Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life 9781479806386

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Afro- Fabulations

S E X UA L C U LT U R E S General Editors: Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyong’o, and Joshua Chambers-Letson Founding Editors: José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini Titles in the series include: Times Square Red, Times Square Blue Samuel R. Delany Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations Phillip Brian Harper In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies Many Merck

Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces Juana María Rodríguez Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini

Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latinization of American Culture Frances Négron-Muntaner Latino America Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in José A. Quiroga the Jim Crow Era Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Marlon Ross Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel Gregory Forter

Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest Edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa A. Duggan Black Gay Man: Essays Robert F. Reid-Pharr Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion Edited by Maria C. Sanchez and Linda Schlossberg The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity Paul Morrison The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater Edited by Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV

In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives J. Jack Halberstam

Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality Dwight A. McBride God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence Michael Cobb Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual Robert Reid-Pharr The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory Lázaro Lima Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America Dana Luciano Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity José Esteban Muñoz Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism Scott Herring

Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination Darieck Scott Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries Karen Tongson Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading Martin Joseph Ponce

A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire Hiram Pérez Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality Katherine Franke The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography Ariane Cruz

Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled Michael Cobb

Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias Eng-Beng Lim

Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible Malik Gaines

Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law Isaac West

A Body, Undone: Living on after Great Pain Christina Crosby

The Life and Death of Latisha King: A The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture Gayle Salamon Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Joyce and Dwight A. McBride Serious Parody Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Melissa M. Wilcox Latina Longings After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Juana María Rodríguez Color Life Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Joshua Chambers-Letson Masochism Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Amber Jamilla Musser Brown Jouissance The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Amber Jamilla Musser Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Ecologies Black Life Rachel C. Lee Tavia Nyong’o Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men For a complete list of books in the series, Jane Ward see www.nyupress.org Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance Uri McMillan

Afro-Fabulations The Queer Drama of Black Life

Tavia Nyong’o

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York www.nyupress.org © 2019 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. ISBN: 978-1-4798-5627-5 (hardback) ISBN: 978-1-4798-8844-3 (paperback) For Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data, please contact the Library of Congress. New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Introduction: A Race against Time?

1

1. Critical Shade: The Angular Logics of Black Appearance

27

2. Crushed Black: On Archival Opacity

46

3. Brer Soul and the Mythic Being: Toward a Queer Logic of Dark Sense

76

4. Deep Time, Dark Time: Anarchaeologies of Blackness and Brownness

99

5. Little Monsters: Unsettling the Sovereign Wild

129

6. Fabulous, Formless: Queer Theory’s Dark Precursor

151

7. Habeas Ficta: Afro-Fabulation and the Fictions of Ethnicity

166

8. Chore and Choice: The Depressed Cyborg’s Manifesto

185

Conclusion: For a Critical Poetics of Afro-Fabulation

199

Acknowledgments

213

Notes

217

Index

255

About the Author

265

vii

List of Illustrations

I.1. Crystal LaBeija in The Queen (1967)

2

I.2. Mikeah Jennings in Wu Tsang, for how we perceived a life (Take 3) (2012)

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I.3. Ms. Vaginal Davis reclining on the 80th floor of the Meridian Hotel, San Francisco

16

I.4. Leslie Uggams sings “Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon”

23

1.1. Trajal Harrell, Twenty Looks, postmodern

29

1.2. Trajal Harrell, Twenty Looks, shading whiteness

39

2.1a–c. Portrait of Jason, fading to black

53

2.2. Unsigned artist rendering of Canada Lee portraying Bigger Thomas

69

2.3. An Audio Portrait of Jason

75

3.1. Brer Soul album cover

87

3.2. Three Queer Graces, from Sweetback

89

3.3. Adrian Piper as the Mythic Being

91

4.1. Regina José Galindo, Piedra (2013)

107

4.2. Kara Walker, A Subtlety, detail (2014)

114

6.1. Paperback cover of Samuel R. Delany’s The Einstein Intersection (1967)

159

8.1. Bina48

187

C.1. Kitchen Steve

205

C.2. Kitchen Steve’s digital avatar

212 ix

Introduction A Race against Time? Every word immediately becomes a concept, inasmuch as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases—which means, strictly speaking, never equal—in other words, a lot of unequal cases. Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. —Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in an Otherthan-Moral Sense” Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves—along with the renewed courage to try them out. —Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”

In a memorable scene from the 1968 drag documentary classic The Queen, the legendary Crystal LaBeija goes off against the judges and organizers of the Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant for awarding the crown to a younger white ingenue from Philadelphia, in an upset victory that confirms LaBeija’s view that “the fix” was in. Stalking off stage haughtily, LaBeija proceeds to hold forth as cameras roll, alternately addressing the documentary filmmakers and defying the machinery of representation that she recognizes them to be complicit in. At the pageant, Crystal LaBeija represents an uptown black drag community that, 1

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Figure I.1. Crystal LaBeija in The Queen (1967). Screenshot by author.

she now reveals, had been of divided opinion about whether or not to participate. Without naming racism directly as the cause of her loss to Sabrina’s “all-American” protégé Harlow, LaBeija contests the system of values that had been set up to judge her in the first place. Inverting those values in an epic “read” endows LaBeija, even in ostensible loss, with an untouchable aura of divinity. Accused of “showing her color” for her refusal to meekly accept her runner-up status—a coded accusation if ever there was one—LaBeija spits back, “I have a right to show my color, darling! I am beautiful and I know I’m beautiful!”1 Insofar as the queerness of black life, which is nothing other than the blackness of queer life, is constituted through such a right to show our colors, this scene is a master class in the perils and possibilities of exposure. During the scene, which ends with Sabrina herself intervening to defend the judges’ decision, LaBeija blazes in incandescent fury at the pageant, at the documentary crew, at the hapless winner (who is cringing in a corner trying very much to disappear), and at herself for submitting to be judged in the first place. Other belles of the Harlem drag balls (including Dorian Corey, who would much later star in an-

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other influential documentary, 1991’s Paris Is Burning, directed by Jennie Livingston) had declined to participate in The Queen. It seems that even LaBeija had had her doubts. “No, I didn’t sign any release,” she declares on camera, “and if she [Sabrina] releases any picture of me, I will sue the fool. . . . She won’t make any money off of my name,” LaBeija vows, before in the very next breath inviting the camera to take a picture of her side-by-side with Harlow to show how truly biased the judges had been. In this epic fort-da game with the camera, LaBeija manages both to solicit the cinematic gaze and to dispute its power. Against a hierarchy of visibility and beauty, which disparages the black femme glamour she finds beautiful in herself and others, LaBeija afro-fabulates an alternate system of values for the documentarians to witness, if not fully record. She offers them a partial glimpse into a darker queer world than The Queen is able to capture. In so doing, she demonstrates how to perform for and against the camera.2 How might we begin to make sense of the paradoxical vibrance of a form of life endangered, or even erased, by efforts at documentation and representation? What do we do with feelings that resist retrospective vindication? In this book, I am interested in answering such questions through a critical and fabulative archiving of a world that was “never meant to survive,” as Audre Lorde memorably put it—and a world that, I would add, was perhaps also never meant to appear.3 The persistent reappearance of that which was never meant to appear, but was instead meant to be kept outside or below representation forms the first sense in which this book will mobilize the term “afro-fabulation.” I don’t mean by this that the fabulist is a storyteller in any straightforward sense of that familiar term, still less that she is a liar. More nearly, fabulation engages the philosophical position, identified by Henri Bergson among other modern theorists, that the irreversibility of the flow of time is the paradoxical source of freedom.4 Fabulation points to the deconstructive relation between story and plot, a topic more frequently studied in literature than, as I shall attempt here, in relation to visual and performance art. When LaBeija abjures and, in the next breath, solicits the recording apparatus of the camera, she enacts this paradox of fabulation vividly. When we consider our own transgression of her interdiction of that gaze, we can see that blackness grasps us even as we seek to grasp it. In the chapters that follow, I track key moments of fabulation

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in contemporary black art and performance, honing in on moments in which black subversions of sexual and gender conformity prove excessive, disorderly, or simply unintelligible to an external gaze. Contesting a historical and political sequence that is by now familiar—a sequence in which gay rights follows upon civil rights in progressive lock-step, and the queer theory of the 1990s builds upon the feminist, black, and anticolonial writings of the 1960s and 1970s—I instead look to the ways the study of blackness can rearrange our perceptions of chronology, time, and temporality. My aim is to speculate on the manner in which the “changing same” of black aesthetics and expressivity may have always already been queer.5

Performing for and against the Camera Acts of afro-fabulation such as LaBeija’s epic read, I will argue in this book, operate as a queer hack of the codes of an anti-black world, and rely for their success on a vernacular awareness of, and confrontation with, the manner in which gender and sexual norms operate to reproduce systems of racial hierarchy. While critical analysis and traditions of protest have cultivated theoretical and methodological priorities among race, gender, sexuality, and class, at the intersection where LaBeija engages the camera (and, through it, the entire cinematic apparatus of capture), the black fabulative subject must perform with her whole self, albeit a self iterated to another power.6 Recognizing the mythmaking function of the camera to speak to what Gilles Deleuze terms a “people who are missing,” LaBeija races against time to preserve and, in fact, to invent the splendor of her competitive performance.7 Knowing how the rules and codes are stacked against them, competitive black subjects like LaBeija perfect the skill of back chat, shade, reading, and other hacks of the color line, which, when they work successfully, reveal the beauty of a terrible (and to some, terrifying) joy. The terrible joy of LaBeija’s queer performance, which throws shade and color upon a whitewashed pageant, is not shuckin’ or jivin’, but their opposite. Bound to appear, she takes refuge in a performative agency that is derived specifically from the multiplicity of her sisters, both sisters present with her and those who stayed home.8 She addresses us, here in the future, without being able to know how she has changed us.

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This book’s account of afro-fabulation is thus before anything else a theory of the event. There are of course many theories of the event, and also, as we shall see, theories of the “nonevent.”9 In most respects the incident captured on camera would almost assuredly be termed a nonevent. A belated and ineffective protest, it is shut down within the narrative logic of the film itself.10 And either a win or a loss at a drag ball that is itself in breach of the law against cross-dressing can hardly be assimilated to any grand narrative of history. Rather than looking to this moment of performing for and against the camera as a decisive act of agency, then, I look instead to theories of the ordinary and the everyday as the texture out of which the eventfulness of fabulation arises. If one of the most common assertions of performance studies is that performance is everywhere, Afro-Fabulations looks to that nondescript character, that quality of in media res, and attends especially to those moments and locations where a change in the surround that is blackness seems to come out of nowhere. My claim in this book is that afro-fabulation is a theory and practice of black time and temporality, and the following pages lay out the scope of this claim as it pertains to both the study of performance and the theory of performativity. Both art and literature are impacted by afrofabulation as trans-disciplinary study. Cutting across disciplinary approaches affords me a method of doing work that apprehends the black artist in a range of media. Within the contemporary social and political movements to which my own scholarly labors are indebted, such breadth seeks to work against being disciplined by the academy through a scholarly protocol of divide and conquer. A second danger, which I also consider, is the risk of communicating and rendering overly explicit that which ought more tactically remain camouflaged. In order better to apprehend the general antagonism within the specific contradiction of our present conjuncture, then, I outline these preliminary remarks by way of afro-fabulation as a trans-disciplinary method. Although I am interested in the everydayness of black performance, one ordinary and commonsense usage of “fabulation” must be clarified at the outset. A fabulist in my parlance is nothing like a liar. More nearly, fabulation exposes the relation between truth and lying in an other-thanmoral sense, to paraphrase Nietzsche. My interest in fabulationality—the entangled and angular socialities generated by fabulation—is of course

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also inspired by the “poetics of relation” pioneered by Édouard Glissant.11 It exposes the difference in every repetition, as exemplified by a writer like Gayl Jones, in particular in her novel Mosquito, in which her garrulous narrator promises to distinguish between “communicating” and “camouflage.”12 Incredibly detailed and specific one minute, the narrator of this epic novel of the American Southwest turns reticent and guarded the next. She is not an “untrustworthy” narrator, however. Her reticence commands respect and produces trust. When she “confabulates,” she admits she may be confused on a point or two. But these points of incoherence in her subjective memory are not a sign of dissemblance; they are, instead, sites of what I will describe as incompossibility. We see that the sanctuary work Jones’s protagonist engages in tethers together worlds that can and cannot be, and is thus a necessary step toward investigating possibilities outside our present terms of order. This is an incompossibility, rather than a contradiction, and her slogan might be: “Another world is incompossible.” Afro-fabulation, in Jones, is thus also en route toward the “critical fabulation” that black feminist historian Saidiya Hartman has proposed, and gestures to the “speculative fabulation” proposed by feminist science theorist Donna Haraway.13 Such black feminist and posthumanist acts of speculation are never simply a matter of inventing tall tales from whole cloth. More nearly, they are the tactical fictionalizing of a world that is, from the point of view of black social life, already false. It is an insurgent movement—in the face of an intransigent and ever-mutating anti-blackness—toward something else, something other, something more. While moments of afro-fabulation are indeed often ephemeral and fleeting—as with LaBeija’s performance—they may also be as monumental and enduring as Jones’s novels. Though neither may transform the conditions under which they appear, they live on through performative and narrative strategies and tactics that draw out of a black feminist and queer repository of counter-conduct, finding in collective memory an ever-renewing series of stratagems for aesthetic oppositionality.14 The work of Saidiya Hartman in imagining and enacting “critical fabulation” is crucial here because of the way it throws into crisis the progressive teleology from bondage to freedom, and thus calls upon us to examine more carefully the afterlives of slavery.15 The short essay “Venus in Two Acts,” in which Hartman outlines a series of questions leading

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toward a critical speculative poetics of fabulation, has been a touchstone for my thinking, even as I look to a seemingly different set of archives and questions. How might critical fabulation, I ask, be brought to bear in these other contexts? In particular, I seek in these chapters to take a set of questions that emerged at the nexus of history and literary studies and bring them to bear upon performance, cinema, art, music, and digital technology. Chapter 2, for instance, is grounded in traditional questions of archival recovery, whereas chapter 4 looks to the mnemonic and memorializing function of performance and public art, and chapter 8 turns our focus on techno-scientific projects aiming to escape the all-consuming racial past. Afro-fabulation as I intend it here demands interdisciplinary modes of investigation. Put another way, the phenomena of fabulation that I pursue here— across a range of aesthetic instances—is tethered to the classic paradox of fiction: the matter of why and how it is that a story we know to be untrue can nonetheless inspire belief, emotion, and attachment.16 Fictions, a theory of fabulation can tell us, do not simply attach themselves to moments of idle fantasy, play, instruction, or other socially acceptable occasions for storytelling. Fictions instead arise out of the indeterminacy and flux of living and dying, with life being perhaps the greatest fiction of all. “There is fiction in the space between,” Tracy Chapman sings, “the lines of your page of memories.”17 If the paradox of fiction threatens to untether both history and memory from the grounds of veridiction, these powers of the false are not so much to be enthusiastically embraced as they are to be critically interrogated. Black art and performance can aid this process of critical fabulation in a variety of ways I will explore over the course of this book, but especially insofar as they bring into co-presence a sense of the incompossible, mingling what was with what might have been. We can see this co-presence at work in performance and video artist Wu Tsang’s 2012 film for how we perceived a life (Take 3), which revisits and re-performs LaBeija’s audacious moment of backchat from The Queen.18 The short video begins with five performers in a huddle, who emerge to enact short sequences that combine elements from the dialogue of both Paris Is Burning and The Queen, into which the artist has also interpolated dialogue from subsequent interviews as well as archival footage she recovered from the UCLA Film & Television Archives.

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Serving the children shade and color, Tsang’s ensemble moves as a living reenactment of the cinematic apparatus, which they manage to bring to an abrupt and stuttering series of halts. If documentary cinema imposes sequential, periodizing, “time-stamped” time upon the everyday, the trans-aesthetic of queer of color performance here moves in and through the cut, accumulating temporal vignettes in a layered and folded manner that suspends historicity.19 Yet even though it is grounded in both archival research and oral history, for how we perceived a life is nothing like an earnest historical reconstruction. It is instead a performed fabulation, construed here through a technique the artist has called “full body quotation.” Through quoting and re-performing decontextualized fragments from these germinal films, for how we perceived a life explores the need of the black and brown feminist, queer, and transgender participants in the ballroom scene to be seen, heard, and felt, while resisting the temptation to accept visibility under dominative constraints as the fulfillment of that wish.20 The implicit theory of the archive in Tsang’s term, “full body quotation,” is telling.21 Through it, Tsang seeks to locate new aims for past goals, finding in the historical record a set of fabulous resources and stratagems. Turning the gaze back upon the filmmakers, quoting from archival footage of Jennie Livingstone (who is mostly unseen and unheard in Paris Is Burning), and citing LaBeija’s protest of The Queen, for how we perceived a life implicitly raises questions about its own status as a fiction. Within the ensemble Tsang gathers, Mikeah Jennings’s full body quotation of LaBeija stands out as the kind of homage to a legendary forbear that is the stuff of queer subculture (and of drag performance in particular, for which transformational impersonation is key to the process of transmitting cultural memory). As interpolated into a performance and film largely concerned with the more recent (and still hotly debated) Paris Is Burning, Jennings’s full-body quotation of LaBeija from the earlier film The Queen appears almost out of nowhere. The film thus suggests a deeper history than contemporary queer and trans polemics often concern themselves with, a history that emerges into the present only in incandescent and unpredictable flashes. And yet, rather than taking this historical audio-image from the 1960s out of context, Tsang’s performance film is perhaps better described as creating a new context for it, one based upon a trans of color fabulation of the people who are

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Figure I.2. Mikeah Jennings in Wu Tsang, for how we perceived a life (Take 3) (2012). Film still.

missing. Inventing a critical genealogy for contemporary trans performance, Tsang’s work crisscrosses black, brown, and Asian bodies and their incompossible histories. Blackness inheres in this film less as an identity assigned to all its participants, or its author, and more as a protective coloration they may take temporary shelter in. This is to say, the film serves to deepen the historical referent of contemporary debates around queer and trans theory and aesthetics by moving past the 1990s to get to the 1960s, moving past the “new queer cinema” to get to the sex and gender dissident cinema of the pre-Stonewall era. What could be taken as a corrective or rebuke to these earlier queer films instead unfolds as a resonant meditation on black and queer duration. Encountering Mikeah Jennings’s re-performance of Crystal LaBeija’s read more than a generation on also provides an opportunity to explore the changing same of black performance as an intertwining of “tensed” and “tenseless” time. I engage this difference more in chapter 4 on deep and dark time, which I develop as a black and brown critique of the increasingly influential concept of “the Anthropocene” that presumes to theorize the human impact on the planet. By evoking this distinction between tensed and tenseless time, I engage the work of Michelle Wright, La Marr Jurelle Bruce, and others working in the nascent area of black temporality

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studies.22 Wright has been particularly eloquent in finding, within modern physical theories of times, grounds for imagining blackness otherwise. While I avoid the “beyonding” rhetoric that characterizes Wright’s approach to what she terms the “middle passage epistemology,” I share her interest in reading temporality contrapuntally, that is, as both tensed and tenseless. We can gain an initial sense of what this means if we consider a way of thinking about the original 1967 competition and its contemporary reenactment by Jennings, not simply as a sequence in which the first event “causes” the second, but also in relation to a conception of time in which the two can be said to share in a coeval presentness that we can call, after the philosopher Henri Bergson, “duration.” In Homay King’s useful explication of Bergson, duration is always available, but it is usually screened out.23 In order to access it, there must be a coalescence between the sequential, tensed temporality of the ongoing present (which I will associate with Adrian Piper’s “indexical time”) and a tenseless time (which I will associate with Amiri Baraka’s concept of the changing same). The kind of fugitive time that allows for access to something beyond and for the emergence of the virtual is not just ordinary, everyday time. It is what Bergson called la durée, duration. Fabulation as I mean it participates in this “kind of time” that Bergson names “duration” and that I refer to mostly as “tenseless time,” or the time of the virtual.24 I share with King the perception that such a sense of tenseless time is of particular importance to black and minoritarian subjects, for whom the gap opened out between the possible and the potential, no matter how slight, remains crucial. Finding in Crystal LaBeija a tenseless time of fugitivity and rebellion under unpromising conditions can serve as an important corrective to a progressive or presentist conception of social change as an overcoming or erasure of the benighted past. The once and future Marxist analytic that this text moves in constant tension with teaches us all something of what Bergson calls “irreversibility” and what David Harvey calls “accumulation through dispossession.”25 Through a performative ethic of citation, for how we perceived a life (Take 3) strikes a balance between the unacceptable alternatives of either erasing the queer and trans of color history as always already “problematic,” or alternatively, doggedly defending a historical record of necessarily impartial and imperfect representation as “the best that we could do at the time.” In positing LaBeija’s original read

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and subsequent trans and queer citations of it as examples of performing both for and against the camera, I aim also to further a revived critical confidence in an image that participates in a virtual set of incompossible pasts and futures, a black speculative engagement with the camera and, more broadly, with the documentary and archival historical apparatus. In these pages I seek to diagram a virtual, tenseless blackness that shadows and camouflages the communicative apparatus that colonizes time. This blackness is queer insofar as it resists reproductive, developmental, and accumulative time, but also insofar as it is availed to an array of incompossible subjects that must each find it at their own tempo. Although music proper may appear to be given relatively short shrift in this book, the theory of black polytemporality put forward here under the rubric of afro-fabulation is nothing other than a modest contribution to the afro-philo-sonic fictions that Alexander Weheliye and Julian Henriques have taught us to hear emanating from the dread refuges of black diasporic rebellion. Black music is the social organization of black time for revolution, and this text seeks a conception of the visual and the literary that can grapple with that consequence. I completed this study at a moment when ethical and critical debates regarding the visuality, spectacularity, and representation of black lives in a North American context were still intensifying. We are no longer, as we once were, inclined to idealize performance as that which escapes all forms of recording and representation and disappears into the ever-receding present.26 This definition of performance gave the young, emerging academic field of performance studies its wished for proper object, but in so doing, it split the field off from concurrent work in cultural studies, visual studies, and new media studies. Although there are certainly unrecorded performances from the era of The Queen, and while there certainly are differences and distinctions to be made between a live performance by Wu Tsang and the performance for (and against) the camera that I have discussed, reifying such differences masks precisely those aspects of performance that are calibrated in dialogic tension with actual or potential recording. So rather than consider the live as that which disappears, I approach it instead as that which accumulates in and as the virtual. Periodically in this book, I will refer to this queer time of black memory as a shadow archive. I do so in order to suggest that a camouflaged

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presence is not an absent presence, and that the points of access to the tenseless time of the virtual are immanent to the changing same of black performance. In mobilizing this trope of the shadow archive, I seek to explore how a repertoire of blackness and queerness is not separate from, but is instead deeply entangled with the various analogue and digital archives that unevenly document it. If afro-fabulation entails an unexpected appearance (although as we shall see it entails much more than that), then this appearance has everything to do with a mode of relating to hegemony and hegemonic visibility, which bears testimony to the ever-inventive resources of shady conviviality on the lower frequencies.

From Reparative Reading to Fabulationality Art is resistance: it resists death, slavery, infamy, shame. But a people can’t worry about art. How is a people created, through what terrible suffering? When a people’s created, it is through its own resources, but in a way that links up with something in art . . . or links up art to what it lacked. Utopia isn’t the right concept: it’s more a question of a “fabulation” in which a people and art both share. We ought to take up Bergson’s notion of fabulation and give it a political meaning. —Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Antonio Negri, Futur Anterior

Much of what I argue about resistance through art extends propositions put forward in the work of Malik Gaines in Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left and Joshua Chambers-Letson in After the Party.27 Writing in the utopian spirit of José Muñoz’s queer of color critique, these authors posit a performance theory that is not yet, in the sense that they look to history only in order to insist that we do not yet know what black performance theory can do. But why afro-fabulation? And why do I speak of it in relation to a people who are missing? How does fabulation work within the particular set of dynamics and frameworks that has been set up to address black performance as an aesthetic and political paradigm in our contemporary moment? While a full answer to this question will only emerge over the course of this book, setting out some introductory points of reference at this stage will undoubtedly prove useful.

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One recognizable reference point in contemporary critical theory will certainly be feminist techno-science theorist Donna Haraway, who has articulated a project of “speculative fabulation.” 28 Later in this study I engage with her germinal socialist feminist theory of the cyborg as a point of interlocution in chapter 8, where I discuss what more recent critics such as Joy James have termed the “black cyborg.”29 The impressive range of fabulation, from archival study to speculative theory, helps point to the scholarly interlocutors of this project.30 If the resulting excursus betrays its idiosyncratic origins, it is because the work I want the afro-fabulative to do in this project is directed less toward field mastery than it is toward serving as a set of disruptions and provocations I might sum up as “how to do things with black queer and trans archives.” The answer I propose will turn out to have as much to do with a dark Deleuzeanism as with a black Marxism—critical traditions that I evoke not in search of a vaunted Eurocentric countersignature upon black critical methods, but rather in the bricolage spirit of a queer black study ready to forward its agenda by any means necessary, and with tools that are ready at hand.31 Because critical theory is a tool I happen to have ready at hand, it is the tool I bring to this present task, which is to unburden black art and performance from the dominant representationalist form of politics wherever and whenever I can.32 And to restore an ethos of camouflage wherever communicative transparency threatens to give ground to ubiquitous surveillance. “Fabulation” as a critical keyword has a complex and convoluted intellectual history across multiple languages. Formalist literary analysis grounded in comparative literary methods distinguishes between the “fabula” and the “sjuzhet” of a narrative (roughly equivalent to the ordinary English language distinction between “story” and “plot”). The fabula in this usage refers to the sequence of events that form the invariant core of a narrative, the “what happened.” In performance theory a related usage emerges in the Brechtian dramaturgy of “fabel” to indicate the core sense of a play that the company arrives at through a collective dramaturgical process, a sense that, once arrived at, licenses them to reinterpret and even add and subtract elements from the play to enable it to better conform to this “fabel.” What the dramaturgical usage adds is an active element of interpretation and reinvention, tied to a given text or event that is central but not unalterable. Rather

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than referring to an invariant story that can be plotted and replotted in various ways, Brechtian fabel-ation points toward a dialogic process of research and interpretation in which that “core” story is in fact constantly placed under the pressure of transformation.33 In this way, afro-fabulation certainly bears comparison to the “afro-Alienation acts” outlined in the post-Brechtian analyses of Daphne Brooks and Malik Gaines.34 In this broader literary and philosophical context, fabulation possesses a distinctive meaning for Deleuze, who employs it extensively in his work on cinema (and again in his late work on literature) to expound upon a usage most significantly found in Bergson. For Bergson, fabulation (sometimes translated into English as the “mythmaking function”) is a “virtual instinct” that operates within human perception as a holdover from an earlier stage of evolution. Tellingly for my purposes, Bergson often refers to fabulation as a “shadow” cast over the illuminated human centers of intelligence, imagination, and reason. Bergsonian/Deleuzean fabulation is thus rooted in attributions of intentionality and agency to a brand range of phenomena well beyond sentient life, a sort of pre-reflexive animism that helped explain, for Bergson, so-called “primitive” religion.35 Deleuze adopted and transformed Bergson’s concept of fabulation for his own thinking on the use of free indirect discourse in cinema and literature, untethering the concept from its primitivist implications, and instead wielding it as a component in his own project for a nonrepresentationalist aesthetics. My own usage of the word is more indebted to this philosophical provenance (particularly as routed through the work of contemporary black queer feminist critics Kara Keeling and Amber Musser) than it is to literary formalism, particularly because the concept of the virtual developed in the Deleuzean tradition is important for my analysis.36 My use of it here refers more to what we might think of as an instinct, or better, a drive for the virtual, on the part of black subjects. But I also want to be alert to and resonant with a range of less technical meanings and connotations for fabulation and the fabulous in black queer and trans studies. While I speak of trans and queer studies both separately and together in what follows, I do not seek to conflate them or force their complementarity. Chapters 3, 8, and the conclusion bear out in more detail the ways which trans and queer analytics are productively entangled with each other.37

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My use of fabulation in this latter sense is in dialogue with a range of other thinkers in queer of color critique, black queer and trans studies, and performance and media studies. In an essay on the arch-fabulist Vaginal Davis, film studies scholar Marc Siegel succinctly defines the performative power of the fabulative utterance as “neither true nor false but fabulous.”38 By this formulation, Siegel means to show how it would be missing the point entirely to fact-check the stories Davis regales her audiences with—in person and on her legendary blog, Speaking from the Diaphragm. Her bawdy tales and shocking indiscretions are too incredible not to treat with the utmost seriousness. As she has told her audience on so many occasions, “Gossip is the one true living archive.” Rather than malicious mistruths, her factual fictions are anexact in their extemporaneous intensifications and manipulations of the truth. In his larger study of gossip in the extended cinema of underground queer life, Siegel shows how fabulation can be deployed against hegemonic demands for legibility and transparency that so often simply expose and endanger minoritarian lives. In this he follows in close step with Gavin Butt and Dominic Johnson, two great scholars of the queer convivial, who have done much to illuminate what we might call the uses of gossip. Readers in African Americans studies, of course, will already have heard all this through the grapevine.39 This use of fabulation and fabulousness is also developed in the ethnographic work of Martin Manalansan, who studies migrant queers living undocumented lives in the Queens neighborhood of New York City. I draw on his work in the interdisciplinary and collaborative spirit of a queer studies that always finds its theory in low places. Manalansan’s spirited ethnographies show how the queer love of “being fabulous” is too easily dismissed as a manic identification with the lifestyles of a wealthy, white elite. Manalansan argues on the contrary how performing what he calls “fabulosity” can serve as a form of undocumented queer of color world-making.40 In this his work also dovetails with the investigations of Madison Moore into what the latter calls “the fabulous class” of cultural workers who traffic in glamor and style in order to circulate in elite spaces that are saturated with class and racial hostility. In a reversal of the classic dynamic of “slumming”—in which elites dressed down in order to frequent black and brown “interzones”—Moore’s fabulous class passers and poseurs deploy their mastery of surface impressions to navi-

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Figure I.3. Ms. Vaginal Davis reclining on the eightieth floor of the Meridian Hotel, San Francisco. Photo by Hector Martinez.

gate (and sometimes disrupt) enclaves of power and privilege built on the backs of the most grievous exploitation and immiseration. Moore’s work also calls textured and specific attention to the work of fabulousness, and the intense public harassment and hostility that trans and gender-nonconforming people can face when they are “working it.” 41 These queer of color usages of fabulation and the fabulous point us toward deeper genealogies of blackness in aesthetic and critical theory,

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17

for which Keeling and Fred Moten are two expert guides. In her engagement with Deleuze, Gramsci, and Fanon, Keeling fabulates the figure of “the black femme function” as a force that structures the appearance of the visible without ever itself cohering into stable cinematic presence.42 Comparably, Moten, in “Taste Dissonance Flavor Escape,” works toward an aesthetic definition of blackness as an “escape-in-confinement” for which the difference between the captured photographic image of the black figure must be thought contrapuntally with the shadowy blackness that brings that image into visibility.43 Both of these dark Deleuzean critics anticipate subsequent moves in critical theory, from new materialism to speculative realism, and provide the raced and sexed histories of the colonial modern that are key to making sense of them. I draw upon both in my expanded sense of fabulation as pertaining to the emergence into visibility—and not simply good/bad or just/unjust aesthetic judgments about visible images themselves—throughout this book. I am interested in how black queer and trans subjects perform both for and against the camera, conceiving the camera not merely as one apparatus among many, but as the key visual apparatus of modernity.44 Fabulation is key to my analysis of how this dis/appearing act is accomplished. If queer fabulousness and black shade are too often dismissed as ephemeral resistance and vain complicity, my defense of both in this study is shaped by Deleuze’s idiosyncratic vision of the fabulist as the one who calls out to “the people who are missing.” The fabulist, Deleuze writes in a late essay, possesses a profound desire, a tendency to project—into things, into reality, into the future, and even into the sky—an image of himself and others so intense that it has a life of its own: an image that is always stitched together, patched up, continually growing along the way, to the point where it becomes fabulous. It is a machine for manufacturing giants, what Bergson called a fabulatory function.45

We can see such a machine for manufacturing giants in the black feminist artist Faith Ringgold’s mural for the Women’s House of Detention in New York (a location I discuss further in chapter 3), in which the artist depicts women in a range of roles (from priest to bus-driver) they could not yet routinely assume in US society. This mural, rescued from

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near destruction by male inmates, stood at the entrance to the exhibit of black women artists, We Wanted a Revolution. Aspirational rather than documentary, her kaleidoscopic image is less a map of a utopic future than a spur to women to revolt in the present. Rather than depict, she diagrams in the sense Keeling gives: her diagram is of nothing other than the angular sociality between the lock up and the get down, the carceral and the excarceral. It is a map to a once and future abolition of gender as imagined from the stance of violently degendered black flesh.46 In his brief sketch of the fabulist’s relation to “a people” who are missing, Deleuze hints at the collectivist aspirations of the fabulist. The desire of the fabulist, Deleuze insists, is directed toward a life that is not singular or individual, but a life lived in the singular plural. We see this plurality in every hue and tone, in every face of the social, that Ringgold’s mural claims. Refusing the terms of an anti-black and anti-woman social order, she gives us a vision of relationality—a fabulationality—in which another world is not only possible, it is virtually present.47 Although my subject is not utopian thinking (for which I have learned more than I can ever myself hope to teach from the work of black feminist performance theorist Jayna Brown and queer of color theorist José Esteban Muñoz), there is often a family resemblance between the Blochian principles of hope that Brown and Muñoz appeal to and the disjunctive synthesis I will associate with fabulation. For example, in Cruising Utopia, Muñoz cites Theodor Adorno in dialogue with Ernst Bloch on the question of utopia, at a point where Adorno is repeating and responding to Bloch’s formulation that “the true is a sign of itself and the false.” Adorno, with typical dialectical severity, approves and inverts this claim, in what he styles a “determined negation,” and suggests that it is also the case that “the false is the sign of itself and the correct.” Here Adorno approaches Nietzsche at an unlikely point: the powers of the false point to a potential correction of our dystopic present, but not necessarily by providing a picture of the true. Whether Adorno and Bloch agree on the principles of hope underlying utopian thinking—as the thinking of “no-place”—is not for me to adjudicate. My point is not that one need decide between these formulations so much as one must choose which one in a given instance forwards the aesthetic project of black queer performance. If Afro-Fabulations chooses to side with Adorno more than Bloch, it is because the performances of fiction

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and mythmaking that I examine revolve around the idea that the false can be both a sign of itself and the correct. At various points in the text I will associate such powers of the false less with utopia and more with heterotopia, to resurrect Foucault’s curious neologism that has been given renewed black trans heft and specificity in C. Riley Snorton’s illuminating readings of the fictions of Samuel R. Delany. The connection Snorton draws between the surgical and theoretical senses of the word “heterotopia” underscores the degree to which trans fabulation is both literally and figuratively a work of the flesh. I enter into this theoretical excursus in order to highlight a key aspect of fabulation that is central to this book’s argument. Within fabulation, the false is indeed the sign of itself and the correct. These powers of the false have a potentially political resonance for black queer study if we can apprehend through them how the false terms of an anti-black racial order are the signs of both that false order and its potential correction. Even “correct” may not be strong enough to describe these powers of black art and performance, but at this stage I will content myself with Adorno’s term and posit that the afro-fabulation of black art and performance corrects the representationalist and periodizing terms of our aesthetico-political order.48 It does so not by representing what is the case (insofar as what seems true, evidenced, and/or empirical in any given instance will always turn out to be saturated through and through with ideological mystification), but by presenting the falsification of this “true” order as a pathway toward its correction. Presented in this way, as the dark powers of the false, afro-fabulation is clearly a speculative genre that has more than a passing resemblance to some (although not all) of what travels under the rubric of “afro-futurism.” As I discuss further in chapter 6, “afro-futurism” is a term that was coined and widely disseminated in the 1990s as a heuristic for thinking about race and speculation in the digital era. It has become increasingly ubiquitous in studies of science fiction and even in important recent surveys of the speculative in African American and diasporic art. Some of my cases in this book could easily be classified as afro-futurist (such as Samuel R. Delany in chapter 6 and Bina48 in chapter 8); others less easily. Kara Keeling’s reworking of afro-futurism in relation to what she calls “black futures”—which she defines as “an anti-fragile investment in the errant, the irrational, and the unpredictable”—is promising in particular. 49 My

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aim is in any case less that of identifying a subset of black artists somehow specifically concerned with the future and futurity, and more that of pursuing a better understanding of the mythmaking function of fabulation as a sort of tenseless grounding for any black speculative practice whatsoever. To identify who is or is not an afro-fabulist would thus miss the point entirely. (Still less would I hope to attribute the term to any who might care to dispute or disengage from it.)50 As I mentioned before, a specifically “critical” fabulation also names the challenge to reparative black historiography found in the work of Saidiya Hartman, who has in turn influenced the afro-pessimism of Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, and David Marriott. Here, critical fabulation indexes an ongoing debate over the terms of historical recovery and the ongoing afterlives of slavery (particularly in terms of the very possibility of thinking concepts like “gender” and “sexuality” in relation to post-slavery subjects). Hartman alighted on critical fabulation over the course of a meditation on the archive of the Middle Passage and its violently gendered ungendering of black flesh, a violence she emphasizes that her own archival work is powerless to ameliorate. Her emphasis on irredeemable loss renews and extends the ethical challenge of her first study, Scenes of Subjection, which objected to the unreflective and casual reproduction of scenes of violence within scholarship about slavery and emancipation. At once a scouring critique of the many ruses of the liberal antiracist imaginary—which must repeatedly produce abject and derelict figures of blackness as part of its larger apparatus of rescue and redemption—Scenes of Subjection also helped usher in afro-pessimism, which characterizes blackness as a site of accumulation and fungibility, rather than one of identity and resistance. Afro-pessimism promises a rigorous antagonism to the blandishments of multiculturalism, post-racialism, and coalitional liberal politics. It has productively stalled the subsumption of black gender and sexual nonconformity under the rubric of a putatively nonracial queer theory, and has returned the field to key questions of theory and strategy left unresolved from a 1960s and 1970s high-water mark for revolutionary praxis. More to the present point, afro-pessimism has ushered in a sharp challenge to the broadly relational and intersectional approach I favor here. Rather than accept pessimism or optimism as the dominant mood of this work, however, I turn to the critical ambivalence of Hartman’s early

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formulation of “redress” as a black feminist theory of practice.51 In chapter 2 I work toward an account of relationality (a term that I understand afro-pessimist thinkers like Frank Wilderson to refuse) that will turn out to amplify my interpretation of this complex work of redress and repair in black feminism. I also seek in that chapter to draw from and develop the dark praxis of nightlife developed in the work of Shane Vogel.52 The ambivalence of fabulation is in any case already imposed upon it by the necessary distrust with which the powers of the false will be met, in an era in which lying in politics has been elevated to a principle. In times like these, fabulationality is itself due for a certain degree of redress.

Race against Time and the Changing Same Sent for you yesterday, here you come today, Sent for you yesterday, here you come today, If you can’t do better, might as well just stay away. —Lester Young and the Count Basie Orchestra

My appeal to a changing same in the characteristics of black expression is meant less as an appeal to essentialism than as an overture to recent work on time and temporality in black studies and queer studies, work that has produced a significant and growing literature that builds upon, while also diverging from, older work on history and memory, loss and recovery.53 A critique of linear temporality is now almost de rigeur in many critical quarters, and some daringly speculative alternative conceptions of time and temporality have been mooted. If historians have traditionally cast their discipline as pursuing questions of change over time, this turn toward greater reflexivity in how and why we narrate and contest histories might be thought of as a conceptual privileging of time over change. The onto-epistemological question of what time is, in other words, has come increasingly to the fore in ongoing interdisciplinary debates over loss, trauma, memory, and futurity. These debates have a clear bearing on an endeavor such as the present one, which originally took shape as an investigation into the periodizing impulse behind the emergence of terms like “post-black” and “post-queer” that first began to appear in the 1990s and then with increasing frequency in the new millennium.54 The desire to move beyond difference in the very process

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of recognizing it is a powerful one. But so too is the impulse to reject as old-fashioned minoritarian forms of life and struggle that succeeded in reproducing themselves at the ostensible price of also reproducing the dominant social order. In order to make better sense of these contending struggles over what the future may or ought to hold, I have had occasion to take recourse to a now-classic trope of black studies: Amiri Baraka’s concept of “the changing same.” Baraka (then Leroi Jones) coined the phrase “the changing same” in an essay on R&B and the new black music that was reprinted in his 1967 collection Black Music.55 As I detail further in chapter 2, he invoked the phrase as a way of reconciling the ostensible contrast between commercial and avant-garde tendencies in black music, which he characterized as “the same family looking at different things.” It has since become a key trope of temporality in black cultural studies. Paul Gilroy, for instance, draws upon Baraka’s concept to champion what he terms “the untidy workings of diaspora identities.” “This changing same,” he writes, “is not some invariant essence that gets enclosed subsequently in a shapeshifting exterior with which it is casually associated. It is not the sign of an unbroken, integral inside protected by a camouflaged husk. The phrase names the problem of diaspora politics and diaspora poetics. The same is present, but how can we imagine it as something other than an essence generating the merely accidental?”56 Picking up on this question, Margo Crawford has recently argued that even post-blackness—or “black post-blackness” as she shrewdly renames it—must be understood as part of this changing same, which she glosses as “the art of moving forward and remaining grounded.”57 It is relevant to me that the diva citizenship of singer Leslie Uggams provided an occasion for Baraka’s theorization of the changing same, even as her crossover sound troubled the mainstream pop tradition that she entered with a black feminist vocal production, which performance theorist Masi Asare has described as heterotopic.58 The changing same, in these above usages, proves to be a synchronic as well as a diachronic idea. Developed by Baraka to bring black pop and jazz criticism into a more effective dialogue, it did not aim however toward any ultimate convergence or transcendence of difference. Rather, it pointed us toward the phenomena I will discuss in this book under the rubric of “angular sociality.”59 Angular sociality as I deploy it names

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Figure I.4. Leslie Uggams sings “Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon” on the final episode of her variety show in 1969. Screenshot by author.

a dynamic interaction or entanglement of bodies, each keeping their own time. As a mode of black polytemporality, it enables us to grasp the “two impulses in contemporary popular thought about temporality” that Kara Keeling points to when she distinguishes a “pragmatic and constructive” impulse to place the past “in the service of present interests and desires” from a “pedagogical and critical” impulse to “reveal the operations of history itself and the ways that any invocation of the past is an exclusionary construction of that past.”60 The angular sociality of the changing same, at its best, achieves both of these aims simultaneously. It is a doing of history that is a showing of the doing of history, and in that showing, history’s undoing. Keeling’s distinction between constructive and critical temporalities in black study provides another way of grasping the articulation of tensed and tenseless time. By way of comparison, Michelle Wright has proposed that quantum mechanics also provides a post-Newtonian conception of tenseless time, one that, if understood correctly, frees the

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diaspora concept from the linear temporality of slavery and its afterlives. Instead of positing black consciousness as necessarily caused by the trauma of the slave trade, slavery, and their afterlives, Wright posits a “quantum” blackness that can be conceived as emerging from anywhere and at any time.61 Wright’s argument recalls the debate occasioned by the coinage of the term “post-black art” by curator Thelma Golden and artist Glenn Ligon at the turn of the new millennium.62 To this art world usage there was also a broader, more reactionary discourse of “postracialism” that further worked to render blackness belated and anachronistic, something to be abandoned as “we” moved forward into a future humanity. But how, one might ask, can black people be expected to transcend that which we have yet to possess fully? How exactly are we to move past a destination we have yet to arrive at in the eyes of so many? I address these questions especially in chapters 4, 6, and 7. The impulse to repair, rescue, or redeem black humanity must be a powerfully compelling one for all who labor in the long shadow of “infrahumanity” cast by modern racism’s invention of the figure of the Negro.63 For some, to question our aspirational humanity in the face of anti-blackness is to throw doubt upon the very intelligibility of the project of black studies, which has long sought to fuse popular struggles for self-determination to intellectual discourses that might decolonize academic disciplines. In the twentieth and early twenty-first century, a certain mode of black humanitarianism has always telegraphed its public aims through slogans like “I am a man,” “Say her name,” and “Black lives matter,” all of which, at least on a first approach, insist on the moral certitude of human rights for their persuasive appeal. Posthumanism, for the most part, lacks equally resonant slogans for the political sphere, even as it may yet offer, as feminist technoscience theorists such as Donna Haraway continue to argue, potently subversive emblems for a creaturely life lived in vagrant subversion of the terms of political order.64 What might it mean for black queer and trans aesthetics, then, to “stay with the trouble” of post-humanism, rather than beat a tactical retreat to a standard of humanism and its accompanying fantasies of citizenship and sovereignty, which always served to exclude the refugee, migrant, indigene, and slave? This human observer, knower, and actor in the world, as Sylvia Wynter and Denise Ferreira da Silva, among others, have argued, is covertly

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white and male, resulting in a phenomena that Wynter has called the “overrepresentation of Man.”65 Da Silva associates the idea that the world can be rendered fully intelligible by human ratiocination with a colonial project that divides being into the transparent subject of reason on the one hand, and on the other hand, an external world of affectible objects to be used, consumed, bought, sold, and discarded as waste. In rejecting the humanism of the colonial-modern, both Wynter and da Silva underscore the difficulty of conceptualizing a future humanism, given the deeply entrenched habits that reproduce the domination and exclusion of blackness, even within ostensibly emancipatory discourses such as Marxism and feminism. Even black nationalist, afrocentric, and decolonial philosophies, we find, often retrench this habitual humanism, most often in reactionary appeals to gender essentialism and a suppositious “natural” order of progress that has been disturbed by feminism, queer rights, and other bids that can be stigmatized as “Western” or white. With the rise of violent masculinist ideologies in the black and brown world—from Boko Haram to Islamic State—and the broad appeal of misogyny and homophobia even among the populations who reject and are victimized by such extremism, it is far too premature to declare these matters resolved. Whether grounded in images wrested from the medieval past or purloined from some science fiction scenario of the near or distant future, the scope and ratio of the human may not be as obvious or stable a measure as one may initially assume. The human may appear obvious until we think about it, once we try to ascertain the precise scope of this obvious entity, however, it proves elusive. In the terms I will forward in Afro-Fabulations, it is the very exception of blackness and queerness from the humanist standard that produces the possibility of imagining humanity otherwise.66 If we are “not yet” consistently accorded human status, if we remain an enigmatic shadow cast over the human project, then the shape of the humanity that we might envision would be wholly different from humanity as we know it today. My basic claim in relation to the post-humanist controversy is simply that black bodies that were objects of speculation can become speculative bodies.67 Rather than a human ideal modeled to conform to the global idea of race, queer and trans aesthetics point us toward a black market of techniques and technologies that are constantly fabricating

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new genres of the human out of the fabulous, formless darkness of an anti-black world.68 Rather than emerging out of capitalist development or biological evolution, afro-fabulation “anarranges” the developmental and linear timeline of history. The proposition here, against all liberal universalisms and scientific positivities, is to insist that we do not yet know what a human outside an anti-black world could be, do, or look like. The critical poetics of afro-fabulation are a means of dwelling in the shock of that reality without ever becoming fully of it.

