar to that of the slave collar: they afford her a closeness to people that garners their support. Based on a manipulation of what the scholar Lewis Call describes as consensual power, she slowly builds a network of supporters rich and well connected enough to withstand the pressures of the state.81 The expression of the prophetic vision often exists in opposition to the colonial project and therefore exposes the limits of citizenship predicated on the denial of past wrongs in exchange for the promise of future equality. Lauren’s prophetic vision, along with that of other black woman prophets, both fictional and historical, produces counter-­publics who suffer from the violent state regulation that occurs in response to such challenges. At the same time, the prophetic draws from an understanding of the forces that cultivate citizenship and does not exist outside the domains of power. Understanding the black prophet’s vision and the price she pays for expressing it offers both instruction and caution for the future as it locates a tradition of practice that may support reform and the individuals who enact them. The space that Lauren founds as Acorn becomes her prison, one that she stealthily avoided for the first twenty-­three years of her life. The camp is a site of suffering that she endures as a result of the shortcoming of her vision for Acorn. It also forces her to craft a radical alternative revelation that expands the working of the prophetic. Lauren learns that she must forgo the stability of a sovereign geographical community to build a society based on each individual’s contribution to the betterment of the whole. She learns the painful lesson that she will never be able to remake the gated community of her childhood; rather, she must use Earthseed to transform the scattering of its members into a constellation that works together in the midst of individual autonomy.



Prophesying in Octavia Butler's Parable Series

141

To understand the implications of the camp as the site of Lauren’s transformation, we must investigate the short-­sightedness that enabled her to feel at home at Acorn. As an adolescent, she expressed a vision of the future that many members of her community saw as dangerous. Her fatalistic predictions and the revolutionary nature of Acorn’s founding make her choice to replicate her childhood home in the structure of Acorn difficult to comprehend. But the act of replication teaches us about the nature of the prophetic and the way in which choice informs the scope of the seer’s vision. The choices Lauren makes once she escapes from her utopia-­turned-­prison become available only after Acorn is demolished, her husband is dead, and the family she chose is scattered throughout California. To unearth the latent potential of the prophetic figures that have been overlooked in many accountings of black radicalism, Bogues turns to “another set of archives, which are normally closed to Caribbean scholarship. The Caribbean poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite calls these archives the ‘inner plantation.’ Brathwaite makes the point that the ‘inner plantation’ is concerned with ‘cores and kernels; resistant local forms; roots, stumps, survival rhythms; growing points.’ ”82 I, too, am interested in unearthing the latent history of the prophet in black cultural production. My methodology differs from Bogues, though, because I am as invested in articulating a methodology to guide exploration of the “inner plantation” as I am on discovering the repertoires that sustain and reshape the movements. If, following Glaude, the prophetic materializes as conduct, then one may as easily look to embodied action as the written word for evidence of the prophetic black radical tradition. The prophetic acts as a visionary precursor and political action, articulating a theory of black radicalism that informs movements. In chapter 4, I consider how marching as a political practice may offer evidence and insight into political theories and institutional practice. Both approaches, one beginning with theory and considering the resulting movement and the other analyzing the archive of movement as an insight into theory, clarify the relationship between freedom dreams and the black citizen-­subject.

4 • Marching

Whatever their flaws and sharp ideological differences and contradictions, [the National Welfare Rights Organization, the Poor People’s Campaign, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Black Workers Congress, the Young Lords, the Black Panthers, and the Combahee River Collective] each embodied, and built on, aspects of the March on Washington’s radical vision. And they prove that marches are not movements. Instead, they are flashes of people’s aspirations and frustrations, imprecise public voicings, and signs of crisis. —Robin D. G. Kelley

Reflecting on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Robin D. G. Kelley comments on its relationship to a larger movement, noting inaccurate coverage of workers’ rights and antiblack violence, organizers’ ill-­advised choice to exclude women, and the historically inaccurate portrayal of the march as a culmination of civil rights activity.1 The media covered the movement as “a kind of last hurrah of the ‘good’ movement whose wind helped push Congress to pass Kennedy’s Civil Rights legislation (the decisive gust being Kennedy’s assassination in November of that year).” They focused almost exclusively on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, “I Have a Dream” speech and the assumption of black violence; and in Kelley’s view, the spectacle overshadowed the ongoing work of activists.2 Yet the historical conditions of the march also made black citizens’ status as a disenfranchised class visible. While this 142

Marching 143

conclusion may seem obvious to those of us with a twenty-­first-­century perspective, the structures of Jim Crow had normalized and personalized black people’s status as second-­class citizens. As David Eng explains, “colorblindness after Brown and Loving is only the latest historical incarnation of what legal scholar Cheryl I. Harris has described as a long and enduring history in U.S. law of ‘whiteness as property.’ ” Harris argues that U.S. jurisprudence has continually evolved in both explicit and implicit ways—­from the period of slavery to emancipation, from the era of Reconstruction to Jim Crow segregation, and from the time of  “separate but equal” to desegregation under civil rights movements—­to connect property rights to race, and to legitimate a property interest in whiteness as the persistent and continuing right to exclude others across different historical periods.3

Ownership remains a central point of demarcation between citizens and noncitizens, making the co-­optation of space and the wrangle over national spaces a powerful civic battleground. After the March on Washington, the visibility of disenfranchisement transformed from a personal to a national problem, largely because of the march’s scale, its international audience, and its interracial and interfaith composition. The march made it possible for the public to look with shame at later mass scenes of disenfranchised citizens—­for instance, the coverage of Hurricane Katrina. As both black and white periodicals documented, the 1963 activists presented themselves as a disciplined body of citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. Just as Mamie Till Bradley taught the nation to see that the death of her fourteen-­year-­old son Emmett Till was unacceptable, the 200,000 citizens who marched on Washington taught the nation how to see black people as patriots. The two ways of looking—­one at the black body as mutilated object of white terror; the other at mobilized, self-­willed, respectable figures capable of integration—­depend on one another. Violence shrouded the March on Washington, and media coverage of the event established a practice of viewing the civil rights movement that disrupted the “teleological narrative of freedom and progress.” The country preferred to look away from the violence inflicted on activists: the savagery of “Bull Connor’s dogs, water hoses, batons, bullets, and jail cells in Birmingham,” “[the] near fatal attacks in Mississippi for attempting to register voters, or attend the

144

Black Movements

funerals of Herbert Lee or Medgar Evers.”4 However, the new technology of television focused the national gaze. Similarly, the nation was shocked to attention by the negligibility of black and blackened life in the twenty-­first century, as demonstrated by the media coverage of the belated evacuation of New Orleans after the levee breach during Hurricane Katrina. The intersection of these scenes of instruction—­marching and suffering—­creates webs of affiliation that are apparent in Spike Lee’s 2006 documentary film When the Levees Broke. In the Silent Protest of 1917 and the 1963 March on Washington, marching was an act of enfranchisement that called attention to black citizens’ disenfranchisement. The two marches exist along a continuum that includes the 1965 Selma-­to-­Montgomery marches, which effectively leveraged America’s purported democratic privilege against its blatant disregard for black life. Likewise, the marches link to the jazz funerals and the portrayals of Katrina evacuees in When the Levees Broke. This connection illustrates the complexity of social actions, which in these situations simultaneously functioned both individually and collectively, filled with transformative potential yet constricted by the status quo. The sly performances show black insurgents living with death even as they demand temporary acknowledgment of life and rights. The value co-­opted by the savvy use of the camera momentarily appropriates power to authorize certain acts, positions, and comportments. As Kelley notes, although “marches do not make a movement, . . . they are flashes” that crystallize time and make history.5 The ability to make and draw from embodied memory and archived histories contributes to self-­ fashioning, a kind of freedom. The coverage of the 1917, 1963, and 1965 marches disrupted viewers’ ability to dehumanize black people. In the civil rights era black people had reclaimed the power of the visual image. Mamie Till Bradley’s well-­known use of her son’s brutalized body stands as the exemplary demonstration of such efforts, but images also circulated of lesser-­known young men and women who placed their bodies on the line in the name of basic civic rights. They, too, participated in reorienting the appearance of black people in the public sphere.6 For example, on May 3, 1963, a student was attacked by a dog in Birmingham. The next day images of the attack appeared on the front page of the New York Times and created a national outcry over what President John F. Kennedy characterized as “shameful” (fig. 13). In When the Levees Broke Spike Lee also draws from this shift in documentary

Marching 145

representations of black people. This chapter examines marching in the jazz funerals depicted in Lee’s film and argues that jazz funerals are a diasporic practice that requires syncopation of the living and communion with the dead. The interconnectedness of the display in and across time, in and throughout place, offers a model of performance that intervenes in the social and physical dying of black people.

Public Occupation: The 1917 Silent Protest Marching has been a staple of black political protest in the twentieth century. Often used to call attention to black disenfranchisement, the collectivity formed in a march visually represents a caucus with the potential to threaten, either momentarily or indefinitely, the operation of local government. On July 28, 1917, 10,000 African American women, men, and children marched down New York City’s Fifth Avenue, from Fifty-­ninth Street to Madison Square Garden. Led by eight hundred children dressed in white, participants were protesting lynching and antiblack violence in East St. Louis in particular and throughout the nation in general. On July 1, two white policemen had been killed in East St. Louis, sparking a slew of vigilante assaults against black residents. Many black residents fled the city after mobs burned their homes. W.E.B. Du Bois organized the Fifth Avenue march, called the Silent Parade because of the noiseless, disciplined choreography of the marchers. The goal was to pressure President Woodrow Wilson to pass antilynching legislation as he had promised in his campaign. At the march, black Boy Scouts distributed a circular that explained, “We march because we deem it a crime to be silent in the face of such barbaric acts. . . . We march in memory of our butchered dead, the massacre of the honest toilers who were removing the reproach of laziness and thriftlessness hurled at the entire race. They died to prove our worthiness to live.”7 Throughout the book, I have shown how the voice, as an instrument of storytelling and prophecy, calls attention to the unequal exercise of democracy predicated on the suffering of black people. The primacy of language depends on the rational explication of events based solely on material evidence. Defying liberalism’s notion of progressive time, black movements offer an alternative rendering of the human that defies the strict divide

146

Black Movements

Figure 13.  Walter Gadsden being attacked by a police dog, Birmingham, Ala-

bama, May 3, 1963. Photograph by Bill Hudson. AP/Wide World Images.

between reason and unreason, between aesthetics and politics. According to J. A. Mbembé in “Necropolitics,” the basis of a distinction between reason and unreason (passion, fantasy) that late-­modern criticism has been able to articulate a certain idea of the political. . . . Within this paradigm, reason is the truth of the subject and politics is the exercise of reason in the public sphere. The exercise of reason is tantamount to the exercise of freedom, a key element for individual autonomy. The romance of sovereignty, in this case, rests on the belief that the subject is the master and the controlling author of his or her own meaning.8

Like the alternative rendering of the human expressed in chapter 1, the Silent Parade challenged the idea of the political as an exercise of reason based “on the belief that the subject is the master and controlling author of his or her own meaning” because the bodies of the protesting citizens emerged in relationship to the violation of bodies on July 1, 1917.

Marching 147

The use of embodiment as a practice that expresses a political theory defines black movements, and the marchers’ uniformity of appearance suggested a singular vision of how the U.S. government should account for its hypocrisy. The almost identical clothing of each man—­a dignified dark suit, a crisp white shirt, and a brimmed hat—­differed from the pristine white dresses of the women. The distinction of dress along gender lines disrupted the singularity of the citizen and reinforced the practice of limited citizenship based on identity categories. At the same time, the deliberate refinement of the clothing reinforced the relationship between rights and respectability. The protestors presented themselves as citizens while affirming the look of citizenship. Although gender politics limited the critique of citizenship, the march still managed to appropriate space, disrupt the quotidian progression of the day, and draw attention to shared grievances of citizens with the state. Through acts of disruption that demand attention, marchers insert themselves into the historical record. Images from 1917 show that the protestors occupied the span of Fifth Avenue (fig. 14). Effectiveness demands that the scale of the march overwhelm the social landscape so that the protest cannot be ignored. Like the performances discussed in chapter 2, the 1917 march reorganized spatial logics to disrupt the actors’ alienation and shift attention to the function of the state, presenting marching as a black movement that affiliated through disruption. A march must also demonstrate a departure from the expected responses of black citizens to antiblack violence. Although many have criticized the approach as a hackneyed means of social protest in the twenty-­first century, its seemingly paradoxical nature, both disruptive and respectable, challenges onlookers to reconsider the nature of black citizens and their claim to the nation.

The Choreography of Marching In the 1917 march, the coordination of clothing and choreography particularized the political possibility made available through protest. In Rituals of Race, Alessandra Lorini asserts, “The black clothes of men and the white dresses of women were the only choreographed details of a parade in which ‘all social lines were obliterated and the question of morals temporarily put aside.’”9 Signs in the silent march ranged from cries

148

Black Movements

Figure 14.  Silent Parade, New York City, July 28, 1917. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, NAACP Collection, Washington, D.C.

for citizenship, to protests against violence, to assertions of patriotism, to demands for economic inclusion. Participants were urged to forgo “the glitter of gold braid and riot of gay colors, the play of inspiring melodies and the martial mien of the participants—­usual features of the Negro parade.”10 Some of the signs charged, “‘Make America safe for democracy.’ ‘The first blood for American independence was shed by a negro.’ ‘Race prejudice is the offspring of ignorance and the mother of lynching.’ ‘We were first in France, ask Pershing.’”11 Others declared, “‘Thou shalt not kill,’ ‘America has lynched without trial 2,867 Negroes in thirty-­one years and not a single murderer has suffered.’ ‘We have fought for the liberty of white Americans in six wars; our reward is East St. Louis.’ ‘Taxation without representation is tyranny.’ ‘We are maligned as lazy and murdered where we work.’ ‘Your hands are full of blood.’ ‘Mother, do lynchers go to heaven?’”12 The decision to march in silence while holding these signs emphasized the nature of choreography as a discipline and a mode of becoming.

Marching 149

The variety of signs, many of which protested physical violence, disdesigned and pristine presentation of respectability. rupted the well-­ Although the marchers displayed reservation, respect, and quiet in their comportment and dress, their sign system emphasized anger, outrage, patriotism, and revolution. Adopting the language of the U.S. independence movement, the protestors revealed, as Nicholas Ridout describes in “Performance and Democracy,” the constant oscillation between “institutionalization” and “insurgency” necessary to maintain democracy.13 Threatening and compliant, agitated and reserved, the signs, together with the participants’ dress and comportment, established the intimacy of restraint and unrest in marching. Whereas the effectiveness of protest marches requires choreography and therefore restraint, the disciplinary nature of choreography does not exclude agitation. André Lepecki and Ric Allsopp explain, “Choreography was invented in order to structure a system of command to which bodies have to subject themselves (freely, as Althusser would say!) into the system’s wills and whims. Thus, choreography also names a corporeal need: the need to pedagogically and biologically (re)produce bodies capable of carrying out certain movement imperatives.”14 The imperative in the case of the 1917 march was to reproduce the political silence surrounding racialized violence and black workers’ exclusion from labor unions yet counteract the invisibility of the black populace as citizens. Through the disciplined and unsettling silence of the participants’ bodies, the marches called attention to the federal government’s refusal to provide them equal protection from violence. The choreography positioned the black subject as disenfranchised citizen by presenting a unified mass large enough to draw national attention, as shown by the newspaper coverage of the event, while disrupting spectators’ assumptions of the “usual features of the Negro parade.” In other words, as protestors, the participants positioned themselves as citizens protected by the First Amendment even though their racial designation (in practice) excluded them from equal protection under the law: hence, the references to lynching in the signs. The exclusion within inclusion necessitated a political practice that drew from the logic and pointed to the illogic of state formation. Nonetheless, in the Silent Parade of 1917, the policing of bodies through choreography did not work implicitly toward liberatory ends, as the march’s gender politics demonstrate.

150

Black Movements

Dissociating marchers from prototypical practices of black parading produces the possibility of a more expansive experience of black citizenship. As in the entrapping politics discussed in chapter 2, the subjection implicit in choreography enables the actor to participate in the process of subject formation as an interrelation between actor and audience that has more to do with the subjection of the viewer than the one being viewed. The staged dynamic of marching or entrapment inverts Frantz Fanon’s famous scene of alienation (activated through a child’s observation, “Look, a Negro”). Using “an apparatus of capture,” the marchers appear before a national audience as not only a racialized collective but a political one as well.15 Through iterative practices, the body emerges in the public spheres and takes on different identity categories. One of the ideal categories is that of the citizen. Just as whiteness signifies a social ideal that is set at a critical distance from the individual person, democratic citizenship is an ideal that must be constantly affirmed and reiterated to come close to the realization of its promise. The 1917 NAACP march registered black individuals as citizens and therefore rightful claimants to government protection from violence, given the lack of such recognition months earlier during the East St. Louis riots. Through the comportment of their bodies, the marchers demonstrated, according to Judith Butler, that “perception . . . is not predetermined by some manner of interior essence, and . . . concrete expression in the world must be understood as the taking up and rendering of a specific set of historical possibilities. Hence, there is an agency which is understood as the process of rendering such possibilities determinate.”16 The marchers positioned their bodies in a history of respectability and militarization as demonstrated by the choice to march in dress attire. They also historicized their bodies as equal participants in collective dissent, as citizens with equal claims to the protections of the Constitution. Although the appearance of the marchers as disenfranchised citizens in 1917 and in 1963 depended on the nonviolent nature of the demonstrations, it also drew attention to the perception of black people as violent instead of victims of violence. As figure 15 shows, the children in the 1917 parade marched hand in hand behind the leadership of the NAACP, with Du Bois to the far right with his cane in his hand and to his left the well-­known poet James Weldon Johnson. Some of the men wore bowties; others donned three-­piece suits. All of the children wore hats to demonstrate not only civility but style. As in a military parade, the 1917 march featured drummers as the only sound. Such choices

Marching 151

Figure 15.  Silent Parade, New York City, July 28, 1917. Bettman Collection/Getty

Images.

placed the protestors within a history of state formation via violence and showed that they were heirs to the “abstract signs and symbols or the civic myths of the nation.”17 Participants in the 1917 march were demanding the basic legal rights of citizenship: suffrage and governmental participation as well as more abstract guarantees of national belonging. State-­authorized violence purports to safeguard the nation-­state and its interests. It is easy to name the twentieth-­century wars ostensibly waged in the name of democracy: the Cold War, Vietnam, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the War on Terror, among others. The practice of marching gains some of its force from its association with militarization and the protection of rights through blood sacrifice. In the wake of the genocide and totalitarianism that prompted World War II, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s The Dialect of Enlightenment called into question the superiority of European Enlightenment rationality as the philosophical basis for modern democracy. Such questioning forgets the long history of genocidal violence that preceded World War II, decimating native populations in the Americas, as well as the transatlantic

152

Black Movements

slave trade that served as the basis for establishing the democratic state. Such relational understanding of citizenship as an ideal dependent on mass violence explains why marching and its particular bourgeois manifestation in 1917 was a fitting demonstration that black people were citizens worthy of national inclusion. The worth came from mobilizing a form that at once participated in the maintenance of democracy through a collective call for reform while also systematizing violence. In exposing the violent practice of making citizens, the marchers expanded the scope of the democratic to encompass all forms of life. In other words, by using a form that linked to militarized violence as it drew from social protest histories, black activists revealed the limitations of the practice of democracy when predicated on the subjugation and death of black people and called for a form of democratic citizenship expansive enough to include the lives of black people.

One March among Many: The March on Washington In 1917, NAACP participants coded marching as a practice that calls attention to the limits of citizenship by, on the one hand, demonstrating the comportment of civility and appearing as citizens while, on the other hand, co-­opting public space and displaying placards that document black people’s disenfranchisement. Their civil disobedience registered the ability of the practice to shape the appearance of the citizen. Similar tactics informed the August 28, 1963, March on Washington, which, according to Michael Eric Dyson, functioned as the march to end all black marches: it “branded the protest march like Xerox branded copy machines, like Apple branded computers.”18 It was accomplished thanks to the herculean effort of several civil rights organizations—­including the National Urban League, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the NAACP, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE)—­as well as the meticulous organization of Bayard Rustin (a closeted gay man and former member of the Communist party) and A. Phillip Randolph, who drew from a long history of civil rights struggle. The march transformed the optics of the movement, focusing attention, for a time, on the mobilization of 300,000 protestors and later the willingness of individual Americans to risk violence, imprisonment, and even death in order to demand social inclusion.

Marching 153

Annual celebrations often conflate the March on Washington with the transformative vision of King’s speech, but the fiftieth-­anniversary celebration also called attention to the lingering need to attend to the event’s stated goal of jobs and freedom. Visual documentation reveals how the greatest mass protest in history enabled the appearance of the black citizen. As Kelley also does in “Big, Glitzy Marches Are Not Movements,” the press questioned the effectiveness and feasibility of the march even before it came to pass, and immediately afterward pundits began dismissing it. The March on Washington required enormous organization, will, determination, and compromise. Hundreds of thousands of protesters arrived in Washington by 6 a.m. on Wednesday, August 28, 1963. Once in the capital, shuttle buses and the Metro system carried them to a waiting area near the Washington Monument, where celebrities led groups in songs and chants. The demonstrators then marched up Independence and Constitution avenues to the Lincoln Memorial. Speakers there included representatives of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the NAACP, CORE, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the National Urban League, and SNCC.19 In the weeks leading up to the march, several newspapers (including the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune) ran stories about the possibility of violence and noted that police and federal forces were being deployed to maintain order. The anticipation of violence heightened the need for disciplined nonviolent bodies, as it provided the grounds for depicting the march as a contracted display of political compromise dismissively aligned with a show. Reporting for the Los Angeles Times on August 25, 1963, Charles Portis described the situation as he understood it: Somewhere along the way, the march on Washington became the march in Washington. The idea was to mobilize 100,000 Negroes, mostly unemployed ones, for a dramatic, super-­Birmingham demonstration at the White House and the Capitol. They would march down Pennsylvania Ave. singing, chanting slogans and waving placards. Perhaps they could inveigle the President to address them, or at least get Bobby Kennedy to confront them again in the streets with his bullhorn. In the House and Senate there would be sit-­ins, with Sen. Eastland stepping over supine bodies to get into his office. Some of the blood-­and-­thunder marchers even suggested lying down in the streets and on

154

Black Movements

the runways of the airports. It would be a spectacular summer climax to the Negro revolt of 1963, a sort of summing-­up of all the demonstrations everywhere. Then, as the plans were being laid, more and more people got into the act—­politicians, labor leaders, clergymen, movie stars. Organizational problems developed, problems of logistics, of control. The tone changed.20

The shift in focus from one of co-­opting space and limiting the function of the federal government to participation in the workings of Washington—­ from on to in—­recalls not only Kelley’s reservations about glitz but also the use value of aesthetics. Coverage of the 1963 march and Kelley’s subsequent caution about the anniversary commemoration suggest that paying too much attention to the glitz causes the viewer to overlook the march’s substance and that focusing on the drama distracts from careful analysis of the political. Yet one cannot fully understand the democratic process in the absence of aesthetic considerations because aesthetics express the imaginative processes necessary to breathe life into emancipatory political practices. Every time we encounter the flash of the aesthetic we have a chance to encounter the expansion of the democratic. Many African American newspapers took issue with the depiction of the march as a watered-­down version of what the organizers had planned initially; but even given that shift in focus, reception of the event does not consider the implications of the disciplined repertoire of the 1963 marchers, the staging of the march, and the political value produced through the aesthetic choices (style, rhetoric, sound).21 The relational dimensions of acts of choreography repurpose space, calling attention to how public space teems with puissance. Choreography as a way of occupying public spaces in specific arrangements produces political possibilities in part because of the physical, ethical, tactical, and social positions into which it places onlookers, those of shared as well as oppositional racial affiliations. Choreography, an organizational structure often associated with dance, becomes the mechanism to transform space through the use of bodies. Harnessing comportment in the service of social reorganization clarifies how imagination and embodied action work together to shape political spheres as physical locations and ideologies. By defying expectations of violence and producing carefully choreographed bodies, the March on Washington participants demonstrated that “the civil rights movement had a somewhat more sophisticated

Marching 155

understanding of visual semiotics largely because African Americans had cultivated almost a century of sensitivity to how popular media represented black bodies.”22 The organizers’ heightened awareness of the power of visual representation led to the savvy use of marching as a performance of civility that would finish the job that Randolph had begun envisioning more than two decades earlier. “‘Such a pilgrimage of 10,000 Negroes would wake up and shock official Washington as it has never been shocked before,’ the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters said. ‘Why? The answer is clear. Nobody expects 10,000 Negroes to get together and march anywhere for anything at any time.’ ”23 Interviewed days before the 1963 march, Randolph affirmed, “We march to redress old grievances and to help resolve an American crisis. . . . Our bodies, numbering over 100,000, will bear witness—­will serve historic notice—­that Jobs and Freedom are needed NOW.”24 The March on Washington as a surrogated performance demonstrated organizers’ choice to reinscribe the limited and class-­ inflected parameters of citizenship with the hope of further incorporating “civil rights subjects” (as Herman Gray uses the term) as “eminently worthy beneficiaries of the rights and equality they demand.”25 As a rehearsed and highly choreographed yet improvisational performance, their marching entwined political and artistic action. The marchers were representatives of democracy. Representation in popular forms (such as fiction, movies, and television) often carries the weight of falsity. However, in terms of democratic ideals, the representation functions as a site of possibility for the exercise of collective will. Aesthetics are often dismissed as unproductive expressions of emotion (catharsis), while political movements entail useful processes that enable change. But the function of representation—­one standing in for another—­in Congress, on stage, or in a march demonstrates the similar function of representation in arts as political processes that advance movements by perpetuating actions and producing innovative ones that draw from the imagination. As C.L.R. James explains of the cricket player in Beyond the Boundary, “The batsman facing the ball does not merely represent his side. For that moment, to all intents and purposes, he is his side. The fundamental relation of the One and the Many, Individual and Social, Individual and Universal, leader and followers, representative and ranks, the part and the whole, is structurally imposed on the players of cricket.”26 The representational economies transformed the march from being on

156

Black Movements

Washington to being in Washington, but not in a derisive sense. Instead, the shift enabled an understanding of “performance—­whether it is theatre or sport—­as something that forms part of the entire ensemble of social relations rather than as an autonomous viewpoint from which the culture of the society in question may be interpreted.”27 The 1963 march was a link in a chain of representational possibilities for black people as citizen-­subjects, precisely because of the hybrid nature of the action—­at once militarized and rhythmic, civil and disruptive. As many commentators noted, once the cycle of the news stories forecasting the impending violence gave way to headlines about peaceful assembly, the marchers appeared to be citizens.28 Stories ran in the Washington Post and the New York Times proclaiming, “The forthcoming march on Washington and all other civil rights demonstrations are a legitimate exercise of the rights provided by the First Amendment and are in keeping with the best traditions of America’s heritage of social protest, the American Civil Liberties Union said yesterday.”29 Similarly, “the amendment forbids Congress to make any law that abridges ‘the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.’ ”30 Certainly, this marking of the protestors’ civility as a sign of democracy seems paradoxical when fellow citizens were vigorously maintaining Jim Crow through violence. Nevertheless, the politics of respectability, with all of its transformative limitations, informed the disciplined and choreographed comportment that aligned the marchers with a democratic subject and attenuated the representational hold of black criminalization but did not delimit the constitutive tension between violence and victory that marching straddles. All three major television networks blocked out “large chunks of the broadcast day and, in the case of CBS, a significant portion of prime time to the March on Washington. With the exception of presidential inaugurations and nominating conventions, no single event had ever received such saturation coverage on television.”31 Working together, the networks covered the events from start to finish and held the nation captive. According to a story in the New York Times, the Nielsen measurement for the New York area increased by almost half during the period of the march.32 Although aspects of the event have become codified in national memory, particularly King’s speech, the collective unnamed men and women offered a different representational politics. Moreover, the enormity and diversity

Marching 157

of humanity displayed at the march connects to the imagery in Lee’s When the Levees Broke and the reclamation of humanity that the film enacts. In this national history the coercive force of individualism strained against the grain of the material evidence; the live newsfeed of the march focused on the crowd more than it did on the speakers.33 Most of the telecast occurred without commentary. Immediately after the end of the march, pundits began to argue for the event’s limited impact, denying that it would substantially influence Congress to pass civil rights legislation. However, the visual archive illustrates the capacious vision of the participants. Ladies and gentlemen in their Sunday best lobbied for labor rights in the August heat of Washington, D.C. (fig. 16). Intergenerational coalitions and children walked hand in hand (figs. 17 and 18). Rather than glitz (though there is nothing wrong with a little shine), faces expressed determination, fortitude, and perseverance. The unified and choreographed comportment of the young people captured in figure 18, holding hands with mouths agape (perhaps in song), embodied citizenship—­a dangerous action, as the freedom riders showed when they “demonstrate[d] with discipline and dignity.”34 The visual representation of the March on Washington presented a massive body of protestors as worthy of national inclusion. It also dispelled the perception of unruly black violence as the result of civil rights protest. Though many argue that the march had limited impact on the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, its value should not be limited to its direct impact on Congress but should be understood in terms of how it opened up and constricted the appearance of the black citizen. As with any other mode of performance, the individual appeared anew in relationship to a given action. Marching sought to disrupt the violation of black people while remembering the violence that limits their experience of democracy. Although the participants distanced themselves visually from connections to violence, the threat of reprisal remained an ever-­present part of the movement.

The Violence Marching Cannot Forget: Bloody Sunday A stunning image of the mutilated body of fourteen-­year-­old Emmett Till, lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Money, Mississippi,

158

Black Movements

Figure 16.  “Marchers Arriving by Bus, with ‘CORE Downtown’ Sign,” March on Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

haunted the cover of Jet magazine. Taken after his mother demanded that her son have an open-­casket funeral, that photograph, along with television footage of the state police’s unprovoked attack on black protestors at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, shocked the nation into attention. As dignified and determined as their March on Washington counterparts, this group of voting rights activists, led by John Lewis of the SNCC and Hosea Williams of the SCLC, marched fifty-­four miles from Selma to Montgomery. Their goal was to protest the death of activist Jimmie Lee Jackson by registering voters at the state capital. As the unarmed protestors reached the foot of the bridge, police in riot gear with bullwhips and billy clubs pushed, beat, and whipped them. Officers stunned the marchers with tear gas and trampled them with feet and horse hooves. To show the activists’ mangled bodies to the entire world, “ABC broke into an already highly rated entertainment program, [with] the ‘Bloody Sunday’ report [which] garnered an otherwise unheard of number of viewers all at one time and all in one place.”35 The footage disrupted the routine experience of Sunday television watching with American civil unrest. Seeping into viewers’ homes and rupturing a day set aside from the workweek, the televised moment enacted a historical rift, imbuing the private sphere with

Marching 159

Figure 17.  March on Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

brutal expressions of power. In this unlikely space, the contestation for civil rights moved from the capital to viewers’ homes. The savagery and the documentation caught the nation by surprise. Whereas the media and the government had had time to shape and influence perceptions of the March on Washington as a public event, Bloody Sunday was an unexpected interruption. The televised coverage sympathetically presented dignified “civil rights subjects,” “eminently worthy beneficiaries of the rights and equality they demand,” and necessitated national outrage.36 If the marching of dignified black bodies functioned as an acceptable practice of protest when citizens were standing up for their constitutional rights, then the violence directed by Sheriff Jim Clark epitomized excessive force. Although the 1917 NAACP march and the 1963 March on Washington each occurred in relation to histories of antiblack violence, the appearance of the citizen-­subject encouraged an erasure of the visual evidence of that violence. In terms of national property rights, any such evidence belonged to the protestors (as evidenced by the newspaper coverage leading up to the March on Washington). In distancing themselves from violence, the protestors also distanced themselves from suffering, for both became

160

Black Movements

Figure 18.  Members of the Congress of Racial Equality singing during the March on Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963. Photograph by Steve Schapiro. Corbis Premium Historical/Getty Images.

undifferentiated when set in relation to the black body. The shock of Bloody Sunday, however, unraveled such conflations. The screams heard on the audio feed required the audience to acknowledge the black citizen not as the perpetrator but as the victim. The choreography of the 1917 march, the 1963 march, and the first Selma to Montgomery march demonstrated the possibility of the appearance of the black citizen-­subject as a victim of antiblack violence. All three hinged on the presumption of black civility, dignity, and docility, but the latter two also leveraged an understanding of U.S. democracy as antiracist. As President Lyndon B. Johnson told a joint session of Congress on March 15, 1965, as he was advocating for the 1965 Voting Rights Act, “what happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”37 Bloody Sunday demanded that the president declare that U.S. democracy is fundamentally antiracist and that therefore such acts of brutality are an affront to democracy. Just as the victims of antiblack violence must remain occluded

Marching 161

to secure democracy, so, too, must the perpetrators remain hidden. The Bloody Sunday footage doubled down on Mamie Till Bradley’s act of defiance, showing not only what the nation had done to its sons and daughters but also what the state-­sanctioned forces had been authorized to do.

The Black Citizenship Subject: When the Levees Broke The rebranding of the citizen subject and the positioning of U.S. democracy as antiracist pressure blackness to become a diffuse signifier. In the post–­ civil rights era, distinguishing citizens by racial identity is the limiting factor of democracy, replacing historical practices that used race to install social hierarchies.38 Therefore, if some black people are thriving, the case for all having a common cause becomes attenuated. The legacy of visual representation in the practice of marching and the appearance of the citizen subject informs the structure of Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke and helps explain the framing of the documentary. In it, the movement of the jazz funeral falls into line with black political protest marches not because they draw from similar disciplinary structures of choreography (though they do) or because they share military influences to coordinate movement (though they do) but because the funeral procession foregrounds what remains latent in two of the three political marches I have discussed: an experience of antiblack violence that to some degree inspires the movement. By placing jazz funerals in a web of affiliation with black protest marching, we recall the death and dying of black people that marching has awakened. The fourth act of Lee’s film begins with a staged jazz funeral for Hurricane Katrina. That hurricane exposed the worst manmade engineering lapse in U.S. history, which resulted in the devastation of the Lower Ninth Ward and Saint Bernard Parish, the death of 1,836 people, and the displacement of 400,000 Gulf Coast residents (fig. 19). As a requiem, the film as a whole functions as a mourning ceremony, but the fourth act emphasizes the particular characteristics of remembering the dead in New Orleans, the home of the jazz funeral. The unique aspects of this type of funeral begin once the official ceremony, whether at church or a funeral home, ends. A brass band waits outside the building to accompany the deceased along his or her transition. Usually led by a grand marshal known as a “Nelson,” the musicians play sad music and march with the family and other mourners in

162

Black Movements

a traditional processional until “the body is ‘cut loose’—­sent on its way in the company of family members.”39 The music then becomes upbeat, and the traditional militarized marching shifts into improvisational dancing and revelry. The celebration of life that follows the mourning rituals is called second lining, and it draws from the syncretic belief systems that inform the jazz funeral as a performance tradition. Richard Mizelle, Jr., writes: Like jazz itself, the tradition of jazz funerals is a cultural hybrid uniquely embedded in the culture of New Orleans. As Jason Berry explains, the origins of the jazz funeral “lie in the colonial era, as French brass bands played in large processions honoring generals and politicians. At the same time, in a public park called Congo Square, African slaves gathered in large concentric circles, ring dances, honoring ancestral spirits. Gradually the two traditions came together—­the line and the ring—­creating a new form of burial ceremony.”40

The line and the ring create a web that prevents “the segregation of the dead.”41 Understandings of race as a construction has given twenty-­first-­century black cultural workers greater flexibility in their modes of affiliation. Therefore, the choice to remain tethered to the dead through the jazz funeral is telling, particularly in Lee’s film, where the funeral is for Katrina. As I have discussed, certain histories of black devastation, particularly slavery, both enable and disable black artists and activists in the post–­civil rights era; and here the mourning of Katrina suggests that the film is aiming to move past the disaster. Yet the act of mourning, particularly in a black diasporic context, does not mean the end of relationships with the dead but an intimacy with death that enables black people to embrace freedom. In other words, understanding the practice of mourning facilitates insight into black freedom struggles, which often occur under the threat of demise. To live so closely with death redefines living. In Lee’s film, images of life mingle with death. The overture that opens the first act presents classic images of New Orleans celebration, music, and Mardi Gras alongside devastating images of death from the levee breaks. Acts 1 and 4 begin with musical sequences that introduce the tension explored in each act. In the overture to act 4, a group of men organized into three lines glides down the street after a Nelson. The band plays “The

Marching 163

Figure 19.  The jazz funeral scene from Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, 2006. Screenshot by Soyica Diggs Colbert.

Old Rugged Cross” and steps from side to side in unity. The camera pans down to the Nelson’s feet to emphasize the deliberateness of the footwork and the function of choreography in the mourning ritual. Inasmuch as choreography works to discipline and regulate bodies, it produces ways of being that are distinctive. In this case, it produces ways for the living to be with the dead. The camera pans up to capture the musicians and then returns to a panoramic view of a devastated street. The procession ambles down an empty, uninhabitable residential street, and the damage frames the marchers. Now the camera shifts angles from a straight-­on shot to a side view that features the hearse. Pulled by two brown horses, it displays a sign, possibly made from discarded wood, with the word “Katrina” painted in red. The side view also allows us to see members of the funeral who are not part of the band. They wear street clothes and do not follow the dipping side-­to-­side choreography of the Nelson. At this point, the funeral scene cuts to an interview with Dinerral “Dick” Shavers, a member of the Hot 8 Brass Band and a resident of the Lower Ninth Ward. Then Lee shows us a house torn to pieces, and the detritus consumes more of the frame than the structure of the building does. The camera pans from house to house, each more torn up than the next, before returning to the funeral procession. In a review of the documentary, Anne M. Valk explains, “The title invokes the notion of requiem, a religious mass or song of mourning for

164

Black Movements

the dead. Through the film, Lee and his subjects grieve the 1700 people lost in the storm; they also mourn the loss of the city to which so many feel a strong sense of connection and identity. Jazz funeral processions snake through the city and film, evincing the city’s unique culture and suggesting the role of music in the city’s healing.”42 Though the film strongly emphasizes the value of New Orleans via its cultural history, the purpose of a jazz funeral is to incorporate memory through performance, as Joseph Roach has emphasized in his groundbreaking study Cities of the Dead, which theorizes how performance embodies and perpetuates memories.43 In this case, its function is not to move past or to get over the devastation of Katrina but to remember it. Lee’s use of the jazz funeral particularizes the nature of the requiem and demonstrates mourning as a political practice through its celebration of black life. Thus, as Valk notes and Lee explains in the film’s voice commentary, the documentary may be understood as a movement in the musical sense because each of the four acts participates in crafting a whole that supplements that history of Katrina. Lee says, “You go out there and shoot and shoot and shoot and find the story, you have to find the narrative. We don’t like this voice of God thing, we want the people to tell the story to ‘testify.’ ”44 Like the other movements I have discussed, the film makes history through acts of memory, offering “new perspectives on history ‘from the bottom up.’ ”45 Lee constructed the documentary using the voices of nearly a hundred individuals, many of them residents of New Orleans, and chose not to show his own face on film, a decision that illustrates his commitment to a methodological approach. When the Levees Broke bears witness to a human-­ made catastrophe from the perspective of the victims, engaging them in a national conversation rather than transforming their homes into objects of conversation. To highlight the power of witnessing, act 1 opens with testimony from New Orleans mayor Clarence Ray Nagin, Jr., who spoke before Congress on December 14, 2006: “We come to you with facts. We come to you with eyewitness accounts. We come to you because we were there before the storm hit. We were there when the storm hit. We were there after the storm and we’re still there.”46 The authority that he affirms is based on experiential knowledge and, like the film itself, demonstrates the blurry line between fact and fiction. Nagin presents the reality of eyewitness testimony as obvious, unquestionable, and self-­evident. Yet the evidentiary nature of black

Marching 165

experience, particularly as it pertains to historical evidence for guiding legislation, is anything but a given. Lee’s use of the Nagin footage to open the film is ironic because it highlights the aims of the film: to trouble the truth claims made about Katrina and to offer a method for analyzing the causes and effects of the catastrophe. Traditionally, such an approach has been an expected function of documentary film, which the Scottish filmmaker John Grierson defined as “[a] creative treatment of actuality” in a review of Robert Flaherty’s Moana (1926).47 Like other forms of historical documentation, Lee’s film draws together varied testimony, footage, and perspectives to craft an account of what transpired in the days leading up to and following Hurricane Katrina. Act 1 depicts the days before the storm and the four days afterward. Act 2 covers the fifth day, as evacuees scattered throughout the country and the federal government began rescuing citizens who had stayed put during the storm. Act 3 opens with a scene in which we see a woman offering a prayer and holding a large picture frame. It then moves on to depict how media coverage circumscribed the event’s coverage and offers insight into New Orleans’s unique history. The woman’s opening prayer also recalls the cultural practices that sustained the speaker’s ancestors, which she asserts carried her and others through the storm as they waded in the water. By making these links to long histories of black cultural production cultivated in slavery and transformed over time, the act suggests that the unique musical and performance traditions of New Orleans produce its national value. It also, in Roach’s words, “attend[s] to ‘counter-­memories’ or the disparities between history as it is discursively transmitted and memory as it is publicly enacted by the bodies that bear its consequences.”48 The prayer that introduces the act reminds us of lost public and personal archives—­pictures, Bibles, documents—­as it foregrounds the film as a site of memory. Roach explains that genealogies of performance “attend not only to ‘the body’ as Foucault suggests, but also to bodies—­to the reciprocal reflections they make on one another’s surfaces as they foreground their capacities for interaction” and function as “practices of memory.”49 The marching depicted in When the Levees Broke contributes to a genealogy of performance that incorporates the countervailing movements of the proper citizen subjects who participated in the March on Washington and the disenfranchised black victims of state-­authorized violence who attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday. The intimacy with death that is central to any

166

Black Movements

mourning ritual becomes syncopated in the movement of the jazz funeral and, in so doing, recalls the violence that attends the making of the disciplined black citizen subject. As I have discussed, act 4 presents a jazz funeral for Katrina and then depicts the limited attempts at clearing debris and rebuilding after the storm. It also features testimony from the Army Corps of Engineers about the failure of the levees and flood walls and describes the type of infrastructure that could secure the city from future storms. Its lack in this crisis suggests to the interviewees that the national will does not support protecting the city. One could easily argue that the absence of such protection reveals the communities’ lack of value to the national body, a notion further emphasized by the painfully slow response to the catastrophe. In a series of events that illustrates the blatant disregard for human life in general and the lives of Katrina evacuees in particular, the funeral honors the dead as well as the survivors, placing them in a relationship of interdependence. In a jazz funeral, second lining functions as a form of communion between the living and the dead. The mourning ritual brings participants into contact with the limits of their community—­the dear departed. It highlights the proximate relationship between death and life as a necessary intimacy for the production of citizenship. When the Levees Broke highlights the peculiar familiarity that black citizens experience with death. In the film, the jazz musician Wynton Marsalis describes living under the shadow of death as a national state of being that must be addressed: I think that this is a great moment in American history because I feel that in this moment we see a lot of what’s wrong with us. It’s a signature moment. It's like sometimes you walk past a mirror and you see yourself in a position you don’t like. “Damn man, I know I was, I thought I was ten pounds overweight; I’m fifty.” Well, this is like you stayed in front of the mirror and you couldn’t turn away from it. You stayed in that pose and everything in that pose shows us what’s wrong with us.50

The inability to look away, to force the nation to see what it has done, is a productive mode of the national imaginary that moves us closer to enacting democracy and equality.