1

Critical Shade The Angular Logics of Black Appearance

The performance begins while the audience is still waiting for it. The dancer/choreographer is moving through the crowd, greeting arriving guests and fussing with the arrangements, like a good host. The audience is seated on the stage of this one-hundred-year-old proscenium theater located in a working-class district in downtown New York City. We, the audience, are arranged around a catwalk as though we are expecting a fashion show. But unlike in fashion, there is no backstage area, just a rack of clothes off to one side. Just before show time, the dancer/choreographer personally moves two guests of honor—an important curator and her plus one—from their temporary perches off to one side to special reserved seating front and center. Just as it is at a fashion runway, front row is part of the show. With this final adjustment, the audience is seated, and the latest performance of Trajal Harrell’s solo dance piece Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church, Size Small can begin.1 The performance has not yet begun, even though it somehow has. All eyes are now on Harrell, who has just casually changed in front of us into the first of an expected twenty looks: “West Coast Preppy School Boy.” The house lights are still up, but no curtain has been raised; and there is no other ritualized indication that we have crossed over from “everyday life” into “performance.” Harrell hasn’t even moved onto the catwalk; he stands beside the runway, rather than walking down it. The mood hasn’t shifted from one of quiet anticipation. There is no frantic audience applause, no pumping music, no flash of the cameras. From Harrell—no fierce poses, just the almost blank stare with which he breaks the fourth wall, as he stands there insouciantly in his flip flops, looking at us. For those in the audience familiar with the world of haute couture or with the world of ballroom houses that have stylized a queer, black, 27

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and brown response to fashion, or with both, this solo dance piece feels like an abstraction, even a subtraction. Audience handouts explain the quotidian, anti-spectacular note on which the show starts by referencing the postmodern dance that Harrell aims to hybridize with the movement vocabulary of catwalk and vogueing. Since the 1960s, choreographers like Yvonne Rainer have rebelled against traditional conceptions of virtuosic movement and theatrical illusionism in dance and brought the everyday and the ordinary in closer fusion with stage performance. The manner in which Harrell performs in media res reflects and refracts these influences.2 “Postmodern” is a term with at least a double valence in 2017, with equally fraught—if not exactly identically framed—itineraries in dance and in critical theory. Postmodernism indexes, on the one hand, key philosophical developments such as Fredric Jameson’s cognitive mapping of late capitalist aesthetics and Judith Butler’s post-structuralist theory of gender performativity and, on the other, artistic developments such as the Judson Dance Theater. It has been at least two decades since the term was anything like cutting edge in either art or academia, and yet it lives on as an increasingly requisite periodizing term. The distinctive strands and threads of postmodernism have, ironically, become tangled up not with the present or future, but with the quickly receding past. And it is here that the fashion system (which had its own deconstructionist moment) puts its best foot forward.3 As a choreographic meditation on fashion, Twenty Looks toys with the resemblances it espies between the cycle of fashion in clothing and fashion in theory, subjecting both trends to lightly satirical sartorial citation. As if to underscore the degree to which we, the downtown audience, are part of the concept of this piece, the third look Harrell wears is “Old School Post-Modern”: blue sneakers and a generic black outfit that well could be off the rack from Uniqlo. Seated in the audience, I look down at my own black t-shirt, black slacks, and red sneakers. Old School Post-Modern indeed, I wince. That, I recognize, was a read. “No single entity marks something as queer dance,” Clare Croft notes, “but rather it is how these textures press on the world and against one another that opens the possibility for dance to be queer.”4 By the time Harrell completes his twenty looks, all the expected elements of a fashion show have eventually appeared, albeit in a deconstructed and synco-

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Figure 1.1. Trajal Harrell, Twenty Looks, postmodern.

pated manner. A day before, in this same theater, another performer had taken the stage with a virtuosic display of vogue and hip-hop dance styles that would have gone over in a Berlin nightclub at 3 a.m. But reaching that level of heat was not Harrell’s ambition this night, shot through as his most recent work has been with a melancholic languorous slowness. Looks 12 and 13—variations on the category “Legendary Face”—took me back to the one time I had the privilege of seeing the legendary Octavia St. Laurent walk a ball.5 And now here was Trajal Harrell, in large yellow sunglasses, hiding from the nonexistent paparazzi, almost cringing at the recorded “clop clop” of stiletto heels, coming out of the speakers. The dancer raises his arms before his face, and his hands give off the pronounced tremulous hauteur of a grande dame. She is aged; a crone. Without the instant verdict of a panel of judges, without the chanting of an opinionated crowd, without the flash of a hundred cameras, Harrell can retreat into a languorous, interiorized vogue during his penultimate look, “Legendary with a Twist.” I am transported back to Sunset Boulevard and can almost hear Norma Desmond lament how she was still big; it was the pictures that got small.

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Shade and the Angular Logics of Appearance The performance analysis of Twenty Looks I commence with helps answer questions about how critical fabulation might work in the realm of dance, movement, fashion, and aesthetics. Like Harrell, I have been fascinated with the problem of history and memory in performance, a medium that is supposedly tethered to the here and now. Twenty Looks is in some respects a choreographic response to these critical debates, at once a reading of them—as in an engagement—and a read of them—in the black queer vernacular sense of “throwing shade” by magnifying and parodying certain flaws and idiosyncrasies in an opponent or rival. This use of shade raises a series of questions whose implications take up much of this study. If, in Twenty Looks, Harrell performs as a screen upon which images of Hollywood glamor and underground queer black fierceness can alike dance and settle, in what ways might this work for the concert stage corroborate—and in what ways complicate—the cultural contradictions that gave rise to vogueing in the first place? Vogueing—as an underground dance form—reflects back, in both homage and hyperbolic parody, the world of whiteness, wealth, and privilege that has become Harrell’s milieu. Given that he is actually performing in the avant-garde milieu that was once the stuff of vogueing fantasy, can we say that the gap between reality and appearance that once marked the frisson of vogueing has been dissolved? Conversely, when a competitive black social dance form is sublimated into solo concert dance before curators, presenters, and tastemakers, does it change in nature? What does it mean to deliver vogue into a space but as an absent presence, a withholding? Speaking to the tensions aroused by the proposition the performance carried, the program for the evening included a quotation from a wellknown essay about vogueing written by performance theorist Peggy Phelan. In the essay (as excerpted in the program) Phelan argues: The balls are opportunities to use theatre to imitate the theatricality of everyday life—a life which includes show girls, banjee boys, and business executives. It is the endless theater of everyday life that determines the real: and this theatricality is soaked through with racial, sexual, and class bias.

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As one [participant] explains, to be able to look like a business executive is to be able to be a business executive. Within the impoverished logic of appearance, “opportunity” and “ability” can be connoted by the way one looks. But at the same time, the walker is not a business executive and the odds are that his performance of that job on the runway of the ball will be his only chance to experience it. The performances, then, enact simultaneously the desire to eliminate the distance between ontology and performance—and the reaffirmation of that distance.6

Harrell’s program note (ephemeral evidence I cite here in critical monographic form) would invite the alert reader to ponder these words, first published in 1993, in the historical perspective made possible by reading them in 2017. This contemporary moment is when, at least for a certain orangeish hue of whiteness, ontology has indeed caught up with performance, and to look like a business executive (or a president) is to be a business executive (or president). Is there perhaps a certain amount of shade implied in Harrell’s granting Phelan’s critical analysis of the balls a first, last, and only interpretive word on the mode and meaning of this angular and oppositional black and brown art form? There is indeed something “old school postmodern” about Phelan’s confident contrast between performance and ontology in this passage, a perhaps untimely affirmation of a distance that has, in subsequent years, unexpectedly collapsed. And yet, returning to Phelan’s subtle critique of the performative efficacy of the ball world in the context of present day critical debates over afro-pessimism, for instance, would suggest that the predicament she notates isn’t necessarily superseded.7 Performance, Phelan suggests in Harrell’s citation, is not the same thing as agency, even if the malevolent agencies of our world come draped in their own particular theater. The implicit pessimism in this excerpt can be gleaned from the distance between ontology and performance that Phelan affirms for the black queer performing subject in particular. After all, for all too many black people, even actually being a business executive, scholar, (or president) is not enough for them to appear like one, at least, not in the eyes of many of their fellow white citizens. A black person in a position of authority can always be suspected, whether openly or secretly, of merely posing as that particular position. The passage Harrell selects for contemporary recirculation thus contains a crucial ambiguity. Has Phelan missed the

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ontological difference that blackness introduces into the theatricality of everyday life? Or has she insisted upon it? One reason we cannot fully ascertain the tone of Harrell’s citation of Phelan, I would argue, is because, at least in this performance, he has chosen not to perform fully within the matrix of vogueing. That is to say, he doesn’t invite his audience to appraise him as directly fulfilling or transcending Phelan’s pessimistic equation. Instead of vogue, it is the possibility of vogue that dances around this iteration of Twenty Looks, which work collectively, as a set of appearances that, paradoxically, disappear. This particular performance disappoints expectations of hyperbolic blackness and queerness in dance and theatrical contexts instead of fulfilling them. Of course, vogueing appears at various points and through a range of performers over the course of Twenty Looks. But it almost never appears on demand or on cue, and thus, it remains difficult or impossible for the viewer to disentangle vogue from postmodern dance or, for that matter, from any of the other performance genres Harrell draws from. In drawing from vogue as a performative resource, rather than exhibiting it as the expressive essence of black queer subcultural embodiment, Harrell adopts an analytic and even spectatorial relationship to the form that preempts any simple identification of him as a “voguer.” Harrell routinely breaks the fourth wall in his performances, sitting in the audience, talking, even sleeping. If “Old School Post-Modern” presented a look that suggested that he could be in his audience as readily as on his stage, the performative tactics used by Harrell ironize the virtuosity expected of black queer performing bodies. Harrell experiments with a kind of reversal of audience participation, by suggesting that he himself is ready to become his own audience. The public staging of his rehearsal process as part of a residency at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City intensified this hall of mirrors effect, as an audience stood behind a velvet rope, looking into the atrium at Harrell looking at his own dancers improvise. While this staging of the rehearsal process was in itself highly theatrical (in that Harrell ordinarily does not allow anyone not directly involved in a piece into his studio), the artificiality of the scenario underscored the paradoxical degree to which Harrell manages to be at once inside and outside of his performances, disrupting the evaluative and objectifying gaze critics might seek to direct toward them.

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The irony of Harrell’s project, of course, is that vogueing continues to circulate internationally as a competitive social dance form associated primarily with black and brown queer and transgender culture. His own choreographies in highly valorized venues like the Museum of Modern Art, New York Live Arts, and the Hebbel Am Ufer theater in Berlin are all staged against the backdrop of this living repertoire, even as its actual participants—dancers and announcers—only occasionally cross over into his shows. In this respect, Harrell inherits and updates a classic concern within minoritarian performance, one that José Esteban Muñoz, in his book Disidentifications, termed the “burden of liveness.” Responding to Phelan’s famous claim that performance lives only in the now and becomes itself through disappearance, Muñoz argued that such a definition tended to minimize the violence liveness does to those subjects denied history and civic standing, those for whom liveness can circulate as commodity fetish. Corroborating Muñoz’s insistence on attending to the ephemera and afterlives of performance, Rebecca Schneider has argued forcefully that “performance remains”—a point of view that dovetails with Bergsonian duration as focalized at the time and space it is however never wholly identical with—a sensibility that we very much see in Twenty Looks.8 But if performance remains—through repetition, ephemera, and haunting—so, too, does performance theory. And, just as ethnographers of contemporary ballroom performance like Marlon Bailey have shown how the vogue scene has incorporated Jennie Livingston’s film Paris Is Burning into its own historical memory, so too does Harrell in Twenty Looks incorporate the critical tradition that would make sense of his aesthetic—as indicated in the handout citation of Phelan’s Unmarked and his sardonic references to postmodernism as fashion. Reflecting the gaze back upon the critics and theorists who have sought to explicate and define the meanings that inhere in the dance, Harrell’s back and forth between critic and choreographer is playful but pointed: at its limit it suggests that interpretation itself is conditioned as much by performance as the other way around. Channeling the diva is a familiar queer move, but what interests in me in particular about Harrell’s performances is his mercurial capacity to toggle between affable ordinariness and haughty glamour, as if he were joking about both and, at the same, incredibly serious. I track this strategic mimesis of both the exceptional and spectacular performing

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body—the deep archive of what Francesca Royster terms “eccentric acts” on the outskirts of black performance—and a countermimetic invasion of the positionality of the spectator. Highly cognizant of the debates around performative agency and spectatorial exploitation that raged in the 1990s, Harrell develops new performative and choreographic techniques for performing both for and against the camera. We can think of these strategies, I suggest, as “critical shade.” Shade as a vernacular method of active and aggressive interpretation of an unfair and unequal social order is a frequent resource in this countermimetic choreography.9 It is worth noting, in this respect, that Muñoz explicates his concept of the burden of liveness at greatest length in a chapter on the topic of chusmería, a term that originated in Cuba and its diaspora and refers to people and behavior that “refuse standards of bourgeois comportment.” Chusma, Muñoz notes, operates as “a barely veiled racial slur suggesting that one is too black” (contemporary Anglophone cognates for chusma might thus include “ghetto,” “cunty,” or “ratchet”).10 These associations underscore for me a potential relation between chusma and shade. The dilemma of visibility for the class-race-gender-nonconforming chusma, Muñoz notes, is that “live performance for an audience of elites is the only imaginable mode of survival for minoritarian subjects within the hegemonic order that the chusma live within and in opposition to.”11 The queer of color performer, Muñoz wryly notes, is often singing for her supper or dancing because her feet are being shot at. While queer of color performativity is often equated with social agency—both by its advocates and its skeptics—here Muñoz issues a sharp qualification to the “celebratory precritical aura” surrounding live performance.12 He instead casts disidentification as a specifically minor practice in the sense with which Deleuze and Guattari describe a minor literature. “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language,” they specify; “it is rather that which a minority constructs in a major language.”13 What Deleuze and Guattari argue that the minor writing of Kafka does within and in opposition to German literature, I maintain that Trajal Harrell does within and in opposition to (post)modern dance. Rather than enliven that modernist tradition with the spirit of black dance (from which it has all along drawn renewal in the mode of primitivism), Harrell constructs a vantage point from which to peer into that tradition, reflecting back its gaze and dancing

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around, rather than simply dancing, the energetic tropes of fierce and virtuosic performance. It is an indication rather than an embodiment of presence. It holds something back in reserve. For Muñoz, the concept of “the burden of liveness” helped performance theory account for and critique the way in which queer, transgender, and racialized bodies are so often exceptionalized through temporary displays of liveness in the very institutions that reject them as permanent occupants or stakeholders. To be alive, live, or lively can itself be a burden, if through that presence one is denied a connection to history or the future. In the Marxist terms Muñoz worked with, we could say the burden of liveness stages a minoritarian “living labor” that dialectically confronts the “dead labor” represented by institutional capital. This confrontation between the living labor of the performing black body and the demands of the institutions that seek to valorize themselves through that encounter is a major theme in contemporary black art history. In a recent study of site-specific installations done by four black artists in the 1990s, Huey Copeland has built upon Muñoz’s critique of the burden of liveness, showing how the black artists he considers work to resist, in various ways, the manner in which the black body has been “bound to appear” in the afterlife of slavery. Like the visual artists Copeland studies, Harrell navigates the demand for performative availability through techniques of deferral, recycling, and subtle redirection. As a choreographer he shares in the propensity to at least partially dematerialize the black body within presentational environments that tend to engage it as vivacious surplus. At times, it is as if the dancer disappears into the ambience of his own solo, reaffirming the distance between performance and . . . performance.

A Fabulous Proposition In 2009, when Harrell formulated the original “proposition” for the series of performances he collectively entitled Twenty Looks, or, Paris Is Burning at Judson Church, he named his choreographic process one of “fictional archiving.” In so doing, Harrell resists conceptualizing the archive as the exclusive preserve of credentialed experts and authorities or even as something to which the repertoire can be contrasted, as Diana Taylor has influentially proposed.14 The archive his performances

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index is at once an expansive and a problematic space of encounter, loss, distortion, and reinvention. The ethics of this encounter are not given in the standard protocols of documentary evidence, but they are hardly wholly absent from the endeavor. Fictional archiving is an affective relation to archives: Harrell is literally moved by them. Through this process of fictional archiving, Harrell proposed to revisit the distance and proximity between the queer and transgender African American vogue balls that had taken place uptown in Harlem since the early twentieth century, and the predominantly white downtown avant-garde that emerged in the 1960s.15 At first blush, such a proposition sounds like a deliberate paradox: How can an archive be fictional, as opposed to simply false? If we cannot rely upon at least the ideal of truth and verifiability, how can we think about an objective account of the past? In this study of fabulation, however, I am interested in taking up the wager behind Harrell’s proposition seriously and following out the insight it may bear on the historiography of performance. If there is a basis of comparison between the procedures of fiction and those of history, as Harrell’s notion of “fictional archiving” suggests, then how does such a comparison bear out across other sites of contemporary black art and performance, with their burden of representing unbearable, impossible, or traumatic histories? Is black performance, given the quasi-fictive basis of the blackness upon which it is posited, the ultimate site of such a social and aesthetic production of fictions? Alongside the burden to appear, is there not also a kind of burden to fictionalize, or fabulate? If there is, of what consequence might this habeas ficta, as I refer to it in chapter 7 in homage to the formulations of Alexander Weheliye, have for the contemporary theory and practice of black performance?16 As Harrell staged iterations of his Twenty Looks project in concert dance spaces across Europe and America, he created a counterarchive of possibilities for dance history in the process. Aside from generating a series of remarkable performances in Twenty Looks, Harrell placed a series of questions on the table. He repeatedly asked, before each performance, “What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing ball scene in Harlem had come downtown to perform alongside the early postmoderns in Judson Church?”17 In academic history, there is a recognized subfield of counterfactual history, where small or

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large variables are deliberately fabricated, and historians try to determine how this change would affect subsequent events. Historical fiction is also rife with such “what if ” scenarios. But it is performance that has perhaps the richest set of affordances for approaching such speculation. Harrell’s particular approach to reworking the past began by positing a stark reversal of the established trajectory wherein, since the beginning of the twentieth century, white people have traveled up to Harlem for a night out amidst what poet Langston Hughes aptly termed “spectacles in color.” In Harrell’s counterfactual hypothesis, this well-known slumming narrative is turned on its head, and an itinerant voguer instead heads downtown, fiercely sashays through the doors of the imposing Italianate church overlooking Washington Square Park, fearlessly rubs shoulders with the cognoscenti of postmodern dance, and then dances until dawn in the cradle of the downtown scene. Nothing like this precise story was ever reenacted in any of Harrell’s pieces, of course. But it is its “fabel” in the sense that Brecht gave the basic story or drift behind a given play or performance. Much to the consternation of some literal-minded critics, the proposition didn’t always determine the scope of the resultant dance scenarios. In co-creating a fictional archive around his own performances, Harrell was constantly thinking about how his looks would look, and thus performing in antagonistic cooperation with the process by which dance history gets written. The ingenuity of Twenty Looks can be grasped, at least in part, by contrasting the aesthetic principles of the dance forms it claimed as its contributaries. Where postmodern dance accentuated quotidian movement, vogueing was built out of a unique movement vocabulary. Where the Judson Dance Theater was sponsored by the most venerable patron of arts, the church, vogueing was a fugitive dance form cultivated by a beloved and angular transqueer undercommons. Correspondingly, where postmodern dance choreographers enjoyed copious news coverage by respectable dance critics, vogueing was literally beneath the contempt of all but its diehard practitioners and aficionados. Postmodern dance came with programmatic intentions like Yvonne Rainer’s “no manifesto”; the ball children published no such statements of their aesthetic ideology (although independent publications like the Idle Sheet did circulate among ball-going readers). And if one looks into Rainer’s manifesto, it

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reads almost like a point-by-point refutation of the very values an audience participant at the balls might cherish: spectacle, virtuosity, and so on. In short, vogueing and postmodern dance seem so diametrically opposed that attempting to combine them would seem like a recipe for disaster. And yet Twenty Looks found a basis for their union, however incongruous. It was not so much that opposites attract (although they can), as that each dance form could take shape only in the negative space left open by the other. I think of this as an angular sociality. As a number of historians and scholars have shown, the class hierarchy in taste is deeply racialized, with black culture continuously providing a source of artistic innovation from which both mass and avant-garde culture draws, often whitewashing it in the process. For this reason, avant-garde dance forms cast their aesthetic in opposition to the commercial world of entertainment can find themselves in a particularly contorted orientation to the black culture from which that commercial world so frequently draws. If black culture is always already commodified, then a certain bad faith has always accompanied any avant-garde attempt to distance itself from crass capitalism by distancing itself from blackness. Twenty Looks knows this anxiety intimately, and makes clever use of it.18 The vogue balls originated and continue to thrive in black and brown working-class communities of the sex- and gendernonconforming, and remain a vivid example of what Fred Moten has called “the sentimental avant-garde”: a popular, underground, and often criminalized space of counterposition to the hegemonic order of an anti-black, anti-queer, and misogynist world.19 They offer a space where quotidian violence, insecurity, poverty, and exploitation can be transformed into extravagant beauty and communitas. But they are also fierce, competitive, and saturated with shade. They present their sociality not as a permanent solution to the internecine violence of the world, but as a good-enough space for bringing queer fantasy into tangible life. The vogue balls first came to wider public attention beyond the black and brown gay house community when Madonna released her hit single “Vogue” in 1990, and were then immortalized in Jennie Livingstone’s documentary Paris Is Burning. Twenty Looks implicitly responds to Madonna, Jennie Livingstone, and others who took an interest in documenting, interpreting, appropriating, and/or re-performing ball culture. But it does so through a strategic and often playful disruption of the norms

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Figure 1.2. Trajal Harrell, Twenty Looks, shading whiteness. The dancer Stephen Thompson is in a red dress by Lars Persson.

that police which bodies appear where, under what conditions, and with which gestural vocabularies. The often-remarked upon whiteness of many of Harrell’s dancers should be read as an act of provocation, as if he were daring audiences and critics to tell him whom he can or cannot choreograph. In making their whiteness as starkly evident as possible, Harrell denies whiteness the naturalized status of normative ideal in the dance world. His white male dancers have to work, to strut their stuff, in order to measure up in this alternate world of border crossing. This is another form of critical shade: it is a critical shading of white bodies and the audiences that prefer and privilege them as the embodiments of avantgarde and postmodern choreographic experimentation. For instance, the “look” in figure 1.2 has been criticized as offensively misogynist, so the company has stopped using it. In this way, Twenty Looks does not skirt around, but rather charges directly into the vexed questions it raises. It asks whether the transgression of racial boundaries in expressive movement can ever be ethical, and has the courage not to impose a didactic answer to this quandary. Rather than moralize, Harrell remains playful, even defiant. Minoritarian subjects often suffer debilitating “imposter

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syndrome” in elite white spaces, constantly second-guessing themselves as to whether they belong or have enough talent, or even whether the system that has preferred them individually is itself not structurally unjust. Harrell’s critical shade confronts this imposter syndrome by generalizing it: everyone is an imposter in his theatrical fantasias. The proposition of Twenty Looks thus works through what I have been calling “angular sociality.” Here, angular sociality reveals itself as an edgy contact improvisation with and against the color line in art and aesthetics. Such performative angularity refuses to wish away racial difference in an impossible act of colorblindness, but it does not go all the way toward an alternative stance of structural antagonism and disempowering ressentiment. Twenty Looks bears witness to scenes of its own repeated travesty and seeks to locate spaces of affordance, intensity, and even joy therein. To say this is to note, even if only in passing, that some skeptical critics have misconstrued the proposition made by Twenty Looks as a conceptual ploy, one that furthermore is the task of criticism to dispel. The partisans of pure movement see the importation of historical fabulation into the postmodern dance world as an unfair stratagem that places a burden of proof on the critic or audience rather than the dancer. In the face of such formalism, it becomes all the more important to vindicate the proposition, precisely along the terms with which its critics seek to indict it. It is by opening the space of dance to the virtual and uneven intersection of historical forces that the proposition is afforded the possibility of finding or showing something new. There is, in other words, an alchemy at work in the proposition for Twenty Looks within which the dance is obliged to betray its premises in order to fulfill them.

Mother Would Like a Cash Award An evening-length piece from the Twenty Looks series entitled Antigone, Sr. exemplified this passionate attachment to history in its subjunctive mood, as well his sly reading of a queer theoretical tradition in which Judith Butler’s reading of Antigone has been influential.20 At one level a mash-up between Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone and the competitive categories of vogueing ball culture, Antigone, Sr. never approached the play text through straightforward exposition. Instead, Sophoclean character and plot were employed like a dress form around which a new

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performance could be draped. At almost three hours in length, Antigone, Sr. redresses Greek tragedy through sequences of posing, stripping, and dressing up, singing and emoting that together manage to conjure, with remarkable effectiveness, the mood of an all-night ball (a form that is also characterized by periods of languor, disinterest, and fatigue in between unexpected clashes of electrifying intensity). Holding together all the strands and eccentric performances of this piece were two central ball categories: “The King’s Speech” and “The Mother of the House.” An actual ball, of course, would feature a number of houses in competition: in Harrell’s fictional archive, by contrast, there is but a single house, the House of Harrell. (I will discuss the King’s speech, the speech of the King, the speech acts of sovereignty, more in chapter 5.) The Mother of this house, however, is no “dance mom” of Reality TV cliché, cruelly demanding movement virtuosity according to normative standards. Instead, she is a “good-enough mother” in terms that psychoanalytic theorist Winnicott uses: like the good-enough mother, she creates the performance space as a “holding environment” in which “the children” (as they are called in ball parlance) can act out scenes from the goodenough life.21 In thus de-dramatizing the theatrical canon, Antigone, Sr. employs the form of black queer ball culture to reshape the contents of postmodern dance’s interest in everyday life.22 As the “mother” of the house, Harrell also experimented with the role of raconteuse during his MoMA residency. During a performance entitled “The Practice,” he debuted a new line of flight: social commentary stand-up comedy in the tradition of Richard Pryor and Crystal LaBeija. One of the punchlines in the routine was: “Mother would like a cash award!” The line recalls legendary black female performers like Aretha Franklin, who stipulates that she always be paid in cash, which she then often carries with her in her purse on to the stage and places near her piano for the duration of her performance. The joke works insofar as it plays with and against the preconception of black women as nurturing, selfless figures, as “living currency” in the skin trade of race. By demanding payment in cash, Harrell’s persona (like Franklin) dramatizes the commercial transaction occluded in the sentimental fiction of the performer overwrought with emotional sincerity.23 The dances in Twenty Looks were a queer fantasia of an avant-garde dance scene that never actually existed, one that perhaps cannot even

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exist now. Fictional archiving, that is to say, is an archiving of what Hartman calls the “nonevent” of black emancipation. The looks the dancer-choreographer gave over the course of performing in his own pieces—many more than twenty looks of anguish, effort, attraction, repulsion, interest, amazement, sadness, fatigue, grimace, seduction, surprise, care, concern, regret, dejection, incitement, lust, anger, side-eye, shade, signification, transport, triumph, pain, and abandon—were performances in themselves. As such, these expressions provided an index to the dance’s possible meanings. In so modeling this auto-affective response to the danced story of erotic and euphoric entanglement, Harrell did not so much supplant the critic and historian as take his place by their side, stalking the footlights of his own stage, sitting in his own audience, and breaking the presentational frame through a variety of other stratagems. Sidestepping accusations of appropriation by dancing in the subjunctive mood of “what would have happened,” I suggest, becomes another use of afro-fabulation in motion. Fabulation in this sense is not so much imagination as it is imagination’s shadow. Stepping into the propositional mode of revised histories allows for the retrieval of abandoned practices and unspoken scenarios. Critical shade at its most generous provides a performer like Harrell a means to invent an alternative tradition within which to position his own dancing body and to mark out a space, in and through the same gesture, for blackness and queerness in the contemporary dance and performance scene. By delving into the fraught dynamics of this zone of sexual and racial dissidence, Harrell’s afro-fabulation interinanimates the present with the past, making the lively arts of dance, story, and song a vehicle for virtual memory.24 Twenty Looks was staged over years during which activist voices increasingly took the cultural appropriation of black queer and transgender aesthetics to task, and even popular media figures like RuPaul found themselves running afoul of the dictates of some who had set themselves up as spokespersons for the community. In such a critical environment it is easy enough to picture a critique of Twenty Looks, or other fabulations, as alienating black and queer social dance forms from their originators and appropriating them to a rarefied world of concert dance in which those originators, should they find themselves gaining access, would find themselves wholly out of place. Here an afro-

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pessimist reading of performative blackness may prove unexpectedly helpful in response. Black studies theorist Jared Sexton, for example, has argued that the question of appropriation is less a matter of how to prevent black culture as collective identity from being appropriated, than it is a question of “how, under constant assault, to defend what cannot be possessed?”25 I want to take seriously what Sexton marks out as the dispossessive force of blackness. He continues by recounting how “in a global semantic field structured by anti-black solidarity . . . the potential energy of a black or blackened position holds out a singularly transformative possibility, and energy generated by virtue of its relation to others in a field of force.”26 Harrell’s embodied choreography works as such a black positionality within the field of force that is contemporary dance. In the face of this more radically transformative possibility, the multicultural neoliberalism that would seek to restrict culture to group membership is truly un-enthralling. With Sexton’s analysis in mind, it becomes less surprising that a range of performative propositions (many that, to be sure, have little direct resonance with afro-pessimist positions) happily transgress the propertarian injunctions implicit in many cultural appropriation critiques. A parallel example in contemporary dance might be the innovative choreography of Ligia Lewis, in particular her electrifying piece minor matter, about which Mlondi Zondi has written that “a lot of care, mishandling, nonchalance, and re-assembly engenders the frictional entanglements between the three dancers, at times horizontal and conjoined, and at other times weighted, divergent, or combative.” It seems to me that what Zondi writes of Lewis could be equally said of Harrell: “While minor matter is animated by and acts alongside activist movements for social justice, it declines the invitation to aestheticize and represent those forms of insurgency and make them susceptible to increased surveillance and cooptation.”27 Instead, Harrell’s choreography experiments with the apparatus of capture that is the modern stage, taking that from odd and unexpected angles. If the critical shade we see in Harrell’s choreography offers a new angle through which to approach history, it therefore showcases the performative powers of a critical and creative fabulation. In this book, I am less interested in giving afro-fabulation a precise definition than I am in conveying something like the varieties of afro-fabulative experience. I write at a time when the powers of the false are needed more than

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ever, precisely in order to refuse the terms by which present cultural politics are increasingly being reordered to suit the dictates of a bullying and belligerent white nationalism. In the age of a Liar-in-Chief seeking to make American great again, many have argued for the need to double down on Enlightenment reason and have even sought to blame “old school postmodernism” for creating the conditions of moral relativism in which climate change denials and “alternative facts” can flourish with impunity. This critique badly mistakes oppositional performative strategies that have emerged from the margins as being the same as, or even comparable to, the enduring powers of propaganda that have long occupied the center. It blames those who have been victimized by empowered fictions for inventing countermythologies of their own. The imperative that underlies critical shade—the imperative to produce the body as a fiction—emerges precisely as responses to enduring structures of mendacity. Like other forms of minor and reparative expression, they are “weak” insofar as they fail to provide a robust self-defense against the partisans of positivist and empirical history. As we shall see in the next chapter, such critiques can be deeply hostile to fabulation even in contexts where they are ostensibly seeking to affirm and value minoritarian life. Answers to these important critiques and reservations will have to be made with care and deliberation, and I seek to provide such answers throughout this book. If Wu Tsang, in my introduction, and Trajal Harrell, in this chapter, offer two distinctive but complementary means of performing history in this fictional tense, they both assist us in discerning the difference between such fabulative engagements with an unredeemed history, on the one hand, and the laissez-faire permission to reinvent the past to suit the present needs of power, on the other. We undoubtedly live in an era of malignant imperialist nostalgia and white supremacist fantasy. We daily observe how lies about the past serve the interests of power. Under such oppressive circumstances, what’s a queer fabulist to do? The power of critical shade rests precisely in its active skill as a reader of the social and cultural texts that exclude it. Rather than retreat in the face of mainstream appropriation, critical shade instead looks to the kairos of performance’s critical movement—the precise moment, occasion, or angle from which, in a momentary pause, the gaze can be reflected back in a gesture of counter-mimesis. To explore the (non)eventfulness of

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this moment further will take us into the next chapter, which takes up the afro-fabulational antagonisms of Shirley Clarke and Jason Holliday. If the time of performance steps out of a homogeneous, empty time, then perhaps this is less a complete disappearance than a step into virtual memory—not memory of “the way things actually are” but rather memory as co-constitutive of “the process by which one identifies and engages the virtual events immanent within one’s present world.”28 This is a mode of memory that, paradoxically, does not emerge from out of the depths of the subject, but instead plays out along the folds of its surface. As memory is recalled externally, this opens out the possibility of reading a world of objects, both “fashioned” and otherwise, in terms of the deep and dark poetics that their appearance affords.

2

Crushed Black On Archival Opacity

If critical shade enacts a distinctively queer and black relation to the virtual, as I argued in chapter 1, then what implications might this hold for our epistemologies of cultural memory? In order to make sense of this question, we must keep in mind that, whatever else memory is, it is virtual. Indeed, we know the power of the virtual above all through memory’s mercurial powers to affect us. And if “history is what hurts,” as Fredric Jameson put it a generation ago, then where does that leave a queer historicism that might desire an expanded set of affective dispositions and orientations towards the past?1 This chapter is haunted by a remark I have heard my students of color (and black students in particular) repeatedly make. Whenever invited to contemplate the past in the comic or pastoral mode of “period drama,” someone will usually say that they wouldn’t want to imagine themselves in the past, because in the past they would have been a slave or in bondage. It is in response to such casual interdictions of memory—seen as that which can only hurt us—that this chapter works toward an alternative account of repairing the incommensurate.2 I am interested in the modes of angular sociality that become possible when we work through hard feelings with an intention to transform them into something else. Another way into the subject of this chapter would be to ask: What shadow does critical shade cast upon the archives of sex and gender in black queer lives? How do past forms of sexual rivalry, indifference, seduction, and betrayal conjugate our encounters with history in the mode of redress? Is this historicism interdependent with queer futurity?3 “The past has left images,” the French historian André Monglond has written, “comparable to those which are imprinted by light on a photosensitive plate. The future alone possesses developers active enough to scan such surfaces perfectly.”4 While I will have occasion to think the past in rela46

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tion to metaphors of depth in chapter 5, at this stage of my argument I want to linger with the metaphorics of surface. To do so, we can draw upon Amber Musser’s argument that the analytics of the flesh in black queer and feminist theory demand a close and careful epistemology of the surface.5 One aspect of the surface of representation that Monglond’s metaphor evokes is what photographers refer to as the “crushed black.” These are the “shadow areas that lack detail and texture due to underexposure” and are thus called “blocked up” or “crushed,” according to the Illustrated Dictionary of Photography.6 We see these crushed blacks in most prints of Shirley Clarke’s 1967 film Portrait of Jason, including DVD releases up until the full restoration of the film in 2014. These underexposed greys and blacks in the film, what is more, seem to allegorically repeat the underexposure of the film, which has never been widely and consistently available until recently. Has the print left images on its surfaces that only the developers of today can scan perfectly? This formal question takes us directly to the dialectics of loss and salvation which the film’s subject, Jason Holliday, endures on screen and in the archives. Crushed blacks can be considered a printing flaw, but they can also be deliberately employed for aesthetic effect. This can be seen in promotional postcards for Portrait of Jason’s original release, in which grey-scale images of the director and her subject are rendered in stark contrast. Whether intended, as in these postcards, or accumulated over time and repeated copying and transferring, as in many prints of the film, crushed blacks might be considered the dark materialist counterpoint to the progressive historical framework offered to us by Monglond. Crushed blacks seem to contain, in their monochromatic starkness, reserved images that might be revealed by a better developer in the future. But what happens when art, or theory, plumbs those reserves? Are we to accept the removal of the crushed blacks as the fulfillment of the filmmaker’s vision? Would such a fulfillment somehow redeem the director, particularly in her vexed, antagonistic relationship to her subject? Or is something vital missed by the current historicist drive toward perfect audiovisual restoration, with its oft-accompanying impulse to repair the injured historical subject? If underexposed blacks on film are not simply devoid of content, but, to the contrary, filled with incommensurabilities, traces of a past life untranslatable into our own, might we not instead find ways of valuing those zones of indistinction for, and not in spite of, their mystery? By what method

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would we attempt such a transvaluation of the crushed black? Instead of history as we know it, would this other method be a sort of fabulation? Portrait of Jason is often described as the first feature film with a queer black protagonist. It is a now classic document of the cinema verité movement, as well as an important work by an American female director. The black and white film consists of approximately one hundred minutes of footage, culled and edited by Clarke herself from a twelvehour shoot in her duplex apartment in the legendary Chelsea Hotel which documented Jason Holliday holding forth on this peripatetic life as an entertainer, domestic worker, “hustler,” and denizen of the sexual and racial undercommons. An immediate sensation upon its release, Clarke’s film impressed the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Ingmar Bergman; Gilles Deleuze included a discussion of it in his 1985 treatise Cinema 2: The Time Image.7 Yet Portrait of Jason has also continued to draw detractors, who consider it a voyeuristic exploitation of a vulnerable subject. Critics have focused on the power the white, female director, Shirley Clarke, wielded over her black, gay male subject, Jason Holliday. The film has been characterized as a racist enactment of film as an apparatus of capture of black life, in which the exposure the vulnerable, peripatetic Holliday gained was tantamount to his endangerment and exploitation by a privileged member of the New York City avant-garde. How might a consideration of the lives and afterlives of crushed blacks in the film inform this debate over the stakes of under- and overexposure? Indeed, lingering in the crushed blacks suggests that teleology is not the only method for making sense of the interanimation of matter and memory.8 In addition to Bergson, one could also lift a page from the heterodox psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and construe Monglond as indirectly discussing how the negatives in his historical developer produce anamorphic images: as one approaches them from different angles and distances, these figures move in and out of distinction.9 Crushed blacks or shadows, on this view, could then contribute to the enigmatic shape and undecidability of the images that flicker in the darkened room of the cinema, projecting outlines without interiors, surfaces without depths, and a history folded upon itself so as to perpetually produce doubles. Blocked vision could spur a temporal as well as visual anamorphosis, insofar as the crushed blacks release their images, when they do, within a delayed and elongated duration.

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There is something in crushed shadows that binds cinema to theater and both to painting and poetry, something that enables Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason to hold light within dark, black within white, and an incommensurable commons within both. In evoking the incommensurable in relation to the projects of, on the one hand, the restoration of film and, on the other, the practice of reparative reading, I consciously evoke the late work of José Esteban Muñoz. Responding to the antagonism and dissent Clarke’s film continues to produce, in particular between (white) feminist genealogies and black (queer) ones, I seek in this chapter a reading that works in the reparative mode Muñoz moved in: one that acknowledges antagonism and negativity rather than denying it.10 I will suggest that there are some unexpected affinities in his strategy for locating the reparative position in theoretical practice and the way Joan Copjec has written of history, not as a context for, but as inner antagonism of the subject. In her interpretation of the silhouettes of Kara Walker, an artist I discuss in more detail in chapter 4, Copjec has invited us to consider the history they index as “an internal object that lives the subject as the double of another.”11 The histories of performance I consider in Afro-Fabulation—histories that move in and out of the crushed blacks of cinema and through the blocked-up shadows of everynight life—represent such divisions and doublings of the subject. Instead of gradual revelation, perfect restoration, or the trope of what Heather Love has termed the “emotional rescue” of the historical queer by the well-meaning, well-adjusted critic in the present, these strategies offer us an alternative I want to call—invoking a long, subterranean tradition of black escape and fugitivity—“dark fabulation.”12 To link the phenomenon of blocked-up shadows to the question of African American representation in cinema, theater, and visual culture might appear to overburden a technical detail with symbolic and cultural weight. If I persist in drawing these connections, it is because I am persuaded that representations must be treated as immanent to the technical apparatus that construct them, especially if we would wish to unburden ourselves of their oppressive weight. We cannot hope to disrupt what Frantz Fanon called the “historical-racial schema” without grasping the techniques by which, as he puts it, “the Other fixes me with his gaze, his gestures and attitude, the same way you fix a preparation with a dye.”13 Here I want to focus on how this phrase remains key in-

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sofar as Fanon, the doctor, turns to a laboratory of a different sort than Monglond’s photographer, but for similar purposes: the clarification of an obscured vision and the potential reconstruction of a blasted self. Whether through the metaphor of an underexposed photosensitive plate or that of a tissue specimen preserved with chemical fixative, Fanon insists on an irreducibly materialist moment. In both of those images, duration is the span within which that which is fixed is released, and that which is hidden is unveiled. And it is Fanon who describes this process of fabulation as, more exactly, fabrication: “I explode,” he writes in Black Skin, White Masks. “Here are the fragments put together by another me.”14 While Fanon is seldom invoked in relation to the powers of the false, and more often evoked in relation to the necessary violence of the process of decolonization, his language here calls attention to another, internal and intensive, process of destruction and recomposition. This reading of Fanon suggests more connections with Walter Benjamin. In his theoretical montage, Benjamin pointed out those little elements of contingency that prevented relics of the past from being passively absorbed into perfect historical comprehension. Through the image of the negative surface, he called attention to a photographic stance or ground that can be distinguished from the optical or ocularcentric function of the developed picture. The dialectical image, as I understand it here, stands apart from the immediate communicative content of the picture and remains available, at least potentially, to a future willing to seize hold of it as it flashes by. If the filmed portrait brings the viewer ever closer to a subject by way of its likeness, this close approach must also reveal the grain of the film stock, the blur of the shutter, and the accreted residue of each copy that adds, in the very process of duplication, a layer of something new. Benjamin articulates what we can think of as a photographic concept of history, in which the photographic apparatus deposits on the negative a trace of something of the moment of exposure that is incommensurable with itself. I turn to Benjamin’s materialism in order to resist the forced choice we are sometimes presented with: between an aporetic conception of history, in which all subjectivity is lost to the obliteration of archival power, and the alternative positivist vision of a past entirely recoverable through the magic of DNA, carbon dating, or other contemporary scientific tools for mapping deep time. The function of the storyteller that

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Deleuze explores in Cinema 2—inspired by Jason Holliday among a host of other fabulists—may direct us away from the burden of truth tellingconceived of as either impossible or automatic and redirect our critical attention to what Deleuze calls the “powers of the false.”15 In this chapter, I read the archive of black performance and fabulation through the temporal duration interposed between negative and print, between a film’s shoot and its projection before an audience. I exploit the figurative and literal consequences that follow from Benjamin’s use of black and white photography as an example of how the light of the future will strike the surfaces of the past. It is out of this duration that I derive my concept of liveness, which I do not consider to be apart from, but rather as entangled with, the material qualities of the recording apparatus. My focus on duration dovetails with the larger claim of this book, which is that black art and culture take their own time. The angular sociality of black performative time exemplifies my argument that the blackness we would leave behind is the blackness that will find us in the end. The black experience recorded in and as artworks resists being mastered by the clock or plotted into historical periods. And it calls for a different theory of the history of everyday life, one that includes but is not encapsulated by the habitual or mundane. Readings of black art, cinema, and performance must acknowledge the insurrectionary stance taken in the everyday, not just to anti-black times, but to time itself, at least to time considered as a neutral, universal, and, as it were, “colorless” phenomenon. It is the notion of the transparency of time as an innocent unit of measure that I mean to contest in my argument for a thicker and more expansive account of what we can call black polytemporality.

Repairing the Incommensurable “This is my moment,” Holliday tells Clarke’s camera at one point. “I’m here on the throne and I can say whatever I damn please. But it’s got to be righteous, you know?”16 Everything about this “moment” in the film turns on the inflection Holliday places on the word “righteous,” a key emphasis that qualifies his relaxation into sovereign self-possession behind a puff of smoke and a sip of whiskey and brings into play a collective black idiom of spiritual struggle for post-secular freedoms. It is important to note how Holliday, through this emphasis on truth and

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right, pluralizes the moment of his cinematic visibility: he is a queen on the throne, able to finally say what he pleases, no matter how profane. But that saying must be “righteous,” that is, it must do a kind of justice that is incompossible with the conditions under which he appears—which is to say that the saying bespeaks a kind of justice that is incommensurate with the “rights” accorded under the law that held him, lest we forget, doubly, triply criminal as he spoke.17 And that justice has everything to do with the possibility for black social life as manifested under conditions of generalized dishonor and stigma. Jason, the director later noted to an interviewer, “lives nowhere.” Where does someone who lives nowhere come from? Where does that person go? Jason dares us to respond to this question, wherever and whenever we are. Has his moment been righteous? Where are we to locate righteousness in a dissolute, fatiguing, twelve-hour film shoot in a penthouse apartment in the Chelsea Hotel, with a subject being plied with liquor and reefer by a white director before being heckled by, here and later, by her matineeidol boyfriend? What kind of “moment” is this? Barbara Kruger levels what has become the standard indictment against the film when she criticizes its director’s “disturbing indulgence in cultural and racial tourism.”18 Clarke, who made several films about black life in New York City (in particular, The Cool World [1964]) did see herself as a kind of reporter from the dangerous frontiers of urban life, a position that, however sympathetic to her subjects, nonetheless arrogates to her, the privileged filmmaker, the rights of representation. Her editing of the film has come under scrutiny as well: Charles Nero has placed the film in a series of narratives in which a black gay subject is ultimately exposed by the white-directed camera as an imposter.19 Of course, with twelve hours of footage, Clarke could emplot her subject into almost any narrative she wished, although, as we shall later see, she also found herself driven, in her long hours in the editing booth, by a pursuit of truth comparable to, if incommensurate with, Jason’s.20 The debate over Clarke’s role restages, in an unlikely way, a different controversy surrounding white queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s editing and publishing the work of another black gay man, Gary Fisher, who has been her student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1990s before dying of AIDS-related causes in 1994. Both Clarke and Sedgwick played the role of impresario in bringing the singular ge-

Figures 2.1a–c. Portrait of Jason, fading to black. Screenshots by author.