Marching 167

Though post–­civil rights artists negotiate the political demand to erase blackness by either occluding black suffering from national narratives or suggesting that blackness as a racial category no longer demarcates a coherent group, they also draw blackness into focus or create greater opacity with the racial category. These artists offer strategies of playing in the dark that produce more expansive exercises of self-­fashioning and greater choices in living and being with blackness. The sense of play does not delimit the threat of violence to black subjects, but it offers the possibility of a more robust afterlife / after-­blackness.

5 • “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” Locating the Future of Black Studies

August Wilson’s play Fences (1986) depicts a man, Troy Maxson, who is both out of time (that is, temporally displaced) and running out of time. The play, which is set in the 1950s, is part of Wilson’s ten-­play cycle, each based in a different decade, but it is the only one of the group that begins in one decade and ends in another: in this case, the time frame extends to 1965. This time overflow, alongside the protagonist’s persistent battles with the angel of death, evokes the intimate relationship between temporality and black social life. It marks the impossibility of black being when framed by neoliberal individualism and the possibility of black being outside the frame. If black movements make webs of affiliation, why, as Hortense Spillers asks, do “audience[s] care to intersect them?”1 Why continue to affirm a connection to traumatic pasts that no longer seem to serve you? Why remain trapped in a perpetual state of, at worst, melancholia and, at best, the blues? Why look for the living among the dead? Fences foregrounds this question of deadly allegiances and intimacies, demonstrating how forms of black embodiment serve as a countercurrent to understandings of black people as death-­bound. From the beginning to the end of the play, time seems to be up for Troy, specifically in his relationships with his friend Bono, his wife Rose, his son Cory, and his brother Gabriel (also known as

168

Locating the Future of Black Studies

169

Gabe), who are the other central characters. Fences depicts Troy’s attempts to recoup the time he lost while incarcerated, including his time as a baseball player talented enough for the yet-­to-­be-­integrated major leagues. He fails to do so because he refuses to shift with the changing times, and by the end of the play he finds himself alienated and alone. Wilson depicts Troy’s temporal struggle, in part, through a narration of his battles with the angel of death. But given the character’s closeness to death, why look to this ostensibly socially dead figure (who physically dies at the end of the play) for signs of black social life? What are the implications of positioning the black and blackened at the center of black studies? And how does this affect our considerations of framing—­not who but where? In the valley (by some measures expansive, by others narrow) that black feminists carved out in the late twentieth century, a debate emerged between Jared Sexton and Fred Moten over the possibility of black being in the afterlife of slavery. It directly and indirectly engaged Saidiya Hartman’s claim in Lose Your Mother that “slavery had established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone.” If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-­ long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—­skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.2

Though many black studies scholars would agree that racism persists as a problem in the twenty-­first century, the question of links, particularly to slavery, remains hotly contested. Sylvia Wynter offers insight into the stakes of black studies through her use of deconstruction, which allows a visionary alternative that leaves room to imagine a social frame expansive enough to include black subjectivity. She reminds us in “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom” that the invention of Man, which stands in for but does not fully encompass the human, is the political project of the twenty-­first century: The lay world’s invention of Man as the political subject of the state . . . and its master code of symbolic life and death, as the first secular or “degodded” (if,

170

Black Movements

at the time, still only partly so) mode of being human in the history of the species, was to be effected only on the basis of what [Aníbal] Quijano identifies as the “coloniality of power,” [Walter] Mignolo as the “colonial difference,” and [Howard] Winant as a huge project demarcating human differences thinkable as a “racial longue durée.” One of the major empirical effects of which would be “the rise of Europe” and its construction of the “world civilization” on the one hand, and, on the other, African enslavement, Latin American conquest, and Asian subjugation.3

Wynter contends that the invention of Man inscribes a particular notion of the subject, the community, and the political—­“a master code of symbolic life and death.” Her use of the word invention deconstructs the relations of power that subordinate Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Her language also makes available the act of invention to theories of life and death. As I discussed in chapter 1, the Flying Africans narrative depicts enslaved Africans, tired of the oppressive conditions of slavery, flying back to Africa. The use of orature in the narrative as an organizing aesthetic that integrates word and deed challenges the temporality of the black life span by offering an afterlife to the purported social death that slavery causes. Expressions of the Flying Africans narrative transform the speaker and the listener because they require the teller to embody language and the listener to participate by filling in the gaps left by silences and omissions. If we understand life and death as the mechanisms that instantiate being and therefore enable the communal and the political, then the Flying Africans narrative disrupts such configurations at a symbolic level by extending the temporality of life beyond physical embodiment. Similarly, Wilson’s depiction of Troy’s mythic battle with death introduces an active reimagining of the black subject’s relationship to symbolic life and physical death. By equipping black folks with the ability to intercede and interrupt dying through articulation (Gabe in Fences, Berniece and Boy Willie in The Piano Lesson, King in King Hedley II, Aunt Esther in Gem of the Ocean), Wilson’s dramas present cultural practices that evidence black life and living. Though my assertion about Wilson’s drama may seem self-­evident, Jared Sexton and Huey Copeland have found it necessary to lean on Lewis Gordon’s explanation: “Blackness functions as the prime racial signifier. It is the element that enters a room and frightens Reason out. . . . The historical specificity of blackness as a point from which the greatest distance must be

Locating the Future of Black Studies

171

forged entails its status as metaphor.”4 Similarly, Sexton has opened a recent speech with a quote from Rita Dove’s poem “David Walker, 1785–­1830”: “We are the most wretched, degraded and abject set / of beings that ever lived since the world began.”5 Elsewhere I have argued that black people function as the limit point of the human—­they are what humanity defines itself against.6 The function of relation between the universal humanness of whiteness that necessitates the objecthood of blackness is at the heart of the Afro-­pessimism versus Afro-­optimism debate between Sexton and Moten. Temporal positions express the function of relation. Sexton’s categorization of the abject status of blackness aligns with Frank B. Wilderson III’s description of “the meaning of Blackness . . . as a structural position of noncommunicability in the face of all other positions.”7 From the vantage point of Afro-­pessimism, blackness functions as the object from which the subject emerges, and the permanence of objection coheres through the afterlife of slavery. The notion of the afterlife of slavery aligns with the, at times, playful but still piercing depictions of Troy negotiating equal treatment at work and in the marketplace. The opening scene of Wilson’s play introduces the audience to a weekly ritual among Troy, Bono, and Rose. Every Friday, Troy receives his pay, stops by the local bar to flirt with his mistress Alberta, and then returns home with Bono for a drink. On this particular day, Troy, Bono, and Rose discuss black people’s access to civil rights. At the beginning of the conversation, Troy dismisses the notion that he may have put his job as a sanitation worker into jeopardy by inquiring about the distribution of labor among the white and black employees. Though black men such as Troy and Bono haul and empty trash, no black men drive the trucks. As a result of his inquiry, Troy has been told to report to the commissioner’s office. Paradoxically, his ability to recognize the sanitation department’s hiring policy as unfair does not translate into a larger critique of civil rights. Additionally, he demands equal treatment at work while he scoffs at his son Cory’s desire to integrate college football. In another mismatched political allegiance, Troy considers it a sign of loyalty to pay more money for groceries at the black-­owned store than at the corporate-­owned A&P. Bono suggests that Troy’s workplace demands and Cory’s athletic aspirations exist along the same continuum. Bono and Rose assert that times have changed since the 1930s, when Troy failed to integrate major league baseball.

172

Black Movements

The structure of the opening conversation communicates Troy’s resistance to the possibility that his son may realize enfranchisement in an area that excludes the patriarch. It also anticipates the connection Troy makes between living in the white world and living with death. After he dismisses Bono’s and Rose’s suggestion that integration is occurring in Major League Baseball, Rose admonishes him: Rose: You gonna drink yourself to death. You don’t need to be drinking like that. Troy: Death ain’t nothing. I done seen him. Done wrassled with him. You can’t tell

me nothing about death. Death ain’t nothing but a fastball on the outside corner. And you know what I’ll do to that! Lookee here, Bono . . . am I lying? . . .  Troy:  .  .  . Don’t you worry about me drinking myself to death. ’Cause I ain’t worried about Death. I done seen him. I done wrestled with him. Look here, Bono . . . I looked up one day and Death was marching straight at me. Like Soldiers on Parade! The Army of Death was marching straight at me. The middle of July, 1941. It got real cold just like it be winter. It seem like Death himself reached out and touched me on the shoulder. He touch me just like I touch you. I got cold as ice and Death standing there grinning at me. Rose: Troy, why don’t you hush that talk. Troy: I say . . . What you want, Mr. Death? You be wanting me? You done brought your army to be getting me? I looked him dead in the eye. I wasn’t fearing nothing. I was ready to tangle. Just like I’m ready to tangle now. The Bible say be ever vigilant. That’s why I don’t get but so drunk. I got to keep watch. Rose: Troy was right down there in Mercy Hospital. You remember he had pneumonia? Laying there with a fever talking plumb out of his head. Troy: . . . We wrestled for three days and three nights. I can’t say where I found the strength from. Every time it seemed like he was gonna get the best of me, I’d reach way down deep inside myself and find the strength to do him one better. . . . At the end of the third night we done weakened each other to where we can’t hardly move. Death stood up, throwed on his robe . . . had him a white robe with a hood on it. He throwed on that robe and went off to look for his sickle. Say, “I’ll be back.” Just like that, “I’ll be back.” I told him, say, “Yeah, but . . . you gonna have to find me!” I wasn’t no fool. I wasn’t going looking for him. Death ain’t nothing to play with. And I know he’s gonna get me. I know I got to join his army . . . his camp followers. But as long as I keep my strength and see him coming . . . as long as I keep up my vigilance . . . he’s gonna have to fight to get me. I ain’t going easy.8

Locating the Future of Black Studies

173

Although Rose introduces the topic of Troy’s excessive drinking, Troy turns the conversation into a bravado-­filled recitation of his ongoing battle with death. His act of oration demonstrates his ability to negotiate with and forestall death. Although he concedes the inevitability of avoiding physical death, he suggests his ability to speak even in the midst of his battle. Through his enunciation of the story, he emerges as an expert storyteller and establishes the centrality of the act of narration to his ongoing battle with death. He forms his position as warrior in articulation. His enunciation establishes a struggle and delimits his position as that which is solely to be acted upon. Through an active engagement with death, at home and work, Troy circumscribes social and physical death. His role as storyteller reconfigures his position as father and links the desire for domestic ideals to social ones to demonstrate how the actor may transform the social role as the role makes demands on the actor. Fences shows how a playwright’s artistic vision translates into action—­the orating of a protagonist and the dancing of a secondary character in the play—­that extends beyond the political frame of civil rights movement politics. Troy’s attempts to work within the system to garner equal treatment render meaningful results, but those payoffs in the play must be read against his persistent battles with the angel of death and the impossibilities that his brother Gabe makes available in the final scene of the play. Troy acts as a surrogate reprising his first battle with death (which, according to Rose, changes with each reiteration) to affirm his ability to see death coming and to quiet his overriding fear of blind spots. He fears what he cannot anticipate or refuses to anticipate, and he attempts to manage the fear by establishing the rules of the game (in the role he plays at work, the dynamics of his household, and his relationship with Alberta). His desire to augment existing structures triggers his downfall because such longing must be met within the given framework. Troy himself relates the manifestation of death to a recognizable symbol of racism, a white robe with a hood, thus establishing the antiblack world as deadly for black people—­the same world he hopes to augment. Troy’s depiction of his battle with death coincides with a fight for civil rights, thereby seeming to affirm Sexton’s rhetorical query “what [does] it [mean] to speak of ‘the tragic continuity between slavery and freedom’ or ‘the incomplete nature of emancipation,’ indeed to speak of about a type of living on that survives after a type of death”? In Sexton’s formulation,

174

Black Movements

being as a black subject is synonymous with social death and manifests in “the convergence of the private property regime and the invention of racial blackness (which is to say the invention of antiblackness in the invention of whiteness, which cannot but become immediately a more generalized nonblackness).”9 The notion that social death coheres in relation to the invention of whiteness and the ongoing legislation of nonblackness establishes the difficulty of black social life. Moten offers an alternative analysis of the status of black being that locates the presence of the black subject in the sound of a radical tradition, which precedes slavery, runs through it, and continues to resound in its afterlife. “[He] hold[s] the force of black agency to be logically and ontologically prior to the construction of a social order characterized by anti-­blackness—­‘the resistance that constitutes constraint,’ as he phrases it elsewhere.”10 Given Moten’s notion of the tenor of black personhood, one may listen differently to the story that Troy tells and the social status he occupies. As an ex-­convict, a manipulative brother, an emotionally unavailable father (at least to his sons), and a philandering husband, Troy exists in liminal space, alienated from all the markers of the so-­called good life in midcentury America. However, he also claims the distinction of being the only black sanitation worker in his unit to drive a truck. His practices, whether through his articulation of his battle with the angel of death or his demand for equal consideration at work, move him out of the status of object, an impossibility within Sexton’s formulation of blackness. According to Sexton, “what qualifies the condition of the slave is a suffering that not only wrecks the coordinates of any humanism but also, for the same reason, precludes the generation of a proper political demand directed at a definable object or objective. What is produced instead is an abstract political insistence—­a politics of the (death) drive.”11 Conversely, Moten demonstrates in his reading of Marx that objects do not speak.12 Moreover, to clarify an understanding of blackness that resists the totalization of objectification, he asserts in “Magic of Objects”: The eclipse of objects by practices is a head. . . . (Afro-­diasporic) performances are resistances of the object and the object is in that it resists. . . . If we understand race, class, gender, and sexuality as the materiality of social identity, as the surplus effect and condition of possibility of production, then we can also

Locating the Future of Black Studies

175

understand the ongoing, resistive force of such materiality as it plays itself out in an[d] as the work of art.13

Moten explains how race, class, gender, and sexuality operate in excess of the production of social identity. As I have argued throughout this book, an unaccounted-­for aspect of blackness pressures theories of identity as the accumulation of repeated acts. This surplus blackness troubles the logics of accumulation, functioning like a work of art, operating in addition to the use value essential to the commodity. Theorizing black performance requires attending to the practices that disrupt the progressive logic of accumulation. In Fences, Troy’s status certifies the impossibility of black social life within the frame and the impossibility of rendering a man an object, which calls for a reconsideration of the afterlife of slavery and the impenetrability of the frame itself. Moten’s analysis suggests that the relationship between ontology and aesthetics interrupts the finality of death and makes black performance capable of loosening the grip of social death. The act of being in relation to the speaking object transforms the object into a thing and undermines the totalizing impulse of slavery. Wilson’s drama, however, offers an alternative entry point to black social life through the figure that exceeds reason. In locating black social life and imagining a future that entails black life and living, how do we account for the unreasonable, the unimaginable, and the impossible? At the end of Fences, Gabe, a mentally disabled World War II veteran, performs a ritual transcending the metaphysical divide that drives the generational conflict in the play. During the war, he had suffered an injury, and doctors had to put a metal plate into his head. Afterward, the army discharged him, giving him compensation but no social support system. Gabe’s situation calls attention to the circumstances of black veterans who defended American democracy only to return to racial discrimination at home, where he is an outcast in both his community and his family. As Troy recalls, “man go over there and fight the war . . . messing around with them Japs, get half his head blown off . . . and they give him a lousy three thousand dollars. And I had to swoop down on that” (128). Elam writes, “Significantly, the money the government provided Gabe after his war injury becomes the financing for Troy’s home. ‘That’s the only way I got a roof over my head . . . cause of that metal plate . . . If my brother didn’t have

176

Black Movements

that metal plate in his head . . . I wouldn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.’ Thus, Gabe’s disability is materially connected to the well-­being of his family.”14 When Rose learns that Troy has had Gabe committed and that the government will send half of his monthly disability check to the hospital and the other half to Troy, she confronts her husband. Although he denies signing the commitment papers, she warns, “You went back on yourself, Troy. You gonna have to answer for that” (75). He has driven a wedge between himself and his family members that forces him to fight death alone. Troy’s betrayals require him to navigate the vicissitudes of life, what he calls “the fastball on the outside corner,” in isolation (89). But Gabe does not leave his brother alone to navigate his transition to the other world. Paradoxically, the same factor—­Gabe’s mental disability and resulting spiritual acuity—­that enables Troy to take advantage of his brother also allows Gabe to intervene on Troy’s behalf. Though Fences seems to follow the conventional mandates of realism, it uses Troy’s struggle with death to insert a metaphysical quality that disrupts formal conventions and specifies Wilson’s aesthetic project. In the final scene, the family gathers to prepare for Troy’s funeral. Gabe, who is last to arrive, summons his heretofore undemonstrated metaphysical powers to open heaven’s gates. In his first attempt, according to the stage directions, Gabriel, with great fanfare, braces himself to blow. The trumpet is without a mouthpiece. He puts the end of it into his mouth and blows with great force, like a man who has been waiting some twenty-­odd years for this single moment. No sound comes out of the trumpet. He braces himself and blows again with the same result. A third time he blows. There is a weight of impossible description that falls away and leaves him bare and exposed to a frightful realization. It is a trauma that a sane and normal mind would be unable to withstand. (101)

Gabe’s apparent failure to open heaven’s gate draws attention to the singularity of his mental state and the fact that his madness uniquely enables him to “‘heal’ the cultural dis-­ease of the Maxson family.”15 Wilson writes, “He begins . . a dance of atavistic signature ritual. Lyons attempts to embrace him. Gabriel pushes Lyons away. He begins to howl in what is an

Locating the Future of Black Studies

177

attempt at song, or perhaps a song turning back into itself in an attempt at speech. He finishes his dance and the gates of heaven stand open as wide as God’s closet.” Gabe declares, “That’s the way that go!” (101). In the 2006 Pasadena Playhouse production of Fences, Orlando Jones played Gabe and in the final scene enacted an erratic dance that culminated with his looking up to the rafters as a spotlight suddenly shone on him, as if the ceiling of the theater had been removed and the sunlight were suddenly pouring in. The effect, alongside his assertion “That’s the way that go!” and the subsequent immediate blackout on stage, creates a feeling that the theater space has been transformed, that Gabe’s performance has altered the structure of the theater. Gabe’s alternative consciousness exists along a continuum, balancing out Troy’s assertion in the first scene that he has seen and wrestled with death. Although Gabe’s intervention may be read as a case of deus ex machina, Wilson’s inclusion of the metaphysical also draws attention to the limitations of perception when fenced in by the singular logic of liberal progressivism. Just as Troy troubles his alienation from social and professional rights through acts of narration, Gabe counters his communal alienation through a transformative dance. His performance in the final scene affirms his unreason within the logics of the law, but it also disrupts the subject-­ object relations that silence black subjects. In Wilson’s drama, the seamless inclusion of the metaphysical world through song, storytelling, and dance embraces the impossible in order to reframe the boundaries of possibility. Fences offers a glimpse of a world unframed.

Acknowledgments

Writing a book is a collective process in which the writer incurs many debts. I began writing Black Movements as a junior faculty member at Dartmouth College. Subsequently, each chapter of the manuscript was presented at the Futures of American Studies Institute and was enriched by the feedback I received from the institute’s director, Donald Pease, and its co-­directors Colleen Boggs, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Winfried Fluck, Donatella Izzo, and Eric Lott. In addition, the institute’s faculty—­including but not limited to Sandy Alexandre, Aimee Bahng, Stephen Best, Anthony Bogues, Hamilton Carroll, Michael Chaney, Duncan Faherty, Cindi Katz, Heather Love, Lisa Lower, Annie McClanahan, Paula Moya, Alan Nadel, John Carlos Rowe, Ivy Schweitzer, Caleb Smith, and Hortense Spillers—­offered robust feedback that shifted my thinking and helped to shape the project. I am also indebted to the institute’s participants for their thoughtful questions and suggestions as well as their rich and inspiring work. Colleagues at other institutions also invited me to workshop chapters of the manuscript, and the responses I received triggered critical conversations that have informed my thinking. I am thankful for the feedback, engagement, and encouragement I received at Northeastern University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Bergen in Norway, Duke University, Brown University, Rutgers University, Boston College, Vanderbilt University, and the Black Performance Theory Group’s meeting at New York University. I am grateful to my supportive and engaged colleagues and students at Dartmouth College and Georgetown University, many of whom responded helpfully to this project. These friends and students inspire me every day. I appreciate the support and assistance of Duke University Press for permission to reprint a revised version of chapter 1. I thank Leslie Mitchner, the acquisitions editor at Rutgers University Press, and Lisa Banning, the press’s assistant editor, for carefully shepherding the book through each stage of its development. I am also grateful to Chester Gillis, dean of Georgetown 179

180 Acknowledgments

University’s College, who provided financial support. In addition, I thank the many friends who read, discussed, and offered feedback about the project: Aliyyah Abdur-­R ahman, Michael Awkward, Nicole Aljoe, Jennifer Brody, Daphne Brooks, Jayna Brown, Patricia Herrera, Meta DuEwa Jones, Douglas Jones, Erica Edwards, Harry Elam, Jr., Michele Elam, Nicole Fleetwood, Françoise Hamlin, Aida Levy-­Hussen, Régine Jean-­Charles, E. Patrick Johnson, Monica White Ndouou, Tavia Nyong’o, Robert Patterson, Russell Rickford, Tricia Rose, Naaborko Sackeyfio, Evie Shockley, Salamishah Tillet, Cheryl Wall, Corey Walker, Michelle Wallace, Harvey Young, and Melissa Zeiger. I am indebted to my family for giving me the room to create and to be me. This book would not be possible without the unconditional love of my parents, R. Harrington and Joanne Diggs; the support and insight of my siblings, Diallyo Diggs and Rakiya Diggs; and the joyful conversations I had with my nephew, Diallyo Diggs, Jr. Finally, I offer my deepest gratitude to my perfect opposite and partner in all things, Rodger Colbert. Your conversation, tough love, compassion, curiosity, and intuition made this work possible. Thank you!