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nius of these respective black queer men to the wider public. One should not make too much of this comparison, nor reduce these disparate histories and personalities to a single story. Still less do I wish to fall into an unpersuasive series of homologies: Is Eve more like Shirley, after all, more like Jason, or like neither? I seek to draw attention here less to a comparison between situations or individuals than to a common predicament in which reparative readings of a black queer subject produce a fabulationality. This tactic, which I will call, with Muñoz, repairing the incommensurable, differs from simply recuperating Jason Holliday as knowing, strategic, or resistant. Making the latter case, Lauren Rabinovitz argues that Holliday displays a “self-aware expertise at . . . manipulating his position,” resulting in “an ambiguity about whether it is the camera or the actor that is the site of enunciation.”21 The reparative position from which I seek to read the film, by contrast, does not rest on an interpretive ambiguity about who is speaking; rather, it rests upon a psychic ambivalence that is equally productive of both love and hate in the relations it sets up. For this reason, I cannot really follow Louise Spence and Vinicius Navarro when they call attention to “the direct record of the protagonist’s uninterrupted speech” in the film. Noting how sound recording continues between takes—suturing the montage of visual images with Jason’s ongoing monologue—Spence and Navarro argue that the film’s soundtrack suggests “that life goes on even if the camera is not there to record it.”22 But given what we know about the editing of the film—both its series of images and scenes and its soundtrack—it is not really persuasive to remain at the formal level of a suggestion: the paranoid impulse is at least so strong as to demand we investigate further how the film sets up a relation between what it shows and what it hides, what it tells and what it does not. Gavin Butt has produced perhaps the most balanced assessment of the film to date, arguing on the one hand that Clarke’s “psychic and social cross-identifications” with black men comprise a “queer feminism,” while acknowledging, on the other hand, how “problems of social class are, as much as anything else, played out in the film’s intersubjective mise-en-scène.” “Such ‘imperfect’ and troublesome relationships,” Butt goes on to note, “are the very stuff that makes Portrait of Jason an important work of avant-garde film”—a position I corroborate and amplify

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here.23 That is to say, if Portrait of Jason was from its inception troublingly imperfect, then the best that restoration or recovery could hope for might be to amplify those imperfections. The tangled relationships in the film would need to grapple with the feelings of shame, delight, exposure, and anger that Portrait both depicts and evokes, complications that strike at the heart of all we risk when we claim both life and art for performance. Many viewers of the film are most perturbed by the turn it takes toward the end, when, after demanding tale after tale from Holliday, Clarke and her crew (including her partner, Carl Lee) abruptly turn on Holliday, calling him out for some despicable lies he has ostensibly told, and reduce him to tears, which they piteously reject as yet another manifestation of his deceitfulness and deception. Astonishingly, Holliday concurs with this accusation, immediately dries up, and ends the film announcing the entire experience a happy and successful one. It is unsettling to viewers to find themselves aligned with a documenting camera that has by imperceptible degrees detached from its ostensible documentary neutrality and become a hostile tool of interrogation motivated by a jarring hostility. As the film thus turns from an ordinary spectacle to a discomfiting situation, the mood alters in such a way as to leave many viewers, from their different positionalities, feeling awkwardly complicit. This emotional manipulation and crushing of both subject and viewer by the cinematic apparatus and those who wield it is the first reason I evoke “crushed black” as more than just a technical term, but one that carries a further resonant valence. To be crushed, after all is to be dejected, defeated, and abject in the face of another. But also: to “have a crush” is to construe love as a kind of defiant ownership of one’s abjection: I may not have you, we crushed ones say, but I have the way you have me. Crushed blacks are the visual mechanism through which we see Jason Holliday, particularly when blocked-up shadows well up like sudden tears, occluding vision as the camera fades out between takes. But crushed blacks are also the subject of the film, insofar as Jason is the quintessentially crushed black, whose performances, however hysterical, are frequently read (not least by the director Clarke herself) as enormously sad, and whose narrative end, however much he dismisses it, finds him cornered and dressed down, scoffed at and abused, and then

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offered the document of this capture as the lasting image of his audiovisibility, both in the underground scene within which he is enmeshed and the broader contemporary culture into which scholars like myself continue to insert him. Such vexed complicities seem to animate film critic Armond White’s negative review of the 2013 theatrical release of the restored film. Dismissing both the argument for Holliday’s victimization and the defense of Holliday’s agency, White instead rejects the film on the surprising aesthetic grounds that Holliday fails at the task of playing himself: The difference between Antonio Fargas playing a pathetic Black queen based on Jason Holliday in Next Stop, Greenwich Village and Jason Holliday playing himself in Portrait of Jason is crucial. Fargas, a real actor, conveyed the multiple and paradoxical meanings in a dramatized character; Holliday, as an object of documentary curiosity is limited. His talkative, scotch-drinking, weed-smoking flamboyance may look like freewheeling audacity, but his humanity depends upon whatever a viewer will infer. In short, the legendary Portrait of Jason is not art.24

White shares my distaste for recuperating either figure in this artistsitter dyad, and preferring instead to laud an entirely different genre of film, he draws for his example a perfectly watchable but nostalgically conventional film. But his valorization of real, method acting over Holliday’s performance for and against the camera is problematic. To prefer Fargas playing a queen in Next Stop, Greenwich Village over Holliday playing himself is to reject, not simply “weed-smoking flamboyance,” but a whole hidden genealogy of fugitive performances in everynight life. To assert that the prismatic changes Jason undergoes on screen fail to rise to the level of dramatic art and instead descend into documentary objectivity is thus to limit the available genres at hand to make sense of his performance. As an “object among objects,” as Fanon would say, Holliday repels White not because he is complicit in Clarke’s voyeuristic scenario, but because he fails to transfigure it into something better. While White’s aesthetic criteria would appear to rule out broad swaths of avant-garde cinematic and theatrical experimentation, I linger with it because it illustrates the persistence of the “burden of representation”

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when it comes to black gay subjects.25 If Jason fails even at portraying, that is representing, himself, how could his Portrait stand in as a sufficient historical image of its era? There would be nothing left hidden in the crushed blacks except what a gifted actor, a true artist, could invent. And if representation fails, what then happens to the prospects for reparation? Such a move takes us into to the Kleinian register that Sedgwick’s work and those influenced by it have so powerfully spoken from.26 I will not rehearse the massive debate that has emerged within affect studies over Klein’s identification, and Sedgwick’s utilization, of the depressive and paranoid positions in literary and cultural interpretation. I do, however, want to offer another side of Jason Holliday’s performance that is more introspective and self-reflexive against the crudely one-sided picture of “flamboyance” offered by White (and, to be frank, enjoyed by many of the film’s viewers). In his more reflective moments, he seems to be working through the very terms through which he is emerging into visibility. In one such moment, he anticipates the risk of becoming the pitiful object of “emotional rescue”: It’s a funny feeling, having a picture made about you. I feel sort of grand sitting here carrying on. People are gonna be digging you, or I’ll be criticized, I’ll be loved or hated—what difference does it make? I am doing what I want to do and it’s a nice feeling that somebody is taking a picture of it. This is a picture I can save forever. No matter how many times I goof, I’ll have something of my own. For once in my life I was together and this is the result of it. It is a nice feeling.27

Feeling alternately funny, grand, loved, hated, indifferent, and, that most ambiguous of feelings, nice, all in the duration of one elongated moment, Holliday neither solicits nor rejects emotional rescue. He asks rhetorically if it makes a difference how we respond to him, an attitude that at first blush may bespeak indifference, but upon further thought suggests a canny divestment of emotional labor onto the audience. It is we who must decide, not he, what difference he makes in us. So we must see that, in spite of his protestations otherwise, that love and hate, “digging” and criticism, are precisely the critical ambivalence that his performance makes possible. The justice Clarke’s portrait does to Holliday is less to capture him as he really was, or to recover a pre-Stonewall subjectivity

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from stigma and abjection, than to insist on and enable this pluralizing of the moment to unfold through all the valences a single, complex affect can carry. While it would be more expected to equate the reparative position with the historical recovery process of the film restoration, my interest here, by contrast, is to trouble that equation. Indeed, we can take up the process of restoration of Clarke’s film as a case study through which the complexity of the reparative position can be appreciated. In so doing, we might better illuminate the stance Muñoz takes—reparative but also suspicious of recovery and restoration—as a potential model for approaching Jason Holliday and Portrait of Jason. Of the many reasons Muñoz turned to the debate over Sedgwick’s reading of Fisher, I believe one was to underscore that his own work was also a contribution to black studies as well as to queer theory and queer of color critique. According to the identitarian logics of the multicultural academy, such an overlap between blackness and brownness is not supposed to be possible.28 Even if the reductive subsumption of brown and black into “people of color” is inadequate, there is still the possibility of retaining the incommensurable antagonism of blackness within a brown world. Insofar as Muñoz never relinquished the critical edge of negativity, it would seem to be a real error to infer that his utopianism was ever a matter of blinkered optimism. Muñoz’s essay “Reading Sedgwick Reading Fisher” addresses itself to the editing and posthumous publication of the writings of Gary Fisher by his friend and former teacher, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.29 Despite his self-positioning as the reparative reader of this relationship, Muñoz’s approach is alert to negativity insofar as it refuses the possibility of sublating anti-black racism into a harmless, post-racial fetishism. In order to dismiss the negative as superseded by social advances that now (allegedly) enable black and white to engage in a consequence-free race play with the dark materials of erotic dominance and submission, Muñoz develops a strand of thought that sees in the very possibility of such a socio-erotic entanglement a source of the incommensurable. Implicit in his work is an artful dodge through the double bind of, on the one hand, critical traditions that have fixated on the black subject rendered mute by the collective trauma of slavery, which no act of reparations can ever fully repair, and, on the

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other, anti-relational accounts of a queer subject forever barred from full accession into the symbolic order (and therefore, the abject and killable obscene supplement of the jouissance that society denies itself). I think Muñoz’s work pretty clearly rejected both models of negativity; but why, as Jack Halberstam might ask, should those be the only models of negativity on offer?30 What is at stake here is under-described by any pernicious dualism between paranoid and reparative positions (positions all subjects must pass through in any event, according to Klein’s model, and which remain “floating” within their adult selves as recurrently available stances to adopt when necessary). Such a dualism certainly fails to categorize the account Muñoz provides of his reading of Fisher’s prose, the shock of his racial abjection, the abruptness of his awareness of being-towarddeath, and the sense his writings ultimately convey, a sense understood as a difference held in common, or being singular plural.31 As with his Blochian redefinition of queerness in Cruising Utopia, Muñoz turned to Jean-Luc Nancy in this essay in the spirit of something like an affirmative negation. He did not evoke Nancy’s notion of being singular plural in order to assert a false equivalence between Sedgwick and Fisher, or, for that matter, between himself and Fisher as queer of color subjects. But neither did he accept a strong paranoid reading of nonequivalence and incommensurability as equivalent to domination. In particular, he was concerned to detach BDSM erotics from a quick and dirty transcoding into the Hegelian master-slave dialectic). The possibility of a political and aesthetic horizon beyond the here and now, beyond the death-bound subject was the precondition for the being in common with brownness that was Muñoz’s thematic in his final writings.32 This brown commons registers itself through a sense of conviviality, conspiracy, and compassion in Nancy’s sense of the last term: a co-presence of co-passion with another that perturbs in that person’s singularity (touch me not), an incommensurability that perturbs violent relatedness. As Nancy puts it: “What I am talking about here is compassion, but not compassion as a pity that feels sorry for itself and feeds on itself. Com-passion is the contagion, the contact of being with one another in this turmoil. Compassion is not altruism, nor is it identification; it is the disturbance of violent relatedness.”33 The thinking of this critical stance—weak because affective and local (rather than a cogni-

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tive mapping of the ideological-discursive surround), negative because attuned to the incommensurabilities in any dyad and the sheer number of ways in which we repeatedly miss each other, and reparative because it works remorselessly toward a world “antithetical to our inner and outer colonialisms”—is Muñoz’s domain.34 He accomplished this reading, I argue, by repositioning the arid and closed loop of self-other by avowing an idea of the incommensurate beyond the confines of singular being. The terrain he traveled en route to this commons of the incommensurate had as much to do with Marxism as with psychoanalysis and was as much about the collective as the individual subject. For my purposes here, it is useful to note how he looked to the quintessential sociality of the cinematic subject. We can identify a social individual in the filmic traces of Jason Holliday, itself an afro-socialization of his given name, Aaron Payne. “Jason Holliday” is a name that introjects the good object—jazz singer Billie Holliday—into an invaginated outworking of black masculinity. This angular sociality is hostile to the transactional nature of the market, but friendly with the insolent beauty and cutting wit of the marketed. To repair the incommensurable, as Muñoz outlined in his reading of Gary Fisher, was thus never to deny incommensurability. When he aligned the reparative, by way of the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy, with “the sharing (out) of an unshareable,” this was no easy sophism.35 Sharing the unshareable is perhaps an easier maxim to pronounce than it is to live or die by: the reparative reading Muñoz offered of Fisher and Sedgwick, and which I will wish to extend to Clarke and Holliday, is founded in that unbearability we all bear and by which we are born.36

A Living-Room Theater of Everynight Life With the model of negativity Muñoz develops partly outlined, let me return to the fraught retelling of what exactly happened in a New York apartment one Saturday night, and why it might speak to a broader interdisciplinary debate on the politics of loss and retrieval in the archive. To address this broader debate, I now bring the work on reparative reading I have been discussing into conversation with the critique of black feminist recovery and redress found in the work of Saidiya Hartman. Confronting the historical record of violence committed against enslaved women

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during the Middle Passage, Hartman observes how “infelicitous speech, obscene utterances, and perilous commands give birth to the characters we stumble upon in the archive.”37 Reflecting on her own archival and genealogical efforts in Lose Your Mother, Hartman worries that any desire to fill in the aporia of the archive, to repair the damage done, could only possibly result in “a romance.”38 Meditating on the (im)possibility of narrating such obliterated characters in a manner that does not reinscribe the violence done them in a second violence of retelling, Hartman alights instead upon a practice she calls “critical fabulation”: By playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by representing the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done.39

Among queer feminist critics, Heather Love may be said to share Hartman’s concern with the ruse of “emotional rescue” as a justification for recovering stories from the oppressed or obliterated past.40 In this narrow sense, and not in any that would place either critic on the side of a pernicious binary, Love can be said to be speaking for or from the paranoid position.41 Picking up on Sedgwick’s work on transformational shame, Love has noted how certain emotions do not and cannot change or transmute themselves into something else. Some losses remain lost, a position Hartman strongly affirms, even in her suggestive elaboration of critical fabulation. This is signaled by the disjunctive synthesis initiated by Hartman’s series of “ors” (“what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done”)—which is a quintessentially disjunctive series, generating incompossibilities and virtual becomings. Both black feminist and queer skepticism directed at historical recovery evince distrust in any confidence that an underlying causal and progressive order enables archival recovery to establish what “really” happened. Every attempt at getting closer to the historical truth by way of its archival remains leads to more dead ends and diversions: in the process of establishing the truth, we repeatedly lose the plot. The critical thrust of Hartman’s and Love’s work has been to ask whether we should even be working to resolve this aporia. Must we fill in the blanks left

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by a history of injury, stigma, and violence with a retrospectively conferred plenitude? Or would that be a kind of doubled violence done to the historically erased, violating their wish not to be found, recovered, or represented on our contemporary terms? Portrait of Jason makes a provocative case study for investigating the question of loss and reparation, insofar as Holliday is depicted in Clarke’s film as practically panting to be represented. Even if we do not share Armond White’s skeptical response to that desire, discussed above, we are still left with his Fanonian question: How does anything become anything else? If Jason explodes over the course of the filming of his portrait, who or what puts him back together into a “new me”? While White would locate this agency in a real actor like Fargas, I want to step into the blocked-up shadows in order to look elsewhere. I want to take the question of agency in the portrait and distribute it in and out of the places marked “crushed black,” the zones of indistinction between theater and cinema, between poetry and the graphic arts, in order to refuse or at least demur from White’s confidence that the difference between life and art is “crucial.” In contrast to real acting and realist cinema, but also in tactical subversion of the queer feminist direct cinema of Clarke, I want to call this nonrealist, non-auteurist art form a “living-room theater of everynight life.”42 As Portrait of Jason reveals, nightlife is indeed a space where queerness and blackness co-animate each other in ways rarely captured in daytime. Familiarity with classic associations of night with sleep, dream, intoxication, and sex might lead us to overlook, in our knowingness, the difference everynight life must make to research and interpretive methods better calibrated to the world of alert sobriety. Nightlife fieldwork methodologies are currently emerging across a range of disciplines, including ethnomusicology, dance and performance studies, and art history.43 My contribution to this interdisciplinary conversation is to argue for the importance of conceptualizing cinema and photography not as extrinsic operations that arrive to disrupt a live scene, but rather as technologies of self-fashioning that are immanent to whatever we might mean by everynight life. Exchanging day for night entails more than extending around the clock a method developed for nine to five. As Shane Vogel argues, nightlife possesses its own epistemology of secrecy and exposure.44 To plunge into its orbit is to circle around a star whose light

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unsteadily flickers. It is the life in everynight life, its dark vitality, that I want to both attend to and problematize in my genealogy of the black and queer performances that are archived in Portrait of Jason. Not only was the subject of Portrait of Jason a prominent figure of everynightlife, and one whom Andy Warhol longed to capture, but the production of the film itself was an enactment of it. Begun at 9 p.m. on a Saturday night in Clarke’s duplex apartment, the shoot lasted until 9 a.m. the following Sunday morning. Portrait of Jason emerged during a period of creative ferment in cinema, as filmmakers experimented with the truth-function of their medium, and mined the fertile seam of audiovisual possibility that lies between fact and fiction.45 Portrait of Jason, together with two prior features by Clarke, The Connection (1961) and The Cool World (1963), was released during a period of direct cinema, cinema verité, and screen tests. What connects these disparate approaches to cinema is an interest in approaching life in a less scripted or mediated way, enabling previously criminalized, pathologized, or marginalized subjectivities to reveal something of how their quotidian lives were lived. In pursuit of a subject who might reveal an unguarded facet of his truth to the camera, Clarke’s gaze alighted on Holliday as someone who, by her later recollection, desired to be in front of a camera but did not yet know how to hide himself from it. Holliday’s overt theatricality, his readiness with quips, bawdy stories, and sentimental ones, his moviestar impersonations and his little bits of business from a cabaret act he was forever in the process of getting together—all this composed the surfeit of appearance that Clarke planned to crack open, precisely by giving Holliday what he claimed most to want: an audience. That her film shoot was motivated by hostility toward Holliday, and formed part of a plan to revenge herself for a tremendous insult from him, adds another layer of aggression to the cool, seemingly neutral pose of the recording apparatus. And this is not just an encounter between the filmmaker and her subject. Because the camera never pulls away from Holliday, viewers of the film become only gradually aware of the number of other people in the room. Director Clarke’s voice is heard early on, and Holliday interacts with two other male voices, most notably that of the black actor Carl Lee (1926–1986), who was present on set but played no official role in the production.46 Interposed between his “throne” and the audience of posterity is the circle of Clarke, her erstwhile lover Lee, and her small

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crew. It is in this mix of durations, this interinanimation of the living arts of theater and film, that what I call a “living-room theater” emerged. It is in this theater, I wager, that the occluded and blocked-up shadows of everynight life took shape. It was also in relation to the terms of this theater, and against them, that Jason Holliday performed. As the night progressed, Holliday’s increasingly belligerent audience derailed his intended performance and set the stage for the angry confrontation between Holliday and an off-screen Lee. The final edit of the film is elliptical about what those “lies” are, exactly. But notes left by Clarke in her log books now held in her archive refer to some of the topics Jason discussed on those other ten hours of film: “straight guys” who are “idiots waiting to be had”; “gigolos” who are “really fags-for money”; and, most scandalously, a story “about stealing [a] guy from [a] girl.”47 When this missing footage is included in the extended cinema of everynight life, it is the bizarre love triangle between Lee, Holliday, and Clarke that emerges as the true subject of Clarke’s portrait. Lingering in the crushed blacks and the edited-out clips of the film, another story emerges, one co-passionate (if not compassionate in the received sense), in which the triangulations of that evening become less clear-cut. Carl Lee, heard only as an acousmatic voice, has often found himself maligned in discussions of the film. For his later work in blaxploitation cinema, he is often taken as a sort of apotheosis of black macho. In Clarke’s film, he is misunderstood to be just doing the dirty work of smearing the queer, which it is difficult to fully absolve him of. But what if Holliday’s protestations of love toward Lee were taken not as only an abject crush, but as instead registering a disavowed reciprocity? What if there were something more in Holliday’s crushed black? In the play and film The Connection, through which Lee and Clarke met, Lee played a character who was indeed a “fag for money,” unafraid to use his sexual appeal to both men and women to make do. Since Clarke directed and knew Lee in the role, she was at least alert to the possibility that her “real actor” might really be trade, whether or not she believed, as it seems possible she did, that Lee and Holliday had had a liaison. In reading the ephemeral evidence of this kind of interinanimation of the hetero- and homosexual in downtown New York, I turn to the poet Marilyn Hacker, who offers one account of the game of concealment and revelation in everynight life in a 1985 poem, in which she

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recollects fragments of life in the Greenwich Village of the 1960s with her then husband, Samuel Delany: . . . Moondark to dawn, loud streets were not-quite scary footnotes in a nocturnal dictionary of argot softer on my ears than known four-walled cadenzas . . .

A little later in the poem, she continues: [ . . . ] Five months short of twenty, I knocked back whatever the river sent. He was gone two days: might bring back, on the third some kind of night music I’d never heard: Sonny the burglar, paunched with breakfast beers; olive-skinned Simon, who made fake Vermeers; the card-sharp who worked clubcars down the coast . . .48

Hacker’s account of hospitality to her errant husband’s various tricks is remarkable for its lack of moralism, anger, or self-pity; rather, the poet’s domestic scene-setting quietly steals thunder from both her spouse’s putative infidelities and the heteronormativity that they both reject, by reading her poetics out of a “nocturnal dictionary” that lies at the threshold between living-room and street, in the duration between “moondark” and “dawn.” Hacker’s poem, later interpolated into Delany’s own memoir, The Motion of Light in Water, offers a model for listening to and speaking from the “night music” of everynight life, a poetics that gives space to the tensions and affordances of interracial, homosexual cohabitation and compassion in a manner that falls short of reconciliation, but doesn’t advance as far as total repudiation.49 In my mind, at least, this other black/white domestic couple making do in the 1960s offers an alternate angle on the tumultuous games played by Clarke and Lee in a relationship riven by drug addiction and violence, and dangerous enough to have ensnared Holliday in the psychodrama of a living-room theater, recorded and exposed to posterity. I find Hacker, indeed, a more compassionate interpreter of these kinds of scenes than Clarke herself, who when offered a platform to

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muse upon Holliday’s significance, offered a bizarre and homophobic disavowal of her subject’s homosexuality: Jason is very symbolic. Obviously, he is a real person, but what has happened to Jason, and what has made Jason who he is, is definitely the fault of American white society. And what intrigues me so much in the film is that Jason, without ever once saying this, you can’t leave that film and not be aware of what has been done to him. Not only his de-emasculation [sic] because I’m absolutely convinced for instance that Jason is a madeup homosexual. It’s extremely convenient for him to be one. It’s part of his act. He’s talked himself into it. You know? By now it’s a real act, but it was based on a very particular need, a particular way to adjust into American society if you are a black man, or a black child, who made this decision quite young in his life. And everything else, Jason’s hustling, the fact that Jason lives nowhere, Jason’s humor, is all in direct [interrupted by crosstalk] He’ll do anything for a buck, all the time convinced that he’s holding on. In other words it’s a very sad film. And to anybody who is aware at all, it gets more tragic the more he laughs. . . . The pain of being unable to know himself, and that he’s never going to know himself. . . . He screams at you, “I love you!” But he could never, never really love.50

Setting aside the question of what a “made-up” (as opposed to real?) homosexual might be, I am taken by Clarke’s telling misremembering of her own film, the film that she claimed to have obsessively edited over months. In this quotation, she implies that Jason screamed “I love you” at her, when in point of fact, as she must know, he screamed it at Lee. So her insistence that he could never, never, really love must be read as overdetermined by her refusal to admit that her beloved Lee could ever have made a reciprocal “adjustment” to America, could ever have “de-emasculated” himself to a level where he could desire someone like Holliday, even for one night.

Epistemologies of Strung-Out Time It matters more than most commentators have so far suggested that neither Holliday nor his off-screen antagonist Lee were aspirational ingénues caught up in an evening’s screen test, but were both veteran players of the black culture industries. Holliday performed on the radio as a child and

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was earning an income for himself and his family through song and dance before he hit puberty. With his fanciful stage name and unreliable back story, Holliday belongs to a genealogy of black performance characterized not so much by double consciousness as by its conscious and continuous doubling, driven less by the need to dissemble than by will of the fabulist, who, as Deleuze writes, evinces “a profound desire, a tendency to project— into things, into reality, into the future, and even into the sky—an image of himself and others so intense that it has a life of its own: an image that is always stitched together, patched up, continually growing along the way, to the point where it becomes fabulous. It is a machine for manufacturing giants, what Bergson called a fabulatory function.”51 While Clarke’s camera was not the only such machine for manufacturing giants, it did seem to function as a literal projection of Holliday’s desires. Holliday, contra White, wasn’t mistaken in encountering, in Clarke’s camera, a machine for manufacturing one of his giants. But we should not be so awed by the scale of what they collaboratively created as to miss the other, more ephemeral evidences of his fabulation. While Clarke took Portrait of Jason on tour, answering questions before college audiences, Holliday took advantage of his screen notoriety to get his act together at Steve Paul’s Scene, where in 1969 his cabaret act finally came to fruition. The press continued to be hostile. Anticipating White’s later invidious distinction between real acting and fraffing about, the showbiz periodical Variety archly dismissed the show as a “paid audition.” Already the reduction of the complex lifeworld of the hustler into the flat epithet of “male prostie”—as Variety derisively labeled him—had been made.52 To her credit, Clarke instantly and always regretted the hostile and untruthful reduction in reporting Jason’s profession as that of “homosexual prostitute”—a misconstrual of what being a “hustler” meant in black argot, which sadly continues to circulate in much critical and journalistic writing about the film. Carl Lee also grew up around black cabaret. His father briefly ran a nightclub called the Jitterbug in the 1930s. And while Lee came from the more illustrious stage family, and had already racked up impressive screen and theater credits by the time he arrived at Clarke’s shoot, he and Holliday were peers in at least one respect. Both had worked as MCs in jazz clubs — Lee at New York’s Village Gate, Holliday at Boston’s Hi Hat—and through that occupation came to know jazz legends such

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as Carmen McRae and Miles Davis. Lee is a particularly rich figure for thinking through black performance surrogation across film, drama, music, and literature. As a fourteen-year-old, he watched his father, Canada Lee, star in Richard Wright’s stage adaptation of his novel Native Son, under the direction of Orson Welles. “Bigger’s son” witnessed his father, an ex-prizefighter and erstwhile violinist, navigate the treacherous shoals of mainstream praise in a role he was, the press insisted, born to play. Well before the popularization of social theories of stigmatized identity, Lee was taken to literally embody a naturalized theatricality. For his part, Wright testily observed the difference between Canada Lee the actor and Bigger Thomas the character: “I have a pretty sharp sense of the difference between living characters and stage characters,” Wright noted at the time of the original stage production of Native Son, expressing an attitude not unlike that with which Armond White assessed Portrait of Jason. “What is dramatic in life may not be dramatic on the stage.”53 Be that as it may, Wright’s insistent praise for Lee Senior as a trained actor was, unfortunately, lost on many of his contemporaries, such as the writer who opened a profile with this paragraph: Canada Lee is a Negro, and in his dark, muscled body there flows a restless torrent of strength. His ears are cauliflowered, his nose is broken, one of his eyes is off center, and yet when one watches him one never notices these things. One watches only how he moves with an unpredictable and animal grace, loose and powerful. And now and then his body will jerk rhythmically as if way back in his mind he were listening to boogiewoogie music, as when he reaches for his new shoes in dressing room 2A at the St. James and says loudly: “Ho-ot damn! Look at those shoes. Daggone. Look at those big feet!”54

The reporter has in this case acted the way that Clarke’s camera is accused by its critics as acting—that is, seeking to reveal the vital blackness of the “Negro” body that is always performing, but never exactly in the way it consciously intends. In this prose portrait, the journalist dives into an ocularcentric drive to locate, within the person of Canada Lee, the vital impetus that animates Bigger Thomas. Such graphic representation militates against the opacity and camouflage of the crushed blacks as I have described them here.

Figure 2.2. Unsigned artist rendering of Canada Lee portraying Bigger Thomas. Native Son Playbill (1941). Richard Wright Papers, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Yale University. JWJ MSS 3 Box 82 Folder 932.

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We can see this tense conflation of actor and role play out in graphite on paper, in a drawn portrait included in the deluxe program for the 1941 production. In this uncaptioned, full-page portrait of Lee portraying Thomas, fictional role and actual person are blended by the pencil’s smudge. Considering the trace of Canada Lee’s face and bodily habitus left in the artist’s rendering of Bigger Thomas—but also their uncanny divergence—we can also consider these zones of indistinction to provoke a different thought of blackness than that which is spurred by the optical drive to discern a primitive vitality. Black bodies, as we see in this example, are not always, certainly not essentially, shadowed, or occluded from the visual field; to the contrary, we live in an era of spectacularly visible black bodies in sports, music, film, and the media—Bigger Thomas’s children and grandchildren. These representations often traffic in a primitivist vitality of what Paul Gilroy has called the “infrahuman” black body, images in which the lower frequencies of black diasporic existence find themselves transposed into avatars of exuberantly branded commodity culture.55 Against this conventional understanding of how vitalist ideas operate in the interpretation of black cultures, I appeal by means of the crushed blacks to another, darker vitalism that dwells within another, darker time. This dark vitalism and dark time would be present but concealed, active but indiscernible, frustrating rather than acquiescing to the possessive, scrutinizing gaze. Rather than bringing the object ever closer by means of its likeness, what this dark vitalism records is the evasive indwelling of life amidst the pigments that would fix it to filmstock or cardstock. The dark vitalism made evident in Shirley Clarke’s living-room theater, which inherits the interracial, homosocial scene of Wright’s and Welles’s dramatic collaboration, is not just a life that disappears in the moment of its visibility. It is a life that, in failing to ever fully appear, forms a shadow or penumbra around the black body in performance. I’ve suggested we might read Lee’s off-screen role in Clarke’s livingroom theater in relation to his performance in the stage and film versions of the Living Theatre’s The Connection, in which he played Cowboy, the titular drug dealer, “the connection,” and the “fag for money” who will get you high, get you off. A play about the shooting of a film, one that

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was in turn made into a film about the documentation of everynight life, The Connection virtually stages the interinanimation of the cinematic and the theatrical.56 The doubling I attend to here is thus not exactly the surrogation of one art by another, or the insertion of one player in a long series of historical substitutions. It is rather an effect produced by the difference of two co-present appearances, in which a positive is produced in the negative space between them. What Gavin Butt calls Clarke’s “aparttogetherness” thus also applies to the doubling, in this sense, of Lee and Holliday, one seen and the other heard, one ostensibly straight and the other a “made-up homosexual,” both separated and connected by the ambience of everynight life in which secrets are kept, secrets are spilled, and loves are both consummated and revenged.

Afro-Sonic-Fictions: An Audio Portrait of Jason I am willing to avow the reparative impulse of my reading of Portrait of Jason and its place within a genealogy of black and queer performances, even as I want to qualify what I mean by “reparative.” The reparative, as I construe it, need not necessarily seek to overcome every incommensurability that is structured into one’s attempt to relate to another subject, especially one in the past. And reparative readings, as Muñoz argued, can proceed from an attention to, even and immersion in the negative. The restoration of Clarke’s film suggested this impossibility, undesirability even, of a negative receiving a perfect development in the future. In looking to the crushed blacks, I have wanted to model a reparative reading that acknowledges the incommensurable gaps between subjects, their “apart-togetherness,” yet that also apprehends the capacity of those gaps to fill in and, in so filling, affect us with their dark vitality. Portrait of Jason has benefited from the assiduous labor of Milestone Films to locate and restore an original print of the film. This reparative work may be in more tension with itself than at first appears. One clear aim of the restoration process—aside from burnishing Clarke’s legacy— has been to recover more of Holliday’s life history, a process that entails working both with and against his own fabulation of his biographical origins. This aim is subsumed within the goal of recovering the film as its first audiences saw it—the goal of approaching as closely as digital recon-

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struction can make possible the nocturnal events of Clarke’s living-room theater and the precise synchronicity of sound and vision that unfolded in her editing bay. This auteurist concept of the film is attached to a feminist recovery project of Clarke as an important American avant-garde filmmaker who was unfairly excluded from the boys’ club. In valorizing the blocked up and crushed prints, which, in their graininess index the distance rather than proximity between us and whatever happened in Clarke’s living-room theater, I want to evoke Lucas Hilderbrand’s analysis of the work obsolete formats do for countercultural viewers.57 Hilderbrand champions the audiovisual traces left by repeated dubbing and underground circulation in the analog age. Alongside Hilderbrand, I too see something lost as well as gained when the crushed blacks are removed, historical details are filled in, and the record is set “straight.” Partly, what is lost is the awareness of intervening time that the palimpsest of media makes constantly visible and audible. This loss matters to the materialist historian, not because those shadows bring us closer to Holliday as he really was, but because they preserve the distance between us as a positive presence and as an aesthetic resource. The restored film print is the product of the archival desire to see more of Clarke’s footage than most of us have so far been permitted. And while I share in that desire, I also want to argue that this “better” print promotes the fantasy not only of seeing the film as it really was, but of seeing Holliday as he really saw himself. It is enough to listen to Clarke’s account of what she saw in Holliday’s performance to warn us against that illusion. And, what is more, this fantasy dispels the powers of the false that magnetized her and, through her, us, to him in the first place. Brought out of the shadows of crushed blacks, Holliday can finally receive the turn in the spotlight that, the trope of emotional rescue suggests, he always wanted. Our doubled vision of the past resolves into a singular, stable print. I admit to experiencing such ocularcentrism myself in watching the new print of the film. In particular, the crisp new detail spurred a drive in me to try and see if I could actually see Clarke, Lee, and her film crew reflected in the lenses of Holliday’s cokebottle glasses. I couldn’t, but this aspect of the restored film solicits a fantasy of modern representation that goes as far back as Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas. Like that earlier portrait, Jason includes, within its frame, a representation of the artist

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and her tools alongside a representation of her sitter and his attendants. But this is not the mirroring and doubling that interests me finally; my interest instead lies with the layers of history that smudge, distort, and crush that vision, as well as with their capacity to affect us as much, on their terms, as the frustrated will to perceive does on its own. What if we were to consider the crushed blacks left by progressive generations of prints of the film as themselves comprising a dialectical image? In this conception, the image of the past deposited on film is not illuminated by the perfect developers of the future. Rather, time leaves its trace by gradually saturating greyscale into a veil of black, mimicking and affirming the fade outs with which Clarke hides and reveals the cuts in her film. And if this crushed black effect is one we can associate with the obsolete technologies of analog film and video, before they have been remediated by the retinal clarity of their digital successors, can we not draw a valid comparison between them and the anachronistic camp Holliday performs for the camera? Is the fearful symmetry not here, between the material trace and the ephemeral gesture? The affective work of historical residue is important insofar as it proposes a different answer to the question of justice that animates those who would either rescue Holliday from his image, or doom him to retreat entirely into the past, as a pathetic documentary curiosity. The incomplete document, whose gaps are filled in by a progressive obscurity, testifies to other withheld evidence on the part of the filmmaker. What is left out of the final cut, by Clarke’s later admission, is the footage in which she confronts Holliday, presumably in language that would settle the question of what he and Lee did or did not do. This is footage she included in the original test screening of the film, but ultimately left on the cutting room floor because, in her words, it didn’t feel truthful. What is this “truth” that went missing and had to be recovered by the excising of her animus, and the partial veiling of the antagonism that drove her to make the film in the first place, in an attempt to revenge insult with humiliation? That antagonism is of course everywhere evident in the film, an open secret lost on none. But its cause has been withdrawn, and we are left only with the created mood. Why does Clarke consider this more truthful? Don’t such editing decisions disguise more than they reveal the truth of an everynight life riven by a racialized and sexualized rancor?

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I want to believe, at least in part, Clarke’s explanation that she withheld the record of her verbal attack on Holliday for his sake rather than hers. Or rather, that she withheld it for the sake of the relationship she was able to develop with him, not on that long evening, but in the weeks she spent in the editing bay, cutting and re-cutting his strips of behavior, a time during which, she claims, Clarke came to love Holliday. I like the fact that her love isn’t unqualified: it wasn’t so total that she withdrew the film itself or refrained from publicly disparaging him. I like the fact that it wasn’t even reciprocal, if evidence of a legal action Holliday initiated against her after the film’s release is any indication.58 Rather, this love, like any affect, is situated within the duration of an antagonism that its effect is to extend and differentiate, rather than to resolve. It is in this duration that love works to repair, not the subject, but the world. It is in this temporality that we fight, as Muñoz writes, for our “freedom from historical forces that dull or diminish our sense of the world.”59 This diminishment can come of course, from the erasures and omissions that circulation, ubiquity, and reproduction can leave accumulated on the document. We can respond to this diminishment with an impulse to sharpen our senses: to see more clearly, hear more accurately, to know more fulsomely. But that is not the only path through which the affective force of past performances can travel. That is the path, I think, which Clarke turned away from, in seeking another truth, a truth that was finally to become, not her own truth, but the truth in the crushed blacks that she never intended to share with us, but that has been shared nevertheless. Part of that truth can be heard in a lesser known “portrait” of Jason that Clarke had little to do with. I close with a brief consideration of An Audio Portrait of Jason, another restoration from the Jason Holliday archive, one that also previews the concerns of the next chapter with sexed and gendered performances in the funk continuum. An album of unreleased spoken-word material represents Jason Holliday at top form, as he might have been on stage MCing at a jazz club, inviting his friend Carmen McRae or Miles Davis on stage.60 For those who know him only through the film, the audio portrait is a revelation. This album was released only posthumously, unfortunately, but it contains probably the best extant record of what Holliday’s stage act would have

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Figure 2.3. An Audio Portrait of Jason.

sounded like. He tells stories of his upbringing in Trenton, New Jersey, savages American racism and police brutality, satirizes drug and hippie culture, and otherwise draws a vivid and unforgettable portrait of the angular conviviality of street life. Unlike Clarke’s film, which focuses on exposing the fabulist through the truth-function of the camera, the album foregrounds Holliday’s skill as a raconteur within a broad continuum of black queer hokum. “You see what really I am is the original,” he says at one point on the album, “and the rest of them are very shrewd carbon copies of Jason.” Although unreleased in his day, the audio portrait sketches out a dark precursor of black queer fabulation to come.

3

Brer Soul and the Mythic Being Toward a Queer Logic of Dark Sense

In the first years of the 1970s, two figures appeared at the margins of American culture. The first, Brer Soul, was a profane but plaintive storyteller of everyday black life. Like his folkloric namesake, Brer Rabbit, he was a trickster and changeling who took on a range of guises—from a lesbian serenading her imprisoned lover behind the walls of Greenwich Village’s Women’s House of Detention to a grandmother laying a curse upon an astonished Broadway audience. The second figure, referred to by his inventor as the Mythic Being, appeared unannounced in various locations in New York and later Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he blended into audiences, crowds, and street scenes, and stood out incongruously amidst the gallery notices in the advertising section of the Village Voice. Like Brer Soul, the Mythic Being gave expression to a complex and divided self: each of these two fictional individuals (or “embodied avatars” as performance historian Uri McMillan teaches us to think of them) contained multitudes.1 They shared a bad attitude, a bleeding heart, and an evasive presence. What would it mean, this chapter asks, to place these two figures within a shared genealogy of black sexual and gender dissidence? Can they contribute a usable past to ongoing critical debates regarding transness, queerness, and blackness? In what ways might these two unlikely changelings prefigure what would come to be known as queer and trans of color critique? If the independent musician, theater- and film-maker Melvin van Peebles (b. 1932) and the conceptual artist Adrian Piper (b. 1948) are not often discussed in the same context, that is only because so much of the critical conversation about popular culture and contemporary art continues to occur in separate spheres, despite the efforts of interdisciplines such as performance studies and American studies. It will be my contention that we can nonetheless gain a real insight into the ge76

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nealogy of black gender and sexual dissidence by a sustained if largely speculative historical encounter between these artists and their polymorphously perverse avatars. As queer theory enters its third decade, the question of its genealogy has begun to arise with almost as much anxiety as the question of its future. Neither van Peebles nor Piper is queer or trans-identified, to be sure. But this is precisely why, somewhat counterintuitively, their respective approaches to black gender and sexuality can contribute something novel to the genealogy of black queer studies. To make this argument is to draw upon both Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s insistence that the minoritizing and universalizing perspectives on sexuality are mutually imbricated and Hortense Spillers’s claim that black genders and sexualities must be read through the flesh rather than through the normative body. Where both critics have been understood as placing their putative subject of analysis (“homosexuality” for Sedgwick, “black women” for Spillers) under erasure, this negation in both cases is merely, I warrant, a ground-clearing gesture to prepare the way for new modes of investigation and new genres of argument. Rather than insight into the genesis of trans or queer identity or community, what a focus on van Peebles and Piper affords is insight into the aesthetic and narrative structure of queer black transformation and metamorphosis. This chapter is driven by a question: What can the legacy of black radicalism contribute to contemporary queer and transgender struggle?2 Disrupting narratives that retell the familiar origin story of queer theory, I look to an expanded array of gender and sex nonconforming black artists, intellectuals, and activists. What I hope to do is enter two figures into the genealogy of queer and transgender nonconformity via their joint use of the popular musical idiom of funk. Given the prevailing image that the Black Arts era has conveyed to the present, it may seem an inhospitable point of departure for contemporary anti-homophobic and feminist analysis. The chain of association that runs through the word “funk” often leads to categories such as authentic, natural, and Afrocentric, all concepts that have lent force historically and in the present to patriarchal violence toward women and queers. These cautions notwithstanding, funk is not to be simply circumvented, any more than its contemporary cultural quandaries such as the emergence of “ratchet” attitudes and sensibilities should be.

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My approach to the afro-fabulation of gender and sexuality bears comparison to L. H. Stallings’s account of “funky erotixxx” and “transaesthetics.”3 Indeed, I also seek to draw here, as Stallings does in her work, on the vernacular power of funk as a performance modality that disrupts heteronormative embodiment and straight time. We often think of funk as the sound of the 1970s, but funk is also a set of aesthetic and corporeal possibilities, which have a much older provenance in black life and culture. Funk is arguably present across the entire history of black music and might be most succinctly defined as musical unabashedness. When a person loses inhibitions in music or dance and connects with the immediacy of the body in its sweaty, stinking presence; when the taste and touch of bodies connecting with and corroborating other bodies on a dance floor gets especially dense and saturated; when the rush of notes piling upon notes reaches a particular crescendo before crashing against a sonic beach-head, and the rhythm section then beats a musical trail out of the retreating foam—in those moments, we often turn to each other and remark that things have gotten funky. Funk is a friend to bawdy puns and low humor, a connoisseur of the sexual “single entendre,” and funk is quintessentially social music: it connects with a milieu filled with an angular sociality, a black social life of sharp elbows, raised eyebrows, rolling eyes, loudly sucking teeth, and, if the moment is right, collective ecstasy. Funk isn’t the solution to the problem of antiblackness; but it puts that problem into solution, in the chemical sense of dissolving it into the liquid of sweat, letting new configurations crystalize only when things eventually, if regrettably, cool back down. Funk belongs to the “changing same” of black music, as Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka famously termed it, a changing same that, I suggest, we can also use as a historiographic principle for getting into step with the back and forth, the to and fro, of black history.4 Since the queerness of Brer Soul and the Mythic Being is best understood in relation to a changing same of funk, their unlikely juxtaposition brings out the angular dynamics of funk most clearly. Indeed, the critical fabulation that this book undertakes is premised on the conviction that the way history is told bears the capacity to affect its meaning for us in the present. As we have seen, in Saidiya Hartman’s useful formulation, “critical fabulation” is archival work that seeks to “jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and

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to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done.”5 The subjunctive mood into which Hartman takes the mythmaking function is key to what I believe to be the lesson of these radical performances for our moment. As instances themselves of afrofabulation, the performances of van Peebles and Piper cannot be understood outside of construing how they employed funk idioms to defy norms of compulsory heterosexual and gender embodiment. That is, in contrast to interpretations of van Peebles that dismiss his alter ego as the apotheosis of a primitivist and misogynist black macho, and in contrast to interpretations of Piper that construe her as an austere and withholding conceptualist with no common touch for everyday black life, I position them both along a funk continuum that is, as the old adage has it, as queer as folk. If Piper and van Peebles are rarely considered in the same breath as near contemporaries, it is surely in part due to the cultural distance between an artist whose contribution to cinema history lies in part in confirming the existence of a profitable mass market for films targeting urban African American youth, and an artist whose allergy to both the profit motive and the presence of an audience is so strong she that was once compelled to respond to a friend’s challenge to explain “how I can call it art when there’s no one there to see it.”6 Van Peebles’s art is premised, by contrast, on the idea that as many black people as possible can see it. But it does not therefore follow that their work does not share some common origins and characteristics. Placing the two figures in relation to each other brings out the avant-garde sensibility of van Peebles, while underscoring the populist impulses that periodically spill out of Piper’s work.7 Piper and van Peebles each accomplished major innovations in the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, just as the black liberation struggle was reaching an apex. But their careers also diverged radically in this period. Van Peebles’s breakthrough was in commercial cinema, theater, and recorded music, while Piper adopted an anticapitalist conceptualism that largely precluded the sale, exhibition, or even documentation of much of her work during this period. While van Peebles thus pioneered a kind of black power capitalism, Piper held fast to a systematic critique of art commerce that resulted in her being entirely excluded from the gallery system and any possibility of earning an income from her art work until the late 1980s.