Notes

Introduction 1 Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon, 2002), xii. 2 Quentin Tarantino begins his exploration into revenge fantasy with Kill Bill, part 1 (Burbank, Calif: Miramax, 2004), DVD; and continues it in Inglourious Basterds (Burbank, Calif.: Universal Studios, 2009), DVD. 3 Quentin Tarantino, dir., Django Unchained (Burbank, Calif.: Weinstein/Columbia Pictures, 2012), streaming. 4 I characterize the final scene as fantastic because, in order to produce the satisfaction at the heart of the revenge fantasy, it must draw on the temporal malleability of black performance that allows black people to be simultaneously seen as twenty-­first-­ century neoliberal subjects and slaves. See J. Douglas Allen-­Taylor, “The Duality of Violence in Django,” and Houston Baker, “Innocent Plantation Seductions: Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained,” both in Black Hollywood Unchained: Commentary on the State of Black Hollywood, ed. Ishmael Reed (Chicago: Third World, 2015), 30–­31. Baker’s essay disrupts the central fantasy of the film, explaining, “First note: Tarantino’s protagonist, Django, is legally as much a slave at the close of the film as at its commencement. Second note: Broomhilda and Django are located in Mississippi plantation country when they ride into a Deep South sunset at the film’s close. There two notes are relevant to an understanding of the legal take away from the discourse of plantation seduction. In that discourse, slave women have no legal rights that a white (or black) man is bound to respect” (33). 5 On Django’s transition from slave to bounty hunter, see Michael K. Johnson, “The D Is Silent: Django Unchained and the African American West,” Safundi 16, no. 3 (2015): 256–­266. On how Django accrues value via his transformation, see William Brown, “Value and Violence in Django Unchained,” in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained: The Continuation of Meta Cinema, ed. Oliver C. Speck (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 163–­165. 6 For more on the limitations of the black heroic figure, see Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Verso Classics, 1999); and Lily 181

182 Notes to Pages 2–4 Saint, “Response: ‘Why Slavery Now?’: Django Unchained As a History of the Present,” Safundi 16, no. 3 (2015): 308–­309. 7 The superhero figure is similar to what journalist David Ehrenstein describes as “the Magic Negro.” In an editorial about then-­senator Barack Obama he explains, “The Magic Negro is a figure of postmodern folk culture, coined by snarky 20th century sociologists, to explain a cultural figure who emerged in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. ‘He has no past, he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist.’  .  .  . He’s there to assuage white ‘guilt’ (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest.” Like the Magic Negro’s, Django’s characterization requires that he attenuate the hold of slavery, which the film facilitates by packaging his story within the genre of a spaghetti western. Django’s character differs, however, in that he does not serve a supporting role but functions to assuage black guilt over the history of slavery and its seeming predictive function that relegates black heroes to supporting roles (“Obama the ‘Magic Negro,’” Los Angeles Times, March 19, 2007, http:// www.latimes.com/la-­oe-­ehrenstein19mar19-­story.html, accessed February 21, 2015). 8 In his 1985 essay “Here Be Dragons,” James Baldwin explains the relationship between particular expressions of masculinity and national identity: “The American ideal, then, of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This ideal has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden—­as an unpatriotic act—­that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood” (reprinted in Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-­Sheftall [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001], 208). 9 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “12 Years a Slave and the African Americans,” Time, October 22, 2013, http://entertainment.time.com/2013/10/22/henry-­louis-­gates-­jr-­ talks-­12-­years-­a-­slave-­and-­the-­african-­americans/, accessed February 20, 2015. 1 0 On how Django’s individualism enables his heroism, see Johnson, “The D Is Silent,” 263–­264. 1 1 On how the category of postmodern literature relates to post–­civil rights literature, see Salamishah Tillet, Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–­Civil Rights Imagination (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 1–­18. 1 2 For a detailed intersectional analysis of black leadership historically and in the post–­civil rights period, see Erica R. Edwards, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); and Robert J. Patterson, Exodus Politics: Civil Rights and Leadership in African American Literature and Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013). 1 3 Spike Lee, dir., 4 Little Girls (Burbank, Calif.: HBO Documentary Film/40 Acres & a Mule Filmworks, 2010), DVD.

Notes to Pages 4–9

183

1 4 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 196. 1 5 In “On Failing to Make the Past Present,” Stephen Best critiques projects of memory that reduce the black past to that of slavery. While I agree that slavery does not encompass black pasts, it does come to stand in for the extreme case of black suffering and therefore is a contested ground in the post–­civil rights era artists’ relationship to blackness (Modern Language Quarterly 73 [September 2012]: 453–­474). 1 6 Farah Jasmine Griffin, Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics during World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 16–­17, Kindle ed. 1 7 Ibid. 1 8 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990; reprint, New York: Routledge, 1999); Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-­ Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003); and Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–­1910 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006). 1 9 D. Soyini Madison, “Foreword,” in Black Performance Theory, ed. Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), viii. 2 0 Judith Butler. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phe nomenology and Feminist Theory,” in The Performance Studies Reader, ed. Henry Bial (New York: Routledge, 2007), 154. 2 1 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 3. 2 2 In Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Global California, Ruth Wilson Gilmore contends that the prison industrial complex exploded in the 1980s with the aid of legislation and deregulation in the 1970s that offered “partial geographical solutions to political economic crises, organized by the state, which itself [was] in crisis” ([Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007], 26). In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander argues that the prison industrial complex takes the place of segregation as a means to regulate people of color. As her subtitle suggests, volitional acts rather than color cause geographic and social exclusion (New York: New Press, 2012). 2 3 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (March 2005): 1234. 2 4 Abdul R. JanMohamed, The Death-­Bound-­Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), Kindle ed. 2 5 Following Patterson in Exodus Politics (9), I seek to uncover the ways in which artists of the late twentieth century expanded on and engaged with the multiple and diverse political projects of the classical phase of the civil rights movement. Unlike him, I do distinguish between cultural production before and after the civil rights movement because I aim to highlight what distinguishes the context of black expressive culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries.

184 Notes to Pages 9-13 2 6 In Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century America, Saidiya Hartman makes a similar point: “In considering the determinations and limits of practice it becomes evident that resistances are engendered in everyday forms of practice and that these resistances are excluded from the locus of the ‘political proper.’ Both aspects of this assessment are significant because too often the interventions and challenges of the dominated have been obscured when measured against the traditional notions of the political and its central features: the unencumbered self, the citizen, the self-­possessed individual, and the volitional and autonomous subject. The importance of the concept of practice is that it enables us to recognize the agency of the dominated and the limited and transient nature of that agency” ([Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997], 61). 2 7 See, for example, Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 21–­23. 2 8 Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement,” 1249. 2 9 Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 172. 3 0 Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), x, xv. 3 1 Ferguson, The Reorder of Things, 190, 192. 3 2 On the unfinished business of civil rights movement freedom dreams as they relate to a critique of capitalism, see Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon, 2002); and Patterson, Exodus Politics, chap. 4. 3 3 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967), 110. 3 4 Similarly, Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection does not disallow black subjectivity, though it is often used to support claims for the impossibility of black ontology. It does, however, call into question the nature of the black subject within the context of the brutal and quotidian terror of slavery: “The particular status of the slave as object and as subject requires a careful consideration of the notion of agency if one wants to do more than ‘endow’ the enslaved with agency as some sort of gift dispensed by historians and critics to the dispossessed” (54). Hartman allows the slave subjectivity, although she severely circumscribes the exercise of agency. The distinction between circumscription and outright denial matters significantly to theories of black life conceptualized in social contexts teeming with anti-­black racism and the physical violence that sustains it. 3 5 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 111. 3 6 Ibid., 112. 3 7 Gina Dent, “Black Pleasure, Black Joy: An Introduction,” in Black Popular Cul ture, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1998), 7. 3 8 Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50 (spring 2008): 187. 3 9 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 119. 4 0 I am borrowing from David Scott’s analysis of liberalism and neoliberalism (“The Government of Freedom,” in New Caribbean Thought: A Reader, ed. Brian Meeks

Notes to Pages 13–20

185

and Folke Lindahl [Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2001], 431). 4 1 David L. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), Kindle ed. 4 2 Frank B. Wilderson III, “Grammar and Ghosts: The Performative Limits of African Freedom,” Theatre Survey 50 (May 2009): 123. 4 3 Thelma Golden, “Post . . . ,” in Freestyle, ed. Christine Y. Kim and Franklin Sirmans (New York: Studio Museum of Harlem, 2001), 14. 4 4 Hamza Walker, “Renigged,” in ibid., 16. 4 5 Amiri Baraka, “Black Fire: A New Introduction,” in Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-­American Writing, ed. Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal (Baltimore: Black Classics Press, 2007), xvii–­x x. 4 6 Gene Andrew Jarrett, Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 7. 4 7 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Gene Andrew Jarrett, eds., “Introduction,” in The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–­1938 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 7. 4 8 According to J. A. Mbembé, myths perpetuate madness and therefore, within western episteme, disqualify themselves from the political. He argues in “Necropolitics” that “the basis of a distinction between reason and unreason (passion, fantasy) [is] that late-­modern criticism has been able to articulate a certain idea of the political, the community, the subject—­or, more fundamentally, of what the good life is all about, how to achieve it, and, in the process, to become a fully moral agent. Within this paradigm, reason is the truth of the subject and politics is the exercise of reason in the public sphere. The exercise of reason is tantamount to the exercise of freedom, a key element for individual autonomy. The romance of sovereignty, in this case, rests on the belief that the subject is the master and the controlling author of his or her own meaning” (Public Culture 15 [winter 2003]: 13). 4 9 Tony Kushner, Angels in America. Part One: Millennium Approaches (New York: Theater Communications Group, 1993), 219. 5 0 Madison, “Foreword,” vii. 5 1 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997). 5 2 Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez, “Introduction: From ‘Negro Expression’ to ‘Black Performance,’” in Black Performance Theory, 6. 5 3 Madison, “Foreword,” viii. 5 4 DeFrantz and Gonzalez, “Introduction,” 6. 5 5 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 2. 5 6 Cheryl A. Wall, Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 11. 5 7 Ibid., 12. 5 8 Nadine George-­ Graves, “Diasporic Spidering: Constructing Contemporary Black Identities,” in Black Performance Theory, 33–­44.

186 Notes to Pages 20–28 5 9 Ibid., 35–­36. 6 0 Ibid., 36. 6 1 Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). 6 2 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 4. 6 3 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 255. 6 4 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1955; reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1995), 581. 6 5 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 27–­28. 6 6 Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., “On Prophecy and Critical Intelligence,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 32 (May 2011): 108, 105.

Chapter 1

Flying Africans in Spaceships

1 Jay-­Z and Kanye West, “Murder to Excellence,” Watch the Throne (New York: Roc-­A-­Fella Records, Roc Nation, and Def Jam Recordings, 2011), iTunes. 2 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 4–­5. 3 Ibid., 4, 13. 4 Alexander Weheliye, “‘Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Music,” Social Text 20 (summer 2002): 23. 5 There are several black diasporic articulations of the Flying Africans narrative that I do not explore because they do not draw attention to iteration as an essential part of the narrative, align with the structure of the narrative as outlined in the beginning of the chapter, or offer insight into the production of the cybernetic post-­human. I did not include others because existing case studies cover similar ground. See, for example, Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada (New York: Scribner, 1998); Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow (New York: Plume); Julie Dash, dir., Daughters of the Dust (New York: Kino International, 1991), Amazon video; and Nalo Hopkinson Midnight Robber (New York: Warner, 2000). 6 See Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–­1910 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 9–­10; and Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 7 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 91. 8 Weheliye, “Feenin,” 22.

Notes to Pages 28–33

187

9 Cornel West, “Black Spiritual Strivings in a Twilight Civilization,” in The Future of the Race, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cornel West (New York: Vintage, 1996), 81. 1 0 D. Soyini Madison, “That Was My Occupation: Oral Narrative, Performance, and Black Feminist Thought,” in Exceptional Spaces: Essays in Performance and History, ed. Della Pollack (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 322. 1 1 Harryette Mullen, “African Signs and Spirit Writing,” Callaloo 19, no. 3 (1996): 670–­671. 1 2 See Meta Du Ewa Jones, “Jazz Prosodies: Orality and Textuality,” Callaloo 25, no. 1 (2002): 66–­91; and Brent Hayes Edwards, “Introduction,” Callaloo 25, no. 1 (2002): 5–­7. 1 3 Gayl Jones, Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3. 1 4 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 117. 1 5 Ibid., 119. 1 6 Dwight Conquergood, “Rethinking Elocution: The Trope of the Talking Book and Other Figures of Speech,” in Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis, ed. E. Patrick Johnson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 110. 1 7 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-­ Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 12. 1 8 Edwards, “Introduction,” 6. 1 9 Susan L. Blake details the influence of Drums and Shadows on Morrison’s novel (“Folklore and Community in Song of Solomon,” MELUS 7 [autumn 1980]: 77–­ 82). Olivia Smith Storey makes a corresponding argument (“Flying Words: Contests of Orality and Literacy in the Trope of the Flying Africans,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 5 [winter 2004]: n.p.). 2 0 Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 130. 2 1 Works Progress Administration (WPA), Georgia Writers’ Project, Savannah Unit, Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1940), 67. 2 2 Ibid. 2 3 Ibid., 17. 2 4 Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, eds., “All God’s Chillen Had Wings,” in The Book of Negro Folklore (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1958), 62. 2 5 Ibid., 63. 2 6 Ibid. 2 7 Jennifer DeVere Brody, “The Blackness of Blackness . . . Reading the Typography of Invisible Man,” Theatre Journal 57, no. 4 (2005): 680. 2 8 Ibid., 687–­688. 2 9 Jones, “Jazz Prosodies,” 66.

188 Notes to Pages 33–41 3 0 WPA, Drums and Shadows, xlii. 3 1 J. A. Mbembé, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15 (winter 2003): 11. 3 2 Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 120. 3 3 Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak! (New York: Vintage, 1996). Danticat also uses the imagery of butterflies throughout the collection to symbolize the dynamics of flight, a depiction that resonates with soul singer Erykah Badu’s iconography but has implications that are different from human flight’s. 3 4 Jana Evans Braziel, “Défilée’s Diasporic Daughters: Revolutionary Narratives of Ayiti (Haiti), Nanchon (Nation), and Dyspora (Diaspora) in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 37 (fall 2004): 79. 3 5 Ibid. 3 6 Danticat, Krik? Krak!, 33. Further references to the collection will be cited parenthetically in the text. 3 7 Braziel, “Re-­ membering Défilée: Dédée Bazile As Revolutionary Lieu de Mémoire,” Small Axe 18 (September 2005): 79. 3 8 Conquergood, “Rethinking Elocution,” 147. 3 9 Rocio G. Davis, “Oral Narratives As Short Story Cycle: Forging Community in Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Krik? Krak!’” MELUS 26 (summer 2001): 67. Also see Nick Nesbitt, “Diasporic Politics: Danticat’s Short Works,” in Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, ed. Martin Munro (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 73–­85. 4 0 Davis, “Oral Narratives,” 68. 4 1 Ibid., 67. 4 2 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 72. 4 3 Jane Evans Braziel, Caribbean Genesis: Jamaica Kincaid and the Writing of New Worlds (Albany: State University of New York, 2009), 77. 4 4 Wilson C. Chen, “Figures of Flight and Entrapment in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!,” Rocky Mountain Review 65 (spring 2011): 49. 4 5 Diana Taylor’s seminal study, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, considers how the evidentiary preeminence of the archive impoverishes other modes of evidence crucial to ethnic studies scholarship (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003). 4 6 Braziel, “Défilée’s Diasporic Daughters,” 80. 4 7 Colin Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 40. 4 8 Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 16. 4 9 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013), 176.

Notes to Pages 41–51

189

5 0 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Echo” (1993), in The Spivak Reader: The Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ed. Donna Landry and Gerald MacClean (New York: Routledge, 1996), 178. 5 1 Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Vintage, 2004), 9. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 5 2 Edwards, “Introduction,” 6. 5 3 Claudia Tate, ed., Black Women Writers at Work (New York: Continuum, 1983), 126. 5 4 Toni Morrison, “The Reader as Artist,” O Magazine ( July 2006), http://www. oprah.com/omagazine/Toni-­Morrison-­on-­Reading, accessed January 8, 2013. 5 5 Ibid. 5 6 Mbembé, “Necropolitics,” 11. 5 7 Spivak, “Echo,” 183. 5 8 Here, I use subjection to refer to the process of making a subject and one subject to power. 5 9 Tim Story, Barbershop (Beverly Hills, Calif.: MGM Studios, 2016), DVD. Melissa Harris-­Lacewell considers the barbershop as a locale for black political theory and an ideologically diverse counterpublic (Barbershops, Bibles, and BET [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006]). 6 0 John Szwed, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (Boston: Da Capo, 1998), 330. 6 1 John Coney, dir., Space Is the Place (New York: Plexifilm, 2003), DVD. 6 2 Ibid. 6 3 Ibid. 6 4 As Monica Miller explicates in Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, style situates individuals within a tradition and marks innovation in self-­fashioning. It may seek to produce a counterpublic and functions as one of the few arenas in which black cultural producers are recognizably at the vanguard (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009). 6 5 Denise Albanese, New Science, New World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 28. 6 6 Elin Diamond, “Modern Drama/Modernity’s Drama,” in Modern Drama: Defining the Field, ed. Ric Knowles, Joanne Tompkins, and W. B. Worthen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 7. 6 7 I borrow the phrase “the stolen’s stealth appropriation” from Fred Moten’s description of the “stealth of the stolen” (“The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50 [spring 2008]: 179). 6 8 Harry J. Elam, Jr., The Past As Present in the Drama of August Wilson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 7. Also see Mark Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 6 9 Elam, The Past As Present, 7. 7 0 Ken McLeod, “Space Oddities: Aliens, Futurism, and Meaning in Popular Music,” Popular Music 22, no. 3 (2003): 343.

190 Notes to Pages 52–58 7 1 Parliament uses the imagery of the Mothership in Mothership Connection (1976), which Rolling Stone has named one of the five hundred best albums of all time. Hip hop audiences most readily associate the sound of Mothership Connection with samples used in Dr. Dre’s multiplatinum album The Chronic. The focus on drug culture in Dre’s album, however, minimizes the powerful imagery of Mothership Connection. 7 2 John Corbett, Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 17. 7 3 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4. 7 4 Corbett, Extended Play, 17–­18. 7 5 Molly Glentzer, “The Steps That Made Him Great,” Houston Chronicle, July 2, 2009, 1. 7 6 Michael Jackson, Moonwalk (New York: Harmony Books, 1988), 210. 7 7 See Sally Banes, Writing Dance in the Age of Postmodernism (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994); and Glentzer, “The Steps That Made Him Great.” 7 8 Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 214–­215. 7 9 Kanye West, College Dropout (New York: Roc-­A-­Fella Records and Def Jam Recordings, 2004), iTunes. 8 0 McLeod, “Space Oddities,” 345. 8 1 West, “I’ll Fly Away,” on College Dropout. 8 2 West, “Spaceship,” on College Dropout. 8 3 West, College Dropout. 8 4 Barbara Kiviat, “10 Questions for Kanye West,” Time, December 17, 2004, http:// www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1009743,00.html, accessed October 10, 2011. 8 5 West, “Spaceship,” on College Dropout. 8 6 Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 202.