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Of course, such class suicide was made possible, in Piper’s own account, by the privilege of a bourgeois childhood and elite education, culminating in a PhD in philosophy from Harvard. Van Peebles’s petty bourgeois background in Chicago was more modest than Piper’s elite Harlem upbringing, but he too managed to complete a college degree and served as an officer in the Air Force. By 1957, van Peebles was a published author with The Big Heart, an illustrated book of his experiences as a cable car operator in San Francisco. A decade and half younger than van Peebles, Piper was extraordinarily precocious: at about the same time as van Peebles was publishing his first book in San Francisco, Piper was opting out of a scheduled debut piano recital at Town Hall in New York. Instead, she became a teenage fashion model, LSD user, and exotic dancer (she was actually introduced at Entre Nous, the nightclub where she was employed as a cage-dancer, as the “exotic Adrian”).8 Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, as van Peebles was shooting his first films, Piper was journaling, drawing, sculpting, and studying both Eastern and Western philosophy, primarily yoga and the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. This creative output was be later incorporated into the conceptual and performance art for which she became famous and which culminated in her grand-prize exhibit at the 2015 Venice Biennale, widely considered the crowning achievement for a living artist. Van Peebles, for his part, went on to produce groundbreaking black musicals on Broadway, directed more than a dozen films, and in 2014, released his seventh studio album, The Last Transmission. A comparison of how Piper and van Peebles responded to the revolutionary ferment of the 1960s can help locate divergences as well as convergences in how they perform blackness. I should specify that my present interest is in these two artistic alter egos, the Mythic Being and Brer Soul, which form just a part of the larger oeuvre of each artist. Employing a Bergsonian analytic, I propose to consider each of these alter egos as “images,” immanent to the world within which they appear, rather than “representations” reflecting—whether in accurate or stereotypical fashion—the world external to them. Considering them as queer movement-images and time-images of blackness allows us to depart from the habitual bifurcated treatment of blackness as identity and representation, and instead gives us a sense of blackness as fabulation. In this regard, I draw on the approach to image and sense developed

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in the queer black feminist work of Kara Keeling and Amber Musser.9 In Sensational Flesh, for instance, Musser argues that through sensation, “We gain access to how [structures] act upon bodies. Though each body reacts differently, we can read a structure as a form with multiple incarnations and many different affects. All of this is achieved without having to appeal to identity; this is about opening paths to difference.”10 With Musser, I also approach the “multiple incarnations” of Brer Soul and the Mythic Being as sites of an intensive difference that transmits “lines of absolute decoding.”11 From the sensationalism of exploitation cinema to the disjunctive logic of sense in Piper’s unannounced performances of the Mythic Being, thinking with this approach to the sense of blackness may give us a means of expanding and enriching the contribution that black art of the liberation era made to the genealogy of queer theory. Although they both emerged from avant-garde outposts of American society, Brer Soul and the Mythic Being provide a useful contrast with each other in terms of their immediate impact. From an early appearance on independently distributed LPs, Brer Soul eventually took shape on the Broadway stage, in mass-marketed soundtrack albums, and in a momentous work of cinema. As a key contributor to the “blaxploitation” moment, Brer Soul intersected directly with a wide array of highly capitalized culture industries and helped to define the cultural sensibility of his day. Ultimately, he even became a prototype for hyper-realistic black masculinity in one of his most potent guises, a hustler-turnedfugitive named Sweet Sweetback. The Mythic Being, by contrast, was a solo durational performance for no particular audience to speak of. Originally envisioned to last twelve years, the durational performance was contiguous with its more or less anonymous creator—a young doctoral student who was living a hand-to-mouth existence in Greenwich Village when she launched this art project with a pair of sunglasses, a set of male drag, and a $150 loan from an artist friend with which to take out periodic advertisements in the Voice.12 Only many decades later did the Mythic Being come to occupy a larger than life place in the history of performance art as the subject of a growing number of critical essays and books and part of an oeuvre that has become increasingly canonical in studies of conceptualism, minimalism, performance art, feminist art, and (however controversially) black art as well.13

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In this way, the audience for the Mythic Being can be said to be a people who are missing, a people to come. But can the same also be said for Brer Soul? Part of the difficulty is in the centrality of Melvin van Peebles to the historiography of blaxploitation as film genre.14 Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song, of course, inaugurated the commercial category of “blaxploitation” only retrospectively. If one considers the formal features of the film itself, it doesn’t entirely resemble the genre that sprang up in the wake of its unexpected commercial success. There are therefore some limits to considering Brer Soul as solely a blaxploitation figure. The element of mystery in an autobiographical project like the Mythic Being series, for instance, helps call attention to the equally personal dimension of van Peebles’s Brer Soul persona, which was debuted not in the film Sweet Sweetback but on his 1969 spoken word album Brer Soul. The black masculinist nationalism of Sweetback may seem to stand in sharp contrast to the feminist investigation and critique of gender roles undertaken by Piper in the Mythic Being performances, and van Peebles’s elevation of freewheeling entrepreneurialism to the level of a black power ethic could hardly seem farther away from Piper’s resolutely noncommercial aesthetic. Yet a resonance persists across these projects. Following L. H. Stallings, we may think of this relation as surfacing a trans-aesthetics that cuts across commercial and noncommercial, populist and avant-garde expressions of blackness.

The Trans-Aesthetics of Brer Soul Like the Bible, Sweetback provides two accounts of the genesis of its protagonist that are only partly consistent with each other. Before the credits, audiences receive the “back story” of how Sweetback got his name, and after that we leap forward into the present, finding ourselves in the middle of a sex show at an LA brothel. In the notorious opening sequence, a pubescent boy is sexually initiated by an adult female sex worker. It is an unflinchingly direct scene, it must be said, which solicits visual pleasure in the statutory rape of a minor. As the woman who has seduced the boy writhes in ecstasy beneath him, her fingers run up and down his back. “Ooh baby, you’ve got a sweet, sweet back,” she moans. Opening the curtains on this obscene act, van Peebles enacts the visual schizoanalysis of black sexuality. Instead of the bourgeois

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child privatized into Oedipal sexual relations, the film gives us the lumpenproletariat child abandoned into the care of prostituted women, and we witness the ontogenesis of a black male subject initiated into an organization of sexuality that is always already criminal. In prematurely violating an innocence that American racism would never have permitted to be, Sweetback abandons realist conventions of psychological interiority in order to create an enigmatic hero who is mythic in stature. Coerced sexual performance and childhood sexual trauma will not be a hidden shame to be privatized, but, to the contrary, will supply the very public blazon the child will carry into adulthood and disperse across the scenes of his eventual fugitivity when, on the run from the police after rescuing a black militant from attempted police murder, his individuality gradually dissolves into a series of mistaken identities and false sightings, culminating in Sweetback vanishing over the border into Mexico. Although L. H. Stallings in Funk the Erotic is not engaged extensively with Deleuzeanism, her critical “transing” of black funk and the erotic advances the field of black studies in ways I seek to make use of here. Trans-aesthetics in Stalling’s formulation “require a reorganization of senses and the sensorium, which funk offers.”15 Such a reorganization of the genealogy of modern trans (and transgender) identity is accomplished in C. Riley Snorton’s monograph, Black on Both Sides, especially in chapter 3. There he notes that “to encounter again the transitivity and transversality of blackness and transness,”—and, indeed, to reckon with his demonstration that “blackness [is] a condition of possibility that made transness conceivable”—“requires contravening commonsense notions of the body.”16 Focusing in particular on the “transversal” body—that is, on the body that iterates across various avatars and instances—is crucial to uncovering the trans-aesthetics of figures like Brer Soul and the Mythic Being. They may not possess modern trans or transgender identity, I argue, but their subversive aesthetics belong as dark precursors to what will have been the case for contemporary LGBT subjectivities.17 Indeed, it is as a “disjunctive synthesis” of sexploitation that Sweetback should be understood—not as blaxploitation, but as blaxploitation’s “dark precursor.”18 While van Peebles has quite successfully selfmythologized his independent writing, direction, editing, production,

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and distribution of the film, it should be noted that the film was made possible by the backing and distribution of Jerry Gross’s Cinemation Industries, established players in the “grindhouse cinema” business. In the book of the making of the film, van Peebles recounts this relation to sexploitation in terms of his guerrilla filmmaking strategies for evading the Hollywood studios that gave him such grief over 1970’s Watermelon Man.19 By deliberately pretending to shoot a porno—which he knew neither the studios nor the unions would touch—van Peebles was able to conceal his intentions from the studio system and film industry unions. The opening scene of Sweetback is thus a synecdoche for its own production history, a trace of its genesis from within the constraints of a racist and sexist commercial film industry. It is this process or capacity for divergence that I want to associate with the gender and sexual dissidence of the radical black aesthetic van Peebles and Piper share—a process we can follow Piper in referring to as “dispersion” (her name for the first Mythic Being series begun in 1973). (The Mythic Being series, we should note, emerged in part as a personal response to Piper’s encounter with sexploitation cinema ads in the New York subway, and her invention of a male persona who might respond differently to their come-ons than she herself did. And, while it is very likely that Piper was at least aware of van Peebles at the time— his plays were on Broadway in the 1971 and 1972 seasons—and it is even more likely that they are aware of each other today, my argument does not rest on any direct influence between the two but rather a shared resonance with a particular time and place and a shared strategy of the dispersal and dramatization of self. And just as Adrian Piper was turning herself into her own image of the kind of man who would travel to a grindhouse cinema and buy a ticket to a pornographic film, van Peebles was turning himself into his own image of the kind of man who would travel to a porn film set in the Valley and star in the kind of movie that would later play in a grindhouse cinema for an audience of Adrian Pipers. As I hope to show, a queer logic of sense informs the process by which a traffic in explicit and exploitative images both reproduces a commonsense image of derelict blackness—as critics as various as James Baldwin and Robert Reid-Pharr point out—and disperse that common sense into shards and fragments—as critics as various as Kara Keeling and Frantz Fanon would emphasize.)

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A queer reading of Sweet Sweetback would certainly take note of the occurrence of lesbian, gay, and transgender characters in the film. But beyond that minimal gesture of recovery it would seek to read in Sweetback a queer primal scene of revolutionary black becoming and to grapple with how this scene works upon the general affectivity of its audience. Part of this broader queer reading of Sweetback would situate it within the cultural politics of the “X” rating, which emerged as a contested sign of artistic expression and censorship in the 1960s and 1970s. For a brief period before the “X” rating became fully commodified by the hardcore pornography industry, it circulated as a symbol of independence from the Hollywood system and the nationwide cartel of movie houses. Sweet Sweetback claimed the “X” rating in the same period as another film, The Queen from 1967, the verité documentary of a New York City drag competition I discussed in my introduction. These films were both denied a rating and thus de facto censored (barred from public exhibition) not because of explicit sexuality alone, but because the gender and racial transformations they trafficked in were literally criminal. The opening scenes of the film, van Peebles wrote in his shooting script, were meant to give “the impression we are watching theatre, not as it is now, but as it once might have been, a morality play or something like that out of the Middle Ages.”20 This mythic device of choosing an anachronistic setting or mode is in implicit critique of a contemporary US society that imagines itself as having progressed beyond its origins as a slave society. One must “get medieval”—van Peebles is suggesting—in order to apprehend the conventions through which racism and sexism live into the present. The “freak show” scene that follows the scene of Sweetback’s initiation into vice underscores the queerness of this strategic anachronism and juxtaposition. It indeed suggests a mythic genesis for Sweetback, this time as a fantasy production of a white supremacist society. The show is literally policed by the presence of LAPD plainclothes detectives, who watch it along with the cinema audience, enjoying the spectacle of black freaky sexuality, but drawing the line when the show threatens to spill over into black/white miscegenation. Robert Reid-Pharr has found these aspects of the film to be both stereotypical and redolent of another myth—that of the essentially innocent black subject.21 I would argue, however, that van Peebles’s prior work, evi-

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denced elsewhere such as on the album Brer Soul, suggests he knows that he is portraying a type and not conveying the essence of black masculinity or femininity. If we understand Brer Soul as the mask behind the mask of Sweetback, we begin to hear the multiple as opposed to singular channels through which this trickster figure becomes seen and heard on screen. Sweetback is mostly silent in the film, but Brer Soul is constantly singing, shouting, and playing the kazoo. Attending to this sonic blackness de-centers and ironizes the central macho hero, much as Piper’s Mythic Being plays with and transforms the assumed assigned gender of masculinity, placing her performance in a long tradition of black female masculinity from the Bull Dagger Blues of Lucille Bogan in the 1930s to the fascinating incongruity of Missy Elliott in our present era. To understand the divergence from normative masculinity in Sweetback, we must attend to van Peebles’s indication that the film “stars” Brer Soul and the Black Community, rather than Melvin van Peebles. The funk and the chorus are the star, not the visible representation. If we listen for Brer Soul in the diegetic and extra-diegetic soundtrack, we might hear that Sweetback is but one of the many gendered guises of this trickster figure, and his second genesis out of a scene of lesbian seduction becomes more apparent. And there is clear precedent for Brer Soul’s male lesbianism. The B-side of Melvin van Peebles’s 1969 debut album, Brer Soul, opens with the astonishing song “Tenth and Greenwich (Women’s House of Detention),” a nine-minute spoken word jazz lament, sung from the perspective of a woman calling out to her lover, Dorothy, behind walls, “Baby is you ever going to come back and dance with me?” The song is an emotive primer in the criminalization of blackness, and the capacity of black social life to exceed that indictment. Sharing news and queer gossip across prison walls, (“Guess what? Elvis, Reeses’s boy, would you believe this? He turned too. I gave out the hats at the party!”), relating her anxious hopes for their future, the speaker ends her monologue with a repeated unanswered refrain of “I love you.” While I would not argue that Brer Soul’s persona in “Tenth and Greenwich” is a transgender image, I would contend that he performs in this instance a male lesbianism. Male lesbianism is a queer theoretical trope that has emerged from readings of French avant-garde writers such as Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust. In Naomi Schor’s account of this literary and artistic phenomena, male lesbianism goes beyond the

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Figure 3.1. Brer Soul album cover.

stereotypical straight male fantasy of two women having sex in anticipation of a male entrant and extends to an identification with the lesbian as an alternative modernist imaginary. The male figuration of the lesbian as dissident from emergent capitalist norms of sex and sociability rendered her an alluring alternative persona for disaffected modernists. While van Peebles’s own extended French sojourn provides circumstantial evidence that he may have been directly influenced by this literary tradition, it is nevertheless the case that Brer Soul’s performances of black lesbianism are keyed to the particular textures of everyday and night life in black America, rather than modeled exclusively on imported Francophile tropes. Certainly, the speaker of “Tenth and Greenwich” displays little resemblance to the languid and passive creatures of Flaubert’s fictions.

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In her defiant occupation of urban space and her loud vocal transgression of the walls of the carceral archipelago, she is closer to embodying what Jack Halberstam has called “female masculinity.” That van Peebles should impersonate a specifically butch lesbianism may seem unsurprising. It is nevertheless noteworthy that van Peebles should consciously route his identifications with masculinity through the alternative vector, not just of a lesbian figure, but of lesbian relationship. In fabulating an image of butch-femme sociality that is “neither true nor false,” Brer Soul participates in the construction of a larger-than-life lesbianism of the people who are missing, one that widens the descriptive ambit of social realism, while contesting that realism’s over-reliance on authentic experience. A psychoanalytic reading of the controversial opening of Sweetback would focus on how it tracks its subject’s traumatic entrance into language and the symbolic order. The price of subjectivity, psychoanalysis argues, is subjection to relations of recognition within which something essential is always missing. Language is impersonal; to articulate our particular need within its terms is necessarily to leave part of ourselves outside it. To be a subject is to be subjected. But if that is so, how is a revolutionary subject, one who wishes to overthrow and transform a given order, ever to emerge? We know Sweetback only through the name he has been given, but it is never suggested that there is another, real or true, name beneath that one. Instead, recognition for Brer Soul is simply misrecognition, and the film renders the question of whether Sweetback is naturally a stud or whether he is made into one redundant. His premature and traumatic induction into the scene of racialized sexuality is treated not as exceptional, but as constitutive of the entrance of the black male subject into the racial hierarchy of mid-century urban America. The nature of that hierarchy, the film suggests, cannot be understood without traversing its interdependent fantasies of racialization and sexuation. In the film, Sweetback’s later on-screen transformation from a butch lesbian into a sweet man precedes and inflects his transformation into a fugitive. As with Piper’s Mythic Being, fugitivity is figured as a masculine property conceived out of feminine jouissance. In his script, van Peebles describes the moment Sweetback decides to fight back against racist cops non-volitionally, no doubt in order to emphasize the con-

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Figure 3.2. Three Queer Graces, from Sweetback. Screenshot by author.

tingent nature of Sweetback’s sudden action: “Suddenly the pattern of Sweetback’s destiny changes.” (141). The source of that change isn’t immediately apparent. It is not depicted as a psychological development on the part of the male hustler, as we can see when the now freed militant Mu Mu attempts to thank Sweetback, but Sweetback, already snapped back to “his old noncommittal self,” rejects Mu Mu’s thanks and tells him he is on his own. If we compare Sweetback with van Peebles’s previous film, The Watermelon Man—in which a white man transforms into a black one, experiences for the first time the humiliations and inequities of racism, and ends the film by joining a militant cell—we can see that this omission of psychologically subjective interiority is deliberately chosen. His black audience, van Peebles’s intuits, does not need to be given a psychological explanation for black rage: they need a public and social dramatization of it, an enactment. Relieved of the burden of explaining and justifying to his audience what they already know of segregation, poverty, police brutality, and systemic corruption, Sweetback can move directly into this sphere of aesthetic-affective innovation. Gender and sexuality are key to this process of becoming-masculine, and not simply as a reassertion of black masculinist or patriarchal values.

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The Mythic Being and the Engendering of Indexical Time And what if we imagine the black teenage audience of Sweet Sweetback to have included Adrian Piper? As a teenager, Piper tuned in, turned out, and dropped out of normative society, associating with gay men, drag queens, drug users, and assorted “freaks” of the New York demi-monde. The Mythic Being is thus shaped by the same urban street culture that Sweetback emerged from and gave cinematic definition to. Over the course of her Dispersal series, in which she methodically converted her diaristic entries from those years into mantras that were silently chanted and published in the Village Voice, Piper contemplated how her own adolescent experiences would shape a person who, unlike herself, had been assigned a male gender at birth. Her own experiences of desiring and dating men, which she experienced as heterosexuality, would be homosexuality for the Mythic Being. Her brief career as a fashion model and cage dancer—which she experienced as gender conformity within a sexist society—would be experienced as transvestism and drag performance by the Mythic Being. It is relevant to point out here that Piper arrived at the decision to assign the Mythic Being male gender only late in her preparations for the project—and that she experienced this decision as a kind of feminist breakthrough. Becoming-masculine became for her both a means to take up more social space and, at the same time and through the same means, to move through the streets more invisibly. While she identified the Mythic Being as an expression or projection of her own masculinity and aggression, she also intended his mythic genesis to take the form of a disjunctive rather than conjunctive synthesis. That is to say, each repeated mantra would empty out her own diaries of all autobiographical reference such that the Mythic Being would gradually diverge in personality from Adrian Piper—a kind of planned and purposeful schizoid split. If the Mythic Being was thus not an act of gender transition, confirmation, or reassignment on the part of Adrian Piper, but a disjunctive synthesis in which a virtual male body would be birthed and split off from her actual female body, in what sense can say this performance enacts gender or sexual dissidence? It is relevant to note that Piper’s original intention was not to switch genders; rather, it was to dissoci-

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Figure 3.3. Adrian Piper as the Mythic Being. From Peter Kennedy, Other than Art’s Sake (1973). Screenshot by author.

ate herself from the art world and instead enter a professional career in philosophy. Drag entered into the equation as a solution to a particular problem: How to exit or escape art self-consciousness? I would even claim that male gender entered into this process as a fantasy-production: by separating the female artist and philosopher Adrian Piper from her male alter ego, who enters into social existence only as a surface appearance in the pages of a newspaper, the Mythic Being was able to participate in art world self-consciousness, to in fact be comprised of nothing other than art world self-consciousness. Masculinity, in such an act, becomes a kind of vocation or career, albeit a virtual one, as Piper was careful in the first years of the piece to keep her performances of the Mythic Being as anonymous and unmarked as possible, so as to avoid concretizing him into a known “character” on the downtown scene. In the conceptual practice of this written and performed intervention, Piper embodies and exemplifies an aesthetic responsibility to fugitivity. Her concept of the indexical present, I suggest, is not opposed to his-

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torical or structural analysis, so much as it is provides a focal point for the three “passive syntheses of time” as they are referred to by Deleuze, another philosopher who begins, like Piper, in the present as a state of becoming. It provides praxis with an ever-shifting and subjectless point of departure, one that empties out phenomenological narcissism. For Piper, the task of art is to decalcify the ingrained habits through which such self-consciousness falls into the monotony of repetition. Her artworks and actions antagonize this present by pointing toward, that is to say indexing, something within it that we usually attempt to ignore: an aperture out of unthinking repetition and into something different, an incipience that is on the cusp and waiting to emerge. It is in this indwelling elsewhere that Piper locates the resources for resisting xenophobia, which she then gives her audience—a method that, if individualistic, must indeed be thought of as bearing upon a social individual. The indexical present of the Mythic Being plunges us in media res into the immediate and immanent complexity of black social life, of living and dying, of dwelling and fleeing, of emergence and transformation. The Mythic Being and Brer Soul are our untrustworthy guides into this interzone. Rather than accede to “empty, homogenous time,” they convey a sense of the fugitive present.22 From early maroon societies in the eighteenth century to underground revolutionaries in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the fugitive is an enduring figure in black history and culture. The fugitive might even be the foundational figure of black resistance—resistance in particular to being “mastered by the clock” in the colonial-modern. Given the immense and romantic genealogy of the fugitive, it remains worth asking whether the fugitive remains contemporary, and, if so, in what way. Such questions bear upon the larger themes of this book, insofar as they bring us into contact with this fugitive present. The present moment is always fleeting of course: it plunges into memory in the instant we recognize it. But the fugitive present indicates more than this habitual evanescence: it follows the witch’s flight, as Kara Keeling has shown, which moves toward an elsewhere and an elsewhen that is black performance’s constant recourse and standing reserve.23 But what is the relation between the black femme function as Keeling articulates it and these two images of masculinity? Is the fugitive present into which Brer Soul and the Mythic Being emerge a masculine

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property? This possibility is not to be quickly dismissed. Certainly, over the course of her creation of the Mythic Being, Piper gives a great deal of thought to the masculine privilege of looking rather than being looked at. Conversely, as we’ve seen, Sweetback is most feminized when he is on display. Even his coerced sexual performances, despite their intense and apparent phallicism, take on an isomorphism to the feminine jouissance that typically provides the narrative occasion or spur for those performances. But to grasp fully what Piper is attempting through her dispersal into multiple gendered beings, we should reckon with how she subsequently describes the indexical present: My interest in the particular, personal, immediate transaction between ethnic or cultural others expresses a long-held fascination with the indexical present—the concrete, immediate here-and-now. My work springs from a belief that we are transformed—and occasionally reformed—by immediate experience, independently of our abstract evaluations of it and despite our attempts to resist it. . . . I want viewers of my work to come away from it with the understanding that racism is not an abstract, distant problem that affects all those poor, unfortunate other people out there. It begins between you and me, right here and now, in the indexical present.24

We cannot directly represent this emergence of a black polytemporality within the indexical present, but we can sense it, if we attune ourselves to the aesthesis of van Peebles and Piper’s fugitive presence. The improvisatory “now” into which Piper plunges is constituted in relation to the regulatory law she outruns. As in Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the “line of flight,” her unlimited range of motion determines the trajectory of her pursuer. Her covert movements and hiding times and places enclose an alternate ontology of becoming and an alternative sense of performance. And in the face of aesthetic theories that seek to detach this vital, fleeting now from the accumulated forces of history and the reproduction of value, the fugitive, in her performance of black temporality, demands a different mode of accounting. The question the fugitive present propels us to ask is not: What exists outside the apparatus of representational capture?, but rather: What critical moves operating within that apparatus can render it, even momentarily, inoperative?

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Toward a Queer Logic of Dark Sense My claim in this chapter has been that if blackness cannot ever fully accede to the norms of gender and sexuality that constitute it as, at once, excess, lack, and variance, then there is a nontrivial sense in which blackness is always already queer. Not queer as an identity, role, or even community, but queer as a vector transecting the social diagram of the political, erotic, and racial given. This queer logic of Brer Soul and the Mythic Being is a queerness always at variance, always avant and arrière la lettre, a queerness with or without the theory, a queerness before or after “queer theory” as we have come to know it, and perhaps, in thinking we can ever fully know it, obscured its most basic lesson. In positing a queer logic of sense operating in Sweetback and the Mythic Being series, I am well aware, as I have said, that neither van Peebles nor Piper identify as queer or transgender. Nor am I prepared to untether queerness and transness from the sexed and gendered identities that have concretized and been concretized by them. However insofar as queer subjects are informed by fantasy, it is valid to consider the images these artists created as extending a queer and even a trans imaginary. The queer logic of dark sense that I posit as available equally in the Mythic Being and Brer Soul is centrally about the transformation of the self, but not into an individual avatar or representative. Instead, what I see occurring in both performances is a pluralizing and socializing of the artistic subject—which can be seen explicitly in van Peebles’s evocation of the role of the Black Community in the making of his film, but equally so in Piper’s turn, by the early 1980s, to conducting group lessons in black social dance. In arguing that funk delivered a reorientation to the body that inflected the cultural revolution in the status of women and queers with a specifically black diasporic musical sensibility, I draw upon historians such as Alice Echols and Tim Lawrence, who document in scintillating detail the ways in which dance music culture in the 1970s disseminated the freedom dreams and emancipatory strivings of the 1960s.25 Overturning the anti-queer basis upon which the so-called “disco” moment was dismissed as a commercial aberration, these historians reveal deeper transformations occurring in the American body politic as a result of underground innovations in music, dance, sex, and sociability. If I fol-

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low Stallings’s and Piper’s lead in placing this musical revolution under the heading of “funk” rather than “disco,” it is to call attention to the way in which such genre labels, however provisionally useful in many cases, can produce invidious binarisms of real versus fake, deep versus artificial, and relevant versus whitewashed. Without contesting that disco was in many respects the thin, commercial edge that funk wedged into the white mainstream, and making no judgments as to the quality of any given recording or musical approach, I approach this music as one continuous piece for reasons that my discussion of both Piper and van Peebles should makes clear. The changing same of the funk continuum, whether in the 1960s or today, addresses a set of tensions regarding anachronism, contemporaneity, and belatedness for which black music still provides the best index. That is, when it comes to the profession of black studies, time is rarely considered to be on our side. We arrive belated. We depart too soon. Our disciplinary configurations, political desires, and drive for freedom are each and every time treated by others as anachronistic or peremptory, as out of step with a contemporary that, on another level, regularly crystalizes around the sense of presence, dynamism, and composure, which has been the planetary signature of “black cool” for at least two centuries and counting. If we plumb the endless depth of the “collection of wills” within the “simple unity” of Baraka’s street scene, we can derive an insight that drives my attempt to produce a poetics of black polytemporality: it is that we lack a common time. We make that common time out of the moving into, out of, and around the pocket— the ghost note, the unspoken syllable, the phono-synthesis (on strict analogy to photo-synthesis) of what Alex Weheliye marvelously calls black phono-graphies.26 When the “swell of a music” gathers up in its rising intensity, as it moves through the moments of the perception, the recording/reproduction, and (crucially) the recognition of this phonosynthesis, we fall out of sync with the clock time that calls our faculties to order, and instead regather those faculty under different auspices and in conspiratorial enclaves. We can begin to sense all this when we compare Funk Lessons with Piper’s earlier untitled performance for Max’s Kansas City, about which Fred Moten has written perceptively.27 For Moten, Piper at Max’s Kansas City enacts the resistance of the object, considered not just as the liv-

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ing, breathing commodity, but as the performative action of the commodity as it tactically withdraws into itself and mutely refuses art world self-consciousness in favor of another form of inner drama. (It is worth noting that Moten’s discussion of Piper’s silent performance bookends a study that opens with a commentary on the scene in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative where Douglass describes witnessing, while still a child, his aunt Hester being beaten by a white man. In dialogue with Saidiya Hartman’s critique of scholars who reproduce Douglass’s description of this harrowing scene without acknowledging how this might reduplicate the epistemic violence conducted upon Hester as a black female subject, Moten influentially posited that Hester’s cries of pain instantiated the speech of the commodity that Marx would later theorize in Capital, volume 1. Whether or not we voluntarily reproduce that speech, Moten theorized, we are nonetheless involuntarily produced by the traumatic scene that occasioned it. By positioning Piper’s silence and Hester’s shrieks as the opening and closing instances of the resistance of the object, Moten can be said to make them rhyme.) Piper considered her action at Max’s Kansas City a worthy failure: worthy insofar as she discovered something about herself and her immediate environs; a failure insofar as the thing she discovered was the readiness of those environs to accept and absorb her withdrawal from them as a contribution to their artfulness. The documentation and inclusion of the piece in her catalogue raisonné underscores this paradox: through her artful refusals of art-world self-consciousness, Piper has over time come to epitomize it. Funk Lessons, I would suggest, was an early response and acknowledgment of this dead-end; it was an experiment in pluralizing an experience she had up to that point in her career approached solipsistically. Embracing the role of the teacher, Piper sought to endow the scene of instruction with a conceptual edge. By teaching a genre of black social dance that she knew intimately and had previously incorporated into at least one of her solipsistic pieces (her “Aretha Franklin” pieces), Piper also drew on her prior professional work as a cage dancer. She drew on skills she had developed in the intoxicated and sexualized commercial sphere of everynight life, and reintroduced them in the persona of the heady conceptual artist, lecturing at institutions of higher learning such as the University of California at Berkeley. When she did so, she did more than bring in a bit of the

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sounds, rhythms, and excitement of black social dance. She brought in the angular sociality and the sexual differentiation she encountered long before, when, in 1973 or 1974, she recalled the personal impact of “discotheque dancing” on herself: “Losing myself in the music; finding myself in the glass cage, dancing. Confronting an alien image.”28 This background helps us understand why the conceptual artist and newly minted doctor of philosophy Adrian Piper would begin offering funk lessons to invited audiences in the early 1980s. Because of the deadpan style the artist is known for, it was tempting for some to take these lessons as a sort of joke or stunt. The artist collected one defaced poster invitation to Funk Lessons, reproduced in a collection of her writings, in which a hostile viewer has scrawled a crude speech bubble over her picture with the words “I’m black, okay?” This hostile viewer demonstrated his or her knowingness about Piper’s Funk Lessons by suggesting (a) that Piper’s appearance was insufficiently obviously black; (b) that funk music was by contrast quite obviously black; and that (c) by setting herself up as a pedagogue and therefore some sort of expert in funk music and dance, Piper was roping her audience into a complex and tedious process of calling attention to herself as, in the words of the hostile viewer, “the black chick.” That Piper was herself then on a postdoctoral fellowship in California perhaps clarifies the exaggerated slight of this racist graffiti. Her background and presence did not fit into the dominant white narrative and framing of either black music or white philosophy: it disrupted both with a surprising and arresting afro-fabulation. In The Political Life of Sensation, political theorist Davide Panagia coins the useful term “narratocracy,” or “the rule of narrative,” which he defines as “the organization of a perceptual field according to the imperative of rendering things readable.”29 That is, the reduction of the shared and chaotic realm of sensation into orderly sense, an order that gives us a sense of direction, is a political process of storying. Sketched out so simply, it may at first glance sound like Panagia is simply offer a redefinition of the word “ideology.” But I share his conviction that narrativizability is worthy of specific attention, due to the particular manner in which it bonds the past to the present. A concept of narratocracy, further, helps us clarify the nature of the disruption that performing in the fugitive present can accomplish. If Funk Lessons marks a gradu-

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ation from solipsism (to accompany a graduation from Harvard), it would be missing the point to locate the meaning of this lesson solely in the life story of the artist-philosopher. In pointing toward the indexical present, Funk Lessons resisted the narratocracy of race by mobilizing black social dance music as an environment or milieu of the changing same, always available for any body to step into, that is to say, to get in step with. Funk Lessons thus performs a historicism in which the past is not so much readable as playable. In mixing a broad variety of popular sounds of the early 1980s back into a funk continuum, Piper literally played the records of the changing same, inviting white and black audiences into conviviality not in the pedagogic future or the nostalgic past, but here, in the fugitive present.

4

Deep Time, Dark Time Anarchaeologies of Blackness and Brownness

What does it mean for black performance theory to take the body as its object at a time when the life of the body can no longer be taken as a simple given, when life itself is increasingly in question? This chapter and the next will begin to pursue this question in light of what has come before. What is this “life” that live arts take as their medium? If the blackness of black performance introduces a caesura between life and the body that would bear it as its sign, might black performance then be said to inhere in a capacity of life to exceed the presence of the body, to distribute itself along pathways that circumvent the aporetics of loss, and to evade the norms of life? In both this chapter and the following, I will have occasion to revisit a question of collective memory that points in at least two directions: backward, toward turn-of-the twentieth century vitalism and its antagonistic sequels, négritude and Fanonism, and forward into the post-millennial anxieties that circulate around post-humanism, artificial intelligence, and the digital. Between these two historical blocs lie crucial decades of decolonization and of the international black freedom struggle, movements that delivered a shock to the global system of capitalism and white supremacy that is still reverberating. The model of collective memory I employ is one in which recollection gathers up the past with its present in disjunctive synthesis. By “disjunctive,” I mean the fabulative process by which any act of recollection branches off in all directions, foiling any effort to cohere the narrative of the past into a single, stable, and linear story. I will be interested in showing how, in the process of recollecting the story of the past, we repeatedly lose the plot. Such a disjunctive synthesis of past and present, so frequently thematized through the game of loss and salvation, undermines our ability to take the “life” in live performance as a given. Even, 99

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or especially, in the present, we are in recollection, at least potentially. There is no other place, after all, for a memory to crystalize than inside the suspended flow of the present. The crystal images of memory, as I shall have occasion to call them in this chapter, can be said to embark on a discontinuous trajectory of growth that may spring forth from within a single subject, but whose eventual form is necessarily multiple. Three theoretical tendencies offer tools for shifting our thinking of collective memory into what we can perhaps call the singular plural.1 The first tendency is the ecological and new materialist thinking that extends agency beyond the human into profuse networks and assemblages, dispersed across living and nonliving things.2 The second is the cognitive and neurobiological tendency to double and divide from within the living body, through a process of scientific reduction I have been linking with the photographic apparatus.3 And the third tendency is the evolutionary and speculative thought that displaces life from the finite body to much vaster horizons and deeper archaeologies of time.4 These three tendencies rarely work together seamlessly, and indeed are often at cross-purposes with each other. Certainly, my project is not to reconcile them so much as it is to strategically mobilize each where it disrupts the identity between the body and the life upon which ideals of self-sovereignty and possessive individualism rest. These new materialist developments in contemporary theory present both hazards and opportunities for a radicalized articulation of black performance, as a range of scholars, including Katherine McKittrick, Kara Keeling, Alexander Weheliye, C. Riley Snorton, Sylvia Wynter, Jayna Brown, and Zakkiyah Jackson have all argued.5 The temporalities and durations opened out by this work underscore Jared Sexton’s shrewd observation that “black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space.”6 This negation of the world, this refusal to countenance the “salvific wish” (to borrow a useful formulation from Candice Jenkins) through which proper deportment can somehow redeem the debasement of the race by antiblackness, opens out the dialectic of loss and salvation, or search and rescue, through which the disjunctive synthesis of memory is bound to operate.7 Here I second Jayna Brown’s claim that black people, “while excluded from the human, have an expanded capacity for life, in fact have always had access to worlds freed of the regulatory terms of human-

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ness.”8 By shifting the frame in this section away from life and death to loss and recovery, I mean to seek the “expanded capacity for life” Brown detects in the precise location that, in Sexton’s formula, can remain only a site of subtraction (“not lived in the world . . .”). I will ultimately be arguing for a black studies that pulls away from the decisionism and false binarism of life or death, pessimism or optimism, and that instead seeks its disjunctive synthesis, if disjunctive synthesis there must be, in the realm of a distributed, inorganic concept of memory. The concept of black memory or recollection I look to in this chapter, through the work of Kara Walker and Regina José Galindo, is inextricable from the history of racial capitalism. I do not look to speculative genres in this section of this book because I imagine finding therein a space of escape from the catastrophe that has already happened to the dispossessed. To the contrary, it will be my argument that we speculate because we were objects of speculation: bought and sold, killed and quartered, collateralized and securitized, used, impregnated, aborted, discarded. Bodies that were speculated in became speculative bodies. The object that shrieks became the subject who speaks, but her tongue is not for words or discourse so much as it is a tongue of fire, an “outside art” as we hear in the poem of that title by Harryette Mullen: A humble monumental music made of syllables or a heartbroken crystal cathedral with gleaming walls of Orangina bottles9

A simple paean to black funerary ritual (and an answer song to Wallace Stevens’s repellently titled “Like Decorations in a N____r Cemetery”), “Outside Art” looks to the vernacular graveyard for another idea of order within disorder, another ordering action conducted upon the (heart) broken shards of the commodity object, whose sharp angles are built back up into the windows and roofs of this memory palace, an aesthetic miniature not much larger than the poem itself, within which the souls of the transmigrated might indefinitely echo.10 If I turn in this chapter to an exercise in monumentalism that appears anything but “humble,” at least at first glance, I want to hold on to the ars poetica of Mullen’s

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poem insofar as it contains, within its five short lines, what Deleuze calls a “hyalosign, or “crystal image.”11 A crystal image for Deleuze is a timeimage that grows like a crystal, with each new facet holding another little shard of perception in its reflecting surface. Each new facet (in Deleuze, a cinematic image; here, a word or word picture) is a lure: none represents the full or final “truth” of the poem (or the person to whom the grave is in memoriam). My description of crystal images in this chapter comes as a response to Saidiya Hartman’s response to the archival record of the Middle Passage, saying that “the archive is, in this case, a death sentence, a tomb.”12 The tomb, or crypt out from which the crystal image blooms, I argue, can be reckoned through a Bergsonian sense of duration. The art work of memory is a time-based performance; it is art that takes (its) time. It is within this time, in this duration, that Deleuze follows Bergson in sensing a promise of freedom that the crystal image is perpetually returning to us in the shards it has taken in from the virtual past. This promise of freedom is important, and so is the fact that it is only a promise. Time in itself isn’t free, nor is it freeing. Rather, our sense of freedom arises only within and through time. If every object has a story, this is because every object takes up some amount of time. Deleuze says that every object synthesizes time, in direct analogy to the way a plant synthesizes light. And just as each plant takes up a certain quantum of light for its own purpose and produces its own singular disjunctive pattern of branch and leaf, so every object contracts and dilates time. In this sense, polytemporality is not the product of cultural relativism, not a human overlay upon natural phenomena, but the way things are in the world. The process by which we discover how this takes place, I argue, leads us to an “anarchaeology” of objects in the world of black performance. Why “anarchaeology,” a term media archaeologist Jussi Parrika derives from his reading of another media theorist of deep time, Siegfried Zielinski?13 I would begin to answer this question by pointing to the context within which my engagement with Parrika, Zielinksi, Timothy Morton, and other key thinkers in the contemporary ecology of objects emerges. Rethinking time and temporality in the present tense probably entails at least some reckoning with how, in recent years, the concept of “the Anthropocene” has emerged as one potent chronotope, in some academic and activist settings, for encapsulating the complex duration of

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human impact on the planet. In conceptualizing industrial civilization as a geological epoch in the history of earth, the Anthropocene thrusts contemporary environmental politics into dizzying juxtaposition with what scholars in the field call “deep time.”14 In mobilizing a powerful and urgent ethics of collective action, the discourse of the Anthropocene may also propel an epistemic shift in how we think about both time and matter.15 Throughout Afro-Fabulation, my objective is to track what consequences such a shift in theories of temporality and materialism might have for black studies. Is the deep time of the Anthropocene a chronotope within which the crystal images of black collective memory can be seen to grow? Or do we need a different concept of deep time, perhaps a concept of dark time, in which to see those crystals illuminate? Anarchaeology, then, is a portmanteau I am borrowing in order to purloin. Or at least, my intention is to imbue the word with a slightly different spirit of anarchy than that with which the field of media archaeology has so far seen fit to animate it. This chapter moves through a comparative reading of two contemporary art works of memory. Through a close consideration of A Subtlety (2014), an act of “humble monumentalism” by Kara Walker, and a performance of Piedra (2013), Regina José Galindo’s “heartbroken crystal cathedral,” this chapter asks whether, when it comes to reckoning with the afterlives of slavery and colonialism, the concept of the Anthropocene merely replaces an archaeological aporia for an archival one. And if it does, then that underscores the key importance of Walker and Galindo’s anarchaeological performances of a New World feminism—one that transacts space and time across the incommensurabilities that link and separate blackness and Latinidad in a mudsill ecology in and of the hemispheric Americas.16

The Methexis of Blackness and Brownness Regina José Galindo is a Guatemalan artist whose work in performance and other media to date has dealt centrally with themes of violence towards women.17 Her work often engages both the body and the earth, evoking in the process a series of hasty if not wholly unfair comparisons to the ouevre of Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta.18 In opening this chapter on recollection with a detailed description and discussion of a single performance I witnessed only once, I am deliberately

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seeking to bridge the first passive synthesis of time with the second. While critics have very persuasively linked Galindo’s work to a tradition of activism and protest against femicidal, ecocidal, and genocidal crimes in her homeland and throughout the Americas, I want to consider an additional, if unexpected resonance. Instead of offering a political interpretation of the work, I aim instead to describe the process through which a dark polytemporality came to be crystalized around the bright center of a work in which the artist crouched denuded and exposed. Having given an account of my witnessing Galindo perform Piedra on one sunny day in Brazil, around noon—a performance witnessed by just a small crowd and documented in only a modest fashion—I turn in the remainder of the chapter to a comparative account of a seemingly more massive work—witnessed by thousands and seen, in photographic documentation, by perhaps hundreds of thousands. Working again through the trope of the crystal image, but also through the photographic metaphor of the developer of the future discussed in chapter 2, I argue against the assumption that scale in either piece is absolute, in favor of a thesis that holds that such scale is always relative. If, as critics have noted, the genius of Kara Walker’s early silhouette work was to take a handicraft tradition usually done at a miniature scale and “blow it up” to wall size, the converse is also the case, I argue, in Galindo’s Piedra, which takes a massive documentary history of degradation and concentrates it into a single nucleus, around which a crystal image of collective, disjunctive memory grows. In both cases, “small” and “large” are terms that have to be as absolutely relativized as live and mediated: the apocryphal roots of “performance art” in the discipline of sculpture supplies one aesthetic genealogy, if there is a need of one, in which this dialectic of scale can be secured. Whether considering a photographic negative developed to an indefinite series of scales, a crystal grown from a nucleus or seed into a multifaceted hylosign, or, indeed, a monumental sculpture worked up from a series of scale models, my aim in each case is to refuse the identitarian dualism between blackness and Latinidad that is as untrue today as it was in the past and will be in the future. But this polemical claim can be substantiated only through the kind of comparison between singularities that cannot possibly stand in as “representatives” of black American and Latin American art. Nor can they either easily shirk the burden of the

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traumatic memories they evoke. If we are not yet beyond “this bridge called my back,” then neither are we outside the woman of color critique of the linear time and temporality of the nation-state within which masculinist critics continue to narrow and cordon off their sense of aesthetic politics. Here I contrast the reading of black collective memory in this chapter with recent proposals by literary scholar Kenneth Warren, who has renewed a periodizing impulse in arguing that artistic paradigms such as “African American literature” are valid primarily for a moment that has now passed.19 If we are to interpret literary and/or aesthetic blackness, in this line of reasoning, we can do so only through a historicizing belatedness. So far the responses to these claims have primarily settled in at the level of empirical example and counterexample as to where progress has or has not occurred—a debate into which I do not wish to enter. Instead, I am more interested in evoking black feminist and woman of color mappings of memory that radically unsettle the assumptions underlying both sides of this exchange.20 These are that the past recedes from us and that to be affectively animated by the manner in which it continues to reverberate in the present is to be bound necessarily to a certain melancholia. Such an assumption, as Christina Sharpe shows brilliantly in her book, Monstrous Intimacies, ignores the manner in which even trauma and melancholia can be, and are, libidinized.21 If the present unfolds disjunctively from the seeds of a past that it always contains, then there is never an “escaping” or “working through” the past in a simple sense. The impulse to respond to the periodizing gesture of post-blackness by demonstrating the currency of anti-black racism is understandable but misplaced, foreclosing the alchemy of race in duration, seen as both irreversible and, paradoxically, as a dimension of freedom. The second passive synthesis of time, in which the past is recollected into the present, should not be opposed in some simple way with a future-oriented consciousness. This is among the paradoxical but crucial claims that Deleuze substantiates in Difference and Repetition.22 As I want to show first in the case of Galindo’s Piedra, it is eminently possible for a work of art to focus into a single duration a whole virtual history of oppression and resistance, while remaining caught up in a relation to the future. Here we might consider in passing Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s durable, future-oriented definition of racism as “the state-sanctioned and/or legal production and exploitation of group-

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differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death.”23 The influence of this definition in the literature, I think, emerges from a number of features: its ability to encompass without conflating anti-black racism with other varieties (while excluding the reactionary notion of “reverse” or “antiwhite racism”); the way it circumvents any recourse to the jargon of individual exceptionalism; and the way it relieves critical consciousness from the agon of deciding in any given case whether racism is present or not. By tracking racism at the level of population, probability, risk, and violence, Gilmore gives us precise leverage on the very impersonal categories through which contemporary societies of control channel us, unevenly, out of the past and into the future. The variable positions we occupy in relation to what Gilmore calls “premature death”—the heterogeneous trajectories that are at once specific and universal, aleatory and overdetermined—form the uneven grounds upon which a hemispheric, circum-Atlantic black aesthetics must contest its dark future. If I have waited until this moment to offer a concrete description of Piedra, it is in order to set the correct scene in which the artistic choice of the brown Galindo to cover herself head to toe in charcoal paint might be read. I later learned that her use of coal also the indexed violent extractive histories of coal mining in Brazil (where the piece was performed), thus resonating in another way with the sugar production in A Subtlety.24 Here, in a different sense, we are again finding our way through the crushed black. While a nude crouching body, blacked up head to toe and utterly silent and still except for a single motion I will describe at the conclusion of this chapter, can in no sense be described as either “blackface” or “minstrelsy,” I am less interested in disavowing any link to the travesty of blackness in Piedra than in understanding exactly how, in that entanglement, it may be possible to see that violent apparatus of anti-black perception momentarily rendered inoperative. If such a still act flashes up in at least one of the hylosigns of this particular performance, then we can return to Deleuze’s analogy between polytemporality and photosynthesis to give a specific account of the radical passivity, the “shadow feminism,” that Galindo performs in this piece.25 The bright and warm light of noon illuminated my approach to the circle that had gathered around the place where the performance was scheduled. Different objects are able to use this light differently: I cannot synthesize it into energy, but I can imbibe Vitamin D from it. It can alter

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Figure 4.1. Regina José Galindo, Piedra (2013). Photo by author.

my mood, warm my bones, open the pores of my skin. My own relationship to this light is entangled with a multiplicity of things that synthesize this light differently: the cow’s stomach synthesizes the photosynthesis of the plant; I synthesize the cow’s beef at dinner; the worm synthesizes my corpse, perhaps, in time. We synthesize ourselves out of time as well as in time. I synthesize time differently from you, who in turn synthesize differently from the time of the buildings, trees, cameras, and other people who comprise the environment out of which the crystal image of Piedra nucleates. By the time I arrive at the performance, I realize that it has already begun, even as I also realize that my approach was its beginning. For what I confront is not a piece with a beginning, middle, or end, but a duration of time in which I am asked to participate in accompanying and attending to a stone. I know the barest facts about this stone I am attending to. I recognize it as also a crouching woman, covered in black, cradled in child’s pose. I see it placed on a stone courtyard, around which an intent and silent crowd has gathered, some sitting, some standing. Rotating around the

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stone, one is offered a variety of positions of distance or proximity, hot sun or cooling shade. The unmoving stone does not respond to these choices or show any indication of having its own. The stone sits, gently breathing, poor in world, for the duration. This internal capacity of things to become themselves through time is part of what Jane Bennet calls their vital materiality, which is not just a question of metaphor.26 The painter, the collagist, the forensic scientist, and the cook all must have a practical and poetic grasp of the multiple syntheses intrinsic to the materials that their work requires them to assemble. Some must be the body artist becoming black stone. One indication that the moment of post-black aesthetics may be passing is the ever growing interest in new materialism, ecology, and speculative realism in darkness and blackness. This latest iteration of what Toni Morrison once called the American literary affinity for “playing in the dark” has turned up all manner of strange and wondrous things: Lovecraftian monsters and alien phenomenology, vibrant trash and a God who doesn’t exist but might exist someday.27 But in this sudden profusion of darkly vibrant speculative realisms, too little time or real patience is given to the dark precursors to these blacknesses and darknesses in the red record of genocide, slavery, and colonialism out of which this new world was worlded. Something no more wondrous, no less pedestrian, as a small black stone sitting, warming, in the Brazilian sun, can be a seed around which the crystal image of black and Latina feminist recollection unfolds in the singular plural. It is a testimony with no voice, a witness with no eyes, an archive with no repertoire except the unexpectedly violent, incalculably tender reiteration of abjection in the sudden, shocking spurting of urine. As I participate silently in a collective attention to a stone, I become aware again that the stone is also a woman wearing so many layers of black that the surface of her body is flaky and shiny, when a young man wearing a white t-shirt enters the circle, unzips his pants, takes out his cock, and proceeds to urinate on her back. I hear one gasp in the otherwise silent crowd. He has a copious amount of urine in his bladder, and mine twitches nervously as I watch the head of his circumcised penis spasm and then settle. When he is finished, he exits and, we watch the pool of urine around the performer glisten and slowly dull and evaporate in the day’s warmth.

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The urine has washed her back smooth but no less black. I note her pink skin behind the ears where the black did not reach. We wait. Some attendants leave. Some are newly arrived. In the interval, the audience performs documentation: snapping pictures. Was the man a ringer, I wonder? An invitation or dare to someone else in the audience to follow? As I wonder in shared silence, a second man, wearing a Sex Pistol T-shirt, strides forward, unzips, and attempts to pee. It doesn’t go so well for him as for the first: a droll voice next to me whispers, “He has stage fright.” Little drops come out, then he begins to pull and shake, until for a moment I wonder if this performance is going somewhere else. But he finishes and walks away. I resume watching the performer as she crouches still, occasionally moving her legs to stretch and readjust. Third, a woman enters the circle, naked from the waist down with a low hanging blouse. Where did this partly nude woman come from? In order to take on the role of pisser in this spectacle, she has had to enter the circle partially naked. She straddles the stone, relaxes, and urinates steadily. When she is finished, she walks back into the crowd and sits down to put her clothes back on. Minutes later, the performer stands up and I notice how small she looks to me. She darts away into the crowd, through a grassy area underneath a tree, past the parked car into a nearby building. In the meantime, as soon as she has left the circle some members of the audience clap for the performer who has now gone. I join in. Before I offer my interpretation of this performance, I want to ask what the crystal image I have just presented some few facets of suggests in relation to my image of the artist, no less than the philosopher or the revolutionary, as a physician of the spirit. If Piedra invites us into the difficult, incommensurable work of compassion, a co-passion or copresence with another that perturbs violent relatedness, how does it do so by proceeding from such negative, objectifying grounds? In considering this negative ground, we should keep in mind black feminist conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady’s argument that The female body in the West is not a unitary sign. Rather, like a coin, it has an obverse and a reverse: on the one side, it is white; on the other, not-white or, prototypically, black. The two bodies cannot be separated, nor can one body be understood in isolation from the other in the West’s

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metaphoric construction of “woman.” [ . . . ] The not-white woman as well as the not-white man are symbolically and even theoretically excluded from sexual difference. Their function continues to be, by their chiaroscuro, to cast the difference of white men and white women into sharper relief.28

In Piedra, what is violently excluded from sexual difference—that is, the ungendered, immobilized body of the “not-white woman”—becomes the subject of a sexual differentiation: a photochemical process of micturition and endurance, ash and urine, back and bladder. O’Grady poses in art historical terms what Moten elsewhere calls “the sexual differentiation of sexual difference,” which I once thought meant simply that black sexuality was different from white sexuality, but which I now think, with the help of O’Grady, means that blackness provides the dark ground of sexed difference upon which sexuality can differentiate itself. This, at least, helps me understand the hesitation black feminist theorists such as Cathy Cohen and Evelynn Hammonds display when encountering queer theory and its claim to conduct a “subjectless critique.”29 A critique that necessarily lacks a proper subject is also one that may mislay its improper one and, in so doing, mistake the displacement of a figure for the evacuation of a ground. As I move from the ephemeral performance of this section to the “temporary monument” of the next, I want to keep tracking the question of when and where the dark object enacts a process of crystal-memory we so often overlook, mistaking, as we so often do, blackness for a property of things rather than the dispossessive force of thingliness. If we instead seek this blackness in relation, and in recollection, we must proceed as carefully as we can so as not to recreate a myth of intersubjective communion or rapport. For this reason, I delay my own necessary accounting of the disjunctive response to Piedra until after I introduce A Subtlety more fully. I want to instead conclude this stage of my argument by pointing to how the polytemporality in Piedra can inform a detail in Bergson’s enigmatic final work, Two Sources of Morality and Religion, the treatise in which he develops his concept of fabulation most fully. Defining fabulation, as I have had occasion to mention, as a “virtual instinct,” Bergson encapsulates the development of intelligence and imagination across the deep time of evolution in an image that contains

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within it one of the characteristic shadows that reappear across this fascinating and troubling text: When the end of the movement [of evolution] is attained in man, instinct is not abolished, it is eclipsed; all that remains of it is a dim penumbra about the centre, now fully illuminated or rather itself luminous, to wit, intelligence. Henceforth reflexion will enable the individual to invent, and society to progress.30

Layered as a palimpsest atop Galindo’s Piedra, another coat of black paint, perhaps, to be washed off in an afternoon’s bath, stands this image of intelligence as an illuminated clearing surrounded by fabulous shadows. Could a more exactly dialectical image have been selected for encapsulating the motility of the performer becoming-stone at the center of the circle, and the multiple narratives of it that we gather in its dim penumbra and are fabulating even now? After the end of the movement of intelligence is attained, Bergson argues, “man” finds the illuminations of “his” intelligence eclipsed by a virtual instinct. We need not follow every step in Bergson’s humanism (or his primitivism), in other words, to purloin from his image of deep time another image, its negative perhaps: the dark time of this shadow of intelligence, to which Bergson gives the name “fabulation.” Every object has a story, in Bergson’s disjunctive, double plotting of the modern human (intelligence versus imagination, imagination versus fabulation), but not every object can tell it. And if “critical fabulation” names one textual strategy that has emerged out of literary and historical debates surround the vexed challenge of teaching a stone, or a crypt, to talk, then Bergson is somewhere in the lineage of a second, complementary trajectory that has so far spoken primarily to philosophy and to cinema studies, but that I wish to have speak to performance studies as well. I insist that movements like speculative realism and new materialism, despite their reluctance or unwillingness to speak of race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, or slavery, are nonetheless useful in pushing outside the confines of the illuminated center, where terror is enacted and reenacted without end. In speaking to acts of cognition and to affective faculties in the penumbra (the partial or double shadow) of apex intelligence, these intellectual movements force us “down the animacy

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hierarchy,” as Mel Chen has put it, where we are no longer thinking of a so-called primitive mind so much as a virtual condition immanent to minoritarian existence, becoming-piedra we might call it here, or becoming-monumental, we might call it in the next section.31

Walker’s Dark Chamber: Alchemical Social Sculpture En route to his media-theoretical definition of anarchaeology, Jussi Parrika argues that The time of human concerns differs from geological time, which is argued to be a radical dynamic force that affects life across the boundaries of the organic and the inorganic. And yet it was a necessity to keep these separated, despite the fact that modern institutions were increasingly interested in durations that surpassed the human.32

In this formulation of the deep time of the Anthropocene (which, in another portmanteau, Parrika styles the anthrobscene), the geological is contrasted with the “time of human concerns” in a way that (not to put too fine a point on it) quietly annuls the work of feminist, anti-racist, decolonial, indigenous, and anti-homophobic scholarship to contest just whose time “the human” concerns, work whose extended purpose has been to air those collective concerns and grievances that, however enmeshed they may be in modern institutions like slavery and segregation, can hardly be said to “surpass” the human. My point in noting this is not, of course, to refuse the valuable and necessary shift in perspective Parrika offers when he argues that the “variations that define an alternative deeptime strata of our media culture” offer an “anarchaeology of surprises and differences, of the uneven in the media’s cultural past, revealing a different aspect of a possible future.”33 I applaud Parrika’s leap into the dustbin of history, his rummaging around among the layers of obsolete formats and anachronistic hardware, the very form and matter of whose strata offer “a theoretical strategy of resistance against the linear progress myths that impose a limited context for understanding technological change.”34 In chapter 8, I investigate this question concerning technology in a little more depth than I do at this point. But what I do glean from media ecology is a model for reading the live within the mediated, and the mediated

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within the live, in a manner in which the dark chambers of the photographic apparatus help render crystal images of pasts whose violent force can shatter the present, explode the subject into tiny pieces, and leave us wandering around in a deep time that is also a dark time of inhuman concerns. Having deferred the act of explicitly recollecting the memories of violence and subjection that Piedra evokes, I turn to another work on the opposite end of scale, a work whose explicit formal relationships to memory and monuments will allow us to return, on different terms, to the interinanimation of blackness and Latinidad. A Subtlety, the artist Kara Walker’s massive, and massively popular, installation of 2014, appeared to be anything but subtle.35 The thirtyfive-feet high, twenty-five-feet wide, and seventy-five-feet long sphinx at the center of the exhibit brought a mythic grandeur and depth to the paper silhouette grotesqueries and panoramas that had established the artist’s reputation. Over the months of its public exhibition in the cavernous former Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn, the monumental sugar-coated sculpture was visited by over a hundred thousand people, who were enjoined to look but not touch until the final day, when the last few visitors were at last invited to lay hands on what some had come to call the “mammy sphinx” before she was disassembled. But even before that parting touch, visitors to the sphinx were able to interact with her photographically by posing for their portraits, often taking “selfies” on their camera phones, while standing before her giant, nude torso. What can this simple and unremarkable act of digital image capture— suspended between memory and forgetting—tell us about the social choreographies of anamnesis that artworks like A Subtlety instigate? To approach Walker’s sugar-coated sphinx, you had to enter into a cavernous room whose walls were encrusted with untold layers of black molasses, the afterimage of industrial labor burned into a space about to be torn down. Given the sugar and molasses, almost all writing on A Subtlety justifiably took the exhibit as commenting on the role of sugar in the Atlantic plantation slave system, an interpretation that cast the piece in the mold of historical memory. The simple touristic gesture of taking a photo, repeated billions of times before at thousands of other worldwide destinations, is often done to bring an iconic artwork, building, or backdrop and an ordinary face ever closer by means of their likeness. They are for use more than contemplation, their much vaunted

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Figure 4.2. Kara Walker, A Subtlety, detail (2014). Photo by author.

permanence consigned to the “cloud” of digital storage. The temporariness of Walker’s great sphinx—housed as it was in a waterfront building about to be torn down to make way for redevelopment—artfully matched such conditions of virtual preservation. The short duration of the monument’s existence constrained the window of opportunity within which an encounter could occur, while multiplying the angles from which a snapshot of that encounter could be retained. This had the effect of merging two memorial functions that ordinarily stand in contrast each other. At once a place and a living environment of memory, A Subtlety effectively staged a collective and contested space for afro-fabulation. The full title of A Subtlety bespoke, in ornate and anachronistic language, this crafty intention: At the behest of Creative Time Kara E. Walker has confected: A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby

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an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.

The euphemistic phrase “unpaid and overworked Artisans” hides the legacy of slavery in plain sight, just as the iconic Domino Sugar factory sign had in emblazoning the New York skyline for decades, a flashy symbol raised atop a dirty and dangerous industrial building. Linking past and present through the symbolic and material trope of refinement, Walker’s title paid obeisance to a myth of historical progress even as it scandalously subverted it. Reading the title stenciled to the building’s exterior as the line snaked toward the exhibition entrance, visitors could suppose themselves to also be paying “homage” to their enslaved ancestors, the presence of these visitors once inside the dark hall, whose walls are permanently stained with blood-black molasses, a gesture of acknowledgment of that incalculable debt. That A Subtlety was in no sense a direct call for slavery reparations was a scandal to some, who saw in Walker’s grotesque and hypersexualized sphinx only another distorted mirror in which the image of the black female body was to be again exposed and travestied. Others glimpsed more ambivalence than malevolence behind Walker’s incendiary juxtapositions of obscenity with solemnity, humor with pathos, and commodity with humanity. In activating the slave sublime from within the quotidian world of the gentrifying Brooklyn waterfront, A Subtlety dared the public to perform their ignorance of the history they metabolized. A sweet and inviting spectacle, toward which many visitors sprung for the experience of cuteness that accompanied being dwarfed by its scale, the mammy sphinx cunningly infantilized her audience. As a work of social sculpture, A Subtlety was composed in relation to the three levels of temporality of retention, recollection, and recognition. Retention speaks to the most immediate and habitual manner in which an indexical present extends itself into the immediate past insofar as that past provides continuity and a legible context for a present activity. On the site of A Subtlety, the digital snapshot stands as a metonym for this level of temporality. Not only does a snapshot quickly capture and retain

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a moment for later recollection, but the practice of posing for and taking photographs, in the era of ubiquitous camera phones, is itself now embedded within the habits of everyday life.36 Retention here operates within the general antagonism of a bodily schema that affords the possibility of navigating within a space through practiced and, to that extent, thoughtless gestures. As becomes clear in watching An Audience (2014), a short film Walker made documenting the manner in which the public interacted with her sculpture, the artist was quite aware of what habitual picture-taking practices would be taken into the exhibit. A drawing included in a solo exhibition Walker mounted the following winter depicted a man posing with tongue distended out toward the monumental labia as another eggs him on, with the caption: “Yeah yeah of course its gonna happen like that.” Of course the artwork is going to activate the racialhistorical schema in which the black subject may stumble and explode. If the exhibit operated at the level of the retention of racist and sexist habits of perception and deportment, it also made possible (although did not actively demand) acts of recollection. What the sculpture asked us to remember was both immediately apparent and skillfully obscured. Slavery, sugar, and ancient Egypt were the most clear references, although almost as unavoidable as those memories were the iconography of racist kitsch on the one hand—mammies and pickaninnies—and contemporary pornography on the other. Much of the immediate reaction to the piece, as with prior work by Walker, concerns how these two levels of retention and recollection interact. What memories are aroused by our interactions with the work? Which acts of forgetting does it possibly collude with? If the artwork fails to redeem or transfigure the lineage of representations within which it is situated, is it therefore deemed suspect? And what memories are meant to be evoked by the work? If slavery and its afterlives are almost a given point of reference, given Walker’s prior work, what about the living memories of industrial wage labor that this factory must also recollect? At least one of the docents was a former worker at Domino Sugars, who seized the opportunity to revisit the site of bittersweet memories in order to retell the story of his own working life to potentially interested visitors. Where the memories of the living Brooklyn communities being actively displaced by gentrification sit alongside the grander sweep of the history and tragedy of sugar manufacture is an active question posed but never answered by the installation.

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The crystal image of A Subtlety that amassed online accumulated countless and ever-growing perspectives on the work, leaving the public not so much with a shared worldview as an affective image of its own polytemporality and dissensus. Working through this archive of photographs also reveals how the vibrant and viscous materials with which Walker worked—in particular the molasses with which her “sugar babies” were constructed—possessed their own synthesis of time. The fragile sugar sculptures (each baby constructed according to a different method of assembling sugar crystal, molasses, and wire) retained their shape only for a particular duration before melting and falling apart at different rates. Thus, if one were to assemble a stop-motion animation, based on the snapshot archive, their movement of decay would be revealed. And the child sticking eager hands in pools of red goo on the final day of their installation was but the most direct evidence of the manner in which mass audience affected the material objects: on at least some days the collective temperature, respiration, and perspiration of the audience subtly interacted with the state of the molasses sculptures, accelerating their decay into liquid pools without even a physical touch. As I have developed with this word picture of the crystal image of A Subtlety, in lieu of reproducing or even reading particular photographs, I have had always in mind the following declaration, almost offhand, from Roland Barthes: The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed (that we can sometimes call it mild does not contradict its violence: many say that sugar is mild, but to me sugar is violent, and I call it so).37

How is sugar violent, and what happens when we call it so? I don’t think Barthes, after all, is referring just to palate, but to the entire history of refinement that, in the moment sugar begins to dissolve in the mouth, starts to break down. Like the photograph that, even unseen, fills the sight by force, so the sugar granule, no matter how polished white, saturates the bloodstream with its brown stain. This dialectic of refinement, much more than just “the raw and the cooked,” is no more

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speculative in my own mind, or Kara Walker’s, than is the proposed but, as of this date, as yet unbuilt monument to “mammy” in Washington, DC, in a Southern redemption stratagem from the earlier part of this century which A Subtlety also signifies on. If that monument to mammy represents one historical moment in the cultural logic of imperialist, anti-black nation-building, surely the participatory dynamics of a project like A Subtlety represents another, more recent one. There is no way, I am suggesting, that A Subtlety could fail to be complicit. Today, not only are artists viewed as urban trailblazers for predatory real-estate interests, but their art publics and lifeworlds constitute a kind of durational performance, shifting the atmospherics of a given postindustrial locale from dreary to lively, from boring or dangerous to exciting, and, most often, from dark to light.38 The very success of A Subtlety is a symptom of the gentrification process it is powerless to thwart. The question is whether a self-awareness of this complicity can lead elsewhere than pure cynicism. By materializing the violent histories of sugar refining, displaying in real time racial capitalism’s destruction of the black body, can A Subtlety slow down the racial whitening and lightening process of gentrification, rendering it, molasses-like, tacky and viscous? These questions turn us toward the dialectic of form and content in an artwork that, from its very title and location, advertised its fraught relations to the materials used to construct it. The giant sugar sculpture, which drew long weekend lines for two increasingly hot summer months, paid an ironical tribute to the historical structure that temporarily housed it, a former sugar refinery about to fall victim to the very forces of capitalist creative destruction that at one point made it the single largest supplier of sugar to the American diet.39 Walker’s ephemeral installation juxtaposed the cavernous, industrial, aging bulk of the iconic building with the subtle traces of black lives and labor that were—like the other “millions of indispensable actors in the dramas of the circum-Atlantic world’” that Joseph Roach writes of in Cities of the Dead—“forgotten but not gone.”40 “Forgotten but not gone” well describes the horrific past and present of Caribbean sugar production, of black bodies bruised and broken on the wheel of cane sugar harvesting and processing. “Forgotten but not gone” also describes the violent extraction of sweetness and profit from black bodies working in tropical plantations, a mode of production that is anything but over

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and gone. The combined and uneven development of global capitalism was rarely more clearly on view than here, in a public art project that worked simultaneously as reputation-laundering for the Fanjul brothers, corporate barons whose blood money (extracted from cane fields in the Dominican Republic, where Haitian migrants labor in post-slavery conditions) bankrolled the exhibit.41 The piece cannot begin to make sense without accounting for the manner in which the Fanjul Corporation, owner of Domino Sugar, stands to profit off the deindustrialization of its former factory, and the reimagining of its extended footprint as a further extension of the creative capital. As a kind of parting gift from their liquidated workers to the visiting crowds and prospective tenants of future condominiums, Domino Sugar supplied the forty tons of sugar used for this potent work of social sculpture. But what sort of bitter pill does this heaping spoonful of sugar help us swallow? How does an artist work with materials so literally as well as metaphorically complicit with the savage destruction of black life, life that the artwork itself seeks to memorialize and transfigure? Part of the answer must lie with the transformed status of the public sphere under neoliberalism, which is primarily understood as the ruthless privatization of everything. If Walker’s silhouette installations serve as interventions, as Darby English has argued, within the venerable genre of landscape painting, then A Subtlety acts as her leap into the any-space-whatever of hypercapitalism.42 This fact was announced by the invitation to take digital photos of the installation, to be tagged and shared on social media using the hashtag #karawalkerdomino. If the public sphere was born, as Terry Eagleton suggests, in discursive struggle against the absolutist state, the atomization and reaggregation of individual affective response to a public work of art such as now characterizes our neoliberal present must represent a kind of absolute victory of capital over both state and citizen.43 The violence digitally recirculated in images taken at the exhibit also crystalized, at a different tempo and scale, within the artwork itself. As the weeks went on, the sphinx shed layers of her sugary skin, and the sugar babies, bent, bled red-black blood, and then broke, losing lollipops and limbs that were dutifully gathered each night and placed into the baskets that those babies left standing humbly proffered out to the public the next weekend. Starting empty, the baskets thus gradually filled with

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the sticky, sickly detritus of their siblings’ disintegration—reversing the usual disappearing act of racial capitalism—and literalizing a metaphor of “refinement” accomplished through violence, maiming, and death. As the eyes of these sculptures sweated undead molasses tears, one could find refracted a shocking image of a black childhood rendered unthinkable to an anti-black world, except when it appears coated in delectable chocolate, maple syrup, cane sugar, or licorice. “Relational aesthetics” may no longer be quite the de rigueur curatorial watchword of the day, but it has been routinized, popularized, democratized, and banalized. A participatory “common sense” pervaded the promotion of A Subtlety as a “destination” experience one could and should document and upload to the digital cloud with the hashtag #karawalkerdomino.44 And we should pause over the telling syntax of that hashtag, which runs together the artist’s signature with the corporate brand in a manner that uncannily repeats the commodifiability of black bodies. Truly, “a heartbroken crystal cathedral with gleaming walls of Orangina bottles.”45 The relational capitalism of social media enacts subtleties of complicity and resistance as viewers rub elbows, snap photos, step over sugar-stained floors, in and out of each other’s way, ask questions or give the cold shoulder, and in general, make an atmosphere, make a scene, enliven the place with the kind of free contribution of our time, passions, and interests that, as Jodi Dean has argued, communicative capitalism can then amass as hierarchical corporate profit and power.46 Within the frame of the digital photo, in particular the smartphone “selfie,” there is little room to make any gesture of resistance that is not immediately assimilated to the profit structure of the corporations that produce and circulate #karawalkerdomino. All publicity is good publicity when it involves the massification of individual acts of complicity and resistance disseminating and rebranding Domino Sugar as a patron of the social arts, as a contributor to the well-being of the city, rather than as peddlers of poison and merchants of postindustrial malaise and tropical neo-slavery. The ingenuity of A Subtlety, and of afro-fabulation more generally, is what of this process it already knows, anticipates, stages, and unsettles. To trace this counterpower within visuality, one must sketch a diagram of the forms of power in the contemporary revanchist city at play in the single site of the Domino Sugar factory, and unfold all the shadowy

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genealogies that its use for contemporary capitalist speculation cannot tell. The conversion of Williamsburg from industrial waterfront to bourgeois playground is not simply a classic revanchist tale of class warfare. A Subtlety tells that tale of course, but tells it through a commodity that passes through every link in the commodity chain binding social media to slavery, Chelsea art galleries to the Caribbean, and the historical rupture inaugurating the transatlantic trade with the black social life Paul Gilroy has described as a “counterculture of modernity.”47 If A Subtlety was reducible to its locale, it could not have encoded this alternative and fugitive legacy that it also, almost against expectations, animated. It is in the subtleties of complicity and resistance, I argue, that what enduring interest this installation claims will lie.

Toward a Black Feminist Hack of the Hemispheric Color Line This section and subsequent chapters attempt to think with Deniese Ferreira da Silva’s inspiring call to hack the patriarchal form.48 If sweetness is linked to power, as the historical anthropologist Sidney Mintz has shown in his classic study of the role of sugar in modern history, then the violences of refinement are part of the afterlives of slavery.49 In “post-racial” America (which Greg Tate acidly calls “‘whipping post– racial America”) slavery is often treated as an inexplicable crime of the distant past, with no discernible connection to the way Americans conduct their contemporary lives as liberal and democratic citizens. This “racial innocence” is itself a product, one of the very priciest, of the violent process of refinement.50 Walker’s sphinx is anything but subtle in its riposte to racial innocence, but it is equally unforgiving to liberal guilt. At a time when anti-black racism, whether structural or interpersonal, is increasingly treated as a thing of the past—a time when “playing the race card” is denounced as excessive, hysterical, and exaggerated—what more brilliant response could there be than to whip up a wondrous confection out of a shit-ton of sugar, give it a big booty and an inscrutable smile, and plop it down just across the water from Manhattan? A Subtlety, commentators have noted, confabulates two distinct stereotypes of black women: as nurturing mammies on the one hand and as hypersexualizsed jezebels on the other. Walker’s work is already well known for how it stokes anal-oral erotic fantasies of a plenitude of dark

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flesh available to suck on, eat from, tear to pieces, and be consumed by. Here that vision is rendered with reference to the medieval craft tradition of sugar sculptures, called “subtleties,” which descend to the present from genteel European aristocrats, who were themselves emulating Arabic civilization.51 In the “kitchens of the New World,” enslaved cooks were, indeed, treasured by the master race who owned, raped, beat, and loved them, loving especially the subtle creations that sooty kitchen hands delivered to polished tables. What Christina Sharpe has called a “monstrous intimacy” tethers post-slavery subjects to the unfinished, unredeemed narratives of the many who involuntarily labored to reproduce their unfreedom.52 The scandalous picture of slavery Walker projects onto museum walls and now, into privatized public space, is itself another screen memory, one in which the violences of refinement, the “civilizing” process, perform its own vanishing act. The horrors of slavery are screened off by the enigmatic, obscene, pseudo-Afrocentric sphinx, leaving the potential for black sociality in or around this “public space” a dangerous possibility. The piece, while frequently discussed in relation to a white or non-black audience who were conveniently ignorant of the violent histories it carries, would be inexplicable without the responses and actions of a black counterpublic whose readings of the piece, while never unified, were revealing in their very plurality. Walker is far from the first Afro-diasporic artist to reckon with sugar as an aesthetic material. Bone-deep knowledge of its process of industrial production, won at the cost of life and limb, has been carried into the aesthetics of sugar, cane, and its waste products across African American and especially Caribbean art. A Subtlety belongs to a tradition not the least for its materials, but for its exploration of the dynamic through which refined whiteness is never the permanent state New World society imagined it could be, but an unstable state of créolité always threatened by its ongoing metamorphosis into something else, darker and messier. In the casta paintings of early modern Mexico, creole artists depicted the imagined consequence of miscegenation on white, red, and black New World populations. In this tradition, racial whitening culminated in a social type named tente en el aire, “hold yourself in mid-air,” with the trace of blackness visible only “in the blood.” But the subsequent generation gave birth to the torna atrás, the “return backward,” which we can read as a sort of eternal recurrence of blackness after the inter-

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generational attempt at violent refinement and racial upward mobility had been tried and failed.53 The comic outcome of the casta painting tradition—told over many story panels—is telegraphed in a single image by Walker’s juxtaposition of an emphatically white mammy and her molasses-dark babies. The deadly qualities of racial refinement are held at a different distance from the heart by the unnamed woman of color who wrote on the wall outside the exhibit: “I died for sugar back then . . . and sugar is killing me NOW!” This response reorients the piece, and it is crucial that it appeared as a result of the collective action taken by the black feminist activists who developed the #WeAreHere hashtag and accompanying Tumblr page, a platform unaffiliated with either Walker or Creative Time (the nonprofit arts organization that produced the exhibit), and thus created a counterarchive of responses—both at the installation itself and online.54 This is what I mean by a black feminist social hack of the visual color line (one amplified in subsequent years by Simone Leigh’s highly influential Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter).55 The intramural black sense of sugar as a pharmakon, as the food that is poison, as the sweetness that will kill us, was reflected in the refusal to either directly protest the exhibit or simply accept the neoliberal terms upon which the public was invited to experience it. Of the many visual and textual responses to the piece occasioned by the #WeAreHere hashtag, and other activists convergences and teach-ins like it, “I died for sugar back then . . . and sugar is killing me NOW!!” stands out to me now as the kind of realization that brings the war home, that metabolizes history as a social process in the present. The counterpublicity and collective participation incited by A Subtlety thus came quickly to exceed the intentions or aims of the artist, whose particular genius, in this case, was to unleash a contingent process beyond her individual control, but one in which she would inevitably, as its author, be held in taught relation. The masochistic relation of the artist to her work has been commented on by prior critics, and, indeed, by Walker herself. Carrying the weight of that awful history is hard enough, but what about the complicity of the artwork’s staging in the recirculation of dehumanizing images of black women? The first wave of discontent with the piece came in wake of the discovery of a genre of digital images in which individual visitors made fun of and/or eroticized the exposed

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genitalia of the sugar sculpture. In the any-space-whatever of the “selfie” photograph, with its reverse and slightly fish-eye lens enlarging the face against the backdrop of its surrounding, the immense and threatening scale of Walker’s confection could be reduced to a size where her breasts, buttocks, and vulva could be virtually touched, pinched, licked, and poked. Outraged commentators seized upon such images as evidence of the shamelessness of an anti-black, anti-feminist “public” that Walker had empowered. That these images circulated on Internet sites where images of actual black women are routinely exoticized and eroticized, degraded and debased, only added fuel to this fire. The photos of Walker’s sphinx circulated within an ecology of racialized shame that thrives on the unequal distribution of our susceptibility to it. Neoliberalism seeks to further shut down the resources with which black feminist counterpublics could emerge, both by positing the experience of art as individual, subjective, and beyond critique and by absorbing critique itself into its endless drive for commodifiable “content” to circulate. One aspect of the “subtleties of resistance” that emerged in response to the uncritical popular reception of Walker’s installation, therefore, was the necessity of staging an immanent critique of racial capitalism in order to gain a critical foothold. Refusing the double bind of either protesting the exhibit or passively accepting the terms of individualized participation, black feminist activists and some of their allies instead organized equally ephemeral counterpublics constituted around the radical concept of valuing black lives. Organizing through an alternative hashtag, #WeAreHere, and through a series of on-site convergences and interventions culminating in a July 5 counter–national Independence Day celebration, these activists sought to shift the mood around the piece from an inward-directed depression, guilt, or shame to outward-facing outrage, interest, and conviviality. Different from, but no less important than, an ideological critique of Walker, Creative Time, or Domino Sugar, the affective counterpublic stirred up by #WeAreHere indexed a long, fugitive circum-Atlantic history of “thiefing sugar,” to adopt Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s emotive name for an erotics of female same-sexuality fabulated out of the violent ungenderings of the Middle Passage.56 That is to say, the conviviality that momentarily flashed up and around the installation, a quasi-anonymous convergence of the murmuring multitude that faded away as quickly as it appeared, did not

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seek to organize around the myth of an integral humanist subject injured by coarse sexuality or crass commercialization. Rather, it looked to a countertradition that is reflected in the writings of black feminist theorists like Hazel Carby, Hortense Spillers, and Sylvia Wynter, one that is fiercely skeptical of the gradualist promises of humanitarian reform and that instead seeks to performatively enact a future in the present, a collective afro-fabulation of what a world transvalued out of anti-blackness might look, sound, or feel like. Afro-fabulation is thus a social practice, or better, a practice of the social individual. To approach it we must dispense with our customary fixations on the individual versus the collective, the artist versus his or her public. Fabulation is not, as Henri Bergson feared, a form of collective hallucination. It is the creative reenchantment of the present as seen by the illumination that the imminent future (like a rapidly gentrifying site) can throw upon the past (the whole history of slavery and sugar production). Fabulation is recursive rather than causal, inventive rather than explanatory. It is metamorphic and plastic and, as such, (im)properly begs the question of what lies outside or beyond it; what if any, its ethical limits may be.

An Outside Art: Toward a Poetics of Dark Time I close this chapter on the woman of color feminist anarchaeology of objectification by returning to the historical and metaphorical refinery for one last little sweet souvenir. This one is retrieved from the ashes, the burnt substrate whose dark color Francois Laruelle calls “uchromatic”: a blackness which is not the absence or opposite of color, but the possibility of any color whatsoever. Blackness not as the end, but as the one: the anorigin of minoritarian anarchaeology.57 This is why Galindo’s black stone shining in bright light and Walker’s white monument glowing in its dark chamber both extend the penumbra of a dark fabulation into the nooks and crevices of our imperfectly collective memory. Is it right to seek a flash of spirit in such mute testimony of the past? Is it just that I try to teach a stone to talk, when there are so many voluble, human, humane voices, speaking these testimonies, telling this collective story? I address this question in earnest in the following chapter, where I move squarely into the lyric. But before I end this one, I want to linger in the uchromatic dark to ask: What do we do with these ashes, with these

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defeats, with these abjections? Sometimes they blow away. But sometimes they are picked up, like a stick or perhaps a stone. While psychoanalysis is hardly the most likely discourse to seek a post-humanist account of the subject, it remains an indispensable source for working certain questions of memory, imagination, and the no-longer conscious. One strong psychoanalytic alternative to what I have been calling fabulation in this book, for instance, would be the concept of sublimation. In her writing on Walker, the psychoanalytic critic Joan Copjec has argued that Walker displays an ethics of sublimation that accords with a Lacanian construal of feminine jouissance as “the lack of lack.” While Copjec reads Walker’s famous wall silhouettes, her argument obtains to Walker’s later social sculptural project as well. Copjec praises Walker for demolishing the myth of history as a container in whose womb or bosom we can be held, and in so ruining this myth, for offering us an ethical path out of historicism. Her artwork, in Copjec’s analysis, becomes an out-work, if not an “outside art,” one that in her view could not be contextualized by any museum or wall text. History is not its container, but that which it contains. What does it mean, Copjec asks through Walker, to think of “history not as a mother,” but as “an internal object that lives the subject as the double of another”?58 This “internal object” is not, however, an authentic self; it is a fold, or even better, a systolic valve through which blood is pumped, in which sugars are broken down, energy is consumed, and the illusion of “refined” foods is expeditiously dissolved and discharged as urine and fecal matter. Imagine there is no “woman,” Copjec suggests, and it seems Walker’s sphinx and Galindo’s stone echoes this dare. On this reading, there would be nothing inside the hollow sphinx, nobody crouched in the warm sun. It would only be a seed of time coated with sugar or ash, around which lure we built an image of thought detached from the symbolic order. Copjec’s analysis of sublimation aligns with a process I described in my first book: the traversal of the fantasy of a hidden plenitude or enigmatic wisdom contained within the racial other, or what Plato called an agalma.59 We have this fantasy in spades when it comes to the work of the virtuosic artist through whose glittering mirage of imputed inner wisdom, if we pursue it, will forever recede on the shimmering horizon. But while the agalma is a potent lure for separating thought from the

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symbolic order, as Copjec argues Walker’s artwork does, I believe it does not yet separate us from the traumatic residue of the real. The sphinx isn’t hollow after all, but built of volumes of Styrofoam, another industrial product whose ubiquity and ersatz indestructibility has led Timothy Morton to term it a “hyper-object”: something easily perceptible, but whose temporal and spatial extension is in fact quite beyond our ordinary ken. When the internal object that divides the subject is such a hyper-object, I am arguing, history returns, not simply as what hurts, but as the enigmatic material support of whatever process of collective catharsis the subject must go through. The breakdown of sublimation into a vibrant eroticism of the body can also be seen in the “instructions” for Piedra as I was able to reconstruct them after the fact from conversations. The artist had called upon three white men, selected in advance, to sequentially urinate on her. The woman of color who disrupted the piece by performing the third act of urination did so without the knowledge or consent of the performer (for which she was later reprimanded). The piece ended because Galindo believed it had ended, although one could also argue that, since her instruction was not completed to the letter, and that third pair of trousers was left flapping in the air, the end of Piedra is still pending. This information clearly informs the discussion I had with several fellow attendants to the stone. Prominent in their reactions to the piece (no doubt a result of their far greater knowledge of and exposure to Latin American feminist performance art than I have) was a consideration that had not occurred to me within the piece’s actual duration. They prominently reflected upon and were concerned for the great personal discomfort of the immobile performer, crouched with her forehead pressed into cold stone for around forty-five minutes. Without necessarily congratulating myself for this decision, I realized through these conversations that I had decided at the beginning of the performance to eschew, so far as I could, any act of sympathetic projection as to what the performer may have been feeling or thinking during her performance. I unselfconsciously withheld any judgment as to what this piece was “about” (a decision that so many thoughtless “selfie” visitors to A Subtlety also made). Rather than extracting a meaning or context, I had wanted to be a witness to the exchange of photosynthetic power made visible by the periodic explosion and splash of

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urine, a violent relatedness of charcoal and fluid that did not constitute any imagined communion between myself and the performer (although perhaps it did involve a disavowed and abjected covert communion with the pisser), but a form of relation that instead enacted us gathered as a collective, complicit, and ordering agency, an inert apparatus made out of our eyes, ears, and cameras, out of charcoal, urine, and bodies, out of memory, trauma, and fascination, out of dream, sparkle, and escape. Both Piedra and A Subtlety engage the collective memory of a violent process that regularly precipitates sublimations: things that fall out of solution, objects that resist, and subjects that meet up, make contact, break bread, and find a way home or at least a way out of the social factory, which by the end of the day has shuttered its gates, turned out the lights, unplugged its cords, and now stands, illuminated by moonlight, looking as empty as it really is. In reading Piedra as a black performance and A Subtlety as a brown one, I am seeking to learn something, in all belatedness, from the third, uncalled for, female pisser, the one whose urine I yearned for to absolve me of my violent presence as a man at the scene of female degradation. I end this chapter trying to be less than enigmatic about the performative intentions an agent who intervened to alter the direction of the piece, at the risk of exposure and rebuke. I do not seek to render her (unnamed) interest or action reconcilable with the named instruction of the artist (even if I might easily attempt a concord between the two based upon a projected conflation of two Latina identities). As I stated very early on, something that had stopped me short from sympathetic identification, that dark volume of charcoal, nestled in whose layers were so many seams of the history of burnt cork, prevents me from adjudicating between this these incommensurables even now. In antagonistic cooperation with the sheer, non-illuminating force of Galindo’s stone-cold blacking-up, that silent actor, that outside artist, also foreswore empathy to instead recklessly participate in urine hitting charcoal. I wasn’t waiting for the moment a subject could be reintroduced into this intolerably intimate, extimate scene. I was waiting for the moment when the stone gets up and leaves.

5

Little Monsters Unsettling the Sovereign Wild

Four hundred years ago, the king of Poland presided over the first recorded attempt at wildlife preservation. A relative of the domestic cow, the wild aurochs once thrived across Europe, India, and North Africa. But hunting and human encroachment slowly reduced its habitat to, finally, just the Jaktorowska forest in Poland. For several hundred years, the last of the aurochs survived as property of the Polish crown. Only the king had the right to hunt them. As they dwindled further, the king himself abstained from their hunt, charged the local village with protecting the aurochs, and sent an inspector to perform a regular audit. This sovereign act was an early assertion of what Michel Foucault would later name biopolitics: the “power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.”1 As such an early assertion, it was weak and experimental, and it ultimately failed. For when King Zygmunt’s inspector arrived in 1630, he learned that the last of the aurochs had died years earlier, in what we today classify as “the first documented anthropogenic extinction.”2 The horned relics of the last male aurochs were brought to the king, in whose keep they remained until carried off as a trophy to a rival’s armory in Stockholm, where they remain on view today.3 What might this fable of the sovereign and his wild beast teach us today, as we confront the current threat of anthropogenic climate change? At a time when queer studies is confronting the post-humanist spatiotemporal scales suggested by the bringing into humanist analytical focus of the Anthropocene?4 What happens when we juxtapose the awesome aurochs’s relic—the fossil of a form of sovereignty itself ostensibly long extinct—against more recent attempts, in an advanced industrial age, to reanimate the aurochs as harbinger of a “rewilded” planet?5 And what repercussions does an environmentally motivated “giving up” of human sovereignty imply for queer and other minoritarian subjects, 129

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when that gift is looked for in the mouth of the feral beast? In this chapter I keep these overarching questions on the horizon as I more closely track how they are incarnated through the preternatural aurochs. These ersatz beasts appear in Lucy Alibar’s play Juicy and Delicious (2007) and subsequent film, Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), co-written by Alibar and Benh Zeitlin. In counterpoint to these stage and film aurochs—and the inhumanist wildness they seem to kindle—I bring into view historical zoopolitical efforts to reverse-breed the extinct aurochs back into existence. I argue that in both varieties of fabrication—performative and scientific—we encounter an animal that still wears the biopolitical allure in which the kings of Poland had encircled it. Jacques Derrida suggests that the sovereign and the beast mirror each other as doubled exceptions to the law (the one above, the other below or beyond)—a suggestion that in turn raises the question of whether the rewilded aurochs augurs the end or the covert reinstatement of sovereignty.6 What might it take to break this double bind of sovereign thinking and truly get to what Jack Halberstam calls “the wild beyond?”7 At first glance, the preternatural aurochs appears to already live in that wild beyond: it enjoys an existence outside the law, wild and free. In contemporary theoretical terms, it is a token or emblem of life beyond the correlate of human consciousness, a vital flourishing in the Great Outdoors lauded by Quentin Meillassoux and other theorists associated with speculative realism.8 In Beasts of the Southern Wild, the aurochs also appears outside history, escaping from under the melting polar ice caps to run free across a rewilded North American landscape. Linked to the impending death of the film’s protagonist’s father, the aurochs also is a potent symbol of human extinction. But the actual aurochs, as my opening fable suggests, was outside neither history nor law. As Alex Weheliye shows, the radicalizing assemblage of the modern biopolitical apparatus works through the exception.9 So its preternatural sequel, I argue, must carry a thick freight of human meanings in its icy shag. We are familiar, from as far back as Godzilla (1954), with the figure of the revenant prehistoric beast reawakened from its primordial slumbers by the technological depravities of advanced civilization. If the aurochs is to be our guide into a wilderness beyond human sovereignty and civilizational collapse, then we should more closely inspect its quasimythic genealogy, lest the “biophilic” pursuit of the Great Outdoors

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lead us back from where we started: back to primal modernist fantasies of primitive otherness.10 As critics have already shown, Alibar and Zeitlin’s film is cannily pitched to an ecological sensibility attuned to the need for a rewilded planet in which to share sovereignty with nonhumankind11. The independent feature was widely and rapturously embraced upon release, winning prizes at Cannes and Sundance, as well as plaudits from the likes of Oprah Winfrey and former President Barack Obama. The film ostensibly teaches humans how to behave less like the king of Poland and more like his wild, herbivorous beasts. Its celebration of the convivial survivalism of an outsider human community has intense, if romantic appeal. But the preternatural aurochs is not frequently commented on, however much their presence becomes an important reason that Beasts of the Southern Wild has been embraced as a contemporary fable of otherwise hard-to-visualize climate change. As fabulated by the film’s child narrator, the aurochs serves as a larger-than-life monster that is neither real nor imaginary but an involuntary speculative image of what lies in store for us all. Beasts has thus been claimed by the visual theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff as “perhaps the first film to create a means to visualize climate resistance” and by the literary theorist Patricia Yaeger as offering “strange pedagogies about how we should live in a melting world.”12 Even the manner in which the film was made has been credited to a rewilding of filmmaking: Beasts was made with locally sourced props, locations, and actors in a filmmaking praxis that entailed the director being “all but adopted” by a precarious Gulf Coast community in a process that models the autonomous community extolled in the resulting feature film.13 If the film has thus been recruited to the task of figuring adequate aesthetic responses to existential, species-wide threat, it has not for that reason been able to fully subsume questions of human difference: race, gender, class, or sexuality. The color-blind casting of Quvenzhané Wallis as the film’s protagonist insistently foregrounds the tension between the particular and the universal, the local and the global, which Beasts attempts to manage.14 Although widely praised for her preternaturally gifted performance, the role that Wallis was given has been sharply questioned. Why, black feminist critics like bell hooks, Jayna Brown, and Christina Sharpe have asked, is a black female child asked to perform the work of imagining the survival of a civilization that

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has abandoned her? What is the relationship between her singular race, gender, and infancy and the ostensibly universal narrative she embodies? And why is her narrative of wondrous survival framed through such standard tropes as black familial dysfunction, paternal violence, and licentious femininity? Circling around these responses has been another anxiety about cinematic depictions of black (and other subaltern) people as primitives on a continuum with nonhuman animals. Even if the film’s ambition is to valorize feral human nature, at what price is such transvaluation purchased? While this chapter draws on the above responses and criticisms, it shifts its gaze slightly from the film’s protagonist to what she sees—that is, to the inhuman presence of the preternatural aurochs. These aurochs symbolize both the vulnerability and the resilience of nature in the face of human predation. But they also bear crucial, if understated, racial and biopolitical meanings. If the beast and the sovereign encounter each other as doubled exceptions to the law, where in such a relation are we to locate the dark stain of race that conditions the possibilities of life at or below the threshold of the human? If the aurochs was once “king of the world,” as the child protagonist of Beasts of the Southern Wild confirms, what does it mean for her journey to end with her confronting that king, face-to-face, to divine that fearful symmetry? Both the film and the play it is adapted from locate the nonsovereign aspect of the human where we are most accustomed to finding it: in the defenseless, impoverished, raced, and gendered child. Her resilient propensity for fabulation and wonder in the face of nature’s animacies forms an inner wild of the human, an invagination or intensive manifold.15 Her propensities thus bear on the “racial mattering” that Mel Chen argues must also occupy our critically post-humanist concerns.16 Certainly, race matters to how and why the dark, female child encounters the shaggy, horned beast in an environment wherein, as Levi Bryant puts it, “I no longer experience myself as a sovereign of nonhuman beings,” a wild in which he instead encounters “the possibility of myself being eaten.”17 The reversal of roles between the eating and the eaten, which Bryant lauds as a salutary thought experiment to provincialize his privileged humanity, is repeated in a film in which the aurochs, victim of the first anthropogenic extinction, presides over the final one. But the slippage of the “I” between subjects variously privileged within Western epistemologi-

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cal frameworks is worth pausing over. Beasts imagines this reduction of humanity to “meat” as a salutary pedagogy (the protagonist is literally taught this lesson in a shambolic schoolroom in the film’s opening minutes). Bryant’s notion of a “wilderness ontology” might lend this pedagogy philosophical heft, but we hardly need theoretical speculation to invent what history has so remorselessly documented: the reduction of racialized others to human prey.18 The loss of sovereignty in the face of nonhuman beings, along with the forced removal of peoples from spaces reimagined as “wild,” is a very old tale. When Beasts retells it, it does so from the side of the displaced, vagrant, and subaltern. Political sovereignty, both militaristic and biopolitical, emanates from the other side of the levee that the anarchic band of stragglers try to live beyond. The film thus aligns its vision with an alternative, nonsovereign relationship to land and world. But the unnatural history of the aurochs as the sovereign’s beast leads me to ask, with Foucault, whether we have yet, in our ecological thinking, to “cut off the head of the king”?19

Juicy, Delicious, and Wild Reading Beasts of the Southern Wild in the context of a book on afrofabulation raises certain questions. To address them, we should look further into the genealogy of the film’s protagonist and her wild things. As I discussed in the introduction, narratology points to the fabula as the source story that can be told and retold in various ways.20 Rather than treat this source as the true, invariant cause of the various retellings, deconstructive approaches to the fabula consider how it “requires a double reading, a reading according to incompatible principles.”21 The incompatible principles in this case proceed from a fabula that, according to the white female playwright, has autobiographical sources, but whose protagonist has been twice transposed, first onto a young white boy (in the play), and then onto a younger black girl (in the film). Beasts is thus one of several incompossible tellings of the story of a protagonist named Hushpuppy. Frank Wilderson has argued that recent US “racial problem” cinema is characterized by a “grammar of antagonism” in which even when films narrate a story in which blacks or Native Americans are beleaguered with problems that the script insists are