Chapter 2 Trapping Entanglements 1 The epigraph quotes Audre Lorde, Conversations with Audre Lorde, ed. John Wylie Hall ( Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004), 91. 2 I borrow the term temporal drag from Elizabeth Freeman’s theorization of political practices across generations of lesbians. She argues, “It may be crucial to complicate the idea of horizontal political generations succeeding one another, with a notion of ‘temporal drag,’ thought less in the psychic time of the individual than in the movement time of collective political life.” Freeman’s theory accounts for how sexuality geared toward reproduction, cultural or otherwise, installs an

Notes to Page 61

191

inheritance model of temporality (Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010], Kindle ed., 729). 3 Sara L. Warner, “Suzan-­Lori Parks’s Drama of Disinterment: A Transnational Exploration of Venus,” Theatre Journal 60 (May 2008): 183–­185. 4 T. Denean Sharpley-­W hiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 18–­21. 5 Although Baartman’s proportions were considered freakish in the nineteenth century, many popular cultural icons of the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries are branding themselves based on similar bodily proportions, including Trinidadian-­American rapper, singer, and songwriter Nicki Minaj and reality television star Kim Kardashian. 6 In 1927, the French dance critic André Levinson famously wrote, “Miss Baker’s poses, back arched, haunches protruding, arms entwined and uplifted in a phallic symbol, had the compelling potency of the finest examples of Negro sculpture” (quoted in Karen Dalton and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African American Dance Seen through Parisian Eyes,” Critical Inquiry 24 [summer 1998]: 914). Although Levinson’s language attempts to freeze Baker in time, the signature circle of bananas swinging from her hips emphasizes her body in motion and resists any static depiction of her. In the same vein, Z. S. Strother has described Baartman’s resistance to being displayed: “Said female at one time appeared very morose and sullen and retired into the little recess off the stage and appeared unwilling to come out again when called by the Exhibitor and the Exhibitor felt it necessary on that occasion to let down a curtain which when drawn separates the stage and little recess from the other part of this room” (“Display of the Body Hottentot,” in Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business, ed. Bernth Lindfors [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999], 45). Baartman and Baker reframe the scenes of their representation. Nevertheless, I purposefully refer to colonial perspectives to emphasize the constant tightrope of identifications they walked as objects and subjects of representation. Feminist scholars Daphne A. Brooks (“The End of the Line: Josephine Baker and the Politics of Black Women’s Corporeal Comedy,” Scholar and Feminist Online 6 [fall 2007–­spring 2008], http://sfonline.barnard.edu/baker/brooks_01.htm, accessed September 1, 2016) and Anthea Kraut (“Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The Dance Performances of Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Katherine Dunham,” Theatre Journal 55 [October 2003]: 433–­450) rightly argue that Baker’s performances have a subversive quality. Also see Bennetta Jules-­ Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 50–­51, 178. Several scholars have worked to redeem Baartman, including T. Denean Sharpley-­ W hiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), and Michele Wallace, Dark Designs and Visual Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004). In contrast, Parks’s work seeks to

192 Notes to Pages 61–65 enact a mode of aesthetic transgression that displaces some of the scopic gaze perpetually used at the site of the figure and her likeness. 7 I borrow the language of the bottom from Parks’s comments about the play in Una Chaudhuri, “For Posterior’s Sake: An Interview with Suzan-­Lori Parks,” in Venus [playbill of the Public Theater] (April 1996), 26, 30, and Brooks, “The End of the Line.” 8 Chaudhuri, “For Posterior’s Sake,” 26, 30. 9 Soyica Diggs Colbert, The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 1 0 Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Cultures (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 59, 60. 1 1 Chapter 2 of Christina Sharpe’s Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-­Slavery Subjects (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), considers how artists and theorist reenact the “biologizing of Baartman commonly summoned up in descriptions of her even by those writers who locate her display within a nexus of factors that includes scientific racism and who work to correct the syntax of illness and pathology that attaches to her” (Kindle ed., 87). Sharpe draws attention to the way in which approximations of freedom often entail demonization of those around you. In the work of Parks, Beyoncé, and Fusco, I (alternatively) read a purposeful engagement with figures as a way to question the easy refusal of bodies seen in relation to those of the performers. The staged approximation troubles the divide enacted in the biologizing of Baartman and creates a strategic encounter. 1 2 Robyn Wiegman, Object Lessons (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), chap. 1. 1 3 Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature? (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011), 119. 1 4 Wiegman, Object Lessons, 93. 1 5 My definition entwines the theories in Richard Schechner’s Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 36; and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 5. 1 6 In “Necropolitics,” J. A. Mbembé explains “the relation between terror, freedom, and sacrifice.” He asserts that “Martin Heidegger argues that the human’s ‘being toward death’ is the decisive condition of all true human freedom. In other words, one is free to live one’s own life only because one is free to die one’s own death. Whereas Heidegger grants an existential status to being-­toward-­death and considers it an event of freedom, Bataille suggests that ‘sacrifice in reality reveals nothing.’ It is not simply the absolute manifestation of negativity. It is also a comedy. For Bataille, death reveals the human subject’s animal side, which he refers to moreover as the subject’s ‘natural being.’ ‘For man to reveal himself in the end, he has to die, but he will have to do so while alive—­by looking at himself ceasing to exist,’ he adds. In other words, the human subject has to be fully alive at the very moment of dying, to be aware of his or her death, to live with the impression of

Notes to Pages 65–72

193

actually dying. Death itself must become awareness of the self at the very time that it does away with the conscious being” (Public Culture 15 [winter 2003]: 37–­38). 1 7 Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 2. 1 8 Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934), in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 79. 1 9 Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 190, 192. 2 0 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861; reprint, Radford, Va.: Wilder, 2008), 207. 2 1 Ibid., 136. 2 2 Warren, What Was African American Literature?, 84. 2 3 Cheryl A. Wall, Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 28, 167. 2 4 Roopali Mukherjee, The Racial Order of Things: Cultural Imaginaries of the Post-­ Soul Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), intro. 2 5 The language of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (New York: Vintage, 2004) complicates the idea of negotiating the past. Beginning with the dedication of the novel to “Sixty Million and More,” Morrison establishes death, specifically the lives lost en route to the Americas, as a central concern of the novel. Drawing inspiration from the story of Margaret Garner, she tells the tale of Sethe, who, in the space of a few moments, must decide whether to return to the plantation where she was raped and dehumanized with her children or to protect them from slavery by killing them. 2 6 These strategies are similar to what Arlene Keizer describes in “Gone Astray in the Flesh: Kara Walker, Black Women Writers, and African American Postmemory” (PMLA 123 [October 2008]: 1649–­1672). However, her historical frame considers artistic production in the wake of the civil rights movement, whereas I am more interested in artists who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s. 2 7 Mark Anthony Neal, Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-­Soul Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 2002), 9. 2 8 James Baldwin and Margaret Meade, A Rap on Race (New York: Dell, 1971), 188. 2 9 Trey Ellis, “The New Black Aesthetic,” Callaloo 38 (winter 1989): 237. 3 0 Thomas F. DeFrantz, “Performing the Breaks: Notes on African American Aes thetic Structures,” Theater 40 (November 2010): 31. 3 1 Ibid. 3 2 Harry J. Elam, Jr. and Alice Rayner, “Body Parts: Between Story and Spectacle in Venus by Suzan-­Lori Parks,” in Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theater, ed. Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 266. For a useful reading of the history and use of spectacle in theater, see

194 Notes to Pages 72–79 Baz Kershaw, “Curiosity or Contempt: On Spectacle, the Human, and Activism,” Theatre Journal 55, no. 4 (2003): 591–­611. 3 3 Jean Young, “The Re-­Objectification and Re-­Commodification of Saartjie Baartman in Suzan-­Lori Parks’s Venus,” African American Review 31 (winter 1997): 699–­708. 3 4 Michele Wallace, “The Hottentot Venus,” Village Voice, May 21, 1996, 31. 3 5 Suzan-­Lori Parks, Venus (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1990), 74. Further references to Venus will be cited parenthetically in the text. 3 6 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-­Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 123; Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 77. 3 7 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 2011), intro.; Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 79. 3 8 Mbembé, “Necropolitics,” 12. 3 9 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­ Making in Nineteenth-­Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 41. 4 0 Harvey Young, “Touching History: Suzan-­Lori Parks, Robbie McCauley, and the Black Body,” Text and Performance Quarterly 23 (April 2003): 137. 4 1 Suzan-­Lori Parks, “Possession,” in The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 4. 4 2 Chaudhuri, “For Posterior’s Sake,” 26. 4 3 Ibid., 30. 4 4 Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 73. 4 5 Parks may have imagined the characters as white to emphasize how drama in a theatrical production requires multiple levels of interpretation, artistic vision, and improvisation. In an interview she describes the Baron Docteur as “a white guy” (Chaudhuri, “For Posterior’s Sake,” 32). 4 6 Brandi Wilkins Catanese, The Problem of the Color[blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 137. Also see Angela C. Pao, No Safe Spaces: Re-­casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). 4 7 Elam and Rayner, “Body Parts,” 265. 4 8 Quoted in Phyllis Rose, “Exactly What Is It About Josephine Baker?,” New York Times, March 10, 1991, 31, 35. 4 9 The question “who’s got the body?” organizes the first chapter of Karla FC Holloway’s Passed On: African American Mourning Stories, which explores the relationship between death and dying and ceremony and performance and draws attention to the deathly consequences of objection (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 15–­56. 5 0 Parks’s choice is dangerous because it challenges what Ferguson calls “the machinery of African American history,” which Parks’s contemporary, the artist Kara Walker, also combats. In his analysis of Walker’s work, Ferguson contends

Notes to Pages 80–83

195

that she raised the ire of critics because her work draws attention to the political demands (for propriety and respectability) that inform the constitution of African American history. Her emphasis on “the unspeakable and its terrifying range” limits modes of ownership and the policing of culture while creating political possibilities and dangers in a manner similar to Parks’s Venus (The Reorder of Things, 186–­187). 5 1 In the Public’s production, the Venus does not revolve on a platform. Instead, she walks from stage left to right, looks at the audience, walks toward the audience, and then stands with her back to the audience with her arms in the air. However, when analyzing the play, I take into account the play, its larger production history, and criticism. 5 2 The playbill of the Public’s production includes images of Baartman. 5 3 Young, “Touching History,” 140. 54 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 200. 55 Stuart Hall, “What Is the ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-­Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 477. 5 6 Ibid. In a longer version of this chapter, I also considered visual artists Carla Williams and Kara Walker and performance artists Nao Bustamante and Renée Green. This does not encompass all the work being done along these lines but does highlight the range of contemporary black artists who engage with the category of spectacle. 5 7 Rap artist Snoop Dogg coined the word “bootylicious” in the song “Dre Day,” recorded on Dr. Dre’s 1992 album, The Chronic. He used the term disparagingly to characterize a rival artist’s lyrics as “wack” or, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “bad, weak, rare.” Destiny’s Child helped to transform the meaning into a “reference to the buttocks: sexually attractive, sexy; shapely,” the definition that now appears in the Oxford English Dictionary. 5 8 Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 15. 5 9 Daphne A. Brooks, “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe,” Meridians 8, no. 1 (2007): 194. 6 0 Beyoncé Knowles, performing at Fashion Rocks, Radio City Music Hall, New York City, September 7, 2006, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzmHZIv966k, accessed August 26, 2016. 6 1 Quoted in “Your Guide to The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” in Porgy and Bess [playbill of the American Repertory Theater] (2011), 8. 6 2 Catanese, The Problem of the Color[blind], 120. 6 3 Farah Jasmine Griffin, “At Last . . . ?: Michelle Obama, Beyoncé, Race, and History,” Daedalus 140 (winter 2011): 137–­138. I borrow the phrase “worry the line” from the title of Wall’s Worrying the Line.

196 Notes to Pages 83–96 6 4 Mark Anthony Neal’s “‘My Passport Says Shawn’: Toward a Hip-­Hop Cosmopolitanism,” in Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 35–­85. 6 5 Griffin, “At Last . . . ?,” 138. 6 6 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990; reprint, New York: Routledge, 1999), 174. 6 7 Anne Anlin Cheng, “Shine: On Race, Glamour, and the Modern,” PMLA 126 (October 2011): 1023. 6 8 Ibid. 6 9 Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 111. 7 0 Jen Chaney, “Etta James, Beyoncé, and the ‘At Last’ Legacy,” Washington Post, January 20, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/celebritology/post/ etta-­james-­beyonce-­and-­the-­at-­last-­legacy/2012/01/20/gIQAZ6JXEQ_blog. html, accessed May 16, 2016. 7 1 Beyoncé Knowles, “Diva,” on I Am . . . Sasha Fierce (New York: Sony BMG Music Entertainment, 2008), iTunes. 7 2 Ibid. 7 3 Ibid. 7 4 Ibid. 7 5 Brooks, “All That You Can’t Leave Behind,” 181. 7 6 Cheng, “Shine,” 1023; Brown, Babylon Girls, 59. 7 7 Beyoncé Knowles, “Partition,” on Beyoncé (New York: Columbia Records/Sony Music Entertainment, 2013), iTunes. 7 8 Freeman, Time Binds, 137. 7 9 Ibid., 138. 8 0 Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 118. 8 1 On the Philadelphia leg of the tour, which I attended, the show began ninety minutes after the scheduled start time. A review of the Miami performance chronicles a similar lag (Liana Lozada, “Jay Z and Beyonce On the Run Tour Review: ‘A two-­and-­a-­half hour joyride,’” Guardian, June 26, 2014, http:// www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jun/26/jay-­z -­beyonce-­on-­the-­r un-­tour-­ review, accessed August 10, 2014). 8 2 Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 114. 8 3 Aliyyah I. Abdur-­R ahman, Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 41. 8 4 Fleetwood, Troubling Vision, 128. 8 5 Coco Fusco, English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York: New Press, 1995), 37. 8 6 Coco Fusco, “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” TDR 38 (spring 1994): 145. 8 7 Ibid. 8 8 In “Performing the Other: A Consideration of Two Cages” (College Literature 26 [winter 1999]: 113–­136), Mary Kate Kelley considers the similarity between The

Notes to Pages 96–104

197

Couple in the Cage and Baker’s performance in the modernist film Zou Zou in which she appears in a cage. In my reading of The Couple in the Cage, I consider how the artists distance themselves from modes of primitivist representation by turning the tables on the audience, but agree that the performance refers to Baker’s work. 8 9 Fusco, “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” 145. 9 0 Ibid. 9 1 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 73. 9 2 Barbara Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett, “The Ethnographic Burlesque,” TDR 42 (sum mer 1998): 177. 9 3 Jennifer Tyburczy, Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display (Chi cago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 69. 9 4 Ibid., 70. 9 5 Fusco, “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” 145. 9 6 Elam and Rayner, “Body Parts,” 277. 9 7 Fusco, “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” 143. 9 8 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 66. 9 9 Suzan-­Lori Parks, Fucking A, in The Red Letter Plays (New York: Theatre Com munications Group, 2001), 153. 1 00 Coco Fusco, The Bodies That Were Not Ours (New York: Routledge, 2001), 10. 1 01 Fusco, English Is Broken Here, 59. 1 02 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004), 42. 1 03 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 121. 1 04 Ibid., 126. 1 05 Coco Fusco, A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), back cover. 1 06 Ibid., 59. 1 07 Ibid. 1 08 Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 83. 1 09 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 136. 1 10 Ibid.

Chapter 3 Prophesying in Octavia Butler’s Parable Series 1

The epigraphs cite Carla L. Peterson, “Subject to Speculation: Assessing the Lives of African-­American Women in the Nineteenth Century,” in Women’s Studies in Transition: The Pursuit of Interdisciplinarity, ed. Kate Conway-­Turner, Suzanne Cherrin, Jessica Schiffman, and Kathleen Doherty Turkel (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 114; and Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” in

198 Notes to Pages 105–112 Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. William K. Zinsser (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 117. 2 Matthew 13: 4–­8, King James Version. 3 Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., “On Prophecy and Critical Intelligence,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 32 (May 2011): 105, 108. 4 For more on this topic see Anthony Bogues, “Intervention / And What about the Human? Freedom, Human Emancipation, and the Radical Imagination.” boundary 2 39, no. 3 (2012): 38. 5 Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 11. 6 Toni Morrison and Robert Richardson, “A Bench by the Road: Beloved,” World 3 ( January–­February 1989): 5. 7 Peterson, “Subject to Speculation,” 114. 8 Grace Kyungwon Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xvi. 9 David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 84. 10 Given Obama’s singularity as the first black president of the United States, his impact on American culture, politics, society, and American studies has been explored in several important scholarly texts, including Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Erica R. Edwards, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Donald Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); and Eric Lott, Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017). 11 Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital, xv. 12 Jared Sexton, “People-­of-­Color-­Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text 28 (summer 2010): 38. 13 Mathias Nilges, “‘We Need the Stars’: Change, Community, and the Absent Father in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents,” Callaloo 32, no. 4 (2009): 1340. 14 Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital, xv–­xvi. 15 Ibid., ix. 16 Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson, eds., Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 11. 17 Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital, xiii. 18 Hong and Ferguson, Strange Affinities, 3. 19 Lisa Marie Cacho, “Racialized Hauntings of the Devalued Dead,” in ibid., 47. 20 Phoebe S. Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 49.

Notes to Pages 112–122 21

199

Ibid., 25. Ibid., 65. 23 Lara D. Nielsen, “Introduction: Heterotopic Transformations, the (Il)Liberal Neoliberal,” in Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations, ed. Lara D. Nielsen and Patricia Ybarra (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1. 24 Angelyn Mitchell, “Octavia Butler’s Parables,” in Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia, ed. Thomas Moylan (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2000), 224. 25 Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York: Warner, 2000), 10. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 26 Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 57. 2 7 David Scott, “The Government of Freedom,” in New Caribbean Thought: A Reader, ed. Brian Meeks and Folke Lindahl (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2001), 431. 2 8 Ibid., 430. 2 9 Glaude, “On Prophecy and Critical Intelligence,” 108. 3 0 George Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 5. 3 1 Octavia Butler, “Brave New Worlds: A Few Rules for Predicting the Future,” Essence 31 (May 2000): 165. 3 2 Glaude, “On Prophecy and Critical Intelligence,” 108. 3 3 Ibid., 105. 3 4 Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 2003), 19. 3 5 Butler, “Brave New Worlds,” 166. 3 6 Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets, 19. 3 7 Mitchell, “Octavia Butler’s Parables,” 225. 3 8 Roderick A. Ferguson, “An American Studies Meant for Interruption,” American Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2010): 215. 3 9 Ibid., 216. 4 0 Carter Mathes, “Circuits of Political Prophecy: Martin Luther King Jr., Peter Tosh, and the Black Radical Imaginary,” Small Axe 32 ( June 2010): 30. 4 1 Ibid., 30–­31. 4 2 Pease, The New American Exceptionalism, 8. 4 3 Ibid., 12. 4 4 Ibid., 12. 4 5 On how black subjects in the United States have affirmed the privileged status of citizens in the early twentieth century, see Stephanie Leigh Batiste, Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression-­Era African American Performance (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011). 4 6 Melissa Harris-­ Perry, “Adding Value to Women’s Work,” MSNBC, April 14, 2012, http://video.msnbc.msn.com/melissa-­harris-­perry/47049605#47049605, accessed August 20, 2012. 22

200 Notes to Pages 123–131 4 7 Jennifer C. James, “Gwendolyn Brooks, World War II, and the Politics of Rehabilitation,” in Feminist Disability Studies, ed. Kim Q. Hall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 140. 4 8 Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents (New York: Warner, 2000), 13. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 4 9 James, “Gwendolyn Brooks,” 142. 5 0 Ibid., 137. 5 1 Jean M. Humez, Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (New York: Back Bay, 2004); Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (New York: One World, 2004); Milton C. Sernett, Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007); James A. McGowan, Harriet Tubman: A Biography (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Greenwood, 2011). 5 2 Sernett, Harriet Tubman, 104. 5 3 Humez, Harriet Tubman, 3. 5 4 Sernett, Harriet Tubman, 315. 5 5 Ibid., 105. 5 6 Ibid., 40. 5 7 Humez, Harriet Tubman, 5. 5 8 Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Verso Classics, 1999), 150. 5 9 Humez, Harriet Tubman, 45. 6 0 Veronica Mixon, “Futurist Woman: Octavia Butler,” Essence 9 (April 1979): 12. 6 1 Robert R. Edgar and Hilary Sapire, The Story of Nontetha Nkwenkwe, a Twentieth-­ Century South African Prophet ( Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2000), 1. 6 2 Ibid., 6. 6 3 Ibid., 13, 11. 6 4 Ibid., 13–­14. 6 5 Ibid., 21. 6 6 Ibid., 22. 6 7 Ibid., 25. 6 8 Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets, 158. 6 9 Ibid., 18. 7 0 Nilges argues, “Lauren [is] a ‘moral exemplum,’ a twenty-­first century Harriet Tubman (who herself was associated metaphorically with Moses, the Biblical hero who led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt)” (“We Need the Stars,” 1358). Similarly, Gregory J. Hampton contends, “Lauren’s character is in many ways analogous to her father and Christ or Moses figures” (“Migration and Capital of the Body: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower,” CLA Journal 49 [September 2005]: 68). I make a distinction between the historical and mythical Tubman in order to complicate understandings of Lauren as a prophet. See also Lisbeth Gant-­Britton, “Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower,” in Women of Other Worlds:

Notes to Pages 132–146

201

Excursions through Science Fiction and Feminism, ed. Helen Merrick and Tess Williams (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1999), 286. 7 1 On exodus politics, see Robert J. Patterson, Exodus Politics: Civil Rights and Leadership in African American Literature and Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013). 7 2 Jay-­Z and Kanye West, “Otis,” on Watch the Throne (New York: Roc-­A-­Fella Records, Roc Nation, and Def Jam Recordings, 2011), iTunes. 7 3 Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz, 1. 7 4 Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 36. 7 5 Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-­Slavery Subjects (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), Kindle edition, 4. 7 6 Cacho, “Racialized Hauntings of the Devalued Dead,” 47. 7 7 Ibid., 46. 7 8 Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz, 36. 7 9 James, “Gwendolyn Brooks,” 142. 8 0 Sarah Outterson, “Diversity, Change, Violence: Octavia Butler’s Pedagogical Philosophy,” Utopian Studies 19, no. 3 (2008): 450. 8 1 Lewis Call, “Structures of Desire: Erotic Power in the Speculative Fiction of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany,” Rethinking History 9 ( June–­September 2005): 285. 8 2 Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets, 177.

Chapter 4

Marching

1 Robin D. G. Kelley, “Big, Glitzy Marches Are Not Movements,” Boston Review, August 28, 2013, http://www.bostonreview.net/us/robin-­kelley-­big-­glitzy-­ marches-­are-­not-­movements, accessed September 4, 2013. 2 Ibid. 3 David L. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), Kindle ed. 4 Kelley, “Big, Glitzy Marches.” 5 Ibid. 6 On the iconic nature of the Till photograph, see Nicole Fleetwood, On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 23–­25. 7 “Negroes in ‘Silent’ Race Riot Protest: 10,000 March in New York—­Circulars Are Distributed,” Washington Post, July 29, 1917, 10; Rebecca Meacham, “Lynching: Silent Protest Parade,” in Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance: K–­Y, ed. Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman (New York: Routledge, 2004), 751. 8 J. A. Mbembé, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15 (winter 2003): 13.

202 Notes to Pages 147–157 9 Alessandra Lorini, Rituals of Race: American Public Culture and the Search for Racial Democracy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 247. 1 0 Ibid. 1 1 “Negroes in ‘Silent’ Race Riot Protest,” 10. 1 2 Meacham, “Lynching,” 751. 1 3 Nicholas Ridout, “Performance and Democracy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, ed. Tracy C. Davis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 12. 1 4 André Lepecki and Ric Allsopp, “Editorial: On Choreography,” Performance Research 13, no. 1 (2008): 3. 1 5 Ibid. 1 6 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in The Performance Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Henry Bial (New York: Routledge, 2004), 156. 1 7 Salamishah Tillet, Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–­ Civil Rights Imagination (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 3. 1 8 Michael Eric Dyson, “August March,” in This Is the Day: The March on Washington, ed. Leonard Freed (Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 2013), 1. 1 9 James Ritch, “1,500 Chicagoans Sign to Make Rights March on Washington: Leaders Expect to Top Goal of 2,500,” Chicago Tribune, August 22, 1963, 7; Helen Henry, “When Coxey Marched to Washington,” Baltimore Sun, August 25, 1963, F1; Charles Portis, “Large and Dignified: Washington March Turns into Civil Rights Festival,” Los Angeles Times, August 25, 1963, B9. 2 0 Portis, “Large and Dignified,” B9. 2 1 Aniko Bodroghkozy, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 112. 2 2 Ibid., 95. 2 3 Nan Robertson, “Protest Marches Are Nothing New to Nation’s Capital: Rights of Assembly and Petition Are in Constitution,” New York Times, August 25, 1963, 80. 2 4 “March on Washington,” New York Times, August 25, 1963, E12. 2 5 Bodroghkozy, Equal Time, 96. 2 6 C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary (London: Hutchinson, 1966), 205. 2 7 Ridout, “Performance and Democracy,” 17. 2 8 “On the March,” Washington Post, August 23, 1963, A18. 2 9 Peter Beachley, “Rights Is Seen in Best Tradition of U.S.: Some Disorder Seen,” Washington Post, August 25, 1963, A19. 3 0 Robertson, “Protest Marches Are Nothing New,” 80. 3 1 Bodroghkozy, Equal Time, 89. 3 2 Val Adams, “TV: Coverage of March: Nielsen Reports 46% Higher Audience Than in Normal Daytime Hours,” New York Times, August 29, 1963, 43. 3 3 According to Bodroghkozy, “King was not the star of the show: the marchers were the ‘collective protagonists’ along with all the speakers up on the podium, including King” (Equal Time, 102).

Notes to Pages 157–170

203

3 4 Ibid., 94. 3 5 Ibid. 3 6 Ibid., 96. 3 7 Kenneth T. Walsh, “Voting Rights Still a Hot-­Button Issue,” U.S. News and World Report, August 4, 2015, http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/08/04/ voting-­rights-­still-­a-­political-­issue-­50-­years-­later, accessed January 17, 2016. 3 8 In “The Device of Race: An Introduction,” Harry J. Elam, Jr., engages with a speech from Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs to explain the constitutive nature of blackness to American culture (in African American Performance and Theater History, ed. Harry J. Elam, Jr., and David Krasner [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], 3–­16). 3 9 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-­ Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 14–­15. 4 0 Richard Mizelle, Jr., “Second-­Lining the Jazz City: Jazz Funerals, Katrina, and the Reemergence of New Orleans,” in Katrina’s Imprint: Race and Vulnerability in America, ed. Keith Wailoo, Karen M. O’Neill, Jeffrey Dowd, and Roland Anglin (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 70. 4 1 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 61. 4 2 Anne M. Valk, “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” Oral History Review 35 (summer–­fall 2008): 199. 4 3 See the introduction to Roach’s Cities of the Dead, 1–­32. 4 4 Spike Lee, dir., When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (Burbank, Calif.: HBO Documentary Film/40 Acres & a Mule Filmworks, 2006), DVD. 4 5 Valk, “When the Levees Broke,” 200. 4 6 Lee, When the Levees Broke. 4 7 Jack C. Ellis, John Grierson: Life Contributions, Influence (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 347. 4 8 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 26. 4 9 Ibid., 25, 26. 5 0 Lee, When the Levees Broke.

Chapter 5 Locating the Future of Black Studies 1 Hortense Spillers, “Cross Currents, Discontinuities: Black Women’s Fiction,” in Conjuring Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 250. 2 Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), 6. 3 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—­An Argument.” New Centennial Review 3 (fall 2003): 263.

204 Notes to Pages 171–176 4 Jared Sexton and Huey Copeland, “Raw Life: An Introduction,” Qui Parle 13 (spring–­summer 2003): 57. 5 Jared Sexton, “People-­of-­Color-­Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text 28 (summer 2010): 31. The Tumblr site is the location of the speech I reference. 6 Soyica Diggs Colbert, “‘When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead’: The Future of the Human in Suzan-­Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World,” boundary 2 39 (fall 2012): 191–­220. 7 Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 58. 8 August Wilson, Fences (New York: Plume, 1986), 10–­ 12. Further references appear parenthetically in the text. 9 Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-­Pessimism and Black Optimism,” InTensions 5 (fall/winter 2011): 23, 17. 1 0 Jared Sexton, “Ante-­Anti-­Blackness: Afterthoughts,” Lateral Issue 1 (2012): 1. 1 1 Sexton, “People-­of-­Color-­Blindness,” 46–­47. 1 2 Fred Moten, In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 8. 1 3 Fred Moten, “Magic of Objects,” Callaloo 26 (winter 2003): 110. 1 4 Harry J. Elam, Jr., Past As Present in the Drama of August Wilson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 65. 1 5 Ibid., 73.

Bibliography

Abdur-­R ahman, Aliyyah I. Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012. Adams, Val. “TV: Coverage of March: Nielsen Reports 46% Higher Audience Than in Normal Daytime Hours.” New York Times, August 29, 1963, 43. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-­ Roazen. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. Albanese, Denise. New Science, New World. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press, 2012. Allen-­Taylor, J. Douglas. “The Duality of Violence in Django.” In Black Hollywood Unchained: Commentary on the State of Black Hollywood, edited by Ishmael Reed, 29–­ 31. Chicago: Third World, 2015. Baker, Houston. “Innocent Plantation Seductions: Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.” In Black Hollywood Unchained: Commentary on the State of Black Hollywood, edited by Ishmael Reed, 32–­35. Chicago: Third World, 2015. Baldwin, James. “Here Be Dragons.” 1985. Reprinted in Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality, edited by Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-­Sheftall, 208–­218. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Baldwin, James, and Margaret Meade. A Rap on Race. New York: Dell, 1971. Baraka, Amiri. “Black Fire: A New Introduction.” In Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-­ American Writing, edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, xvii–­x x. Baltimore: Black Classics Press, 2007. Banes, Sally. Writing Dance in the Age of Postmodernism. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Batiste, Stephanie Leigh. Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression-­Era African American Performance. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011. Beachley, Peter. “Rights Is Seen in Best Tradition of U.S.: Some Disorder Seen.” Washington Post, August 25, 1963, A19. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 253–­264. New York: Schocken, 1968. Best, Stephen. “On Failing to Make the Past Present.” Modern Language Quarterly 73 (September 2012): 453–­474.

205

206 Bibliography Blake, Susan L. “Folklore and Community in Song of Solomon.” MELUS 7 (autumn 1980): 77–­82. Bodroghkozy, Aniko. Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Bogues, Anthony. Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals. New York: Routledge, 2003. ———. “Intervention / And What about the Human? Freedom, Human Emancipation, and the Radical Imagination.” boundary 2 39, no. 3 (2012): 38. Braziel, Jane Evans. Caribbean Genesis: Jamaica Kincaid and the Writing of New Worlds. Albany: State University of New York, 2009. ———. “Défilée’s Diasporic Daughters: Revolutionary Narratives of Ayiti (Haiti), Nanchon (Nation), and Dyspora (Diaspora) in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!” Studies in the Literary Imagination 37 (fall 2004): 77–­96. ———. “Re-­membering Défilée: Dédée Bazile As Revolutionary Lieu de Mémoire.” Small Axe 18 (September 2005): 57–­85. Brody, Jennifer DeVere. “The Blackness of Blackness . . . Reading the Typography of Invisible Man.” Theatre Journal 57, no. 4 (2005): 679–­698. Brooks, Daphne A. “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe.” Meridians 8, no. 1 (2007): 180–­204. ———. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–­1910. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006. ———. “The End of the Line: Josephine Baker and the Politics of Black Women’s Corporeal Comedy.” Scholar and Feminist Online 6 (fall 2007–­spring 2008), http:// sfonline.barnard.edu/baker/brooks_01.htm. Accessed September 1, 2016. Brown, Jayna. Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Brown, William. “Value and Violence in Django Unchained.” In Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained: The Continuation of Meta Cinema, edited by Oliver C. Speck, 161–­176. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 2011. ———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 1990. Reprint, New York: Routledge, 1999. ———. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” In The Performance Studies Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Henry Bial, 154–­166. New York: Routledge, 2004. ———. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997. Butler, Octavia. “Brave New Worlds: A Few Rules for Predicting the Future.” Essence 31 (May 2000): 164–­166, 264. ———. Parable of the Sower. New York: Warner, 2000. ———. Parable of the Talents. New York: Warner, 2000.

Bibliography 207 Cacho, Lisa Marie. “Racialized Hauntings of the Devalued Dead.” In Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization, edited by Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson, 25–­52. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011. Call, Lewis. “Structures of Desire: Erotic Power in the Speculative Fiction of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany.” Rethinking History 9 ( June–­September 2005): 275–­296. Catanese, Brandi Wilkins. The Problem of the Color[blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Chaney, Jen. “Etta James, Beyoncé and the ‘At Last’ Legacy.” Washington Post, January 20, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/celebritology/post/etta-­ james-­beyonce-­and-­the-­at-­last-­legacy/2012/01/20/gIQAZ6JXEQ_blog.html. Accessed May 16, 2016. Chaudhuri, Una. “For Posterior’s Sake: An Interview with Suzan-­Lori Parks,” in Venus [playbill of the Public Theater] (April 1996), 26, 30. Chen, Wilson C. “Figures of Flight and Entrapment in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!” Rocky Mountain Review 65 (spring 2011): 36–­55. Cheng, Anne Anlin. “Shine: On Race, Glamour, and the Modern.” PMLA 126 (October 2011): 1022–­1041. Clinton, Catherine. Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom. New York: Back Bay, 2004. Colbert, Soyica Diggs. The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ———. “‘When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead’: The Future of the Human in Suzan-­Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.” boundary 2 39 (fall 2012): 191–­220. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge, 2004. Coney, John, dir. Space Is the Place. New York: Plexifilm, 2003. DVD. Conquergood, Dwight. “Rethinking Elocution: The Trope of the Talking Book and Other Figures of Speech.” In Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis, edited by E. Patrick Johnson, 81–­103. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Corbett, John. Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994. Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Cultures. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. Dalton, Karen, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African American Dance Seen through Parisian Eyes.” Critical Inquiry 24 (summer 1998): 903–­934. Danticat, Edwidge. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010. ———. Krik? Krak! New York: Vintage, 1996.

208 Bibliography Dash, Julie, dir., Daughters of the Dust. New York: Kino International, 1991. Amazon video. Davis, Rocio G. “Oral Narratives As Short Story Cycle: Forging Community in Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Krik? Krak!’” MELUS 26 (summer 2001): 65–­81. Dayan, Colin. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. DeFrantz, Thomas F. “Performing the Breaks: Notes on African American Aesthetic Structures.” Theater 40 (November 2010): 31–­37. DeFrantz, Thomas F., and Anita Gonzalez, eds. Black Performance Theory. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. Dent, Gina, ed. Black Popular Culture. New York: New Press, 1998. Dery, Mark. “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.” In Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, edited by Mark Dery, 179–­222. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994. Diamond, Elin. “Modern Drama/Modernity’s Drama.” In Modern Drama: Defining the Field, edited by Ric Knowles, Joanne Tompkins, and W. B. Worthen, 3–­15. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Dubey, Madhu. Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Dyson, Michael Eric. “August March.” In This Is the Day: The March on Washington, edited by Leonard Freed, 1–­8. Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 2013. Edgar, Robert R., and Hilary Sapire. The Story of Nontetha Nkwenkwe, a Twentieth-­ Century South African Prophet. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2000. Edwards, Brent Hayes. “Introduction.” Callaloo 25, no. 1 (2002): 5–­7. ———. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Edwards, Erica R. Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Ehrenstein, David. “Obama the ‘Magic Negro.’ ” Los Angeles Times, March 19, 2007, http://www.latimes.com/la-­oe-­ehrenstein19mar19-­story.html. Accessed February 21, 2015. Elam, Harry J., Jr. “The Device of Race: An Introduction.” In African American Performance and Theater History, edited by Harry J. Elam, Jr., and David Krasner, 3–­16. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. ———. The Past As Present in the Drama of August Wilson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Elam, Harry J., Jr., and Alice Rayner. “Body Parts: Between Story and Spectacle in Venus by Suzan-­Lori Parks.” In Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theater, edited by Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer, 265–­282. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Ellis, Jack C. John Grierson: Life Contributions, Influence. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000.

Bibliography 209 Ellis, Trey. “The New Black Aesthetic.” Callaloo 38 (winter 1989): 322–­243. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage International, 1995. Eng, David L. The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. Kindle edition. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 1967. Ferguson, Roderick A. “An American Studies Meant for Interruption.” American Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2010): 215–­219. ———. The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Fleetwood, Nicole. On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2015. ———. Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. Kindle edition. Fusco, Coco. The Bodies That Were Not Ours. New York: Routledge, 2001. ———. English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas. New York: New Press, 1995. ———. A Field Guide for Female Interrogators. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008. ———. “The Other History of Intercultural Performance.” TDR 38 (spring 1994): 143–­167. Gant-­Britton, Lisbeth. “Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” In Women of Other Worlds: Excursions through Science Fiction and Feminism, edited by Helen Merrick and Tess Williams, 280–­294. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1999. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “12 Years a Slave and the African Americans.” Time, October 22, 2013, http://entertainment.time.com/2013/10/22/henry-­louis-­gates-­jr-­talks-­ 12-­years-­a-­slave-­and-­the-­african-­americans/. Accessed February 20 2015. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Gene Andrew Jarrett, eds. The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–­1938. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007. George-­Graves, Nadine. “Diasporic Spidering: Constructing Contemporary Black Identities.” In Black Performance Theory, edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez, 33–­44. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Global California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Glaude, Eddie S., Jr. “On Prophecy and Critical Intelligence.” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 32 (May 2011): 105–­121. Glentzer, Molly. “The Steps That Made Him Great.” Houston Chronicle, July 2, 2009, 1.

210 Bibliography Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation, translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Golden, Thelma. “Post . . .” In Freestyle, edited by Christine Y. Kim and Franklin Sirmans, 14–­15. New York: Studio Museum of Harlem, 2001. Gomez, Michael A. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “At Last . . . ? Michelle Obama, Beyoncé, Race & History.” Daedalus 140 (winter 2011): 131–­141. ———. Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics during World War II. New York: Basic Books, 2013. Kindle edition. Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past.” Journal of American History 91 (March 2005): 1233–­1263. Hall, Stuart. “What Is the ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-­Hsing Chen, 468–­ 478. London: Routledge, 1996. Hampton, Gregory J. “Migration and Capital of the Body: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” CLA Journal 49 (September 2005): 56–­73. Harris-­Lacewell, Melissa. Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. Harris-­Perry, Melissa. “Adding Value to Women’s Work.” MSNBC, April 14, 2012, http://video.msnbc.msn.com/melissa-­h arris-­p erry/47049605#47049605. Accessed August 20, 2012. Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007. ———. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Perennial, 2013. Henry, Helen. “When Coxey Marched to Washington.” Baltimore Sun, August 25, 1963, F1. Holloway, Karla FC. Passed On: African American Mourning Stories. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002. Hong, Grace Kyungwon. The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Hong, Grace Kyungwon, and Roderick A. Ferguson, eds. Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011. Hopkinson, Nalo. Midnight Robber. New York: Warner, 2000.

Bibliography 211 Hughes, Langston, and Arna Bontemps, eds. “All God’s Chillen Had Wings.” In The Book of Negro Folklore, 62–­65. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1958. Humez, Jean M. Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Hurston, Zora Neale. “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” 1934. Reprinted in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitchell, 79–­94. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994. Jackson, Michael. Moonwalk. New York: Harmony Books, 1988. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. 1861. Reprint, Radford, Va.: Wilder, 2008. James, C.L.R. Beyond a Boundary. London: Hutchinson, 1966. James, Jennifer C. “Gwendolyn Brooks, World War II, and the Politics of Rehabilitation.” In Feminist Disability Studies, edited by Kim Q. Hall, 136–­158. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. JanMohamed, Abdul R. The Death-­Bound-­Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. Kindle edition. Jarrett, Gene Andrew. Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature. New York: New York University Press, 2011. Jay-­Z and Kanye West. Watch the Throne. New York: Roc-­A-­Fella Records, Roc Nation, and Def Jam Recordings, 2011. iTunes. Johnson, E. Patrick. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. Johnson, Michael K. “The D Is Silent: Django Unchained and the African American West.” Safundi 16, no. 3 (2015): 256–­266. Jones, Gayl. Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Jones, Meta Du Ewa. “Jazz Prosodies: Orality and Textuality.” Callaloo 25, no. 1 (2002): 66–­91. Jules-­Rosette, Bennetta. Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Keizer, Arlene R. “Gone Astray in the Flesh: Kara Walker, Black Women Writers, and African American Postmemory.” PMLA 123 (October 2008): 1649–­1672. Kelley, Mary Kate. “Performing the Other: A Consideration of Two Cages.” College Literature 26 (winter 1999): 113–­136. Kelley, Robin D. G. “Big, Glitzy Marches Are Not Movements.” Boston Review, August 28, 2013, http://www.bostonreview.net/us/robin-­kelley-­big-­glitzy-­marches-­are-­ not-­movements. Accessed September 4, 2013. ———. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon, 2002. Kershaw, Baz. “Curiosity or Contempt: On Spectacle, the Human, and Activism.” Theatre Journal 55, no. 4 (2003): 591–­611. Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett, Barbara. “The Ethnographic Burlesque.” TDR 42 (summer 1998): 175–­180.

212 Bibliography Kiviat, Barbara. “10 Questions for Kanye West.” Time, December 17, 2004, http:// www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1009743,00.html. Accessed October 10, 2011. Knowles, Beyoncé. Beyoncé. New York: Columbia Records/Sony Music Entertainment, 2013. iTunes. ———. I Am . . . Sasha Fierce. New York: Sony BMG Music Entertainment, 2008. iTunes. Kraut, Anthea. “Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The Dance Performances of Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Katherine Dunham.” Theatre Journal 55 (October 2003): 433–­450. Kropp, Phoebe S. California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Kushner, Tony. Angels in America. Part One: Millennium Approaches. New York: Theater Communications Group, 1993. Larson, Kate Clifford. Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero. New York: One World, 2004. Lee, Spike, dir. 4 Little Girls. Burbank, Calif.: HBO Documentary Film/40 Acres & a Mule Filmworks, 2010. DVD. ———. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. Burbank, Calif.: HBO Documentary Film/40 Acres & a Mule Filmworks, 2006. DVD. Lepecki, André, and Ric Allsopp. “Editorial: On Choreography.” Performance Research 13, no. 1 (2008): 1–­6. Levinson, André. “Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African American Dance Seen through Parisian Eyes.” Critical Inquiry 24 (summer 1998): 903–­934. Lindfors, Bernth. “The Hottentot Venus and Other African Attractions in Nineteenth Century England.” Australasian Drama Studies 1 (1983): 83–­104. Lorde, Audre. Conversations with Audre Lorde, edited by John Wylie Hall. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004. Lorini, Alessandra. Rituals of Race: American Public Culture and the Search for Racial Democracy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999. Lott, Eric. Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017. Lozada, Liana. “Jay Z and Beyonce On the Run Tour Review: ‘A two-­and-­a-­half hour joyride.’ ” Guardian, June 26, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/ jun/26/jay-­z-­beyonce-­on-­the-­run-­tour-­review. Accessed August 10, 2014. Madison, D. Soyini. “That Was My Occupation: Oral Narrative, Performance, and Black Feminist Thought,” Exceptional Spaces: Essays in Performance and History, edited by Della Pollack, 319–­342. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. ———. “Foreword.” In Black Performance Theory, edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez, vii–­x. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. “March on Washington.” New York Times, August 25, 1963, E12. Marshall, Paule. Praisesong for the Widow. New York: Plume, 1984.

Bibliography 213 Mathes, Carter. “Circuits of Political Prophecy: Martin Luther King, Jr., Peter Tosh, and the Black Radical Imaginary.” Small Axe 32 ( June 2010): 17–­41. Mbembé, J. A. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15 (winter 2003): 11–­40. McGowan, James A. Harriet Tubman: A Biography. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Greenwood, 2011. McLeod, Ken. “Space Oddities: Aliens, Futurism, and Meaning in Popular Music.” Popular Music 22, no. 3 (2003): 337–­355. Meacham, Rebecca. “Lynching: Silent Protest Parade.” In Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance: K–­Y, edited by Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman, 751. New York: Routledge, 2004. Melamed, Jodi. Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Miller, Monica. Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009. Mitchell, Angelyn. “Octavia Butler’s Parables.” In Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia, edited by Thomas Moylan, 223–­245. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2000. Mixon, Veronica. “Futurist Woman: Octavia Butler.” Essence 9 (April 1979): 12, 15. Mizelle, Richard, Jr. “Second-­Lining the Jazz City: Jazz Funerals, Katrina, and the Reemergence of New Orleans.” In Katrina’s Imprint: Race and Vulnerability in America, edited by Keith Wailoo, Karen M. O’Neill, Jeffrey Dowd, and Roland Anglin, 69–­77. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage, 2004. ———. “The Reader As Artist,” O Magazine ( July 2006). http://www.oprah.com/ omagazine/Toni-­Morrison-­on-­Reading. Accessed January 8, 2013. ———. “The Site of Memory.” In Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William K. Zinsser, 103–­124. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. ———. Song of Solomon. New York, Vintage, 2004. Morrison, Toni, and Robert Richardson. “A Bench by the Road: Beloved.” World 3 ( January–­February 1989): 4, 5, 37–­41. Moten, Fred. “The Case of Blackness.” Criticism 50 (spring 2008): 177–­218. ———. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. ———. “Magic of Objects,” Callaloo 26 (winter 2003): 109–­111. Mukherjee, Roopali. The Racial Order of Things: Cultural Imaginaries of the Post-­Soul Era. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Mullen, Harryette. “African Signs and Spirit Writing.” Callaloo 19, no. 3 (1996): 670–­689. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Neal, Mark Anthony. “‘My Passport Says Shawn’: Toward a Hip-­Hop Cosmopolitanism.” In Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities, 35–­85. New York: New York University Press, 2012.