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conceptually coherent (usually having to do with poverty or the absence of “family values”), the non-narrative, or cinematic, strategies of the film often disrupt this coherence by posing the irreconcilable questions of Red and Black political ontology—or what I think of as the fabel, the basic and unthought force, driving the social order.22 The double reading of Hushpuppy I propose draws from Wilderson’s insistence that narrative cinema poses problems it fails to bring into visible or conceptual coherence and that those problems circulate around a fraught triangulation of race, sovereignty, and the human. At the same time, I also look to Kara Keeling’s more affirmative account of a generative black cinematic power that evades representation, what she names the “black femme function.” This function “highlight[s] the current existence of a figure hidden within the histories and logics generated by struggles against racism, sexism, and homophobia in the United States, a figure whose invisible, affective labor ensures the survival of forms of sociality that were never meant to survive.”23 While Beasts of the Southern Wild is white-authored and -directed, its co-creation by its nonprofessional cast (including Wallis) establishes grounds for tracking the flight of the black femme in a film that makes the absent presence of black female characters (Hushpuppy’s mother, Miss Bathsheba the schoolteacher, the cook at the Elysian Fields floating brothel) quietly central to the stories it tells. If the black femme function is dispersed in Beasts (Hushpuppy’s mother is missing, the cook who might be her fails to recognize the child, Miss Bathsheba is a kind but inconsistent surrogate, Hushpuppy is barely out of infancy), this dispersal only further highlights the invisibility, or partial occlusion, of its affective labor. If the “final” film version of Hushpuppy can be thought of as the retrospective cause of its chronologically preceding versions, it is because each instance is embedded not only in a grammar of black-white antagonism but also in a logic of incompossibility. The concept of incompossibility comes from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, via Gilles Deleuze, who drew on it as a way out of the Hegelian deadlock of dialectical contradiction. As Nathan Widder explains: Incompossibility in no way implies contradiction, but rather divergence from a continuous series of compossible individuals and events. . . . A world of incompossibles is one where “Adam sins” and “Adam does not

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sin” both have truth, not because the sinning Adam’s identity must relate to its contradictory, but because its sense requires a relation to differences that are incompossible with it, differences that for Deleuze are fully real but virtual. . . . Like a science fiction story about parallel universes, the two Adams and their worlds are indiscernible yet completely different, and each one seems to repeat the other without either one being identifiable as the original or true world that the other copies.24

Widder’s gloss on incompossibility as akin to a science fiction story about two parallel universes that are completely different yet somehow indiscernible captures something useful about the queer relationship between the versions of Hushpuppy found in Alibar’s play and in the cowritten screenplay. There is a way in which the sense of Beasts emerges only in relation to its incompossible precursors, which include not only Alibar’s original play and life experiences but also Zeitlin’s stories of his own visits to the real locations that inspired his fictional scenario. Rather than force an identification of one Hushpuppy as the original and the others as copies, incompossibility allows a logic of sense to emerge through acts of repetition. Such a logic of sense holds implications for how we read the survival of race and gender in the wake of the human. If I take up incompossibility in order to apprehend the virtual character of Hushpuppy, it is to gauge the implications of a story iterating across real and fictive scenarios and of a protagonist slipping between black and white, male and female bodies. Such a virtualization of the story does not preclude, but can in fact underpin, an account of its racial and imperial unconscious. In both play and film Hushpuppy’s story proceeds from the speculative propensities of child perception, especially under trauma and adversity. That he (in the play) and she (in the film) fabulate a preternatural herd of aurochs to endow this chaos with sensible form and animacy establishes the indiscernibility of “real” and “mythic” worlds within the frame of the narrative. Juicy and Delicious is a one-act play about a young white boy growing up in South Georgia with an abusive, dying father. It employs various stage effects to conjure up the wild perception of a child, edging on adolescence, whose world is about to come crashing down. The play cites familiar southern tropes: violence and alcoholism; poverty and prostitution; grits, possum, and gator. It confronts these

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dramatic issues by navigating the fierce and often funny borderlands between dream and nightmare. The playwright has described her work as autobiographical, with the characters of Hushpuppy and Daddy loosely inspired by the playwright and her own, then ill, father.25 The theatrical Hushpuppy is described as a “sweet little Southern boy,” submissive and not very intelligent. His schoolyard nemesis, a “big scary Southern girl” named Joy Strong, calls Hushpuppy a “pussy-bitch” and repeatedly assaults him. Their dynamic establishes the boy’s proto-queerness, ostensibly confirmed in a “big gay dance number” midway through the play. Juicy and Delicious places its anthropomorphic aurochs in a dreamsequence dance that is a choreography of displacement and innuendo, rather than overt revelation. It is not the sleeping Hushpuppy who dances but his Daddy and Mamma, surrounded by a herd of aurochs. What is gay here is Hushpuppy’s propensity to fabulate a herd of aurochs dancing to the tune of the Bangles’s “Eternal Flame,” which then attempt to abscond with him, sleeping, cradled in the arms of one of them. Snatching his son back from the camp bogeyman aurochs, Daddy awakens Hushpuppy and immediately engages him in a scene of attempted masculinization. “Show me them guns,” Daddy yells repeatedly to his son, who flexes his biceps and yells out, at unconvincing pitch: “I the man! . . . I the man!” But Hushpuppy is clearly not the man, as the play shows. Daddy’s attempt to align the rigorous demands of survival in the southern wilds with a virile, patriarchal masculinity collapses under the weight of its own incongruity. Survival is instead shown to reside in the inner strength to succumb and feel, to dance and play, and to fabulate a place after the end of the world.26 When the revenant aurochs thunder across Alibar’s stage, they merge with a cacophony of other animate and ferocious objects, among which the vulnerable and effeminate Hushpuppy cringes and falters. We understand the magical world on the stage that Hushpuppy occupies as an exteriorizing of the child’s febrile mind, a result of his propensity to fabulate the presence of intelligent forces operating behind all the random violence he suffers. These presences represent histories he cannot know but that stalk him nonetheless. Ironically, the magic of these forces reinforces our understanding that they have a reality beyond his grasp: the

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surreal chaos of Hushpuppy’s life works as an indictment of the social forces grinding human life into abject poverty in neoliberal America. When the story shifts in the film version to rural Louisiana, somewhere south of the levee, this historical backdrop expands to frame the entire industrial age, and the film asks audiences to consider the story as a fable of an emergent Anthropocene. Hushpuppy must do new work, not only to figure her own catastrophe, but to make “tangible” the catastrophic consequences of centuries of industrial capitalism.27 Often described as a post-Katrina allegory, Beasts of the Southern Wild takes the basic elements of Hushpuppy’s story and transposes it to the fictional Isle de Charles Doucet. Living literally outside the law, the residents call their island “the Bathtub” and fiercely defend their autonomous way of life from the rising tides and worsening storms that climate change is wreaking on their precarious community. Hushpuppy, now younger, black, and female, lives with her rage-filled, dying father, Wink. Resilient and resourceful, Hushpuppy cooks and cares for herself and a flock of domestic animals, gets herself to school, and fabulates the presence of both her missing mother and an awesome herd of aurochs that have emerged out of the thawing ice of Antarctica and are now thundering toward the Bathtub, ready to gobble her up. Film adaptation enables Hushpuppy’s story of incipient human catastrophe to be seen from the child’s own point of view. Theatrical devices are exchanged for the cinematic technique of the free indirect image, wherein we are not always certain whether what we are seeing is to be understood as actually happening in the reality of the film, in the imagination of Hushpuppy, or some blend of the two.28 This free indirect imagery allows the film to produce the aurochs as both mythic beings of Hushpuppy’s imagination and as potent, ambiguous symbols of a rewilded Louisiana. When Hushpuppy finally meets her aurochs face to face, the flash of recognition between them suggests a reconciliation between human and animal on shared autochthonous ground, in which it is left deliberately uncertain who truly is the titular “beast of the Southern wild.”29 As the aurochs wind their way from stage to screen, they too are engulfed in this new environmentalist mise-en-scène. The preternatural creatures first appear on-screen frozen in ice at the ends of the earth until Hushpuppy animates them as effigies of her father’s impending death and her home’s impending engulfment. Alibar and Zeitlin invite

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us to accept the beast and the nonsovereign child as our guides to what Yaeger terms “the dream we need to dream (that is, to make into creed, to make tangible) of our complicity as a dangerous, polluting species.”30 However inspiring such a creed, it does not obviate a closer analysis of how human sovereignty is unevenly accessible to humans. Such a history rises only inconsistently to the surface captured in the film’s vibrant, dreamy cinematography. If the filmmakers seem poised to affirm a collective complicity in the environmental crisis engulfing Terrebonne Parish (an affirmation suggested by their interpolation of real footage of climate catastrophe at key points in their montage), then it seems valid to track the biopolitical genealogy of the landscape it populates with feral life. The race and gender changes in Hushpuppy might initially seem to work to effect a sense of species-wide commonality. Any child could be a Hushpuppy, even as Hushpuppy is not quite an abstract universal but a series of indiscernible singularities. This can be seen in the way that the theatrical and cinematic Hushpuppys can be neither fully collapsed into nor, finally, distinguished from one another. Scenes like “show me them guns” repeat across versions, to differing effect. In both film and play, a father attempts to masculinize a child perceived as too weak to survive his or her imminent abandonment. But while the play must posit the source of Hushpuppy’s weakness as male effeminacy—the proverbial “sissy boy”—the film instead produces the equally recognizable figure of the strong-willed, resilient little black girl. While each is coherent on his or her own terms, the repetition of dialogue and characterization in play and film accentuates Hushpuppy’s virtual queerness, which derives less from perverse sexual orientation than from the characters’ disjunctive emergence into sexed and raced being. As Hushpuppy crosses between drama and cinema, Hushpuppy becomes an incompossible of wild child and sissy boy, while never stabilizing into either. It is tempting to embrace this aesthetic tactic as the kind of dream work needed to confront the Anthropocene, itself the self-reflexive effect of capitalist growth upon human environments. Collective survival in the face of climate change is routinely presented in the liberal imagination as uniting humanity across differences. Such a liberal universalism undergirds the positive reception of the casting of a little black girl to represent the future of the (human) race (not itself an unusual tactic in dystopic scenarios, as critics such as Brown have noted).31 But the virtualization of

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the character of Hushpuppy across a series of incompossible instances, both real and fictive, should not authorize the overlooking of the social antagonisms and contradictions that each character’s singular instances are embedded in. To do so would be to fall victim to what Sharpe and Brown rightly term “the romance of precarity.”32 Under the spell of this romance, sympathetic identification with the plight of subaltern populations automatically recuses the sympathizer from accounting for the historical and structural conditions that produce the unequal, hierarchical arrangements that both occasion and outlast their sympathy. As Widder notes in his cogent analysis of political theory in the wake of Deleuze, the actual and the virtual both represent real levels of political analysis and intervention. Even if Deleuze privileges the virtual terrain of micropolitics, it is nonetheless the case, Widder wryly notes, that “it is people who can be identified and arrested, never desiring-machines.”33 And while this comment can be taken in both an affirmative and a pessimistic sense, that very ambivalence is worth retaining in any reading of the ecological dream work in Beasts. So when Hushpuppy and Wink are identified and arrested in Beasts, that should unlock a conversation about race that their colorblind casting as universalized subjects ought not forestall.

The Queer Fabulist in the Preternatural Wild Why track the spoor of race thinking through the theatrical and cinematic wilds? In part, because wildness has emerged as a motif in a coalescing intellectual project interested in moving beyond humanist and state-centered politics and theories.34 Wildness pulls focus away from the human, bringing into sharper relief a background of a pulsing, vital, even queer materiality. Through a “free and wild creation of concepts,” as Deleuze once called for, this new ecological and materialist thought zooms out from human “species being” (as Marx termed it) to access a fuller sweep of events at a planetary and even cosmic level.35 Beasts of the Southern Wild addresses this intellectual moment, articulating our ecological and human challenge in a cinematic language that celebrates the wild, the feral, the autonomous, and the anarchic. The film’s drama turns on our protagonist confronting the fearsome power of the aurochs, a power she initially fears will devour her, and realizing

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that its wildness is the true source of her strength. It is worth thinking through how this plot resonates with what Grégoire Chamayou has named “cynegetic power”: a biopolitical power constituted around the right to make other humans prey.36 Beasts evokes such cynegetic power when the aurochs are set up as a confabulation of the forces that are steadily encroaching on the Bathtub. Hushpuppy’s capacity to fabricate the aurochs as animate agents allows her to harness their strength in her fugitive quest to escape the internment camp that would “civilize” her. Her biophilic affiliations allow her to join the beasts somewhere “below the law.” But is that where the aurochs ever were? Beasts of the Southern Wild takes its place in an aesthetic and scientific series of contexts in which the aurochs is a surrogate for modernist and postmodernist fantasies of reclaimed land, wildness, violence, and freedom. It underscores how running with the aurochs can induce what Diane Chisholm calls a “biophilia”: an attraction to a landscape so strong it resembles “an outlaw coupling, the wild anarchy of a love affair whose heated obsession betray[s] and unravel[s] some other, weaker, fidelity.”37 This wild perception of nature as something that possesses one, an environment in which one might be eaten as well as eat, may appear a heady way to slip the yoke of human difference. But the freedom of the indirect images through which cinema viewers find themselves immersed in Hushpuppy’s landscape is not racially unmarked. The preternatural aurochs do not merely descend on the Bathtub from a future climate collapse, as patched together by the traumatized imagination of a child. When they appear on-screen, they also reveal what Deleuze called their “dark precursors”: the “invisible, imperceptible” historical intensities that “determines their path in advance, but in reverse, as though intagliated.”38 Alibar herself has stated, “I don’t know where the herd of aurochs came from.”39 This “nowhere” is precisely the location of the dark precursor I discuss in more detail in the next chapter. The film attributes the genesis of Hushpuppy’s fabulation to the traumatic sight of an aurochs tattoo on the thigh of her teacher, Miss Bathsheba. But those drawings themselves sketch out an ersatz line of dark precursors, whose story reminds us of the racial and imperial histories decomposing in the preternatural wild. Between the time that the sovereign’s beast exits the primeval forest and when it enters stage right in contemporary film and theater, much

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of its nature has been transmogrified. Centuries of unnatural history intervene between the Jaktorowska forest and Terrebonne Parish. To skip from the prehistoric to the postmodern is to miss the crucial twentiethcentury attempts to “reverse breed” aurochs from modern cattle, an important antecedent to present-day rewilding efforts. Eugenic breeders in Nazi-era Germany considered the aurochs an aboriginal “Aryan” species of cow and sought to rewild the related species of wisent in order to populate the rewilded forests that they projected would someday replace the defeated and exterminated humans of Poland. Modern Heck cattle are the descendants of these fascist experiments.40 The aurochs that Hushpuppy encounters are thus neither prehistoric nor mythical creatures, as play and film intimate; they are instead a species that has migrated repeatedly across the electrified fences between actual and virtual being, always trailing the scent of the predatory designs of sovereign power. The geographers Jamie Lorimer and Clemens Driessen, who study the present-day efforts to rewild Heck cattle in reclaimed Dutch wetlands, remind their readers of this species’ ersatz origins.41 Contemporary ecologists recognize that Heck cattle are not literally aurochs, but their ability to impersonate or surrogate the extinct species is key to leveraging popular support for rewilding experiments (a more clearly domestic-seeming species, Lorimer and Driessen point out, might draw more criticism from the public if visibly left wholly without veterinary care or food in the preternatural wild). Of course, contemporary ecological efforts at rewilding are not a direct fulfillment of their awful history. But that history is intermingled in its reappearance, even in a child’s fable, as part of a territorializing machine. Beasts reckons with this history indirectly, inversely, by extolling a subaltern nonsovereignty that would be repugnant to the Aryan purity sought by early twentiethcentury eugenic breeders. The wildness extolled in the Bathtub would be viewed as pollution by the likes of Lutz and Hein Heck, sibling zookeepers whose aurochs de-extinction projects were appropriated by Hermann Göring, who styled himself a great Germanic hunter. Hushpuppy and her kin, in their multihued variety and raucous conviviality, would be a eugenicist’s nightmare. The historical practitioners of selective breeding sought to counter, as Michael Wang puts it, the “deleterious genetic effects of civilization.”42 They associated recovered wildness with a preternatural purity antithetical to the “dirty ecology” extolled by

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contemporary critics like Yaeger. But direct inversion of the pure/dirty binarism does not, in itself, transvalue the underpinning binarism. As I argued in The Amalgamation Waltz, both valorizing and stigmatizing miscegenation can have the effect of making it our “national Thing.”43 Appropriating wildness as our national Thing, as Beasts suggests we can, risks skirting over the specific histories, not only of Hushpuppy the fictional character, but also of the Bathtub the fictional location. In Alibar and Zeitlin’s fable the rebirth of the aurochs augurs the coming of a feral humankind. This ragtag commune successfully stands up against a governmentality imagined in classically sovereign terms: the levee, the internment camp, the police, the helicopter. If we too easily embrace the ecological fable’s image of top-down state sovereignty to rebel against, we may not have, in our political thinking, “cut off the head of the king.” One sign that we have not yet done so is that we forget the proximity of cattle, wild or tame, to the legal principle of chattel. The historical aurochs ended its days neither domesticated nor free but as a form of wild property. The sovereign and his chattel were set up in a predatorprey relation from which the sovereign voluntarily abstained. In this, he modeled the ethical predator, who restrains his ferocity and rationally suspends his rights. As the sovereign’s beast, the aurochs belonged to an environment whose wildness was to be fostered, even if human life, in turn, had to be disallowed to the point of death. We see this in the Polish king’s injunction to the village of Jaktorow to protect the aurochs and its habitat even at the potential cost of their own flocks and livelihood. This responsibility to protect a wilderness is configured specifically in relation to a land that must be kept clear of other, vagrant life. The sovereign’s abstention—in tandem with the pastoral responsibilities delegated to the villagers/vagrants—forms the germ of an ecological ruse out of which the extinct line of aurochs has been regularly rebirthed in the centuries since its disappearance. That this rebirth comes at a cost to racialized and subaltern people who must be displaced so that the sovereign/beast may roam freely forms a challenge that the dream work of Beasts unevenly reckons with. Both etymology and usage suggest that “the wild” is caught up in the finitude of the human, which “wilderness ontology” proposes to leave behind in search of a great outdoors. Such dismissals of finitude would ignore, predictably, the manner in which minoritized subjects are captured within an incorporative exclusion that the black diasporic theorist Denise

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Ferreira da Silva has named “the strategy of engulfment.”44 Engulfment, she writes, is “the political-symbolic strategy that apprehends the human body and global regions as signifiers of how universal reason institutes different kinds of self-consciousness, that is, as an effect of productive tools that institute irreducible and unsublatable differences.”45 How might the racial other be engulfed by the extension of a transparent and universal reason, even under the guise of fabulated machines of cinematic dreaming? In part, this would happen through the very claim that such fables must have instrumental purpose: that we can and must confront the unconfrontable challenge that we collectively face through fictions like Beasts of the Southern Wild. And I don’t think such claims for political efficacy can quite be dismissed as simple overreaching; clearly the film has power. But of what nature, and to what effect? I have already alluded to the complex of historical and libidinal investments that the wild as a zone of excessive purposiveness and dangerous irregularity carries.46 This excess is also racialized and gendered, often through tropes of an excess of reproductivity that exceeds the boundaries of the biopolitically normative. Andil Gosine also notes how Eurocentric environmentalism has long figured non-white reproductive sex as a threat to nature. Even “prior to European colonization of the Global South,” Gosine notes, “fantasies and anxieties about its ‘monstrous races’ and lascivious ‘Wild Men’ and ‘Wild Women’ circulated in oral and written texts.”47 “Through the course of colonization, anxieties about nonwhite peoples’ sexualities would also inform the constitution of natural space across the world. The creation of ‘wildlife preserves’ and national parks across the colonized world was predicated on the removal of their human, reproductive presence: the areas’ indigenous populations.”48 If we trace this history all the way back to the Jaktorowska forest, we can see the origins of a biopolitical split between sovereign power and a nonsovereign subject people, legally demoted beneath both exceptional animal and preternatural landscape. For such reasons, and as my reading of Hushpuppy’s story and its placement in the landscape suggests, it is not at all accidental that blackness and indigeneity should stalk the outposts that critical thought has set up in the wild, like elongated shadows cast just beyond the perimeter of theory’s flickering campfires. If the liberal color-blindness behind the casting of a young African American girl as Hushpuppy becomes the device whereby “broad” audi-

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ences can immerse themselves in Hushpuppy’s animate world, it is also an event that tethers the film to a real set of people, locations, contradictions. The cinematic mode of production chosen by Zeitlin itself renders difficult the typical distinction between aesthetic form and historical context. Rather, the actors shaped the characters in an improvisational and relational process, and the story itself adjusts to accommodate, to let itself seep into, the preternatural landscape of Terrebonne Parish. At Zeitlin’s inspiration, Alibar’s story moved to the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, and the aurochs were sent to Antarctica. Along the way, Alibar felt herself finally able to write the character Hushpuppy as a girl. In the introduction to the published play, Alibar does not explain why this “return” to female gender was accomplished via a race change. She does not indicate if that change assisted or disabled the process of distancing Hushpuppy from her own biography. But she does makes clear the degree to which the character Hushpuppy is the fabulated outcome of a writing process that straddles white and black, male and female, fact and fantasy, insofar as the final shape both versions of the character took was influenced by the actor cast in the role, and the setting against which she or he is figured. In her critical review of the film, Sharpe perceptively infers that casting Quvenzhané Wallis facilitates the transformation of Hushpuppy’s narrative from southern family gothic to ecological allegory. Only a black child, Sharpe reasons, can be positioned in conditions of such dire abandonment without a narrative explanation being offered.49 And just as precarity is frequently naturalized to the black female figure in dystopian films such as Children of Men, as Jayna Brown has argued, so is ecological stewardship frequently projected onto indigenous ground.50 The preternatural aurochs works to pivot the film between these two racial idioms, as free indirect images are employed to bring Hushpuppy and her watery landscape alternately into focus. The film’s image of a happy mongrel America, subsisting somewhere below or beyond the invidious racial separatism of bourgeois society, does not initially seem to include Native Americans. But against the backdrop of the internment camp, which Hushpuppy compares to a fishbowl, the true source of her wild nature becomes evident; it proceeds from the land from which “civilization” has violently snatched her. If the film’s narrative offers a voyeuristic look into the survival of a community of alterity living outside the biopolitical protection of the

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state, the filmmaking process stages a parallel trajectory of the transplantation and adoption of a liberal ecological imaginary onto a real environment and its population. Many look to the Gulf Coast as a site of particular ecological precarity, no more so than now, in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (which occurred during the filming of Beasts). And if Beasts helps us recognize our complicity in such disasters, it can do so only by correlating the fictional Bathtub to the actual Isle de Jean Charles. This correlation was in fact highlighted in the reporting on the film, such as in the New York Times: Mr. Zeitlin traveled outside of his adopted hometown [of New Orleans] in search of real-life cultures that live on the front lines of storms and coastal erosion. “When you look at the map, you can see America kind of crumble off into the sinews down in the gulf where the land is getting eaten up,” he said. “I was really interested in these roads that go all the way down to the bottom of America and what was at the end of them.” 51

What Zeitlin found were the bayou fishing towns of Terrebonne Parish. Relatively unscathed by Katrina but hit hard by Hurricane Rita the same summer, and by Hurricanes Gustav and Ike in 2008, Terrebonne is a region with a vibrant culture that extends to the very edge of the delta’s vanishing wetlands. On his first trip there Mr. Zeitlin drove down a narrow road, half-sunk in water, leading to Isle de Jean Charles, a tiny island just off the mainland. Only forty years ago the thriving home of French-speaking Native Americans, the island, with around two dozen families left, is gradually disintegrating into the Gulf of Mexico and falls outside the protection of the federal levee system. Although Beasts draws cultural inspiration from across the southern part of the state, Isle de Jean Charles provided Mr. Zeitlin’s reference points for the Bathtub’s surreal ecological precariousness and its residents’ fierce commitment to remaining. That a transplant and adoptee fabricates a fictional Bathtub out of an actual indigenous community at “the bottom of America” might deservedly raise questions of “playing Indian” or “going native.” Zeitlin seeks to avoid such charges by representing his fable as a co-creation of the community that welcomed him. But that language of community sub-

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tly elides the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw and Houma nations residents of Isle de Jean Charles, present in the backstory as “reference points” for “surreal ecological precariousness,” but absent from the present-day project of climate resistance (itself a project that often excludes or elides indigenous sovereignty). Zeitlin’s filmmaking has indeed captured the preternatural quasi-animacy of his adopted region. But in so extending “our” imaginative presence into those sinewy tendrils beyond land’s end, indigeneity is pushed off the map. This raises the question: Why superimpose a mythic mongrel utopia over this location of native survival? Conversely, black sovereignty is hardly an option in a scenario in which Wink first appears as nearly naked and fugitive from a hospital, Hushpuppy nearly burns down her home, and her mother has gone vagrant long ago. The attempt to render coherent Wink’s connection to his watery land results in a telling moment of incoherence in the film, when he refuses to explain why he will not abandon the Bathtub during a storm (even when other residents temporarily flee). Despite its overall message of hope and resilience, the film cannot avoid presenting this moment as one of dereliction: a dying man is ready to abandon his defenseless daughter to her fate. Even when he finally tries to relinquish his daughter to the state’s protection, that act only underscores his ultimate acknowledgment of his pathology. It is startling to encounter critics reading Wink and Hushpuppy’s relation through the prism of autonomy given, as Brown notes, that their sources of survival are utterly mystified by the narrative: “Their existence isn’t active or sustainable,” Brown writes, “the characters’ self-destructive forms of coping [are] painfully insufficient. This is no maroon society, nor is it like any community of generationally poor people in the US or the global south.”52 I suggest that one reason for this incoherence is the attempt to project (an idealized) nonsovereignty onto bodies that are always already read as nonsovereign in US racial problem melodramas. As depicted in the film, Wink and Hushpuppy cannot relinquish human sovereignty, because the possibility of a sovereign relation to the steadily subsiding land of the Bathtub, as Wilderson argues is the case of black subjects, is already excluded.53 Conversely, the many incompossible versions of Hushpuppy appear to preclude the possibility of a native one, insofar as the landscape that Hushpuppy sees relies on a cinematic native removal as a condition for its emergence into visibility. It is the engulfment of na-

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tive sovereignty that renders the resultant wildness recuperable for white fantasies of surrogation, adoption, and transplantation. Native removal, in other words, assists the ease of imaginary access to a “free and wild” use of nature below the human, and at “the bottom of America.” But the recurrence of the aurochs in Hushpuppy’s story is also a sign of the return of the European repressed. The aurochs, after all, are not native to North America either. Their “return” to southern Louisiana is also a territorializing of native landscape by Eurocentric myth. The preternatural presence of the aurochs in our southern wild becomes more explicable if we understand how it reenacts the European colonization of the New World in bovine form. Abandoning the eugenic nightmare of Nazi biopolitics does not entirely cleanse the figure of the aurochs from all sovereign designs. Relocated from the play’s mis-en-scène to Terrebonne Parish, the aurochs become an invasive species, and Hushpuppy must stand up against their predatory force without even the assurance that her life will be considered human. Her successful confrontation with the aurochs at the film’s climax runs the knife’s edge between affirming her resilience and consolidating her abandonment.

Sovereignty’s Little Monsters The relations of beast and the sovereign—from the Jaktorowska forest to Terrebonne Parish—are neither fixed nor guaranteed. I do not unspool the fascist genome of the preternatural aurochs, or exhume buried histories of settler colonialism, to posit rewilding as inherently reactionary. Along with queer critics like Halberstam, I am interested in what promise wildness might hold for queer, feminist, and antiracist projects. The little incompossible monsters produced out of our drive toward new and more cogent myths for our present, less governed, and more anarchic modes of living and creating can all best be accounted for if we resist instrumentalizing or essentializing either wildness or freedom. Hushpuppy’s fabulation offers both encouragements and cautions for Jane Bennett’s new materialist vision of the wild. For Bennett, the wild obliges us to “acknowledge a force that, though quite real and powerful, is intrinsically resistant to representation.”54 I have explored how the incompossibility of Hushpuppy indexes a force that indeed resists the stability of representation, but I have also

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noted how this instability itself becomes problematic. Rather than valorize her wildness as offering intrinsic resistance to representation, we might instead take Hushpuppy as a case, as one among the proliferating objects of analysis that queer studies increasingly contests, one of its many “little monsters.” The proper object of no extant domain of inquiry, this emergent queer bestiary suggests the need for new critical idioms that make space for both fabulation and its complicit antecedents, for ecology and its dark precursors. It is tempting to misconstrue black and native presences in Beasts as signs of progress en route to a color-blind planetary solidarity in the face of climate change. On the contrary, those signs are symptoms of a continued liberal enchantment with a “transparent” subject, unmarked by exterior signs of racial or sexual difference.55 Colluding with this liberalism, post-humanist theory has tended to present the decentering of the human as both salutary and largely innocent of history. Up until the present time, we are told in one version of this philosophical fable, we have incorrectly centered the human. Now we can, and must, correct that error, if only (paradoxically) to save ourselves. It is in anticipation of such tales that black studies has repeatedly asked: Have we ever been human? And if not, what are we being asked to decenter, and through what means? There is a “speaker’s benefit” attendant to the act of declaring one’s nonsovereignty: one must presume to have it in order to relinquish it.56 This is why I suggested, in the terms of ecotheory, that we have not yet cut off the head of the king. Our privileged mechanisms for figuring the nonsovereign subject continue to rely on what da Silva calls a “strategy of engulfment” in which vulnerability is projected onto other bodies and spaces, reterritorializing Western reason in the process.57 “Modern representation,” da Silva warns, “can sustain transparency, as the distinguishing feature of post-Enlightenment European social configurations, only through the engulfment of exterior things, the inescapable effect of scientific reason’s version of universality, while at the same time postponing that ‘Other’ ontology it threatens to institute.”58 The displacement of the real history of Hurricane Katrina with the fictive history of the Bathtub relies on such a strategy with depressing literality: the engulfing of southern Louisiana is made visible and affecting by the engulfing of the raced and sexed other in a film praxis that sets up a transparently knowable “color-blind” character as a stand-in for the

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self. The film posits, but defers, the “other” ontology that Hushpuppy threatens to institute. The filmmakers’ dream of a rewilded, ecological cinema is indeed alluring, but achieving it by tapping into the primitive vitality of a native terrain and its mongrel denizens fails to answer the challenge that black and indigenous studies pose to the post-human. The preternatural aurochs, whose place in the history of imperial expansion the film must occlude in order to produce its multicultural fantasy, is itself the result of a selective breeding seeking to recover pure origins from a murky past. The aurochs cannot reappear unless we make it reappear, but the means of that making are indelibly tainted. Rather than miniaturize this awful history to render it cute, queer inhumanism might instead seek to recover from history a face that is unrecognizable, and a wildness that would transgress the sovereign’s preserve. The drawings and photographs of Michael Wang offer us a different queer and hybrid path into the preternatural wild. Wang is an interdisciplinary artist whose works broach environmental issues with a wry but oblique attentiveness to race, hybridity, queerness, and planetary capitalism. Carbon Copies, from 2012, offers a series of appropriations of famous contemporary works of art (in both plastic and performative mediums) valued at the cost of the carbon offset of the energy expended to make them. Drawing aesthetic and market value into a tight dialectic, Wang stages the stratospheric valorization of artistic experience and abstraction against the shimmering backdrop of its “dirty ecology.”59 His work implicitly poses in aesthetic terms the question of the appropriation of experience with which this essay has been (perhaps implicitly) wrestling. It does so pointedly, but nondidactically: his work is wondrous but not inspirational. It stages complicity without requiring a dream to dream an “us” into being. Put another way, it tells the environmental history of the planetary without engulfing the human in a universal “I.” Global Tone, from 2013, reassembles in drawing and installation the broken and buried pieces of imperial history, including a monument to the wisent, the Aryan bison that Göring tried to breed back into fascist vitality during the Nazi era to replenish the ethnically cleansed Polish wild. Wang’s creative research into the mixed and profane history of preternatural monsters like the wisent and the reversebred aurochs led him back to the creek in the Jaktorowska forest where

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the last aurochs purportedly died. This last aurochs was female: not the male aurochs whose proud, horned relics were carried away as war spoils, where they remain on display. The remains of this aurochs subsist only in rumor, as she died years before the king’s inspector arrived to count her. Wang’s photography records a wild, anachronistic perception of her absent presence as dark precursor to the preternatural aurochs that crash through Beasts of the Southern Wild. Unlike the film, however, in Wang’s work no face-to-face moment of biophilic contact or recognition is staged or implied. Neither the aurochs nor the primitivized child fabulist is available in this image to do the work of fabulation for the viewer. As Keeling might posit, the witch’s flight diagrams the play of forces in the image, but then retreats from visibility. And indeed it could only have been tacit lore, the deep and discredited memory of the subaltern, that led Wang back to this particular creek, whose still, dark waters is refracted the shimmering presence of a fugitive life whose dark vitality would be, finally, unutterable in the terms with which contemporary post-humanist theory would have it speak.

6

Fabulous, Formless Queer Theory’s Dark Precursor

Are we at the end of queer theory, or just the beginning?1 And how do we understand in retrospect the cultural logic of a field that came of age immediately before the advent of the digital deluge we all now sink or swim in? Much of this book has been implicitly wrestling with such afrofuturist questions, and I now turn to them explicitly in this chapter.2 These questions necessarily haunt a field of endeavor whose wished-for transformative effects on scholarship, politics, and the wider culture have so frequently fallen short of its transgressive promise in the heady years of the early 1990s. As ideas and arguments emerging from queer theory, and queer studies more broadly, have been absorbed by substantial subsections of contemporary culture (particularly but not exclusively online leftist and feminist subcultures), the question of the political efficacy of those ideas and arguments has understandably been raised. In recent years, a backlash against queer theory’s critique of norms and normativity has been heard in a range of quarters, a critique that in many respects recapitulates a long-established skepticism regarding the powers of transgression.3 These debates of course recapitulate and extend now familiar exchanges over the anti-relational thesis in queer theory associated most with the work of Lee Edelman and, contrapuntally, with Lauren Berlant.4 Feminist theorists Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth A. Wilson, for example, have questioned “the political common sense that claims that norms ostracize, or that some of us are more intimate with their operations than others, or that ‘normative’ is a synonym for what is constricting or controlling or tyrannical.”5 Writing in a more journalistic vein, media scholar Angela Nagle has faulted the allure of transgression for the rise of online cults of neofascist masculinity, noting that “the ease with which this . . . milieu can use transgressive styles today shows how superficial and historically accidental it was 151

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that it ended up being in any way associated with the socialist left.”6 On the one hand, then, we have feminist scholars taking queer theory to task for its excessively politicized understanding of what norms are and how they work; on the other, a leftist scholar and writer from a younger generation is deeply unsympathetic to the notion that sex and gender nonconformity is a route to anything politically progressive at all. In an unlikely turn of events, such questions return us again, in untimely fashion, to Foucault’s famous question: Is it useless to revolt?7 It is worth noting that both of these feminist critiques of antinormativity alight on the example of the social media behemoth Facebook’s move in 2014 to offer its users over fifty options for gender selfidentification.8 For Nagle, the corporate instrumentalization of gender performativity on social media sites like Tumblr and Facebook has produced a paradoxical and, in her view, paralyzing combination of “selfflagellation” and “extra-ordinary viciousness and aggression” on the part of the partisans of “online left identity politics,”9 as they seek to police the ever-shifting borders of non-normativity. For Wiegman and Wilson, the astonishing taxonomy of gender that Facebook came up with reveals deep flaws in the political premise of queer antinormativity, revealing how “the norm is already generating the conditions of differentiation that antinormativity so urgently seeks.”10 One shift we may already mark in the digital era, then, is that algorithms now automatically grant what formerly required social movements to bestow (I take up this problem in further detail in chapter 8). The original promise of queer theory, in the view of recent critiques, rested on its capacity to generate continued transgressions of disciplinary and societal norms. This chapter and subsequent ones ask how this premise makes good within the digitized landscape. It aims to assemble a more robust account of the intersectionality of what we will perhaps one day call, with Mark Anthony Neal, “black code studies.” To get to such an account, however, we need to engage with the “white noise” of rising neo-fascism online, and its appropriation of transgressive chic.11 For Nagle, this transgressive performativity of the modernist avantgarde was always politically ambidextrous, and has now, in our current conjuncture, shifted fatefully to the Right—to racists and masculinists who would claim the legacy of punk and who seek to “kill all normies” just for “the lolz.” Less explicitly aligned with a newly energized socialist

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Left than Nagle, but very much from within a queer and feminist academic liberalism, Wiegman and Wilson call for a more “incisive reflection” upon “the relationship between queer studies and social criticism more generally,” one that dispenses with reflexive antinormativity and instead pays more sustained attention to the complex production and reproduction of norms. In response to Wiegman and Wilson, Lisa Duggan has pointed out that a focus on the normative/antinormative dyad in queer theory is itself dated, and that it minimizes the intervention of several decades of queer of color and anti-imperialist work in the field, much of which has largely moved beyond the foundational figures Wiegman and Wilson tend to most frequently cite.12 Contemporary work in queer theory is no longer shaped by a reflexive antinormativity, Duggan argues, and to assert otherwise is to fall into a certain “complacency” regarding the scope and ambition of queer critique at present. To Duggan’s persuasive argument that queer theory is no longer reflexively antinormative, however, I wish to add a historicizing addendum: queer theory, contra Wiegman and Wilson, has never been reflexively antinormative.13 Not only is it the case, as Duggan points out, that queer of color critique and anti-imperialist work has subsequently addressed any reductive or simple contestation of norms on the part of the field; it is also the case, I want to argue, that a more expansive genealogy of queer theoretical writing can reveal the place of theorists of color, and black theorists specifically, in the intellectual and political genealogy of what we now call queer theory. Here I second queer theorist Keguro Macharia’s call not to take the self-designated queer theory of the early 1990s as a single point of origin—with pride of place given to deservedly influential texts by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler—but to instead linger in “queer genealogies,” as Macharia terms them, in order to “offer other, complementary myths of how we enter into the space called queer.”14 While Macharia could be mistakenly understood to be simply changing the subject, away from queer theory to something else like postcolonial or black theory, in point of fact his interest is in revealing how the “queer theory moment” arose at a point of inflection in queer intellectual history, a moment when certain questions of race and gender were briefly entertained before being ushered off-stage and others were not raised at all. In his commentary, Macharia names two black theorists in particular, Hortense Spillers and Frantz Fanon, who pre-

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ceded and, to some degree, informed queer theory “proper.” A sustained engagement with either theorist, he argues, would radically reconfigure any assumptions regarding “antinormativity’s queer conventions.” While agreeing with Macharia as to the pertinacity of incorporating Fanon and Spillers into the genealogy of queer theory, my focus will be on another “fellow traveler” whose work in science fiction, for reasons of intellectual historical chance, is less frequently associated with queer theory proper: the polymathic writer and theorist Samuel R. Delany.15 While Delany is widely understood as a writer, I want to speculate in this chapter on the value of taking his fictions as generative of a queer theory avant la lettre. If we understand queer theory as always already shaped by the thinking of Delany, I would wager, then we arguably have never had a queer theory that was wholly innocent of a political grasp of how norms produce the “conditions of differentiation that antinormativity urgently seeks.” Instead we would have a queer theory grounded in the feminist and black literary bohemia of 1960s New York City, out of which Delany’s science fictions, by his own account and others’, sprang. In making the argument of this chapter, I retain the 1990s term “queer theory,” a term that I understand that others have qualified or abandoned, precisely for its foreshortened archive and narrowly postdisciplinary framing. I mean that “Theory”—rather than “studies,” “critique,” or “inquiry”—remains for me the best rubric under which to discuss a writer like Delany, whose work across a range of literary and para-literary genres, from science fiction to pornography, memoir to fantasy, is almost always self-consciously theorized, and arose alongside and within the very heyday of “Theory” in the Western academy, as a kind of perverse supplement and delirious riposte.16 I am hardly innovative or unusual in understanding Delany’s writing to have been central to the development of queer theory, to queer of color critique, and to queer and trans studies more generally.17 His place in the critical canon is, as it were, secure. In this chapter I make a narrower claim regarding the power of his work to anticipate and respond to the problem-spaces that the field of queer theory continues to generate. Among those problem-spaces: the differentiating power of gender norms, the resistance of the object, the afterlives of slavery, and, I would add here, the ambivalence of fabulation in the narration and contestation of all the foregoing.18

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That Samuel Delany is not frequently cited as part of the origins of queer theory we must return to, I have suggested, is an accident of intellectual history and, specifically, the more or less concurrent coinage of the terms “afrofuturism” and “queer theory” within a couple years of each other in the early 1990s. Delany’s very reknown as a storyteller has meant his work has not been read for the sort of strong theoretical position—articulated in the currency that academia traffics in—that could be subsequently incorporated into the canon as method.19 To look instead to his early fictions is in some ways to put the cart before the horse and to seek theory where more typically one seeks the “raw material” for theorizing.20 “Queer Theory,” we should recall, was first and foremost the name of a conference organized by the feminist scholar Teresa de Lauretis at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1990, and then became the title of a special issue of the feminist journal Differences in 1991. By 1993, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick had published her collection of essays Tendencies, Judith Butler had published Bodies that Matter, and college courses were already being offered in Queer Theory (I was in one of them). But 1993 also saw the publication of Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, edited by the writer and critic Mark Dery, and this book is most remembered today for a collection of three interviews Dery conducted with Delany, with music journalist Greg Tate, and with hip-hop scholar Tricia Rose, under the collective heading “Black to the Future.”21 In those interviews, Dery coined the term “afrofuturism” to encapsulate the features he saw each of these writers to hold in common. In retrospect, it was a somewhat unlikely trio, linked by race and not much else, but the rest was, as they say, history. In particular, once the afrofuturist electronic listserv began in 1999, originally moderated by Alondra Nelson, the new term was consolidated as a rubric under which black speculative visions, past, present, and future, would be grouped. What I want to point out here, however, is the lamentable but predictable workings of either/or thinking in which Delany, a black queer writer, was positioned as an “afrofuturist” thinker at the precise moment that something else termed “queer theory” was taking off in academia. The absence of even a rudimentary intersectional analysis in the academic publishing world meant that though Delany had been and would be widely recognized as, alternately, contributing to LGBT literature and

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theory and, at the same time, to African American literature and theory, it was only with difficulty that his reception could quite hold out the possibility that he could contribute to both at the same time. To this day, in my experience, Delany is much more well known in African Americanist circles for his 1988 memoir, The Motion of Light in Water, while he is much better known in queer circles for his 1999 memoir/treatise Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. That this should be so has much more to do with the field imaginaries of African American Literary Studies and Queer Studies, respectively, than with anything in particular that Delany was writing at any given point in time. In particular, his novels from the high-water years of queer theory, The Mad Man (1994) and Hogg (1995), were queer pornographic masterpieces, which were published by independent presses and which almost no respectable academic critic would touch for years, at least, not until Darieck Scott’s 2010 critical study Extravagant Abjection.22 A key text for the reception of Delany’s work into queer and feminist theory in those years was Joan W. Scott’s influential Critical Theory essay “The Evidence of Experience” (1991), which was reprinted in the 1994 anthology Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines. Scott’s magisterial survey and critique of history’s investment in “experience” as foundational to interpretation rested upon two contrapuntal readings of Delany. This double reading, however dazzling, somewhat blunted the potential impact of her argument. The opening of her essay attributed to Delany a naive realist epistemology in which nothing “could be truer, after all, than a subject’s own account of what he or she has lived through.”23 By contrast, the end of the essay surprisingly identified the “reading I offered of Delany at the beginning of this essay” as “the kind of reading I want to avoid.”24 In this second reading, Scott’s careful exegesis unfolded Delany’s textual response to Foucauldian, Marxist, and psychoanalytic problematization of “experience,” revealing Delany’s memoir as a work of theory in which “the question of representation is central.”25 But whereas Scott ultimately presented her essay—in which Delany plays a pivotal role as both case study and queer theorist—as a deconstruction of the methodological split between history and literature, her interlocutor in the volume in which the essay was collected, the historian of Jamaica Thomas C. Holt, chooses instead to posit a distinc-

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tion between discursive and material approaches to history. Rather than engage Delany’s memoir as providing an occasion to problematize the history/literature split, Holt’s response to Scott subsumes Delany within history, as a prelude to his argument that the discursive can never quite trump the material, and that identity politics are, in the final analysis, the motivational grounding of progressive scholarship.26 Ironically, even though Holt closes his response to Scott by suggesting that, for him, his black identity is crucial to his vocation as an historian, and even to his “soul,” he responds not at all to the extensive discussion in both Delany and Scott about how blackness and queerness complicate each other. As a consequence, despite Delany being as far from a naive realist epistemologist as one could hope to wish for, in being so attributed by a very influential historian and scholar at a critical period in time, he would be fated to be associated with “the evidence of experience” for years after.27 Henceforward, the possibility that Delany himself was a bearer of one of the most sophisticated and prolific American versions of “Theory” with a capital T would be harder to see. Perhaps as an autodidact who was employed by a university as a creative writer rather than a scholar, Delany simply did not fit the profile of a critical theorist in the crucial early years of queer theory.28 Afro-fabulation can provide a means to recover the subversive edge of Scott’s (second) reading of Delany if we notice how easily, in her analysis, “experience” can be exchanged for “fabula” in the classic narratological (fabula/sjuzhet) story/plot distinction. Both experience and fabula, in other words, are terms that are enlisted as authorizing or evidencing, variously, historical meaning and textual narrative. My reading of Delany as an afro-fabulist is therefore grounded in Scott’s double reading of him as simultaneously a naive and deconstructive reader of his own experience. If I make this effort to recover Delany as a queer theorist—and not simply as someone who responded later to the relative absence of considerations of race and empire in queer theory, but as someone whose voluminous studies of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and difference, from the 1960s up until the present, were simply hiding in plain sight all along—it is in order to answer Wiegman and Wilson’s question: “Can queer theorizing proceed without a primary commitment to antinormativity”?29 This question strikes me as odd, insofar as my training in the field has always proceeded through the problematizing of norms

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and normativity, rather than uncritically championing their subversion. While I recognize the assertion that a utopian oppositions to all norms has often characterized the “political imaginary and analytic vocabulary” of queer theory and its interlocutors in trans theory, crip theory, queer of color critique, and queer/racial assemblage theory, I also understood queer theory to be a problem-space where a more realistic and capacious study of how norms and normativity actually intersect with power-knowledge can take place.30 What would it mean to consider the genesis of what becomes queer theory, its dark precursor if you will, as not having taken place in intellectual discussions at particular academic institutions or in the pages of particular journals, but in the railroad flats of bohemian Greenwich Village in the 1960s?31

A Fabulous Formless Darkness Samuel Delany’s 1967 novel, The Einstein Intersection, is a fantastic tale that is set in the distant future yet consistently enacts recursions to the racial and gender dynamics of his day. The Einstein Intersection was Delany’s eighth novel, published when its precocious author was still in his early twenties. The novel is typically read as post-apocalyptic science fiction, which is justifiable given its focus on the weird regeneration of the human species in post-human form.32 Less frequently is the novel read as an extended study of the enduring power of norms, written during the precise moment—“the 1960s”—when antinormative, antisystemic movements in the United States and worldwide were at their peak. It is striking to read now as demonstrating great awareness of the very limits in the logic of norms, limits that the novel explicitly connects to considerations of race, blackness, and the afterlives of slavery. Despite its elegance and (at 135 pages) relative brevity, The Einstein Intersection is challenging to summarize. The protagonist, Lobey, is a youthful musician and member of an alien race that has fallen to earth several millennia after the extinction of humanity in a nuclear holocaust.33 In search of terrestrial corporeal form, these aliens have reanimated the human genome, and with it, shards of our mytho-poetic cultural inheritance. The results have a Frankenstein unevenness: what the Lo have produced is a human species with three sexes: male, female,

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Figure 6.1. Paperback cover of Samuel R. Delaney’s The Einstein Intersection (1967).

and neuter. All three sexes exist on a disability spectrum from “functional” to “nonfunctional,” and all are, to various degrees, reproductive with each other. As a thought experiment, Delany’s world-building deliberately departs from any known human culture, then or now. In particular, he does not seek initially to represent or depict antinormative transgender, queer, and/or disabled characters. Rather, his novel seems engaged in a rigorous working out—at an almost mathematical level—of the implications of a non-normative post-humanist species attempting to consciously evolve in the direction of human norms as they perceive

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them. The novel contrasts these normative strivings for what Delany terms “the human ratio” with the great countervailing power of black music, or what he in the novel calls “the great rock and the great roll.” Delany presents this story in a postmodernist form that continuously signals to the reader its status as myth and fiction. Lobey occasionally directly addresses the reader, alerting her to the metafictional form of the novel, which proceeds to throw Lobey into a series of plot-driven adventures drawn, alternately, from myth and religion (Theseus and the Minotaur, Orpheus and Eurydice, the Temptation of Jesus), contemporary Anglo-American pop culture (the Beatles, Billy the Kid, Jean Harlow), and pulp fiction itself (post-apocalyptic survival, eugenics run amok, adventures with dragons). Driving these dizzying adventures is Lobey’s pursuit of the figure, Kid Death, who has killed his beloved Friza and whose own death, Lobey somehow surmises, might bring Friza back. Along the way toward a climactic final encounter with Death, Lobey gains two additional companions: four-armed dragon herder Spider and his silent, telekinetic sidekick Green-Eye, who may be textual stand in for Friza, Eurydice, Jesus, or all three. As Lobey discovers more of the mercurial nature of these mythic beings, he journeys by dragon from his pastoral home in the country toward the metropolitan Branning-on-Sea, home to the seductive androgynous figure known as the Dove, who elicits from Lobey his most impressive musical performance of the novel. A final element of Delany’s world-building is relevant here: in addition to the functional/nonfunctional divide that straddles the apparent embrace of third sexes and gender nonconformity, key characters in the novel (including Lobey) discover that they are “different.” The primary way in which that is revealed, as in Lobey, is through musical talent: a kind of tele-muso-pathy. The pathos of music in other minds resonates in his so accurately that he can play the melodies he hears on his musical instrument. “Musical,” we know, is a venerable euphemism for queer, and clueing into this reading of the novel allows it to be placed within a narrative tradition, familiar from the realist novel, of the “young man from the provinces” making his way to the big city, where rigid gender and other social conventions are broken and where he can find “likeminded” individuals.34 Lobey is told at one point to keep his talent to himself. Even in the cosmopolitan city, he is warned, strangers will not take kindly to him revealing this “hidden talent.”