214 Bibliography ———. Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-­Soul Aesthetic. New York: Routledge, 2002. “Negroes in ‘Silent’ Race Riot Protest: 10,000 March in New York—­Circulars Are Distributed.” Washington Post, July 29, 1917, 10. Nesbitt, Nick. “Diasporic Politics: Danticat’s Short Works.” In Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, edited by Martin Munro, 73–­85. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. Nielsen, Lara D. “Introduction: Heterotopic Transformations, the (Il)Liberal Neoliberal.” In Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations, edited by Lara D. Nielsen and Patricia Ybarra, 1–­21. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Nilges, Mathias. “‘We Need the Stars’: Change, Community, and the Absent Father in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.” Callaloo 32, no. 4 (2009): 1332–­1352. Nyong’o, Tavia. The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. “On the March.” Washington Post, August 23, 1963, A18. Outterson, Sarah. “Diversity, Change, Violence: Octavia Butler’s Pedagogical Philosophy.” Utopian Studies 19, no. 3 (2008): 433–­456. Pao, Angela C. No Safe Spaces: Re-­casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Parks, Suzan-­Lori. Fucking A. In The Red Letter Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001. ———. “Possession.” In The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995. ———. Venus. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1990. Parliament. Mothership Connection. Santa Monica, Calif.: Universal Music Group, 2003. iTunes. Patterson, Robert J. Exodus Politics: Civil Rights and Leadership in African American Literature and Culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. Pease, Donald. The New American Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Peterson, Carla L. “Subject to Speculation: Assessing the Lives of African-­American Women in the Nineteenth Century.” In Women’s Studies in Transition: The Pursuit of Interdisciplinarity, edited by Kate Conway-­Turner, Suzanne Cherrin, Jessica Schiffman, and Kathleen Doherty Turkel, 109–­117. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998. Portis, Charles. “Large and Dignified: Washington March Turns into Civil Rights Festival.” Los Angeles Times, August 25, 1963, B9. Reddy, Chandan. Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011. Reed, Ishmael. Flight to Canada. New York: Scribner, 1998.

Bibliography 215 Ridout, Nicholas. “Performance and Democracy.” In The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, edited by Tracy C. Davis, 11–­22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Ritch, James. “1,500 Chicagoans Sign to Make Rights March on Washington: Leaders Expect to Top Goal of 2,500.” Chicago Tribune, August 22, 1963, 7. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-­Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Robertson, Nan. “Protest Marches Are Nothing New to Nation’s Capital: Rights of Assembly and Petition Are in Constitution.” New York Times, August 25, 1963, 80. Rodríguez, Dylan. Forced Passages: Imprisoned Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Rose, Phyllis. “Exactly What Is It about Josephine Baker?” New York Times, March 10, 1991, 31, 35. Saint, Lily. “Response: ‘Why Slavery Now?’: Django Unchained As a History of the Present.” Safundi 16, no. 3 (2015): 307–­311. Schechner, Richard. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge, 2011. Scott, David. “The Government of Freedom.” In New Caribbean Thought: A Reader, edited by Brian Meeks and Folke Lindahl, 428–­452. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2001. ———. Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. Sernett, Milton C. Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. Sexton, Jared. “Ante-­Anti-­Blackness: Afterthoughts.” Lateral Issue 1 (2012): 1–­11. ———. “People-­of-­Color-­Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery.” Social Text 28 (summer 2010): 31–­56. ———. “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-­Pessimism and Black Optimism.” InTensions 5 (2011): 1–­47. Sexton, Jared, and Huey Copeland. “Raw Life: An Introduction.” Qui Parle 13 (spring–­ summer 2003): 53–­62. Sharpe, Christina. Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-­Slavery Subjects. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. Kindle edition. Sharpley-­W hiting, T. Denean. Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999. Shulman, George. American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Smallwood, Stephanie E. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Smith, Mark. Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

216 Bibliography Spillers, Hortense. “Cross Currents, Discontinuities: Black Women’s Fiction.” In Conjuring Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers, 246–­261. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Echo.” In The Spivak Reader, edited by Donna Landry and Gerald MacClean, 175–­202. New York: Routledge, 1996. Storey, Olivia Smith. “Flying Words: Contests of Orality and Literacy in the Trope of the Flying Africans.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 5 (winter 2004): n.p. Strother, Z. S. “Display of the Body Hottentot.” In Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business, edited by Bernth Lindfors, 1–­61. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Szwed, John. Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra. Boston: Da Capo, 1998. Tarantino, Quentin, dir. Django Unchained. Burbank, Calif.: Weinstein/Columbia Pictures, 2012. iTunes. ———. Inglourious Basterds. Burbank, Calif.: Universal Studios, 2009. DVD. ———. Kill Bill, part 1. Burbank, Calif.: Miramax, 2004. DVD. Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. Tillet, Salamishah. Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–­Civil Rights Imagination. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012. Tyburczy, Jennifer. Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Valk, Anne M. “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.” Oral History Review 35 (summer–­fall 2008): 197–­201. Walker, Hamza. “Renigged.” In Freestyle, edited by Christine Y. Kim and Franklin Sirmans, 16–­17. New York: Studio Museum of Harlem, 2001. Wall, Cheryl A. Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Wallace, Michele. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. New York: Verso Classics, 1999. ———. Dark Designs and Visual Culture . Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. ———. “The Hottentot Venus.” Village Voice, May 21, 1996, 31. Walsh, Kenneth T. “Voting Rights Still a Hot-­Button Issue.” U.S. News and World Report, August 4, 2015, http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/08/04/ voting-­rights-­still-­a-­political-­issue-­50-­years-­later. Accessed January 17, 2016. Warner, Sara L. “Suzan-­Lori Parks’s Drama of Disinterment: A Transnational Exploration of Venus,” Theatre Journal 60 (May 2008): 181–­199. Warren, Kenneth W. What Was African American Literature? Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011. Weheliye, Alexander. “‘Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Music.” Social Text 20 (summer 2002): 21–­47.

Bibliography 217 ———. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and the Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. West, Cornel. “Black Spiritual Strivings in a Twilight Civilization.” In The Future of the Race, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cornel West, 53–­114. New York: Vintage, 1996. West, Kanye. College Dropout. New York: Roc-­A-­Fella Records and Def Jam Recordings, 2004. iTunes. Wiegman, Robyn. Object Lessons. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012. Wilderson, Frank B., III. “Grammar and Ghosts: The Performative Limits of African Freedom.” Theatre Survey 50 (May 2009): 119–­125. ———. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. Wilson, August. Fences. New York: Plume, 1986. Works Progress Administration (WPA), Georgia Writers’ Project, Savannah Unit. Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1940. Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—­An Argument.” New Centennial Review 3 (fall 2003): 257–­337. Young, Harvey. “Touching History: Suzan-­Lori Parks, Robbie McCauley, and the Black Body.” Text and Performance Quarterly 23 (April 2003): 134–­154. Young, Jean. “The Re-­Objectification and Re-­Commodification of Saartjie Baartman in Suzan-­Lori Parks’s Venus.” African American Review 31 (winter 1997): 699–­708. “Your Guide to the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess.” In Porgy and Bess [playbill of the American Repertory Theater] (2011), 8.

Index Page references with a fig. indicate a figure.

Abdur-­R ahman, Aliyyah, 4, 94; Against the Closet, 4, 94 Adorno, Theodor, 151; The Dialect of Enlightenment (with Horkheimer), 151 affiliation, webs of, 11, 14, 21, 62; and black women artists, 68, 103; and black women feminists, 107; and commonality presumptions, 109–­111; delineation of, 67; and differences, 106–­107; mimicry, 66; race-­based forms of, 77; redirecting of, 72; and spectatorship, 98; Spillers on, 168; and temporality, 104; and women of color, 122 affirmative action, 69 Africa: affiliation, webs of, 21; Igbos, 33–­34; postcolonial movements in, 4; traditional systems of thought, 31 Afro-­optimism, 13, 25, 171 Afro-­pessimism, 25, 171 afterliving, 24, 66, 123, 132–­141, 169, 171 Agamben, Giorgio, 73 agency, and liberal individualism, 13, 58, 74–­75, 109, 116 Ailey, Alvin, 81; “Revelation” (dance), 81 alienation, 11 “All God’s Chillen Had Wings” (folk tale), 32–­34 Allsopp, Ric, 149 Anansi tales, 20–­21 antiracist social movements, and multiculturalism, 10 assimilation, demands of, 65–­66, 67 The Attendant (film), 91, 93 Awkward, Michael, 45; Negotiating Difference, 45–­46 Baartman, Saartjie, 22, 61, 69, 72, 73, 76–­80, 94; and animal imagery, 101; comparisons to, 96, 102; consent issue, 103; Fusco on, 101; images of, 59fig.;

remains of, 100; use of images of, 97, 98. See also Venus (Parks) Bailey, Bill, 54 Baker, Josephine, 22, 61, 69, 81, 82, 83, 84, 94; and animal imagery, 102; comparisons to, 96; image of, 60fig. Baldwin, James, 70 Bankole (fictional character), 136–­137 Baraka, Amiri, 14–­15 Baron Docteur (fictional character), 77–­79, 99 Baucom, Ian, 67 Baynton, Douglas, 125 Beharie, Nicole, 78 belief, factors enabling, 22 Benjamin, Walter, 21, 118 Beyoncé. See Knowles, Beyoncé Bhabha, Homi, 138 black artists: death and dying, effects of on, 21; and Flying African narrative, 34; Golden on, 14; identifying as, 15; in post–­civil rights era, 3, 12, 62; as producers of goods, 94; use of performance practices, 5 Black Arts Movement, 14, 19, 48 black community, 2 black culture, 4, 13, 28, 119 black diaspora, 20–­21, 23, 30, 101, 107 black embodiment, and storytelling, 27 black exceptionalism, 119 black exploitation, 66 black feminism: and art, 77; critique of, 109, 169; and history, 77; and memory, 107; and the prophetic, 107 Black Fire (ed. Baraka and Neal), 14–­15 black freedom movement: and citizenship, 120–­121; , and death, 107; final goal of, 65; and gender negotiation, 34; and nationalism, 118; struggles, parameters of, 11

219

220

Index

black girlhood, and innocence, 4 black history, and postmodernism, 2 black identity: caricatures of, 69; and liberal subjectivity, 108 black internationalism, and Cold War, 10 black justice movements, and containment, 95 black liberation: and racial dominance, 2; in Space Is the Planet, 48 black literary styles, and oral/written narrative relationship, 28 black masculinity, and exceptionalism, 108 black movements: defined, 5; and reorganization, 11 blackness: ahistoricization of, 106; belatedness of, 14; as a choice, 15; commodification of, 54, 85; and exclusion, 125; exclusion of from liberal human, 24; and flight metaphor, 41–­47; framing of, 58; and freedom, 3, 13–­14; futurity of, 47–­ 57; and liberal humanism, 58; liberation of, 48; new architectures of, 2; objectification of, 11, 15, 174–­175; and official antiracist regimes, 10; ontological status of, 13, 25, 58; as a performative, 12; redefining of, 5, 12, 170–­171; and sign of pathology, 129; and temporality, 5, 14, 106; and women-­of-­color feminism, 111 black ontology, 11–­12; and European humanism, 25 black performance, 13; as theory of social life, 13 black performance theory: and democratic society, 4; and poststructuralism, 4 black popular culture, and animal imagery, 101–­102 Black Power, 69 black radicalism, and the prophetic, 117, 141 black representation, changing nature of, 65 black revenge, and transformation, 2 black sexuality: commodification of, 74; representations of, 68, 79; and temporality, 58 black social life, 57, 175 black social movements, disruptive power of, 119

Black Star Line, 19 black studies: and art, 107; future of, 168–­177 black style, in music, 49 black suffering: and Birmingham campaign, 3; representations of, 5 black superhero figure, 2; risks of embracing, 5 black women: and animal imagery, 101–­102; and assimilation assumptions, 124–­125; and erotics, 88; gender-­inflected movement of, 22; and multiculturalism, 108; and neoliberal multiculturalism, 66; objectification of, 59, 59fig., 60fig., 61, 62, 69–­70, 80; opacity of body, 81; and the prophetic, 123–­132; racialization of, 109; sexuality of, 91; visibility, undermining of, 59, 77, 121 black women artists: and display, 80–­81; and reframing of blackness, 58, 67–­68; sexual representations of, 68 Black Women Writers’ Renaissance, 68 black writers, post–­civil rights era, 62 Bloody Sunday (March 7, 1965), 157–­ 161, 165 Bogues, Tony, 106, 118, 131, 141 Bontemps, Arna, 32–­33 The Book of Negro Folklore (ed. Hughes and Bontemps), 32–­33 The Book of Eli (film), 114 Bradford, Sarah Hopkins, 126; Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, 126 Bradley, Mamie Till, 143, 144, 157, 161. See also Till, Emmett Brathwaite, Kamau, 141 Braziel, Jane Evans, 35–­36, 40; “Défilée’s Diasporic Daughters,” 35–­36, 40 break theory, 71–­72 Brody, Jennifer DeVere, 33–­34 Brooks, Daphne, 82 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 122–­123; Maud Martha, 122–­123 Broomhilda (film character), 1 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 152, 153, 155 Brown, James, 54, 55

Index 221 Brown, Jayna, 81, 87 Brown v. Board of Education, 120 Brumley, Albert E., 55; “I’ll Fly Away” (song), 54–­55 Bulhoek Massacre (May 24, 1921), 130 Butler, Judith, 5–­6, 15, 17, 84, 150; Gender Trouble, 6; “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 5–­6; The Psychic Life of Power, 17 Butler, Octavia, 8; change in Parable series, 109–­110; on costs of progress, 113; on heroes, 129; Parable of the Sower, 104–­ 105, 109, 111, 113, 116–­117, 120; Parable of the Talents, 104, 109, 115, 124, 125, 132–­136; on prophets, 118; slavery in, 135; use of the prophetic, 104–­106, 108; and women-­of-­color feminism, 110, 111 Cacho, Lisa Marie, 137 caging/entrapment, 88fig., 90, 94, 95–­103, 124 California, development of, 110–­112 Call, Lewis, 140 Calloway, Cab, 54 Calvin Candie (film character), 1–­2 Canary Mary (fictional character), 100 capitalism, critique of, 11, 54, 57, 66 Carby, Hazel, 79 Caribbean, 4, 21 caricatures, of black identity, 69 casting, in Venus, 78–­79 Catanese, Brandi Wilkins, 78, 82–­83 change: aversion to, 115; nature of, 109–­ 110; in Parable series, 118–­119 chattel slavery, 48, 52, 111 Chen, Wilson C., 39 Cheng, Anne Anlin, 84–­85 citizenship, 120–­121; black citizenship, 144, 161–­167; common denomina​​tor of, 133; exclusions to, 122–­123; and ownership, 111 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 157 civil rights movement: and affiliation, 65; and affirmative action, 69; antiracism of, 11; and black nationalism, 19; documentaries about, 3–­4

Clinton, George, 47, 49, 51, 52–­53, 52fig., 54. See also Funkadelic; Parliament Cold War, 10 collective dissent, humanization of individuals and, 3 collective liberation, and black women artists, 68 collective movements, race-­based, 4 Collins, Addie Mae, 3 Collins, Patricia Hill, 101–­102 commingling, of race and theatricality, 97 commodification, 82, 85, 94–­95 Conquergood, Dwight, 37, 38 Conrad, Earl, 126 consent, of the viewer, 90 consumerism, 82 Copeland, Huey, 170 Corbett, John, 52 counter-­memory, in Django Unchained (film), 5 countertraditions, liberatory possibilities of, 68 critical intelligence, predictive function of, 22, 117 cultural politics, indirect, 15 cultural production, and black life, 48 Cuvier, Georges, 77–­78 Cvetkovich, Ann, 61 cybernetic posthumanism: and exclusion of blackness, 24, 25; and Flying African narrative, 27; production of, 27 Dandridge, Dorothy, 83 Daniel, Jeffry, 54 Danticat, Edwidge, 34, 35, 37, 39–­40, 46, 104; The Framing of Bones, 35; Krik? Krak?, 34, 35; “Nineteen Thirty-­Seven,” 34, 35–­38, 40, 41, 43, 104 Dash, Sarah, 50, 50fig. Davis, Rocio G., 37 Dayan, Colin, 40 death and dying: defying social death, 30–­34; in Fences, 168, 170, 171–­174; as flying, 23; and Flying African narrative, 26, 170; jazz funeral, 161–­167; Jay-­Z on, 23; in Song of Solomon, 41, 43; in Spaceship, 55–­56

222

Index

deconstruction, Parks’s use of, 80 Dédée Bazile (Défilée/Défilée-­la-­Folle), 35–­36, 40 Défilé (fictional character), 35–­36, 39–­40 Défilée-­la-­Folle. See Dédée Bazile (Défilée/ Défilée-­la-­Folle) DeFrantz, Thomas F., 17, 71 dehumanization: of blackness, 23, 102; interruption of, 5; and media coverage, 144; of slaves, 2 democratic society, and black performance and cultural production, 4 Dery, Mark, 54 desegregation, 15, 63, 143 Dessalines, Jean-­Jacques, 35, 40 Destiny’s Child, 81, 101; “Bootylicious” (song), 81. See also Knowles, Beyoncé Diamond, Elin, 50 direct/indirect action, 15 disaffiliation: and blackness, 12; and black women artists, 68 disenfranchised communities, 10 display: modes of, 80–­81; politics of, 95 disposability: in Django Unchained (film), 5; of enslaved in film media, 5 diva status, 85–­87 Django (film character), 1–­2 Django Unchained (film), 1, 181n4; and cultural production, 4–­5 domination systems, 91, 93–­94; reinforcement of, 5 Douglass, Frederick, 25; The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 25 Dove, Rita, 171; “David Walker, 1785–­ 1830,” 171 drama, and mimicry, 66 Drums and Shadows (ed. WPA), 30–­32, 33–­34, 46, 56 Dubey, Madhu, 28 Du Bois, W.E.B., 14–­15, 145, 150; The Souls of Black Folk, 14–­15 Dyson, Eric, 152 Echo (mythological character), 45 echoes, 30, 33, 42, 47, 57, 86 Edgar, Robert R., 130 Edmund Pettus Bridge attack (March 7, 1965), 158, 165

Edwards, Brent Hayes, 21, 29, 107 Ehrenstein, David, 182n7 Elam, Harry J., 51, 72, 79, 99 El Camino Real, 110–­113 ellipses, use of, 33, 57 Ellis, Trey, 70; “The New Black Aesthetic,” 70 embodied/disembodied quality, of Flying African narratives, 28, 30 embodiment: histories of, 68; and liberal humanism, 85 Eng, David, 13, 143 Enlightenment: advancement of notions of, 28; and dehumanization of blackness, 23 entrapment, performances of, 67–­68, 71 erotica, 88–­90 essentialism: race-­based forms of, 78; sex-­ based forms of, 78 ethical issues, 3 ethnic Otherness, 96, 100 European humanism, and ontology of blackness, 25 Evers, Medgar, 144 exceptionalism, 108, 121 exploitation, 68, 77 Fanon, Frantz, 11–­12, 150; Black Skin, White Masks, 11 feminism: and gender politics, 102; second-­ wave feminism, 69 Ferguson, Roderick, A., 10, 85, 110–­111, 119 Fleetwood, Nicole, 85, 94 flight metaphor: and blackness as baggage, 41–­47; and death, 46; and futurity of blackness, 47–­57; gendering of, 34–­40; and moonwalking, 53–­54; and resurrection, 26 Flying Africans narrative: black diasporic representations of, 23; and blackness, 41–­47; coercive power, 23; in College Dropout, 55; and cybernetic posthumanism, 27; and death of slavery, 23; exhausting labor, 23; flying away image, 23; and futurity of blackness, 47–­57; gendered flight, 34–­40; and music, 54; and orality, 28–­30; in post–­civil rights era, 24; and resurrection, 26; and social death, 28, 30–­34; and storytelling, 26–­27; and