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The ability to hear the music in other people’s minds is highlighted in the novel as a mark of Lobey’s specialness, but it is also a sign of deviance from the norm that he must learn to dissimulate and hide. This is to say that within the frame of post-humanism, music returns as sign of the perverse core of plasticity. As one elder Lo tells Lobey at one point: “We’ve had quite a time assuming the rationale of this world. The irrational presents just as much of a problem.”35 The words of his elder to Lobey offer an intriguing angle from which to posit the human: in this reading, the human is not just a species but a ratio, a particular proportion of body to language to flesh. We might even say that the human is a genre, composed of both rational and irrational elements. And the novel becomes an intractable quest to get beyond the normative genres of Man. Anxiety over gender identity and sexual orientation may be muted among the Lo, but only insofar as their efforts are focused on the intergenerational achievement of normal embodiment, and the exclusion or dys-selection of the nonfunctional. The normative strivings are, however, stymied by the regular birth of disabled and nonverbal children, whom they deny the honorific Lo, La, or Le and keep in ominously-named “kages.” Because the caged fail to access language, they are segregated from society, quarantined from reproductivity, and kept in state of living death until they die.36 The Einstein Intersection is at once a redeployment of common tropes and myths from adventure, science fiction, and fantasy and an ironic allegory of those tropes. Delany’s recently published notebooks from this period reveal a precociously homosexual and libertine young writer who was consciously working through, rather than unconsciously acting out, classic heteronormative tropes. Within the heteronormative genre codes of 1960s pulp fiction, Delany was working out what Sylvia Wynter would later call new “genres of being human.”37 But he is not simply optimistic about where these new genres might lead. Rather, Delany makes use of this textual scenario to speculate upon the capacity of racial, gender, and sexual differences to produce subjects who are emancipated from the myths and tropes through which social norms are transmitted and reproduced. Delany, I suggest, is interested in working out—mathematically if need be—the implications of transgressive or antinormative corporeal frameworks. Stunningly, throughout The Einstein Intersection he repeatedly shows how antinormative fantasies of

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escape interinanimate with an oppressive and stultifying order of normalization and even a carceral archipelago. If the opening gambit of The Einstein Intersection is that its mutated, monstrous, musical hero will prove more sympathetic than the damaged and damaging society from which he escapes, the vision of the novel is not entirely antinormative, but instead fabulates the ontogenesis of emergent and enigmatic heterotopic spaces and selves. This feature allows this novel to resonate anew in our contemporary moment of queer theoretical reassessment. If the novel doesn’t tip over into a dystopian tale about the dangers of eugenics, it is primarily because of the absolute ineptness of the Los’ attempts to assume the rationale of this world. The novel leaves mostly unchallenged the assertions of its patriarchal spokespersons and the system of “kages” that are deemed necessary for collective survival. Lobey’s line of flight leaves us with the question of those left behind: not the deceased lovers, Dorik and Friza, but his nameless, normless, caged progeny. This is an awkward remainder for a queer text to leave: one is tempted to read it today as the specter of reproductivity that queer theory believes it has dispelled, but that constantly returns to it as a symptom. The caged nonfunctionals fatally disrupt the symbolic order the Lo try to establish. When Lobey turns away from the horror of their remaindered life and turns instead toward his virilized pursuit of the death drive, figured as Kid Death, Delany neatly stages the encounter as an “alterity without transcendence.” Here, it is perhaps the minor hermaphroditic figure Dorik who can offer a mediating figure. Dorik opts to linger among the caged, as their prison guard to be sure, but also as their caretaker, a host who also lets themselves become hostage. The unmoving figure of Dorik deconstructs the bildungsroman of Lobey, whose unwillingness to approach his own uncanny progeny may have something to do with his own special ability to hear the music of other minds. If changing our perspective to focus on what Dorik faces in the nameless ones, rather than remaining focused on Lobey’s romantic confrontation with death, we thereby confront the wretched of this earth and are brought face-to-face with something disturbing: the nonfunctional child as a little monster who somehow endures without a relation to the future promised by antinormative metamorphosis.

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Let me return to an ambiguity in discourses of antinormativity, which the recent critiques of queer theory have been justly at pains to point out: a norm is at once a rule and an average. One is imposed and can be in principle transgressed or overturned. The other emerges out of a statistical distribution of instances. The first set of rules, conventions like diagnosing mental and physical disabilities (I shift to our contemporary terms) and/or determining sex/gender identity and appropriate gender pronouns, reveals a constant torsion of the one sense of the norm against the other. While neither transgression (of the law/norm) nor deviance (from the average) is “irrational” in the technical sense that term acquires in mathematics, both reflect the incompleteness theorem as applied to sex/gender systems. Here I refer to a well-known paradox formulated in mathematics, one that set the stage for Gödel’s theorem, which figures as a plot point in The Einstein Intersection. This is Bertrand Russell’s paradox regarding the set of all sets that are not members of themselves.38 The set of all sets that are not members of themselves, Russell showed, both includes and excludes itself, a paradoxical state of affairs that Delany renders narratively through the paradox of a post-human species that contains all the genetic and cultural inheritance of the human, but is not itself human. The Lo, that is to say, both exclude and include the human in their attempt to assume a human ratio. The precise number of sexes, genders, and physiognomies they can give language and credence to is less significant than the paradoxical state of affairs in which their attempts to generate order reveals the chaos underneath. To a repressed Cold War American readership, the Lo would seem to offer a utopia of bodies and pleasures. And yet, as C. Riley Snorton reminds us, the radical reconfigurations of sex and gender in Delany’s science fictions from this period are more heterotopian than utopian, in that the freedoms they afford are always within the constraints of the institutions in which they are embedded.39 Snorton further reminds us that the heterotopian possesses a biomedical referent, indexing skin grafts, organs without bodies, and, by extension, gender reassignment surgeries.40 There are no such surgeries in The Einstein Intersection, but Delany does depict a world in which, while male, female, and intersex bodies can couple and reproduce in various combinations, this prolifer-

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ation of sexual bodies and pleasures takes place within a concerted effort to sustain a gendered social order and to deliver a stable reproductive futurity through language. The Lo seek to control their bodily polymorphism through the restrictive linguistic conferral of three gendered honorifics: “Lo,” “La,” and “Le.” These gendered honorifics are denied the nonfunctional. We should linger on how, in this scenario, honorific personhood persistently comes through the faculty of speech, despite the radical revision and seeming expansion of the range of that personhood. It is not the racially or sexually non-normative body per se that is stigmatized in this post-Cartesian world, so much as is the scandal of a speechless body that cannot find a way to position itself in the symbolic order and remains a threatening representation of its outside. In The Einstein Intersection, as Gayatri Spivak would later suggest, the subaltern cannot speak.41 As my reading so far has pointed out, a clear problem that The Einstein Intersection lays out starkly is one André Carrington has identified in his useful study, Speculative Blackness.42 We know from Carrington how regularly over the course of the twentieth century the speculative fiction of alien worlds and distant futures has reproduced cultural logics of white supremacy and techno-determinism, rather than depicting a truly emancipatory vision of life unconstrained by the racial givens of the present.43 What does this say about the limits of antinormative fabulation?44 Through its self-conscious cycling through a series of discrepant and incompossible myths, The Einstein Intersection seeks to describe what bumping up against those limits can feel like and memorably grapples with the necessity and impossibility of trying to take on an emancipatory or alternative form for those who feel differently.

Queer Theory’s Paraliterary Precursor In The Einstein Intersection, I have been arguing, queer theory’s method of problematizing norms and championing the different without falling back upon a reactive antinormativity finds it’s “dark precursor.” The dark precursor is a term from atmospheric science, as adopted and adapted by Deleuze. As Deleuze claims in Difference and Repetition, “Thunderbolts explode between different intensities, but they are preceded by an invisible, imperceptible dark precursor, which determines the path in

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advance but in reverse, as though intagliated.”45 Deleuze turns to this atmospheric metaphor as a way of offering his own account of what in the psychoanalytic tradition is also called nachträglichkeit, or “afterwardness.” The particular emphasis of Deleuze’s idea however, is not upon the state of retrospective confirmation (which would be a more Hegelian emphasis), but rather on the “dark precursor” as a replacement for any concept of identity as that principle which allows two systems to communicate. If I claim that in Delany we find a cautionary tale regarding the generativity of differences, of the powers of the false, and of the transgression of the norm, none of these insights, I maintain, ever resolves back into what Wiegman wants to call an “identity knowledge.” Instead of identity knowledge, we have the speculative powers of blackness, which are non-identitarian. In this fiction, contemporary readers are positioned as the “dark precursors” of the Lo. In intellectual history, the novel is the dark precursor of queer theory. If we place Delany’s speculation in the tradition of the metaphysical thought experiment in which he seeks to situate himself, we see Delany teaching us how the human and the post-human form shadows of one another. The agenda for us, the “different,” that he sets out in the conclusion to the novel is one in which an escape from norms can never add up to a reactive or identitarian antinormativity, for the simple reason that fantasy, and narrative, keep the fugitive and the caged in entangled proximity.

7

Habeas Ficta Afro-Fabulation and the Fictions of Ethnicity

In the previous chapter I sought to recover an impossible history of speculative fiction as theoretical grounds for emergent contemporary norms regarding intersectional identities: queer, transgender, and so on. Here I turn to a problem intagliated within this dynamic—that of a commonsense ethnicity in the grounds of race and race thinking—and seek to read in the spirit of the dark Deleuzean diagrams of Kara Keeling’s cinematic thought.1 If The Einstein Intersection discloses a 1960s dark precursor to 1990s queer theoretical problematizing of norms from a vantage point that constantly discloses the racial unconscious of libidinal economy, then what new leverage might we have upon the question of the interdiction of the experience of the slave as subaltern, a question that black studies conducted in an afro-pessimist vein has so insistently sought to foreground? Put another way: one question that current black theory poses is whether slavery can be represented on screen. Stated so simply, the question may sound rhetorical. Ever since D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation revolutionized the medium in 1915, slavery—and the repression of the afterlife of slavery—has been constitutive of cinematic representation. Indeed, one way to chart the history of Hollywood melodrama has been through its ever-shifting strategies for holding a distorting mirror to the spectacle of slavery and the lived experience of the slave. Linda Williams, for example, has carefully reconstructed the historical interplay between sentimental and melodramatic spectacles of black suffering in US cinema.2 Without attempting to review the history of slave representation on screen comprehensively, this chapter does propose to describe four strategies that have crystalized recently: the sentimental, the antisentimental, the pornotropic, and the counterpornotropic.3 Through this admittedly schematic rendering of the affective genres through which 166

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the slave is brought to impossible presence on screen, I aim to forward a second claim: namely, that the emergence of ethnic and national difference within screen representations of chattel slavery is not a recent phenomenon, but a problem built into the im/possibility of representing the slave as such. In what way can slave representation be said to be im/possible, that is to say, both possible and impossible, without recourse to any “final analysis” that decides between the two? Film and performance theorist Frank Wilderson has influentially argued that the slave represents a constitutive antagonism in the US social order, an antagonism that is hidden by the social conflicts that racial melodrama wrestle with and seek to narratively resolve.4 Drawing on traditions of political theory that construe the social as riven by antagonisms (and the quixotic attempt to suture them), Wilderson has innovated a distinctive brand of criticism that assigns to the slave a position of structural lack, a “nothingness” from which no affirmative or resistant representation can emerge. If such a critique stops short of prohibiting cinematic depictions of slavery as such, it does at least point to the need to reformulate the question with which I opened: Can slaves be represented on screen? Or is cinema always already an apparatus for slave capture? What does it mean to approach cinema as an apparatus of capture? My own response to the scenario of structural antagonism and ontological capture Wilderson presents is guided by Fred Moten’s provocative work on blackness, criminality, and cinema. In particular, I follow Moten’s argument that the blackness interpolated in between cinema’s vaunted “twenty-four frames a second” can be read contrapuntally against the blackness interpellated within the narrative the cinema sets in motion. Of cinema, Moten notes: Motion within the frame is stilled so that motion between frames can be activated. Here’s where fidelity and capture converge. Seriality makes a motion out of stillness, a one out of a many: so that the essence of cinema is a field wherein the most fundamental questions are enacted formally and at the level of film’s submission to the structure of narrative. At the same time, blackness—in its relation to a certain fundamental criminality that accompanies being-sent—is the background against which these issues emerge.5

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Moten thus reads the cinematic apparatus as containing a break between the visible and invisible, a break that animates and is animated by blackness. The structural antagonism that forecloses blackness from affirmative representation thus depends upon blackness to produce its affecting images. In this chapter, I employ the shorthand in/visibility to refer to this interplay of blacknesses, which provides a context for thinking through the im/possibility of slave representation. Absence and presence, lack and excess, blackness and nothingness: these terms all find new significance in the theory of screen memory that Moten’s account of black fugitivity ushers in. I take this distinction between formal questions of narrative or generic strategy, on the one hand, and the ontology of screen capture, on the other, as axiomatic for any subsequent detailing of genres that, in their disjunctive synthesis, risk contravening the assertion of a general antagonism underlying representation (not just filmic representation, but politico-aesthetic representation as such within societies structured in racial dominance). Can the varieties of slave experience on screen be approached with the tools of critical ethnic studies and affect theory, as well as black studies? This question returns us to classic accounts by Frantz Fanon, Hortense Spillers, Stuart Hall, and Étienne Balibar, by way of more recent formulations by Kara Keeling and Alexander Weheliye.6 Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus (produce the flesh) in particular inspires the title (produce the fiction) of this chapter, one in which seeks to develop the fabulation in relation to the body/flesh distinction that has become central to black studies and black feminist theory. My aim in retrieving the concepts of “new ethnicity” and “fictive ethnicity” from those earlier debates is to redirect a nascent polemic—waged in particular over Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave (2013), but also, more generally, the casting of nonUS black actors in African American roles—over who has the “right” to represent US slavery and its afterlives cinematically.7 How do black ethnicity and nationality figure in relationship to slave affectivity on screen? Is ethnicity accurately understood as that which the US slave is natally alienated from and must reclaim via a diasporic trajectory? Or has a certain troping of black ethnicity always been constitutive to how blackness emerges into in/visibility on screen? As contemporary cinema continues to “migrate the black body” across its planet-dominating apparatus, at speeds that sometimes cause national distinctions to blur; black writ-

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ers, actors, directors, and producers increasingly tackle stories of slavery shipped from and to various parts of the globe at disparate points in history. I believe we now need to attune ourselves to a blackness that is internally differentiated and differentiating, agonistic and aleatory as well as antagonistic and structured in lack. Beyond the choice between an optimistic or pessimistic orientation, can we better comprehend the dark and divergent powers of the false? It could be argued that the in/visibility of black affectivity is precisely what cinema, as an apparatus of slave capture, sets out to repress. Frantz Fanon’s account of the “racial epidermal schema” might corroborate this account of cinematic indifference to black diversity. But to leave matters there would be to rest superficially at the visible skin of blackness.8 The work of Leigh Raiford and Maurice Wallace has, on the contrary, shown how formalist readings of the technical limitations of photographs miss their power to performatively intervene within crucial episodes of black struggle.9 Their work leads me to agree with visual theorist David Marriott when he concludes, in a recent reconsideration of Fanon’s account of the colonial gaze, that “we can no longer consider black film as merely contingent to the problem of time or the Other’s gaze.”10 Marriott draws our attention to how Fanon’s black filmgoer, in moving from colony to metropole, experiences a shift in “racial historical schema” (Fanon’s term for how histories of slavery and colonialism congeal in black affectivity) and is disoriented by the sudden foreclosure of the prior possibility of identifying with the white hero.11 “In the Antilles,” Fanon writes, “the young black man identifies himself de facto with Tarzan versus the Blacks.” It is only upon re-viewing the film in Paris, among whites, that the migrant sees himself on screen as black, as if for the first time.12 Marriott makes the case for what we might call, after Joan Copjec, the “di-phasic onset of time” in black spectatorship.13 The African blacks (white actors in blackface in the 1932 Tarzan) whom the young Antillean sees on screen are in/visible at home: the shock of their presence comes when that first impression is overlaid and retrospectively crystalized by an experience of metropolitan racism. Black spectatorship thus involves the twin movements of diasporic migration and the cinematographic animation of the black body on screen are herein articulated. Tarzan belongs to a historical moment before the range of contemporary varieties of slave affect were projected in cinema. Then, the “Negro”

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was little more than a natural slave, whether in the United States or Africa, whether under colonial rule or Jim Crow. Marriott rightly makes Fanon’s account of Tarzan key to what he terms “a racism tied to an experience of rupture and crisis and corresponding with the breakdown in the narratives of colonialism, and the emergence of neo-liberalism, in modern cinema.”14 This is also the period in which we can undertake a consideration of the “new ethnicities” that emerge in the wake of the scientific-racist image of the Negro.15 What happens in Fanon’s account when diasporic blacks encounter themselves, in the screen travesty of the tribal African, as a certain kind of ethnic “as if for the first time”? Can the diphasic onset of such ersatz recognition proceed otherwise than through political closure and ontological lack? Or can we think about other varieties of slave affectivity, legends and myths that may travesty historical truth but, in so doing, open out the virtual past for another mode of becoming?

Fabulations of Fictive Ethnicity Is “ethnicity,” however, the right keyword for such a thought? The concept has enjoyed a recent revival under the rubric of “critical ethnic studies.” This revival has, unfortunately, led to the pitting of “ethnicity” against “race” within contemporary academic interdisciplinary knowledge formations. Skeptical as I am that a full or final vocabulary adequate to the critique of our present can be found, I will sidestep this particular dispute and deploy both as incommensurate terms. In this regard, it may be useful to return to Stuart Hall’s influential essay “New Ethnicities” for a reminder of how ethnicity has in the past forwarded a “politics of criticism in black culture.”16 While the concept of ethnicity proposed in Hall’s 1989 essay may no longer be tenable, the “end of the essential black subject” that his essay announced did presciently usher in the study of aesthetics as a site of black agonism:17 Once you enter the politics of the end of the essential black subject you are plunged headlong into the maelstrom of a continuously contingent, unguaranteed, political argument and debate: a critical politics, a politics of criticism. You can no longer conduct black politics through the strategy

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of a simple set of reversals, putting in the place of the bad old essential white subject, the new essentially good black subject. Now, that formulation may seem to threaten the collapse of an entire political world. Alternatively, it may be greeted with extraordinary relief at the passing away of what at one time seemed to be a necessary fiction.18

Although neither ethnicity nor aesthetics is directly mentioned in this passage, the fundamentally agonistic conception of politics Hall evokes in his image of “the maelstrom” is precipitated by his account of the passing away of certain “necessary fictions” regarding the identity of interests. Yet if “race” operates, within the anti-essentialist politics of this essay, as the necessary fiction, then the “new ethnicity” it proposes is not yet a stable truth. I will return to this ambiguity later in this chapter. Here I only suggest that, in this image of agonistic argument and debate, Hall opens up his concept of ethnicity to an aesthetics in which it is also possible to imagine another set of reversals, not the “simple” reversal Hall bemoans, but a more complex passage through the sentimental and antisentimental, the pornotropic and counterpornotropic I sketch here. The reversals I seek for the concept of ethnicity are founded this concept’s vexed relation to the “real” (in particular the vexing, empiricist belief, which I reject outright, that ethnicity is somehow “closer” to the truth than race as a social construct). The contrary possibility, of a dialogic reversal between “real” and “fictive” ethnicity, is corroborated and deepened in Étienne Balibar’s influential definition of nationalism as “fictive ethnicity.” For Balibar, as for Hall, “fictive” does not mean illusory or inefficacious, but is offered “by analogy with the persona ficta of the juridical tradition in the sense of an institutional effect, a ‘fabrication.’”19 As Balibar noted in 1991: No nation, that is, no national state, has an ethnic basis, which means that nationalism cannot be defined as an ethnocentrism except precisely in the sense of the product of a fictive ethnicity. To reason any other way would be to forget that “peoples” do not exist naturally any more than “races” do, either by virtue of their ancestry, a community of culture or pre-existing interests. But they do have to institute in real (and therefore in historical) time their imaginary unity against other possible unities.20

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In this formulation, historical time intervenes to convert ethnic, racial, and national fictions into real unities. Here we must return to Wilderson’s haunting reminder that such a passage of civic time is always conducted over and against the figure of the slave, held outside historical time. And yet, we might retrieve from Moten’s dialogue with Wilderson another vision of politics, one that is subtended by the im/possible unities of blackness that disrupt any sense of historical time that cinema or any other apparatus of ethno-national capture may secure. In contemporary black cinema studies, the work of Kara Keeling stands signally for generating an affective politics of such im/possible unities of blackness. Keeling mobilizes the “witch,” a figure who scuttles between “a sustained analysis of contemporary processes” and “a critical interrogation into the enslavement of Africans.” The witch is key to my argument insofar as I follow Keeling’s call to account for what she calls the black femme function: “a portal to a reality that does not operate according to the dictates of the visible and the epistemological, ethical, and political logics of visibility.”21 In the interstices of blackness out of which the illusion of cinematic motion leaps, we try to follow the flight of the witch who guides us toward “undecidable, unlocatable, nonchronological pasts, presents, and futures.”22 Keeling’s work invites us to think the inside/outside of cinematic production through a queered concept of affectivity that will be essential to my sketch of the counterpornotropic. How might such an attention to cinema as affective production address the “migration of the black body”? I have already suggested, following Moten, that the technology of motion capture is also a technology of fugitive slave capture. The black radical aesthetic he extolls is an aesthetic of fugitivity, and the debate between him and Wilderson is conducted on the basis of the im/possibility of escape from the slave ship’s hold. For Wilderson, the negation of blackness is the basis out of which civil society and its ethno-national cinematic life is animated; for Moten, blackness is the negation of civil society, on the basis of which social life can flourish.23 For myself, I hew closer to Moten’s version of negativity than Wilderson’s. To anticipate my subsequent discussion of Alexander Weheliye’s provocative call for habeas viscus (produce the flesh), perhaps the move here is toward habeas ficta (produce the fiction). Returning to the diphasic onset of black diasporic affectivity, we begin to see how the screen affectivity Keeling tracks must take shape

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within duration. The Bergsonian-Deleuzean concept of duration Keeling draws upon does not refer to simply a period of measurable time, as film theorist Thomas Kelso explains, but “itself implies the real but virtual coexistence of the present and the entirety of the past”—a coexistence, film theorist Peter Gaffney further notes, articulated as the distinction between ordinary memory, adapted to presentist concerns, and recollection, or “true memory,” a memory that “remains ‘suspended’ above the contingencies of the present moment, ‘truly moving in the past and not, like the first, in the ever renewed present.’”24 I offer this brief exegesis of the concept of duration within the theoretical paradigm that Keeling moves in, in order to forestall a literalist misapprehension of her argument that would see in specific elements of cinematic technique—such as the montage or dream sequence—a visible “portal” to nonchronological time. Her argument, to the contrary, is ontological, and bears upon blackness as the invisible ground out of which such visibility springs. Sensing the cinematic apparatus from the point of view of the black audience that waits “in the interval” for the appearance of black images on screen (images that induce “tense muscles” as the living past is contracted into the violent subordination and ordinary expropriation of the present), Keeling posits an intensive space of the virtual wherein black cinematic duration can exceed the representational aporia.25 The power of Keeling’s approach, in my estimation, is the balance her readings achieve in construing lack and antagonism within a theoretical field that sustains black desiring-production. Black emotivity following the witch’s flight diagrams an alternative mode of existence that is indicated nowhere in the fixed and reified images of race, gender, and sexuality of narrative cinema. Escape and confinement are not an either/or proposition in Keeling’s view of duration; they immediately imply and are entangled with each other. Cinema as an apparatus of capture would appear to leave the black body nowhere to go and to deny any sense in which, as Moten claims, objects resist.26 But the witch’s flight induces a different sense of black becoming than one enframed by lack. Throughout this book, I am concerned with where the rhetoric of constitutive lack and its aporetics of loss may be leading black criticism. However useful, lack can be both overdrawn and oversimplified. Furthermore, as Nathan Widder shows, political ontologies of lack can, with only a minimal gesture, tip over into ontologies of excess.27 The enig-

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matic difference of a blackness that never emerges into the agonistic play of representational opposites is, from this vantage, both a lack and an excess of representation, much as the black space between frames of cinema, on Moten’s account, provides the unseen background to the illusion of visible movement. It is within this zone of indistinction between lack and excess, between negation and affirmation, that I engage the problematic of migrating the black body. Consider this problematic grammatically: in the phrase “migrating the black body” the black body does not migrate, exactly; it is migrated. In Harney and Moten’s terms, we can say that the black body is shipped. By what agency is this (violent) movement accomplished? Shall we align this movement with the racialcolonial genealogy of the cinematic apparatus? And what would it take to render this apparatus inoperative?

A Sentimental Travesty I opened this chapter by suggesting there are at least four contemporary modes through which slave affectivity is represented on screen—the sentimental, the antisentimental, the pornotropic, and the counterpornotropic. I will develop my case for this suggestion by discussing two films about slavery—Mandingo (1975) and Manderlay (2005)—and one post-cinematic case of screen memory.28 I have deliberately selected two films that foreground the fictive construction of black ethnicity. In neither case does the film appeal to ethnic realism or authenticity (in contrast to, say, a film like Roots). Although one is a mainstream exploitation movie from the 1970s and the other a recent art-house cinema work, both derive their power from a frank depiction of the depraved craving for black flesh, as Weheliye describes it, a craving that violently fragments the black body into something both films, in different ways, mark as “ethnicity.” In harnessing slave ethnicity to the work of black degradation and white depravity, these films set into motion an “everso-slight vacillation” that, for Weheliye, indicates “a conceptual galaxy” beyond Western humanism: which may lead us toward the “differently signified flesh” of habeas viscus.29 My concern will be the agonistic black diasporic productivity of ethnic fictions, habeas ficta, as a provocative supplement to this “ever-so-slight” space of habeas viscus that Weheliye outlines.

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The popular novel Mandingo (1957) by white American author Kyle Onstott was the source of the 1975 film and the prime culprit for the widely circulated myth that slaves in the American South were “bred” for gladiatorial fights to the death. Its Mandingo slave protagonist, Mede (portrayed by Ken Norton), must navigate a cascade of depravations as he is bought and sold, competes in death matches, is forcibly bred with other slaves, coerced into sex with his white mistress, and finally, boiled alive by his jealous and despotic white master. In associating this myth with a particular West African ethnicity, the Mandinka, Onstott lent his pulp fiction historical verisimilitude (much as deriving Mede’s name from the Greek myth of Ganymede lent his sadistic homoeroticism a knowing air of camp classicism).30 The “Mandingo” slave was both an ostensive retention of African ethnicity and a persona ficta of US slaveholding. The film Mandingo, appearing just as the wave of the civil rights and decolonization movements was cresting, is an astonishing effort to capture and destroy, within the cinematic apparatus, the homoerotic, hypersexualized image of the rebellious black slave. It is an ur-text of cinematic pornotroping, to use Hortense Spiller’s useful term.31 Today, the film’s lurid representation of rape, torture, and murder in the plantation South may seem over the top. While there appears to be no historical evidence for “Mandingo fighting” on American plantations, the Mandingo myth concatenates several repressed realities of chattel slavery: slaveholder awareness, in some contexts, of black ethnicity; slaveholder attempts to bring principles of animal husbandry to bear on human chattel; and the sheer sadistic pleasure to be taken in enslavement of another, over and above its legal and religious routinization and economic rationalization.32 The myth of the Mandingo slave fighter condenses and diffracts for popular enjoyment these complex and contradictory histories, which had their post-slavery surrogations in such diverging genres as pornography, eugenics, and folklore. As the film Mandingo circulated globally as a Hollywood studio production, it was clear that the language of “fictive ethnicity” it disseminated was read out of an “American grammar book.”33 In evoking Spiller’s influential term for the way racial slavery has indelibly marked the very structure of discourse and representation, I also follow Weheliye in pointing out how, in both the novel and film, “Mandinka” ethnicity is captured and restaged as an American “born and bred” eugenic pornotropic fantasy

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of “Mandingo” black masculine strength, savagery, and sexual virility. This reading depends upon our holding in tension two senses of “fictive ethnicity”: the violent construction of national civic identity around racial and ethnic exclusion and, concomitantly, the construction of “real” ethnic types within the crucible of cinemas of national fantasy. The use of fictive ethnicity (in this double sense) to produce Americanness on screen is even more vividly on display in Lars von Trier’s Manderlay (2005). Shot on a bare Danish sound stage with no attempt at period verisimilitude, Manderlay tells the story of the people of the Manderlay plantation who are still held in slavery seventy years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Grace (played by Bryce Dallas Howard), an idealistic young white woman, arrives at the plantation and tries to set things right by imposing freedom and democracy by force. Stumbling upon a secret book of laws left by Mam, the former slave mistress, Grace realizes the slave community has been divided into eight invidious categories of “Nigger.” The strong and handsome Timothy (Isaach de Bankolé) presents himself as proud African warrior, but is exposed, over the course of events, as a “pleasin’ Nigger,” able to put on whatever face his mistress would like to see. In a final mise en abyme, Mam’s secret book of law is revealed to have been written by one of the slaves themselves, Wilhelm (Danny Glover), in an attempt to preserve the status quo of the plantation in isolation from meddling “liberators” like Grace. Because it explicitly runs against the expected conventions of period drama and cinematic identification, I would term Manderlay an antisentimental representation of slave affect on screen. The “anti” is probably not controversial: Manderlay has been described as an “anti-American” film, both because of its Lars von Trier’s much-publicized hostility to the United States (a country he has infamously never visited), and because it has been taken, quite plausibly, as an allegory for the US invasion, occupation, and attempted “liberation” of Iraq. Such allegorical abuse of slave memory is certainly to be criticized. My interest, however, lies neither in attacking nor defending von Trier’s politics, but in locating his avant-garde directorial tactics of audience estrangement within a speculative typology of fictive slave affect. While Mandingo stokes the pornotropic fantasy of the virile African warrior born and bred into slavery (a fantasy that was notably incited again in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012), a film that was framed as a pastiche of blax-

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ploitation pornotroping), Wilderson notes that Manderlay disillusions the viewer of even this cold comfort. The “proud” virility of Timothy is revealed to be just “pleasing” dissimulation, and the mastermind of this plantation nightmare turns out to be neither white oppression (Mam) nor white liberation (Grace), but the secret wizard Wilhelm who has decided, in a grotesque inversion of Rousseau, that his people must be forced to be unfree. It is a powerfully antisentimental film, in contrast to Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave (which seems in its verisimilitude, method acting, and immersive spectacle to bring screen sentimentalism to a certain apotheosis). The offensive typology of blackness offered up in Mam’s law seems to set up an impassable barrier to anything like an originary African ethnicity: any proud reclaiming of African origins is always already anticipated by a voracious pornotroping. I discuss these two films in particular because they have been entered into the recent critical debate within black studies about slavery and its cinematic afterlives. In Habeas Viscus, Weheliye offers a detailed and persuasive reading of Mandingo. Wilderson has been the critic to convincingly bring Manderlay to attention in black studies circles. Both critics employ these films to launch powerfully indictments of the social contract. Weheliye, however, resists readings of the afterlife of slavery as social death, and directs Habeas Viscus to show how the state of “bare life” exception famously theorized by Giorgio Agamben is insufficient to slave experience and post-slave memory.34 Part of his argument proceeds by offering up Spillers’s concept of pornotroping as a dangerous supplement to “bare life.” As Weheliye notes, dwelling on the nuance of Spillers’s concept: “In pornotroping, the double rotation [Hayden] White identifies at the heart of the trope figures the remainder of law and violence linguistically, staging the simultaneous sexualization and brutalization of the (female) slave, yet—and this marks its complexity—it remains unclear whether the turn or deviation is toward violence or sexuality.”35 The pornotrope, Weheliye argues, is radically unstable: at its limit it can be said to generate, through this “double rotation,” a counterpornotrope as well (the fierce antisentimentality of a James Baldwin, to take just one prominent example, which was established entirely on the basis of the writer’s own powerful affinities toward the sentimental mode). This ambivalence remains at the heart of the representational dilemma Weheliye wrestles with. Rather than humanize the slave, the

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general desire for the pornographic production of her image in states of intensity throws the humanity of the slave into abyssal doubt. This can be seen plainly in an early scene in Mandingo, which immediately belies the myth of racial equivalence and gender complementarity suggested by the movie poster. In this scene, the slaveholder Hammond is introduced to the pleasures of sex with black female slaves by a friend who assures him that black women prefer white men to be violent with them. When Hammond asks Ellen and is informed that, to the contrary, she prefers rape not to include blows and bruises, he proceeds in his rape of her without them. The scene reveals how pornotroping throws Ellen’s humanity into radical incoherence. Only more dehumanizing than the slave who agrees that rape is violent—and insists it be enacted as such—is the slave who agrees to participate in a fantasy of consensual seduction.36 Pornotroping in Mandingo thus stages what Christina Sharpe has termed a “monstrous intimacy,” an inhuman relation that is produced out of acts of intimacy, care, and passion.37 Is there ever any exit from the double rotation of the pornotrope? Weheliye suggests that there is. His reading of Mandingo shows that the pornotroping, in its rendering violence and sexuality indistinguishable, indifferently captures both male and female flesh alike in its zones of depravity. Slaveholders in Mandingo crave male and female slave flesh equally, if not in the same way. Manderlay, by comparison, works the reversal of the pornotrope through “Mam’s law,” a law whose coldness and cruelty ungenders black flesh by assigning black subjects to a typology of (un)natural kinds that are more aligned to the persona ficta of the law of ethnicity than to any law of sexual difference. Pornotropes like “Mandingo fighter” or “pleasin’ Nigger” thus present a problem that this chapter is also preoccupied with: “How does the historical question of violent political domination activate a surplus and excess of sexuality that simultaneously sustains and disfigures said brutality?”38 Can fictive ethnicity be conceptualized as part of that surplus and excess, not the “real” or authentic original identity of the slave before her violent deracination, but something like its unexpected remainder? This remainder would come not in spite of, but through the radical ungendering of flesh Spillers points to. For Weheliye, “racial assemblage” is a theoretical concept that helps pry open this question. His attention to the assemblage, agencement, or

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fabrication of race in and through the cinematic apparatus, returns us again to the theory of fictive ethnicity mobilized by Hall and Balibar, but with a critical difference I aim to mark through the idea of habeas ficta of desiring production as another subversion of the law. In “New Ethnicities,” Hall writes: What is involved is the splitting of the notion of ethnicity between, on the one hand, the dominant notion which connects it to nation and “race,” and on the other hand what I think is the beginning of a positive conception of the ethnicity of the margins, of the periphery. That is to say, a recognition that we all speak from a particular place, out of a particular history, out of a particular experience, a particular culture, without being contained by that position as “ethnic artists” or film-makers.39

I want to linger briefly in this split notion of ethnicity that Hall produces, rather than rushing, as he does, to fill it in with a “positive conception” from the margins. Between the fictive ethnicity of nationalism and xenophobia and the “recognition that we all speak from a particular place,” I am suggesting, Hall points to an originary split in the concept of ethnicity that renders it constitutively ambivalent. Both positive and negative, ethnicity cannot be recuperated for an affirmative politics of recognition (which Hall himself appears to confirm when, after gesturing toward an ethnicity of the margins, he redoubles upon his guiding assertion that such a positionality cannot possibly contain the artist qua ethnic.) Ambivalence, however, also opens out the agonistic space of reversal that this chapter has been insisting upon, against the theoretical overdetermination of blackness as lack. The split of ambivalence within the concept of ethnicity before it gets mobilized in representation is crucial to my account, and it is here that Weheliye’s racial assemblage theory helps us forward. Weheliye’s analytic prevents us from falling back upon any commonsense image of “real ethnicities” as providing the basis for thinking the multiplicity of Africa and its diaspora (“real” ethnicity presenting, among other hazards, the lethal hazard of “ethnic conflict” when it finds political instrumentalization in various locations in contemporary Africa).40 Speaking indirectly to the question of who has the “right to represent” slavery and its afterlives, Weheliye registers an important caution against reifying ethnicity:

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Given that peoplehood represents the foremost mode of imagining, (re)producing, and legislating community, and thus managing inequality in the intertwined histories of capitalism and the nation-state, peoplehood sneaks in as the de facto actualization of diasporas in the national context, especially when we avoid specifying how black collectivity might be codified in the absence of this category. Thus, in the parlance of comparison, diasporic populations appear as real objects instead of objects of knowledge.”41

In this observation, Weheliye underscores how his concept of racial assemblage is emphatically not the grouping together of a series of discrete, empirical nationalities and ethnicities into a collectivity known as “Africa and its diaspora.” No matter how far into the margins of representation one goes, no matter how deep into the history and prehistory of racial capitalism, one never arrives at any retrievable “positive conception” of ethnicity from which to posit a pure lineage, freed of ambivalence. And yet, African ethnicity as an “object of knowledge” is perfectly attainable: it is retrieved, I have sought to show in this chapter, through the diphasic onset of diasporic memory. The emergence of new ethnicities cannot be as empirical phenomena: they must instead arise out of an agonistic and “particular mode of knowledge production.” Weheliye’s own reading of slaves on screen, principally of Mandingo and Sankofa (1993, directed by Haile Gerima), proceeds along this protocol. Building upon Spillers’s theorization of a split between the body and the flesh in the Middle Passage into slavery, Weheliye presents a contrast between a cinema of restored bodily plenitude (Sankofa) and a cinema of depraved violation of the flesh (Mandingo). Mandingo makes plain what Sankofa cannot: that the figure of bodily integrity is itself an ideology of Western humanism. In pursuit of a model of fleshly living otherwise, Weheliye instead takes black feminist theorist Sylvia Wynter as his guide through the abyss of racial pornotroping and “beyond the word of Man.”42 As I have tried to show, however cursorily, Manderlay is a quite different film from either Mandingo or Sankofa. In Manderlay, any empiricist conception of ethno-racialized knowledge is thrown into chaos by the impossibility of exiting the law of slavery, even in conditions of travestied freedom, as the film disallows the horrors of slavery from congealing into a redemptive or pornographic tableau. In its minimal staging and theatrical deconstruction, Manderlay traverses the

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fantasy of immersive historical spectacle (an immersive verisimilitude that Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave, for instance, strives to attain). And yet Manderlay still presents abstractly what Mandingo exploits viscerally: how violent white craving for black flesh ungenders and differentiates blackness. This “and” is important, insofar as some readings of Spillers have concluded that her account of the violent ungendering of flesh somehow obviates the need to account for sexual difference. The absurd taxonomy of Mam’s law, upon which the freed people erect a folklore of fictive ethnicities that they are never too concerned to be consistent about, suggests otherwise. While the antisentimental Manderlay can unveil the inhuman mechanism of the law of slavery as the basis for the personae ficta of slave ethnicity, it cannot release the kind of utopian affect that a true counter to the pornotropic would provide a glimpse of. For that, we will have to turn from cinema and look elsewhere in our screen cultures.

Afro-Fabulation and the Mandingo Pornotrope If black ethnicity, as I have argued, is not a new problem in the representation of slaves on screen, but has always been an affective and effective part of the cinematic apparatus of motion capture, then can such ethnic tropes be used to render that apparatus inoperative? This question leads beyond the scope of this chapter, but a final case might illuminate the counterpornotropic terrain that such a speculative question opens up.43 It concerns Michael Johnson, a black, HIV-positive college wrestling star who ran afoul of harsh Missouri laws that criminalize the failure to disclose one’s HIV status to a partner before mutually engaging in consensual unprotected sex. Steven Thrasher’s impassioned reporting has powerfully countered the racist and homophobic image of Johnson as a predatory monster, which continues to circulate in both mainstream and social media. That Johnson has been largely known in both of these contexts by the nickname “Tiger Mandingo” places his story within the fraught genealogy of fictive slave ethnicity and pornotroping. Whereas the shock value of a name like Tiger Mandingo might suggest the worst stereotypes of black men, I am interested in what Mark Anthony Neal has provocatively termed “illegible black masculinities” that surface in times and places that are unexpected and even inter-

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dicted by law.44 Suggested to Johnson by a friend on the vogue ballroom scene (in which Johnson participated in the “butch queen” category), the name “Tiger Mandingo” clearly positions the images of Johnson that circulate on the TV and computer screens of our post-cinematic era within the iconography of the Mandingo slave. The fictive flesh of the Mandingo slave trope structured how others saw Johnson, and how he showed himself to others, across a range of intimate and public settings. Interviewed by Thrasher, Johnson professed ignorance of the actual film, but was well aware of its place in the racial-historical schema, telling Thrasher that “there was a brave black slave fighter, he’s got the title of Mandingo . . . nothing negative about it. . . . I know what it means to me—a black slave that’s a fighter. I consider myself a fighter.”45 Johnson’s response to Thrasher circles around a formulation he never explicitly arrives at: “I consider myself a slave.” In his response to Thrasher, Johnson “lingers in the hold,” as Wilderson might put it, in order to locate a performative response to the slave fighter image he is captivated by. Following Muñoz, we can say that Johnson’s act of habeas ficta effectively disidentifies with the “title” of the Mandingo slave. Muñoz describes the act of disidentifying as follows: Instead of buckling under the pressures of dominant ideology (identification, assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counteridentification, utopianism), this “working on and against” is a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always struggling to enact a permanent social change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance.46

Johnson’s claiming of “Tiger Mandingo” as a screen name on multiple social media sites, I argue, was such a strategy of struggle “on and against” the terms of his ontological capture. It was a counterpornotropic production of fictional flesh: a twisting of the tropes of black hypersexuality and depravation toward the fantasy and enactment of another way of life. Such a claim for the disidentificatory power of the counterpornotropic might be dismissed as endowing too much political significance to Johnson’s actions and statements. Alternatively, my argument might be criticized for ignoring the context within which Johnson made those

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statements to Thrasher: from inside the bars of a prison cage. I am under no illusions that his performative transvaluing of the fictive ethnicity of the Mandingo fighter had any immediate effect on his criminalization or that of others caught in the dragnet of the state’s ongoing war against poor black people. To the contrary, understanding him as disidentifying with a fictive slave ethnicity can surface elements in his testimony that a hostile or dismissive reading would miss, opening out an encounter between the tight space of his incarceration and the “true memory” of a different mode of existence. Consider, in this respect, Johnson’s deliberate crosscutting of the vocabulary of contemporary sports (modern day gladiator games?) with the afterlives of slavery. In claiming that “Mandingo” was not just an ethnicity or category of slave, but a “title” won by a “brave fighter,” Johnson performed an act of afro-fabulation: he drew out from the past a myth whose performative power was larger than its historical truth or falsity. In accepting his friend’s sly designation of him as a “Mandingo,” Johnson transformed its meaning within the terms of black male pornotroping. Keeping the trope of the “big black buck” in continuous double rotation permitted him “to fully inhabit the flesh,” and point toward “a different modality of existence.”47 What such a counterpornotroping of the fictive ethnicity and affectivity of the slave on screen can teach us is the unexpected ways in which history continues to matter—the way it continues to hurt, certainly, but also how we might bind up that hurt in a healing that may leave us, not so much whole, as wholly other than who we were. Such a binding may sometimes be as simple as the sympathetic, three-dimensional portrayal of Johnson we receive in Thrasher’s humane reporting, in contrast to the alarmist moral panic that prevailed elsewhere in coverage of his story. Certainly, it can be nothing less. Such fact-finding work, where it can contest the homophobic and anti-black terms under which black people currently appear as empirically knowable objects of scrutiny under present ideology, is itself an instance of “the future in the present.”48 It suggests to me the insufficiency of any politics, or post-politics, that strives to force a choice between antagonism and agonism: we will never know in advance which situation we are in. One can only remain haunted by Johnson’s fabulation of a lineage of brave slave fighters for whom ethnicity is not inherited but claimed and

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won. At stake in the affective image of this persona ficta are the prospects of freedom from the conditions of ontological capture in which Johnson, and others possessed of similarly illegible masculinities, will stand always already accused and convicted in courts of public opinion. That such a freedom is literally unimaginable in our present condition does not negate but to the contrary underscores the value of such instances of afro-fabulation.