Index 223 supernatural powers, 23; and temporality, 26 Foreman, Richard, 77 forgetting: and empowerment, 5; and exceptionalism, 121–­122 Foucault, Michel, 15, 165 4 Little Girls (documentary film), 3; comparison to Django Unchained (film), 5 freedom: bifurcation of, 136; and blackness, 3, 141; and forgetting, 5; of modern democracy, 73; negative freedom, 106; in twenty-­first century, 101; and women-­of-­ color feminism, 108 Freestyle (ed. Kim and Sirmans), 14 Freud, Sigmund, 44; “On Narcissism,” 44–­45 Funkadelic (musical group), 47, 49, 51, 52fig., 53. See also Clinton, George funk genre, 47, 49, 51, 52fig., 53 Fusco, Coco, 61, 65, 65fig., 66–­71, 95–­97; and animal imagery, 101; “The Bodies That Were Not Ours,” 101; The Couple in the Cage (documentary film) (with Gómez-­Peña), 61, 65fig., 83, 95–­101; as definer, 102; English Is Broken Here, 95; A Field Guide for Female Interrogators, 102; and loophole of retreat, 103; Operation Atropos (documentary film), 102–­103; “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” 99–­100; status of, 94; Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit (with Gómez-­Peña), 95 futurity: of blackness, 47; and liberal subjectivity, 75 Gabe (fictional character), 175–­177 Gadsden, Walter, 144, 146fig. Garvey, Marcus, 19 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 2, 28 Gaye, Marvin, 55, 56 gaze/gazer, 11 gender, heteronormative performance of, 2 gendered flight, 34–­40 gendered sound, 44–­45 gender identity: as matter of choice, 121–­ 122; and multiculturalism, 109; and objectification, 87 gender politics, and feminism, 102 generative associations, 81–­95

George-­Graves, Nadine, 20–­21; “Diasporic Spidering,” 20–­21 Gershwin, George, Porgy and Bess (opera), 82 Gilroy, Paul, 52 Glaude, Eddie S., Jr., 116–­117, 119, 141; Is It Nation Time?, 118 GLC (musical group), 55–­56 Glissant, Édouard, 38–­39 Golden, Thelma, 14 Gomez, Michael, 33–­34; Exchanging Our Country Marks, 33 Gómez-­Peña, Guillermo, 61, 65fig.; The Couple in the Cage (documentary film) (with Fusco), 61, 65fig., 83, 95–­101; Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit (with Fusco), 95 Gonzalez, Anita, 17 Gordon, Lewis, 170 Gray, Herman, 155 Grierson, John, 165 Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 83 habeas corpus, 73, 79 Haitian massacre (1937), 35–­40 Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, 8–­10 Hall, Stuart, 80 Harlem Renaissance, 19 Harris, Cheryl I., 143 Harris-­Perry, Melissa, 122 Hartman, Saidiya, 74, 169; Lose Your Mother, 169 Hayles, N. Katherine, 24–­26, 27; How We Became Posthuman, 24 Heidegger, Martin, 41, 192n16 Hendryx, Nona, 50, 50fig. heteronormative performance of gender, 2 hip hop genre, 53–­57, 81, 82, 91 history: ahistoricization of blackness, 106; Baldwin on, 70; Knowles’s use of, 83; material historicism, 100; and nationalism, 118; Parks on, 76, 82–­83; standardization of, 109; Warren on, 67 Holt, Thomas, 115 Hong, Grace Kyungwon, 108–­109, 110–­ 111 Horkheimer, Max, 151; The Dialect of Enlightenment (with Adorno), 151

224

Index

Horne, Lena, 83 Hottentot Venus. See Baartman, Saartjie Hudlin, Reginald, 70 Hughes, Langston, 32–­33, 79; “The Negro and the Racial Mountain,” 79 human exhibitionism, 96–­97 humanism, of afterliving, 24, 66 Humez, Jean M., 126, 127, 129 Hurricane Katrina, 143, 161–­167 Hurston, Zora Neale, 66; “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” 66 hypersexuality, 89, 90 idealization, and performance studies approach, 24 identity, theories of, 15, 78, 84, 91, 96, 100, 175 identity categories, regulatory powers of, 5 Igbos, 33–­34 illegibility, context of, 13 immateriality, and performance, 27 improvisation, 33 inclusion: access and, 65–­66; and black freedom movements, 120, 121–­122; limits of, 122–­123; and ownership, 73–­74 individualism: in Django Unchained (film), 2; liberal ideals of, 2; myth of individual exceptionalism, 5; and patriarchal privilege, 46; and women-­of-­color feminism, 110 inheritance, race reframing, 67–­68, 70 intermission, use of, 99 Ishi (Yahi tribe member), 97, 98 isolation, and black exceptionalism, 119 Jackson, Jimmie Lee, 158 Jackson, Michael, 53–­54; “Billie Jean” (song), 53 Jacobs, Harriet, 66–­67, 70, 94, 103; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 66–­67 Jacqueline (fictional character), 38 James, C.L.R., 155; Beyond the Boundary, 155 James, Etta, 83, 84 James, Jennifer, 122–­125 Jameson, Fredric, 109–­110; Seeds of Time, 109–­110

JanMohamed, Abdul R., 9 Jarrett, Gene Andrew, 15 Jay-­Z, 7, 23, 87, 88, 90, 92fig., 131 jazz funeral, 161–­167, 163fig. Jim Crow era, 20, 62, 65, 143 Joanne (fictional character), 116, 117 Johnson, James Weldon, 150 Johnson, Lyndon B., 160 Johnson, Robert, 7 Jones, Gayl, 29 Jones, Kellie, 70 Jones, Lisa, 70 Jones, Meta Du Ewa, 29 Josephine (fictional character), 34–­40, 46 Julien, Isaac, 91 Kelley, Robin D. G., 1, 142, 144, 153, 154; “Big, Glitzy Marches Are Not Movements,” 153, 154 Kennedy, John F., 144 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 55, 104, 119–­120, 127, 142, 153, 155 Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett, Barbara, 98 knowledge: privileged ways of, 27; production systems, 35, 54; self-­knowledge, 45; sources of, 26, 107; and storytelling, 28; and women-­of-­color feminism, 108 Knowles, Beyoncé, 7, 8, 61, 64fig., 65–­70, 81–­95, 89fig., 92fig., 93fig.; and animal imagery, 101–­102; caging/entrapment imagery, 96; “Crazy in Love” (song), 83; as definer, 102; “Déjà vu” (song), 81, 86; “Drunk in Love” (song), 90; layering, practice of, 95; and loophole of retreat, 103; performance comparisons, 96; “Partition” (music video), 87–­90, 88fig., 89fig.; status of, 94. See also Destiny’s Child LaBelle, Patti, 49, 50, 50fig., 54 language, use of, 80 Larkin (fictional character), 136 Larson, Kate Clifford, 126 Lauren Oya Olamina (fictional character), 104–­105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113–­ 115, 116, 117–­118, 120, 123–­124, 125, 129–­130, 131–­132, 133–­135, 137–­141

Index 225 layering, practice of, 95 Lee, Herbert, 144 Lee, Spike, 3, 144–­145, 155, 161–­167. See also 4 Little Girls (documentary film); When the Levees Broke (documentary film) Lepecki, André, 149 Lewis, John, 158 liberal capitalism, 10 liberal humanism: embodiment and, 85; and erotics, 88; and exclusion of blackness, 24, 58; and exhibitionism, 96–­97; and gender, 35; and materialization of black subjects, 74; and multiculturalism, 100; and social order, 96 liberal individualism: and agency, 13, 58; discouragements to black movements, 22 liberalism: black investment in, 48–­49, 115; and freedom, 13 liberal multiculturalism, 10, 100 liberal subjectivity, and black identity, 108 Ligon, Glenn, 14 listening, 31–­32 loophole of retreat, 67, 68, 94, 103 Lorde, Audre, 58 Lorini, Alessandra, 147; Rituals of Race, 147 “Love and Beauty—­Sartjee the Hottentot Venus” (engraving), 59fig. Madison, D. Soyini, 17, 28 marching: choreography of, 147–­152; and Hurricane Katrina crisis, 161–­ 167; march continuum, 144; March on Washington, 142–­144, 152–­157, 158fig., 159fig., 160fig., 165; media coverage of, 144–­145; as mode of mourning, 22; as political strategy, 19, 22, 132–­141; Silent Protest of 1917, 145–­147; as spatial disruption, 22 Marsalis, Wynton, 166 Martin, Trayvon, 16 masochism, 91 material historicism, 100 materiality: and performance, 26, 27; and representations of the black body, 101; transformation of, 26

materialization, of black subjects, 74, 106 Mathes, Carter, 119, 120 Mbembé, J. A., 15–­16, 146; “Necropolitics,” 146 McLeod, Ken, 51, 55 McNair, Carol Denise, 3–­4 media: and black voices, 27, 28, 144; coverage of marching, 152–­157; coverage of violence, 157–­161; and Hurricane Katrina crisis, 144 Melamed, Jodi, 10, 66 memory, acts of: and black feminism, 107; Django Unchained (film) as, 5; 4 Little Girls (documentary film) as, 3, 4; and history, 62; and music, 55; in “Nineteen Thirty-­Seven,” 39, 40; in “The Site of Memory,” 4, 107 Middle Passage, 52, 56, 136 Milkman (fictional character), 41–­47, 57 mimicry, 66 Mitchell, Angelyn, 113 Mizelle, Richard, Jr., 162 modernity: temporality of, 50–­51, 119 Monáe, Janelle, 50, 54 moonwalking, 53–­54 Moraga, Cherrie, 110 Morrison, Toni: Beloved, 69, 107, 193n25; and black freedom, 8; quotes, 104, 107; “The Reader As Artist,” 42–­43; “The Site of Memory,” 4, 107; Song of Solomon, 18, 31, 41–­47, 54–­55, 187n19 Moten, Fred, 4, 12, 25, 57, 80, 169, 171, 174–­175; “The Case of Blackness,” 12; In the Break, 25 Motown, 49, 51–­52, 53 mourning, marching as mode of, 22 mo(ur)nin(g) period, 4 movement: choreography of marching, 147–­52; multiple meanings defined, 5 Mullen, Harryette, 28, 29 multiculturalism: in education, 125–­126; Fusco on, 100; legacy of, 65; liberal multiculturalism, 10; limits of, 95–­96; maintenance of, 100; neoliberal multiculturalism, 10; and parameters of black freedom struggles, 11; and women-­of-­ color feminism, 109–­110

226

Index

multiplicity, and women-­of-­color feminism, 108 Murphy, Eddie, 70 Musée de l’Homme, 100 museums, and otherness, 100 music: and Flying African narrative, 30, 41; funk genre, 47, 49, 51, 52fig., 53; Motown, 49; and political actions, 48; singing impulse in black literature, 41; in Song of Solomon, 46 myth, blackness as, 49 Nagin, (Clarence) Ray, Jr., 164–­165 narcissism, gender and, 44–­45 Narcissus (mythological character), 44–­45 nationalism, and black freedom movements, 118, 119 Neal, Mark Anthony, 69, 83; Looking for Leroy, 84; Soul Babies, 69 Negri, Antonio, 113 Negro Resurrectionist (fictional character), 75–­77, 80 neoliberalism, 115; and costs of progress, 113–­115; discouragements to black movements, 22, 115; and distancing, 121; legacy of, 65; and progressivism, 118; and responsibility, 13 neoliberal multiculturalism, 10, 66, 74, 95, 100, 135, 139 Nesbitt, Nick, 37 New Black Aesthetic (NBA) movement, 70 New Negro ideal, 19 Ngugi wa Thiong, 29, 37, 38 “nigga” term, 69 Nilges, Mathias, 109–­110 Nkwenkwe, Nontetha, 130–­131 Nyong’o, Tavia, 138 Obama, Barack, 6, 7, 133 objectification: of blackness, 11, 15; of black women, 59, 59fig., 60fig., 61, 62, 69–­70; and gender identity, 87; and performances of entrapment, 67–­68; of slave trade, 22; in Venus (Parks), 72 official antiracist regimes, 10 opacity, 81 orality, and textuality, 29–­30

oral/written narratives, relationship of, 28 orature, 28–­30, 31, 37, 38, 39–­40, 48 otherness, 96, 100 Ovid, 44–­45; “The Judgment of Tiresias,” 44–­45 ownership, 143; and citizenship, 111 Papaelias, Lucas, 78 Parks, Suzan-­Lori, 61, 63fig., 65–­75; The Book of Grace, 78; as definer, 102; Father Comes Home from War, 78; Fucking A, 100; on history, 76, 82–­83; and loophole of retreat, 103; portrayal of black women, 79; “Possession,” 75–­76; status of, 94; Topdog/Underdog, 71, 86. See also Venus (Parks) Parliament (musical group), 47, 49, 50–­51, 52fig., 53–­54, 56, 190n71; Mothership Connection (album), 52. See also Clinton, George pastiche, 97 patriarchy, 3, 46 Pease, Donald, 121 performance: of entrapment, 67; and materiality, 26; and ontologies, 15; performance studies approach, 24; and personhood, 74; as repeated action, 5; representational history of, 58 performativity: and ethnic Otherness, 96; and orature, 40; and racialization, 98–­99; and subjectivity, 84; theories of, 12, 29–­30 Perry, Lee, 52 Perry, Tyler, 7 personas, 83–­84, 87–­88, 89–­90 personhood, and ownership, 73–­74 Peterson, Carla, 104, 107 Phelan, Peggy, 27; Unmarked, 27 Pilate (fictional character), 41–­44, 46–­47 policing: and gender, 39; and the prophetic, 130–­131 political action: African American, 15; and black radicalism, 132–­141; and racial identity, 48 political movement, defined, 5 popular culture, visibility of, undermining of, 85

Index 227 Porter, Adina, 61, 63fig., 74 Portis, Charles, 153 post-­black art (term), 14 post–­civil rights era: artists and black cultural politics in, 3; black artists in, 12, 13–­14; blackness in, 13–­14; and Flying African narrative, 30; and literary histories, 62; and poststructuralism, 2 posthumanism, 24–­27 post-­soul aesthetics, 69, 95 Powell, Colin, 7 power: assertion of, 39; coloniality of, 169–­170; structures of, 78; theories of, 15, 100 predictive function, of critical intelligence, 22 primitivism/neo-­primitivism, 61, 96, 98 privilege: class privilege, 90; and knowledge, 27; national privileges, 122; patriarchal privilege, 46 prophetic: description of prophets, 118; King’s vision as, 119–­120; and Nkwenkwe, Nontetha, 130–­131; predictive function of, 22, 116–­117; Tubman’s vision as, 125–­126; use of the, 104–­108, 131 psychic death, and Flying African narrative, 28, 55–­56 public occupation, Silent Protest of 1917, 145–­147 Quijano, Aníbal, 170 Ra, Sun, 48–­49, 52; in Space Is the Place (film), 48 race: cultural demands of, 68; reframing of, 70, 71; and theatricality, 97 racial affiliations, shifting of, 62–­63 racial identity, 14–­15; and aesthetics, 96; and artists’ performance practices, 5, 85; as matter of choice, 121–­122; and political affiliation, 48 racial inheritance, blackness as, 14 racialization: and commonality presumptions, 110–­111; limits of historical, 14; and performativity, 98–­99 racism, response to, 63, 68 Randolph, A. Phillip, 152, 155 Rayner, Alice, 72, 79, 99

Reagan era, 69 recognition, moments of, 21 Reddy, Chandan, 133 remembering: of forgotten histories, 5; future-­oriented, 2–­3 renaissance movement. See Black Women Writers’ Renaissance representation: delimitation of power of, 67; oppressive modes of, 97 resource redistribution, 10 resurrection: and Flying African narrative, 26; Negro Resurrectionist (fictional character), 75–­77; in Venus (Parks), 80 Rice, Condoleezza, 7 Ridout, Nicholas, 149 Roach, Joseph, 6, 18, 20, 29–­30, 165; Cities of the Dead, 18, 20, 29, 165 Robertson, Carole, 3 Robinson, Cedric, 119 robot dance, 54 Romney, Ann, 122 Rose (fictional character), 171–­173, 176 Rose, Tricia, 54 Rosen, Hilary, 122 Ross, Diana, 83 Rustin, Bayard, 152 Ryna (fictional character), 43–­47 sadomasochism, 91 Sapire, Hilary, 130 Sasha Fierce (Beyoncé persona), 83–­84 satire, and post-­soul artists, 95 Schneider, Rebecca, 27; Performing Remains, 27 Schultz, Dr. King (film character), 1 Scott, David, 108, 115 second-­wave feminism, 69 Sernett, Milton, 126, 127–­128; Harriet Tubman, 126 Seward, William H., 129 Sexton, Jared, 109, 169, 170–­171, 173–­174 sexuality: black, commodification of, 74; black, representations of, 68, 79; black, temporality of, 58; of black women, 68, 91; hypersexuality, 89, 90; and identity, 96; policing of, 123; and subjectivity, 91, 94

228

Index

Sharpe, Christina, 91, 103, 136; Monstrous Intimacies, 136 Shaver, Dinerral “Dick,” 163 Shulman, George, 117 Silent Protest of 1917, 144, 145–­147, 148fig., 151fig., 159 Singh, Nikhil Pal, 119 Singleton, Paul, 31 Sixteenth Street Church bombing (September 16, 1963), 3 slavery: afterlife of, 24, 66, 123, 132–­141, 169, 171; chattel slavery, 48, 52, 111; in Exodus, 131–­132; and historical standardization, 109; as a historical touchstone, 4; legacy of, 2, 21; objectification of, 22, 24; in Parable of the Talents, 125; and sexual violence, 94; transatlantic, 57, 69 Smallwood, Stephanie, 31 social death: of black subjects, 24; defying, 30–­34; and Flying African narrative, 28, 41 Solomon (fictional character), 43–­47 sound: filtering of, 47; gendering of, 44–­45 space/alien imagery, 52–­53 Space Is the Place (film), 48 spatial disruption, marching as mode of, 22 spectacle, cross-­purposes of, 72, 95 spidering, concept of, 20–­21 Spillers, Hortense, 20, 168 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 41, 44–­45; “Echo,” 44–­45 stereotypes: examination of, 75; in popular culture, 80; unlinking from, 99 Story, Tim, 47 storytelling: Anansi tales, 20–­21; and black movements, 145–­46; in Drums and Shadows, 31–­32; in Fences, 173; and Flying African narrative, 26–­27, 31; and knowledge, 28; Morrison on, 42; as political strategy, 21–­22; Tubman and, 127 subjectivity: and black studies, 169–­70; and identity, 84; and sexuality, 91, 94 suffering: and black achievement, 12–­13; denial of, 77; and racial identity, 78, 79 suicide, 33; and Igbos, 33–­34; in Song of Solomon, 43

superhero figure, black, 1–­2, 182n7 Tarantino, Quentin, 1–­2, 7, 181n2. See also Django Unchained (film) Tate, Claudia, 42 Tate, Greg, 70 Taylor, Diana, 98 technology: and flight, 47, 54; and futurity of blackness, 47 temporality, 29; and blackness, 14, 37–­38, 48; and black sexuality, 58; confusion of, 72; of modernity, 50–­51; and performance, 5, 13, 98, 106; relationship of, 61–­62; reorientation of, 49; Warren on, 67 textuality, and orality, 29–­30 theatricality, and race, 97 Till, Emmett, 4, 47, 143, 157. See also Bradley, Mamie Till Tiresias (mythicalogical character), 44–­45 traditions: liberatory possibilities of, 68; redefining of, 71 transcendence, critique of, 54 Troy Maxson (fictional character), 168–­ 169, 170, 171–­177 Trujillo, Rafael, 36 Tubman, Harriet, 104, 107, 125–­130, 131, 132 Turner, Tina, 83, 84 12 Years a Slave (film), 2 Tyburczy, Jennifer, 98 Tyson, June, 48 underrepresentation, 11 Universal Negro Improvement Association, 19 upper-­middle class, black, 2 ur-­text, of black culture, 28 Valk, Anne M., 163–­164 Venus (Parks), 61, 63fig., 72–­76, 76fig., 77, 83, 86; caging/entrapment in, 99–­100; critique of, 95; Elam and Rayner on, 79; layering, practice of, 95; performance comparisons, 96. See also Baartman, Saartjie viewer/performer relationships, 97–­98 violence, media coverage of, 157–­161

Index 229 visibility/hypervisibility, 85 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 160 Walker, Hamza, 14–­15; “Renigged,” 14 Wall, Cheryl, 20, 68; Worrying the Line, 20 Wallace, Michele, 72–­73, 75, 128 Warren, Kenneth, 15, 20, 62; What Was African American Literature?, 20, 62, 70 Washington, Mary Helen, 20 Weheliye, Alexander G., 25–­26 Weller, Frederick, 78 Wesley, Cynthia, 3 West, Cornel, 28 West, Kanye, 8, 53, 54–­57; “All Falls Down” (song), 57; College Dropout (album), 54–­55; “Spaceship” (song), 55–­57 When the Levees Broke (documentary film), 144–­145, 157, 161–­167 white liberal legibility, limits of, 48 white masculinity, 25–­26, 95 Wilderson, Frank B., III, 13–­14, 25; Red, White & Black, 25 Wilentz, Gay, 33; “If You Surrender to the Air,” 33 Williams, Hosea, 158

Wilson, August, 69, 168–­169, 170, 171–­ 177; Fences, 168–­169, 171–­177; Gem of the Ocean, 69 Wilson, Woodrow, 145 Winant, Howard, 170 Winfrey, Oprah, 7 Wolfe, George C., 49, 70; The Colored Museum, 49 women-­of-­color feminism: affiliation and, webs of, 122; delegitimization of, 109; and individualism, 110; and multiplicity, 108; and national privileges, 122; and studies of blackness, 111 Wong, Anna May, 84–­85 written narratives, oral quality of, 26 Wynter, Sylvia, 169–­170; “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/ Freedom,” 169–­170 Young, Harvey, 73, 75, 80 Young, Jean, 72–­73, 75, 77, 79 Zahra (fictional character), 137, 138 Zirimu, Pio, 29

About the Author

Soyica Diggs Colbert is an associate professor of African American studies and theater and performance studies at Georgetown University, where she also chairs the Department of Performing Arts and directs the theater and performance studies program. She is the author of The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage (2011) and coeditor of The Psychic Hold of Slavery (2016). She is currently working on a book titled Lorraine Hansberry: Artist/Activist.