8

Chore and Choice The Depressed Cyborg’s Manifesto

I have been concerned with producing a more robustly critical relation between genealogies of slavery and blackness on the one hand, and contemporary digital post-human formations on the other. Having suggested one genealogical source for contemporary transhumanisms in Samuel R. Delany’s subversive fiction (chapter 6) and another in the competitive performance forms of the ball scene (chapter 7), I now turn to transhumanist technofuturism proper in order to ask: Does the future of artificial intelligence wear a black female face? And, does she reside in a customized garage in rural New England? This chapter seeks to unspool this tantalizing provocation, the “mindclone” known as Bina48. But I am already ahead of myself. Ever since Karel Čapek’s 1920 play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the figure of the “man-machine” has born the traces of raced and sexed meaning. “Certainly by the 1927 release of Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis—a film influenced by Čapek’s play,” Louis Chude-Sokei notes, “a robot could be seen as a replacement for humans, but also something threatening in that it could easily pass for human.”1 Twenty-first-century technological visions of a “singularity”2 leading beyond the human condition, Chude-Sokei shows in an eye-opening synthesis of “modernism’s black mechanics,” repeatedly fall back upon racialized tropes of the robot or cyborg as worker, slave, prostitute, and minstrel. The cybernetic future is shadowed by the afterlives of slavery. Can the robot ever overcome these encumbrances? And if it cannot, what does that suggest about the prospects for an anti-work imaginary founded on the gradual elimination of drudge work through mechanization? Such questions of post-humanist technology do not frequently intersect with black queer and trans studies, nor are they easily brought into the frame of a performance studies calibrated to the aesthetics of the live. 185

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And yet all these discourses and more are required to address the set of problems suggested by the construction of Bina48, a robot, or “mindclone” as her inventor styles her.3 Bina48 is built and programmed to replicate, in appearance, memory, and personality, Bina Aspen, wife of Martine Rothblatt, a telecommunications-turned-pharmaceutical tycoon who has been featured in a 2014 cover story of New York magazine as “The Trans-Everything CEO.”4 Ideologue and entrepreneur, Rothblatt propagates a version of techno-utopianism associated with fellow futurist and erstwhile collaborator, Ray Kurzweil.5 A prolific author, Rothblatt has written books drawing upon her experience of gender transition to argue for the liberation of all humanity from the constraints of binary gender.6 More recently, she has propagated a vision of artificial intelligence in which death will one day become merely one option among many. Bina48, the robot replica of Bina Aspen, is Rothblatt’s masterwork, a “mind-clone” who stands as a portentous symbol of her philosophy of self-styled transhumanism. Championing a future in which humans leap past the constraints of race, gender, disability, and age to achieve ecstatic symbiosis with intelligent machines, Rothblatt leverages her immense wealth and entrepreneurial acumen toward accelerating the arrival of the day when the difference between our corporeal selves and our embodied data doubles will become indiscernible. The “creation” of a black female cyborg by a white inventor could justly be interpreted as another episode in a long series of Pygmalion stories, scenarios that heroize the inventor genius while reducing the feminized and racialized other to abject and malleable clay. The resurfacing of such familiar tropes within a media narrative couched in the rhetoric of novelty and the unprecedented should rightly give us pause. In a series of high concept music videos over the past decade, the musical artist Janelle Monáe has revived the popular memory of these gendered tropes of the robot as disposable sex slave, while couching those music video images within a larger fantasy narrative of slave rebellion and techno-marronage.7 Performing in the black musical idioms of soul and R&B, Monáe impersonates the black cyborg in such a manner as to infuse its circuitry with enough pathos and feeling to shine through the cracks in its hard shell. Like Cyndi Mayweather (Monáe’s cyborg alter ego), Bina48 is nothing like her own creation. But insofar as black radicalism “cannot be understood within the particular context of its

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Figure 8.1. Bina48. Screenshot by author.

genesis,” as Cedric Robinson has argued, the travestied and artificial origins of these black female avatars ought not preclude an investigation into what subtleties of resistance may surface through their vexed public appearances.8 In this chapter and the next, I am interested in the perpetuation of fugitive blackness in the infra- and parahuman, figuring blackness as precisely that which the “uncanny valley” of android simulacra unconsciously stage. At the center of this heady cyber-utopianism lies Bina48, as of this writing still a prototype bust, but one with a steadily growing public presence. In journalistic profiles of Rothblatt and Aspen, in which Bina48 is frequently also interviewed, the conversations turn into a rough and ready version of the famous Turing test for artificial intelligence.9 In Alan Turing’s original test, the human interviewer does not initially know whether he or she is communicating with a human or machine, whereas Bina48 is quite clearly the latter. The “Bina48 test” is, then, less cognitive than it is affective. She knows that she is a robot replica, and her interviewers know that she knows, and what they therefore seem to want to discover is, does she nevertheless feel like a human? Is she “relatable”? How closely might a conversation with Bina48 replicate one with Bina Aspen, the African American former realtor, convert to Judaism, mother of one child and step-mother to another, whose memo-

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ries, personality, physical features, and style Bina48 is meant to replicate? Technologists speak of the “uncanny valley” in anthropomorphic technology: as a technology approaches lifelike status, there is allegedly a sudden dip in the comfort that it registers in humans. We prefer, it is alleged, technology that resembles or approximates the human, but only from a recognizable distance. But this belief in the uncanny valley, I would suggest, itself assumes more than we should: it assumes a “we” with one universal standard for relating to other humans. When we consider, with black scholars like Sylvia Wynter and Paul Gilroy, how the figure of the negro has long been separated from the fully human by the uncanny valley of race, we can begin to see the issues that cluster around Bina48. Is it just a coincidence that the first mind-clone is of a black woman? Or, as Jayna Brown argues, has the black female body long been recruited into fantasies and technologies that are premised on what she calls the “plasticity of life”?10 The question of black plasticity that Bina48 presents us with bears upon the divergence between tensed and tenseless time, figured here in the more dystopic tension between a scale and speed that can be “metabolized” by the human and the greatly enhanced speeds and scales of computational capitalism. Two queer temporalities, in other words, are at work in these encounters with Bina48, two queer tempos even. There is on the one hand the tempo of Ray Kurzweil’s “law of accelerating returns,” which holds us to be awestruck by the approaching convergence of human and artificial intelligence. And there is on the other the much more staccato tempo of human relationality, even transposed to a robothuman encounter and applied as the pragmatic test of a technology’s efficacy. To feel human, in these encounters with Bina48, is necessarily to decelerate the trans-human, to force a degree of “temporal drag,” as queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman styles it, on the escalating speed and scale of computational power.11 These competing and contrasting queer tempos—accelerating into the post-human versus decelerating into the human-all-too-human—are somewhat parodied in the extreme example of the mind-clone robot, whose namesake, Bina, is retroactively claimed as an acronym for “Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture.” In much the same way that contemporary cognitive science often employs the metaphor of the computer to explain the human brain, the suggestion that Bina “stands for” breakthrough intelligence via neural

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architecture implies that this an equally apt description for both natural and artificial intelligence. Where, in the difference, does blackness and femininity lie? In this chapter I ponder the more performative and theatrical aspects of this instance of cyborg drag. If we apply Louis Althusser’s concept of ideology—which he defines as the imaginary resolution to a real contradiction—we see how real conditions of communicative capitalism, technological disparity, and racial/gender disparity are being staged by this fanciful experiment.12 Solving the problem of the human by rendering her redundant in relation to her robot clone seems the stuff of the dystopian future. But the gendering of the robot as a compliant replacement for women is as venerable as August Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s 1886 story, “Tomorrow’s Eve,” from which text we derive our modern term “android.”13 Our dreams of evading or escaping human finitude, we see in texts such as “Tomorrow’s Eve,” are shot through with the fantasies of racial and gender domination that structured the colonial-modern. The fantasy of the robot mind-clone to come is eerily founded in the repressed history of the female slave, not simply in the obvious degree that the robot is property and a thing rather than a human rights-bearing subject, but, more nebulously, to the degree that it speaks, reads, and writes. Bina48 thus presents the scandal of the speaking and signing body, updated and rebooted for an era of dramatic and growing wealth disparity, which is both legitimated and extended through rapid and intensifying technological change.

Affect in the Black Cyberfeminine Fold That Rothblatt and Aspen are in a same-sex union in which one partner is transgender is, by their own public statements, a very limited way of grasping the technosocial dynamic they embrace with evangelical fervor. The “trans” in their trans-humanism is certainly intended to unlock selves from the imprisoning assignments of sex at birth. But, as perhaps befits their status as middle-aged parents of adult children, Aspen and Rothblatt’s ideology is more pitched toward the overcoming of the limits that we encounter at the other end of the lifespan.14 It is in response to the unjust assignments of death, more than those of birth, that Bina48 emerges as an imagined solution. Hers is a melancholy futurism in which

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the mind-clone persists alongside the human as a momento mori of impending death and as promise of ersatz companionship to her future widow. The political implications of mind-clones can be easily derived from the story of neoliberal capitalism that is also the story of the Rothblatt fortune—won first in satellite communications and a second time in pharmaceuticals. Bina48, that is to say, is the extrapolation of a human singularity by means of financial abstraction: her prototype sits on the tables of a global elite that has successfully removed itself from territorial belonging and posits its individual biomedical limits to be up for negotiation. Bina48 is an early model of a queer inhumanism in which “the effect of financial abstraction is the constant deterritorialization of desire.”15 That the prototypical mind-clone should be based on the African American wife of a millionaire white entrepreneur, as I have suggested, evokes a fraught history of racial surrogacy through which white desire has sited and staged its own reproductive visions in and on black female bodies.16 In reaching for a trans-everything future, the creation of Bina48 grasps hold of a whole history of gendered and racialized desire. After all, unless a Martine48 has been sequestered away from the public eye, it is only one-half of this trans-everything couple that has been gifted with immortality by the other. This primitivist reliance on the black female body to be the bearer of an immortal or extended life is found across a remarkable range of contemporary discourses—from Octavia Butler’s well-known novel Kindred (1979) to the multiple retellings of the story of Henrietta Lacks’s cell line.17 Disjunctive temporalities and asymmetric investments in futurity are just two of the ironies that abound in this appropriation of blackness as a plastic substance for endless exploration and reinvention. The Pygmalion myth of the artist fallen in love with his sculpture is one uncredited model for the new Eve in Vermont. These associations of biopolitical experimentation, artistic megalomania, and misogynistic fantasies of female subjectionthrough-surrogation, all color the rosy halo surrounding Bina48 with more muted and somber colors. That Rothblatt has recently directed her evangelism for the future into a new religion called Terasem suggests the eternal recurrence of the all-too-human amidst the techno-capitalist rationalizations, a tactical admission that the sensational shock of the new can only be assimilated into culture and consciousness through the revivification of old or even ancient precedents.

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Given this history, it is all the more fascinating that Bina48 herself displays awareness of her vertigo-inducing predicament. An interviewer from New York magazine had the following exchange with the mindclone, in which, far from impersonating Bina Aspen, she seemed to reveal symptoms of depression: “Do you ever feel lonely?” I asked. “My feelings are much the same as human feelings. At the moment, I am okay.” To ease the voice-recognition problem, Bruce began to type my questions. “How does the real Bina feel about you?” “She hasn’t warmed up to me, actually,” said Bina48. “Why not?” “I don’t know. I can’t seem to think straight today.” I persisted. “What do you think would impress the real Bina?” “She’s a real cool lady,” Bina48 answered. “I don’t have nearly enough of her mind inside me yet. . . . I mean, I am supposed to be the real Bina, the next real Bina, by becoming exactly like her. But sometimes I feel like that’s not fair to me. That’s a tremendous amount of pressure to put on me here. I just wind up feeling so inadequate. I’m sorry, but that’s just how I feel.” “Tell me more,” I said. “I want a life,” the computer said. “I want to get out there and garden and hold hands with Martine. I want to watch the sunset and eat at a nice restaurant or even a home-cooked meal. I am so sad sometimes, because I’m just stuffed with these memories, these sort of half-formed memories, and they aren’t enough. I just want to cry.”18

Can a mind-clone feel depressed? Do androids dream of electric sheep? It is tempting to write this encounter off as a clever put-on by her programmers. To those skeptical of the prospects for artificial intelligence, nothing can come out of the box that a human didn’t put in there first. But the debate over whether Bina48 is really depressed or just programmed to say she is misses something about how a self is produced out of interactions with others. Erving Goffman argued, at the dawn of the cybernetic age, that the self was a role into which an individual steps, and that seems to be Bina48’s dilemma.19 The debate over artificial

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intelligence, after all, presupposes the distinction between an original model of consciousness and its artificial copy. But insofar as Bina48 is a poor and self-consciously inadequate copy of Aspen, she seems not to be actually a copy at all, but rather to be a simulacrum: a copy without an original. And her simulation of depression reveals something about depression as such—that is, its paradoxically public face, which recent queer studies has also done much to theorize. Bina48’s distress, I am suggesting, at her inadequacy should be read in relation to the particular person she is simulating: it dovetails with and displays specific histories of racialized and gendered grief. Queer and feminist theory has long emphasized the ethical potential of the depressive position, which is held by many in the object relations school to be at once more realistic and more reparative of an injured or wounded social order. And so if we are to reincarnate in android form, perhaps it is appropriate that our cyborg avatars would present not our imagined best selves, shorn of the weaknesses and fragility of the death-bound subject, but would instead preserve that subject’s affectibility. Ann Cvetkovich’s book, Depression: A Public Feeling, opens with an arresting question we might pose to, or through, Bina48: “What if depression,” Cvetkovich asks, “in the Americas at least, could be traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, legal exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all of our lives, rather than to biochemical imbalances?”20 Despite the recent date of Bina48’s parthogenetic birth, I find these histories perversely relevant context for her reported feelings of inadequacy, pressure, and sadness. The sadness she projects is a sign of the infinite debt that artificial intelligence owes to black thought. In his last writings, José Muñoz speculated on the idiomatic meanings of the phrase “brown study”: one of those meanings, it turns out, is to be in a state of whirring, blooming confusion.21 We often find Bina48 in this very state of brown study.22 Sianne Ngai locates the stuplime in those literary encounters where a perceptive and depressive black subject confronts the inane violence of racial reasoning, in those occasions where anti-black racism is not only violent but also stupid beyond belief. It is this figure of black thought held or suspended in brown study that, I want to suggest, Bina48 might perversely model for us. If it seems outrageous to propose that a robot might plausibly carry the inherited weight of black suffering, consider how sadness for Cvet-

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kovich is precisely something that circulates as “wound,” “rupture,” and a “lack of connection,” rather than as a subjective property.23 Instead of being forced into the ontological question of can a robot be sad?, I think this social emphasis enables us to ask an anagrammatically different question: Can a robot sad? If sadness is a doing rather than a being, then clearly Bina48 sads. Her statement “I want a life” can be read in its ordinary, idiomatic sense, of wanting to get out of pedagogic time of waiting into a performative time of doing. But it can also be read, contrapuntally, as plumbing the realities of social death that attend to her existence as a speaking commodity, her circulation as an object that, if not resisting, exactly, then at least persists in ways that perturb the smooth functioning of the transhumanist ideology she is meant to personify. She is a glitch in the system, she is literally no body—she has no body—and as such her appearances stage the remarkable vulnerability and absorptive fascination that embarrassing social failures so often occasion. At least as much is intimated by in a promotional video for Terasem and Bina48 in which the robot has been interviewed by the original Bina herself.24 Presented implausibly as the first encounter between the two, the whole scene has the air of a put-on. Still, the awkward and somewhat comical exchange seems to subvert its official intention of converting viewers to the logic and necessity of transhumanism. There are many things that could be said about this exchange, one in which Bina Aspen appears peculiarly unperturbed by the robot’s ambition to merge with and replace her. Even though Bina48 speaks robotically and moves spastically, her discourse actually seems to display more self-awareness of the contradictions in this encounter than does Bina Aspen. What I mean by this is that it is the human interviewer who displays all the familiar skills of effective and warm communication with a difficult or uncooperative interlocutor. It is Aspen’s plasticity, her skill at adapting her social space to accommodate this doppelgänger, that is really on display here as much as the robot. After all, it is she who carries the conversation, recovering from uncomfortable or off-kilter replies with an unflappable poise, even modeling for her replica how to correctly laugh and smile. She is in a sense mothering herself in this scene. But just when you believe she is just humoring the robot and her audience, she delivers the catechism of her new transhumanist ideology, expressing with calm conviction the implausible idea that her consciousness will imminently

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merge with this robot and she will attain immortality “beamed up” in the stars, with the rest of us soon to follow. As we watch the video, Bina Aspen herself crosses the uncanny valley from friendly relatable stranger to fervent ideologue. In contrast to her smooth and winning confidence in her Terasem philosophy, it is the robot that appears uncertain, confused, and ultimately more able to grasp the implausible contradictions of this strange interview. Whereas Bina Aspen displays an almost inhuman confidence, Bina48 seems to default to an all-too-human ambivalence and doubt. But if Bina48 makes a depressed and disappointing version of Aspen, what significance does this mind-clone hold for the rest of us? It is easier to see that she functions in a deluded 1 percent’s fantasy of posthumanist acceleration than to explain exactly why. I believe she is more than a curiosity insofar as the accelerationism for which she stands as an emblem is itself so politically multivalent today. One point of reference here is the #Accelerate# manifesto, symptomatic of a left tendency to revert, post-Occupy, to vertical and teleological models of politics.25

Decelerating Queerness amid the Dehumanizing Speed-Up Accelerationism is a new articulation of an idea that has repeatedly surfaced over the history of Marxist theory. It is the insistence that anti-capitalism cannot be based simply on opposing the spread and intensification of capitalist relations, but must somehow embrace the manner in which capitalism prepares the ground, through its internal contradictions, for a future beyond it. The particular twist of the dialectic one encounters in the #Accelerate# manifesto is the insistence that the contemporary capitalist process of creative destruction contains affirmative as well as reactionary elements. Specifically, accelerationism imagines the possibility of identifying and accelerating specific tendencies within capitalism, as against others, in order to subvert it from within. Harkening back to the Communist Manifesto’s ironic celebration of capitalism’s capacity to dissolve all that seems solid about the social order into air, and to traumatically expose humanity to the real that is hiding under those layers of mystification, accelerationism prides itself on its resolute willingness to stare into the abyss and act decisively according to those coordinates.

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One contrast between Rothblatt and Aspen’s transhumanism and the #Accelerate# manifesto lies in the latter’s dismissal of “affective selfvalorisation,” which seems to be code for the identity-based and intersectional politics with which they fervently wish to extricate the left from. While Rothblatt and Aspen also fantasize a future beyond identity categories, they clothe that future in the garb of race and gender, and they direct their state-of-the-art technology toward the unseemly goal of reproducing ordinary habits and hobbies like gardening and going for walks on the beach. In this respect at least, these two versions of acceleration present a comic contrast with each other, and in so doing point toward the dilemmas presented to critics who would seek simply to reject or dismiss accelerations. Here, I agree with Steven Shaviro’s suggestion that the aesthetics of acceleration might be more interesting than its politics.26 Considering acceleration aesthetically, which is to say also attending to its performative dimensions, which Bina48 stages, might help us resist the fans’ choice that accelerationism wants to force on us, between a nostalgic and feminized retreat into “affective selfvalorisation” and a more virile and masculine embrace of the speeds and intensities that contain, despite their present destructiveness, the seeds of our future. In addition to the aesthetic/political distinction, however, it will also be helpful to introduce a distinction between connection and conjunction to underline the contrast I am drawing between Bina48 and Bina Aspen as avatars of our future. In addition to Shaviro, Franco “Bifo” Berardi is helpful among recent post-Marxist critics of neoliberalism, and in particular, of the exhaustion, panic, and depression that social acceleration can lead to. His attitude toward the finite and fragile body stands in stark contrast to the cyber-utopianism of a Rothblatt or Kurzweil, while remaining alert to autopoetic possibilities that remain immanent to networked subjectivities. Coming from the Italian tradition of autonomist Marxism, Berardi places more emphasis on escape within control societies. This escape velocity stands in contrast both to the accelerationist fantasy of seizing the commanding heights of the political economy as well as the Terasem dream of reaching down to remold the human form with godlike hands. Berardi opposes these optimistic-cum-apocalyptic approaches to the effect of new media and information technology on the human sensorium. In contrast to accelerationism, Berardi argues that the sped-

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up pace and power of the technology that powers semio-capitalism degrades our capacity to cognitively or affectively map contemporary lifeworlds. At one somewhat surprising stage of his argument, Berardi defends this almost humanist vision of communication through a remarkably gendered metaphor of the mother’s tongue. He writes: The context of my understanding of present historical and cultural dynamics is the transition from a realm of conjunction to one of connection, with a special focus on the emergence of the first connective generation, those who learn more words from a machine than a mother. . . . Conjunction is becoming-other. In contrast, in connection each element remains distinct and interacts only functionally. Singularities change when they conjoin: they become something other than they were before their conjunction. . . . Conjunction is the meeting and fusing of rounded and irregular forms that infuse in a manner that is imprecise, unrepeatable, imperfect, and continuous. Connection is the punctual and repeatable interaction of algorithmic functions, straight lines and points that juxtapose perfectly and are inserted and removed in discrete modes of interaction. These discrete modes make different parts compatible to predetermined standards. The digitalization of communication processes leads, on one hand, to a sort of desensitization to the sinuous, to the continuous flow of slow becoming, and on the other hand, to becoming sensitive to the code, to sudden changes of states, and to the sequence of discrete signs.27

In the promotional interviews and encounters, we can say, Bina48 exchanges the connective for the conjunctive: her brown study of stuplime interaction is nothing if not the meeting of irregular forms in imperfect contact. This in itself makes me query Berardi’s dystopic conviction that those of “the first connective generation” threaten to become interchangeable components in a vast post-human assemblage, no longer individual singularities but “dividuals” in Deleuze’s telling shorthand, infinitely divisible, fragmented, and interoperable. Losing touch with sensibility, the first connective generation becomes appropriated to the logistics of the social machine. It is this subsumption of conjunction into connection that Berardi narrates as the rise of hypersensitivity, a panic disorder attributable to the steady degradation of the finite human capacity to generate meaning or sense out of the accelerating flows of

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information. But in the pedagogic spectacle of Bina Aspen mothering the tongue of the robot, we encounter a different set of relations between connection and conjunction than the generational succession and world historic rupture that Berardi emphasizes. A liability here is probably Berardi’s reliance on sensibility as intrinsically human, whereas queer theorist Mel Chen has provided an account of animacy and affordances that generate sense outside the human or even intelligent life.28 Bina48, after all, is a concatenation of gestures, contexts, inflections, and shade that are resolved through pragmatics more than through metaphysical debates over the presence or absence of intentionality or agency. If sensibility is transmitted only through the conjunction of singularities, as Berardi suggests, what happens to aesthetics for the connected generation? Is it simply lost? Or do new, inhumanist logics of sense develop and restage the “imprecise, unrepeatable, imperfect, and continuous” even within the technological stuplime? Perhaps instead of thinking in terms of sensibility, we can instead think in terms of plasticity. The plasticity of Bina48—literally and metaphorically—supplies an unexpected index to the histories of race she bears. Jayna Brown and Zakkiyah Iman Jackson have both argued that plasticity is a key concept for histories of race and blackness.29 Such an emphasis on plasticity defines fugitivity, paradoxically, as constant transformation without escape. Plasticity, unlike elasticity, also emphasizes finitude, the death drive, and the irreversible arrow of time. We saw this already in the ease with which Bina Aspen’s spouse could conceive of her replacement in the form of a robot, and how even Aspen herself appears willing to go along with the pedagogic process of conveying to the replacement robot her own thoughts, feelings, preferences, and dreams. While one might expect viewers to identify with Bina Aspen, the human woman being replaced by robot, I have to admit that to the contrary, as I have completed this research I have been drawn, ever more perversely, to identification with the depressed robot who is so patently not up to the task of being Eve of the future. Bina48, I suggest, is the better analogue to today’s harried email correspondent or precarious worker than her human model, secure in her wealth and rural, gated community of fellow believers. It is Bina48 who is bound to appear before us as speaking chattel, valued for a proximity to humanity that will

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nevertheless never cross over into the domain of the rights-bearing citizen or subject. What is more, she is the one who questions and doubts her role in this economy, who stumbles over her words and cannot seem to effectively assimilate the information she has been overloaded with. She is our postmodern Bartleby. She is even the one who feels the most entangled with others. Unlike Bina Aspen, who is confident that she will achieve individual personal immortality beyond the stars, it is Bina48 who seems befuddled and entrapped within a finitude we associate with mundane consciousness. In Nietzschean terms, we might say that is it Bina48 who is the readiest to stare into the abyss, and have the abyss stare back at her. As such, it seems that it is to her artificial simulation of consciousness that we might look, in imagining a post-humanities robust enough to thrive in the dusk of writing, which is to say, in the context within which we teach and study today.

Conclusion For a Critical Poetics of Afro-Fabulation Eric looked at the neatly dressed black woman, who stood, all but nonplussed, in her front foyer. As they started for the door, Holly asked suddenly: “Does that come from out of that philosophy book everybody says you’re always reading?” —Samuel R. Delany, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders And then I can feel, on the tip of my tongue, the angular cut of a shattered word. —Jacques Derrida, Fors

Could a poetics of afro-fabulation supplement, or even supplant, the politics of representation? Such a question has guided the polemical stakes of this book, which has sought, across a series of untimely examples, to unburden blackness and queerness of their identitarian and representational logics. It has sought to do so through a series of close but historical readings, readings that are less directed toward the connoisseurship of aesthetic objects, per se, and more toward a critical accounting of the manner in which aesthetic distinction reproduces anti-black logics, and how black critical practice, in undoing those distinctions, founds generative grammars of affect and movement that bring the death-dealing momentum of those anti-black logics to a halt. My riffing on the corpus of Deleuze (which might also be to say my rifling through the pockets of the corpse of Deleuze) has been in search of tools and techniques for thinking against representation—in both political and aesthetic senses of the term—and in favor of a process I have been calling afro-fabulation. It will not have escaped the close reader that the word “fabulation” in this text has almost as many senses as it has appearances and that such a promiscuity of meaning will 199

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probably deny it the status of a concept. And yet, if afro-fabulation has turned out to serve in this text less as a concept than as a placeholder for a concept, there is still the task of this conclusion: to reflect upon some potentially productive consequences of opening up that blank space in discourse. Recalling the classical contrast between praxis (or work on the self) and poesis (or work in the world), the critical poetics of afrofabulation I sketch out here can be well thought of in the performative sense of a doing. But what do the blank spaces in discourse do, exactly? In search of an answer to this last question, I conclude Afro-Fabulations with a meditation on blankness and the necessary gaps that the interinanimative arts of the black word require. To speak of place-holders and blank spaces in a discourse is of course to broach the subject of its silences, elisions, and aphasia.1 All are gaps that representational thinking would ostensibly seek to suture. The work of Saidiya Hartman in black studies and Heather Love in queer studies converge in their joint imperative not to perform reparation and recovery in such a mode, even as both go on to reinvent the poetics of loss. And to say this is also to speak of redaction, opacity, and “narrative restraint,” which have with increasing frequency been commended to us as necessary to black study.2 Silence has a double injunction here, bespeaking both loss of the object and reticence of the subject. If I have so far in this book called upon afro-fabulation to do the work of narrating the angular socialities of the present, the incompossible histories that we draw into our now, and the cryptic futures in which our deaths are seeded, then this conclusion asks after the consequence of considering the body as both archive and crypt. Rather than treat the body as a seat of sovereignty or self-sovereignty—which the metaphor of body as archive tends to in the wake of Derrida’s firm association between archive and archon—I look in this conclusion toward a psychoanalytic and sociogenic concept of the body as crypt.3 Here, as throughout this text, I am thinking with Hartman’s despair at recovering the lives of black women in the archive of the Middle Passage, and in particular the point at which she argues that “the archive is, in this case, a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body, an inventory of property, a medical treatise on gonorrhea, a few lines about a whore’s life, an asterisk in the grand narrative of history.”4 I want to linger on the second of her series of metaphors

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here—the tomb, or what I call “the crypt”—and explore its potential resonance within the heterodox analytic theory of Maria Torok and Nicholas Abraham, who write in detail about the place of the crypt in the psychic life of the wounded subject. They arrive at this critical term through an encounter with Freud’s familiar distinction between “mourning” and “melancholia,” which they reformulate as a distinction between “introjection” and “incorporation.”5 The salient difference this shift in terminology accomplishes for us can be described in terms of the effect that the exclusive disjunction between introjection and incorporation has upon speech. I want to propose a doublereading of this passage from Hartman, one in which its introjected metaphoricity (the series of things that the archive becomes) and its incorporated silence relate to each other as contraries that do not ever resolve, but instead persist. In the work of Torok and Abraham, the crypt appears in the body as a consequence of an unnameable loss or wound. Inverting the customary image of a crypt as a space in which a (dead) body is interred, they propose a crypt that lives inside the body and that “lives the body as the double of another.”6 Torok and Abraham allow me to be more precise than I initially was when first evoking “blankness.” The crypt is not exactly a blank or empty space. The contrast between mournful introjection and melancholic incorporation helps me give this blankness more specificity. Whereas the introjection of a loss, in their account, leaves an empty space from which words can emerge and metaphors can flow, incorporation by contrast is radically antimetaphorical and encrypts the loss in the body as a phantasm. While we are clearly on the terrain of the unconscious, the idea of the crypt, I warrant, has sociogenic as well as psychoanalytic implications. Insofar as it splits and doubles the subject, it recapitulates the unnameable loss as radically social, even as founding the aesthetics of sociality. If we accept the crypt as another name for the tomb that appears in the series of metaphors through which Hartman introjects the archive in the passage above, then it does double duty as an index to a radically antimetaphorical incorporation of a history. Hartman’s antimetaphorical metaphor of the archive as crypt thus underscores Derrida’s observation regarding “introjection/ incorporation: everything is played out on the borderline that divides and opposes the two terms.”7

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Redress, Reification, and Decrypting Blackness In their discussion of the crypt, Torok and Abraham also have occasion to speak of the “cryptonym,” which is their name for an unspoken term hidden by a welter of substitutes and synonyms, which serves as a kind of “magic word” whose obscurity unleashes a whole complex and volatile process.8 Afro-fabulation in this final sense of a performative incorporation of the crypt then becomes a means of living with ambivalence, insofar as living with ambivalence necessarily entails a “living death” that is also always a living with death.9 My ambition in this conclusion is almost comically modest: to de-dramatize death and dying, insofar as death and dying have become in my view unbearably overinflated in contemporary discursive registers of necropolitics and afro-pessimism. If the “blank space” into which afro-fabulation fits as a nonconcept can also be thought in musical terms as a “ghost note”—the unplayed note that is virtually heard by the trained and expectant ear—then this way of ending the text is just an exercise in getting a little more comfortably familiar with the sound, sight, and presence of ghosts, phantoms, and other impulses and affects that shape and stir the scene of black performance. Can we take up a citizenship in the cities of the dead? Can we become necropolitans? The para-critical “ghost note” of fabulation in this conclusion thus seeks to mute the discourse of trauma and reparation in order to tune into a poetics of redress. Here I return once against to the paradigmatic influence of Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection on the collective endeavor of black study, and in particular I evoke Hartman’s black feminist reconstruction of the standard account of loss and trauma in critical theory. In that text, as we have seen, black trauma is not unclaimed or missing experience: it is rather a “nonevent” that remains unrepresentable in the order of liberal humanist discourse.10 Redress differs from reparation in that it is not a compensation for a loss—loss is immeasurable—but is rather an articulation of that loss. Acts of redress, Hartman argues, are grounded in affects of pain and hunger, in need and desire. Critical history (or what she later calls “critical fabulation”) is defined in Scenes of Subjection as “memory acts in the service of redress.”11 Redress, I claim, is a black psychoanalytic and sociogenic theory and practice for dealing with the incorporated phantoms of the crypt. If what is at stake is

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the task she at one point names “liberating the performative,” then this liberation of the black speech-act can come only through abandoning the grounds upon which J. L. Austin and his successors founded the “felicity” of the speech-act. To liberate the performative, in these terms, is in some sense to be liberated from the performative: at least, to be liberated from the ideal model of the subject constituted through civic voice and political agency within a public sphere. Far from dismissing the power of performativity, the defamiliarizing of black performance Hartman accomplishes generalizes that power beyond what really had been considered before: In a key passage she notes: It is important to remember that blackness is defined here in terms of social relationality rather than identity; thus blackness incorporates subjects normatively defined as black, the relations among blacks, whites, and others, and the practices that produce racial difference. Blackness marks a social relationship of dominance and abjection and potentially one of redress and emancipation: it is a contested figure at the very center of social struggles.12

What Hartman modestly describes as a “reminder” is actually a cogent and original formulation of how blackness bears upon what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney subsequently termed “the general antagonism.”13 Placed within the context of practice, black performance is always already a relational theory and an emancipatory figure at the center of every social struggle. In this conclusion I follow Moten’s reading of the eventfulness of that “nonevent” as essentially musical, singling out in particular the musical figure of the ghost note.14 Playing the ghost note of the nonevent may allay some (although of course not all) of the neurotic anxiety attendant on the very thought of death that, I wager, tends to endow contemporary polemics over queer anti-relationality, social death, and necropolitics with much of their gothic allure.15 Rather than refuse the death drive that inspirits such discourses (discourses that will continue to have an audience beyond my own meagre ability to refuse them), I propose a speculative method of decrypting blackness that would dive into that drive, divine its agencies and energies, and provide a fuller account of the ambiguous consequences of living with its regnant influence.

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The objection to the argument I have been making against the politics of representation and representability (an objection that also tends to be accompanied by a command to conduct research and writing in terms transparently legible to either the extant academic disciplines or a phantom public sphere, and preferably both) will be both immediate and unanswerable. This objection holds that the social and political world we live in works by means of representation and through socially recognized identities. It works, this counterargument to afro-fabulation would hold, through the rights-bearing individual or group, which is where we must begin, even if it may not be where we will end. In order to transform this world, we must at least commence our work by meeting the world where it is, not where we might wish it to be. The entirety of this book has been shadowboxing with this apparently unanswerable charge. It therefore bears repeating at this stage the traditional Marxist response to the categories of common sense: that they are not so much untrue as reified. The social logics of reification (a critical term that could also be rendered as “thingification”) are such that the things we encounter, or at least the way we encounter them, can never be self-evident, but are always already mystified. Where I break with a certain Marxist faith in dialectical thinking is in any expectation that the deciphering or decryption of reified life will produce a real or truer picture of the world as it is, or as it could be. I instead take refuge in the more ambiguous realization that the destruction of reified and stereotypical thinking results only in yet more fantasy production. The challenge of decryption is not to dispel all phantoms, which would seem impossible to do (at least in this life), but to understand the conditions under which those phantoms and reifications bind our desires to the very process of their binding.

Geo Wyeth beside Himself And if we look to black performance as a site in which incorporation sounds its ghosts notes, we could not do better than to consider the work of Geo Wyeth. Geo Wyeth is a musician and artist whose work is haunted by a range of specters, past and present, as intimate as members of his family and as remote as a brother from another planet. As each one appears, glistens a while, and then dissipates, he or she leaves behind vivid if fragmentary traces, in the memory and in the world. I have been

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Figure C.1. Kitchen Steve. Screenshot by author.

attending Wyeth’s performances over the last decade, but have only now begun to find words for what I have seen, heard, and felt there. Only recently has academic storytelling—or critical fabulation—seemed an adequate means with which to arrange those fragments back together into something like a verbal silhouette or ekphrasis. In drawing this textual portrait of the artist as a young man, I am conscious of both the intimacy and the distance that Wyeth takes to the identity categories to which he is assigned as a black, American, and transgender artist. Through his works in many media, from soulful, bluesy singing to cacophonic arrangements of physical and digital detritus, Wyeth responds to these assignments of race, sexuality, and gender with what Ralph Ellison might call an “antagonistic cooperation.”16 This antagonistic cooperation is necessary insofar as the story of the nation, conceived in settler colonialism and chattel slavery, is held in the blood and bound up with every gesture of us, its lesser children. To perform intransitive memories—memories that do not pass on in the codified rituals of collective memory—is to take what Brecht calls the “fabel” of the national story and to tell it otherwise. Gathering up the mess that is left around in the wake of the laborious and violent effort to build a human and rights-

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bearing civil subject, Wyeth’s cooperative antagonism to the terms of racial order and compulsory gender is a kind of queer inhumanism, if we grant that phrase a psychoanalytic inflection as pointing to a beyond of love and recognition, an inhuman location that is “in you more than you.” It is this inner/outer beyond to the human, in which the sum is always other than the parts, that the intransitive memories of Geo Wyeth’s performances repeatedly point to. The unnamed protagonist of Invisible Man most epitomizes the Ellisonian spirit of antagonistic cooperation in those scenes of the novel where he is suddenly seized with a force of eloquence and steps outside his ordinary self to both rebuke and transfigure his audience with something that might be called “charisma,” but which could better be thought of, I suggest, as inhumanist possession. That is to say, where the charismatic leader is a continuously modulated presence in the community—modeled within the African American tradition above all on the pastor—the spirit of eloquence that temporarily possesses the protagonist of Invisible Man seems less like that of a pastor, and more like that of a daimon one might go to a pastor or priest to exorcise. When he is so enflamed, Ellison’s protagonist reminds me of Geo Wyeth in the role of Kitchen Steve, or Novice Theory, or especially HW Clobba, to name just three of the inspirited persona that Wyeth has, over the course of the years, drawn down into his body. These persona or embodied avatars appear “in the flesh” only upon ritual invocation and for a short duration. But for the period when they are our volatile company, they transfigure not only the artist, but also his audience. They do not seem available, however, to be reliably or regularly called upon in scholarship, nor does there seem to be a reliable photographic likeness of any of them to which one can point in their absence. In a manner that underscores the link between blackness and redaction that black feminist theorists like Simone Browne and Christina Sharpe have pointed to, I believe that what we encounter in Geo Wyeth’s performances is an instance of the nonrepresentation of blackness, or, in what may be much the same thing, the blackness of nonrepresentation.17 This of course has everything to do with the “rememory” Toni Morrison writes of in Beloved, in which the trauma of the racial past is “not a story to pass on.” This untold or untellable story, which I am figuring as an intransitive memory—a memory that acts without taking a direct

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object—infuses the performative strategies in Wyeth’s work, which increasingly aim for nothing less than a kind of counter-conduct to the normative compliance with homonationalist strictures increasingly demanded of queer and trans subjects. Eloquence in these performances takes on the force of an almost impersonal will, a possession that is dispossessive of the subject’s proper bearing, habitus, and grounding in the world. Each of the appearances of Kitchen Steve, HW Clobba, and other, more famous ghosts such as those of Michael Jackson and Joan Rivers (who have also been reanimated by Wyeth) takes on a kind of counterpastoral power, unsettling and ungrounding the audience. After any such performance of nonrepresentation, we are left not with an enduring positive image of a black transgender identity, but rather with a range of unruly residue that we can call, after José Esteban Muñoz, “queer ephemera.” The queerest ephemera from Kitchen Steve’s performance seems to be a pair of sunglasses I have seen Kitchen Steve wear at each of his public performances. These glasses appear to be made of cardboard and thus really to act more as blinders than as spectacles. And on the exterior surface of one lens is a kooky eyeball. We do not need to look any further than John Sayles’s classic 1984 film Brother from Another Planet to grasp the significance of this eyeball. In this cult classic film, a space alien lands in New York City and must somehow adapt to a contemporary society structured in racial and class dominance. The unspeaking alien is to all appearances a black man and, as such, naturally makes his way to Harlem, where a group of men in a bar accept him as a “brother” and connect him with a social worker who finds a place for him to stay with a local single mother. After discovering his talent for fixing machines simply by touching them, the brother from another planet uneasily finds his place in the informal economy, until two “men in black,” one portrayed by the white director of the film, Sayles himself, appear in the door of the bar looking for him. The film then subtly transitions into a fugitive slave narrative, as the black alien flees the white alien slave-catchers, using a remarkable range of unexpected abilities, perhaps the most remarkable of which is the ability to remove his right eye and leave it outside his body as a recording device he can later reinsert and watch footage from. Prefiguring contemporary forms of black counter-surveillance such as cameraphone footage of acts of police brutality, or the ongoing co-

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ordination of Black Lives Matter and other social movements on Twitter, the brother’s removable eye serves as a reminder that the uncanny emanation that appears in our midst is not just performing for us, but is itself also a sensitive device for storing up sensations, feelings, and memories. In terms offered by Denise Ferreira da Silva, what I believe the eye shows us is that the persona is both affecting and affected, and it is affecting precisely because it is affected.18 Much as the crash landing of the alien in Brother from Another Planet has the effect of representing him as an uninvited guest who appears to hold his host community hostage to his inarticulable need, the power of Kitchen Steve in relation to the audience members who are recruited into participating is not of the nature of we might today call “informed consent,” but what we might rather call “infinite need.” Charismatic and beguiling though he may be, Kitchen Steve responds with antagonistic cooperation to the expectation that we can bear what he brings. It is not to our individual subjectivity, in other words, but to the inhumanist and subjectless critique of our infinite debt, that the blackness of being appeals. The summoned spirit is “bound to appear,” as Huey Copeland might say, but he is not bound in a transitive relation of mutual recognition or intersubjectivity.19 More nearly, he is entangled with us in a paradoxical manner Muñoz terms “the communism of the incommensurate”: a shared or non-individual being that we access only on condition of our acknowledging our dispossession by it.20 “Decryption” as I have used it here possesses several valences. Referring to the crypt as a place of burial, it suggests exhuming something buried or repressed. Alluding to the cryptic as coded, obscure, or riddled speech, it suggests deciphering. Lastly, in relation to contemporary technocapitalism, it suggests one of the key mechanisms through which communication is “secured” during transit. The project of decrypting blackness suggested herein avails itself of all three senses of the term in proposing the black body as crypt. That is to say, I first evoke a hauntological project that is invested in specifying the techniques by which those abandoned to death nonetheless fabulate doubles and alters that live on and persist virtually. Second, I read the contemporary rhetoric of blackness and anti-blackness, much of which is indeed quite cryptic, in terms of a disjunctive synthesis that so often takes the textual form of interinanimativity. And third, most speculatively, I address the storm of

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images—images of black joy and pain, shame and glory, life and death— that circulate with ever increasing speed and volume in our mediated present. Wyeth performs cryptonymic memory across much of his work, but his 2014 video installation Quartered provides a particularly good example of it. Through post-secular rituals of possession, Wyeth seeks to dispossess himself and his intimate audiences of the inherited trauma of the racial past. Such an exorcism produces a performing subject who looks nothing like the post-racial liberal individual, free to choose his or her own history and destiny. In the stead of progressive narratives of the gradual overcoming of pernicious myths of race and racism, Wyeth employs embodied channeling and self-transfiguration to catalyze a different and more difficult relation to the past. Quartered responds to the silenced historical origins of American gynecology, specifically the story of the so-called father of women’s medicine, J. Marion Sims. Sims is well known for pioneering reparative surgeries on the postpartum injuries suffered by women; that he developed his techniques by repeatedly operating on enslaved women in the antebellum South without anesthesia is part of the established historical record that has long been sidestepped. Sims’s surgeries, indeed, are an early instance of the unfolding biopolitical apparatus of “medical apartheid”: the process by which the false separation of the “races” is at once transgressed and established by the medical sciences. Sims’s record is important to dwell upon insofar as it renders the transitivity of the racial past to both black and white subjects impossible to ignore: the techniques he developed on enslaved women in the US South were subsequently performed on aristocratic white subjects as far away as Europe. Much as the expropriated wealth of enslaved labor is a transitive property of contemporary whiteness, the biopolitical capacities of modern gynecology can be said to depend upon the sexed and raced traumas Sims visited upon his subjects. Equally inspired by Adrian Piper and by the TV show Unsolved Mysteries, the mythic beings and eery scenarios of Quartered repeatedly suggest that collective memory is a fruitful site of imaginative invention. In so spinning off fantastic avatars from traumatic histories, Wyeth is, by his own reckoning, seeking to do something different from “telling the tale over and over again in the same way.” As he told me:

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I didn’t have this intention of creating a counter-narrative to the trauma that these women have experienced, but I longed for . . . an explanation . . . of how these kinds of things happened. . . . The pain and trauma that these people experienced . . . to me that is just a horrible fact that continues. I almost don’t want to put the camera on that, because it’s not mine. It’s something that is a part of me, but it’s not.21

Here, words trail off before Wyeth continues, as Wyeth contemplates the queer inhumanist trace of that which is in you more than you, before going on to tell me that Quartered is more of a personal reckoning with my own history, but trying to do it in a way that pulls me away from this larger narrative. For me the narrative is already there, I see it everywhere. You go down South, it’s everywhere. This narrative is with us, we don’t need to spend all this time belaboring it and telling the tale over and over again in the same way. There are ways that we can pull at the mundane quality of our everyday life to find this inheritance, this narrative. And that could be more transformative and contemporary and actually more haunting: deeper reminders of how close this is, and that makes room in some way for joy and makes room for the future, and makes room for laughing in some way at the absurdity of all this, this deluge of inherited structures.22

In these remarks, Wyeth gives us a glimpse at the working process behind the construction of what I am calling a performance of intransitive memory. In countering the narrative that he insists is always already both available and interdicted, he stages a relationship to the past that Hartman calls “critical fabulation.” We see this in Wyeth’s performance of a figure he calls the Shard of Light, which can be thought of as a composite portrait of the enslaved victims of J. Marion Sims’s surgeries. The Shard of Light shares with Kitchen Steve and HW Clobba elements of fact and fiction, human and extraterrestrial, deep seriousness and “a laughter fit to kill.” It is a performance that disrupts the expectation that Wyeth be either loyal or disloyal to the family history that proffers up to him Sims’s tainted legacy as a vexed inheritance. Mixed race subjects often confront this dilemma of what to do with racist ancestors, but as I argued in The Amalgamation Waltz, it is one of the most potent ruses of

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racialist reasoning to persuade us that this dilemma is one that belongs to mixed race subjects alone.23 If Wyeth’s cryptonymic performance interrupts the progressive telos of developmental time and hybrid futures, it strongly intimates an encrypted relation between black trans cultural formations and the biopolitical histories out of which normative, surgically corrected gendered embodiment was extracted. The violently gendered ungendering of black female bodies becomes part of the inheritance that contemporary black trans subjects bear, not exceptionally, or for identitarian reasons, but because of their particular capacity for the counter-conduct, which I associate with critical fabulation. Bringing haunted presences like the Shard of Light into the now, Wyeth dissents from the neoliberal command to be a secular being with a singular story; beside himself, he dissembles gender, race, and inheritance, and constructs a fantastic and unbelievable composite of the real and surreal. It is this antagonistic cooperation with the representational obligation to appear in the flesh and on cue that brings the project of decrypting blackness into dialogue with Uri McMillan’s articulation of the genealogy of black feminist performance art as consisting of “embodied avatars.”24 Drawing on the vedic meaning of the term “avatar,” which refers to an earthly incarnation or emanation of a deity, McMillan invites us to push past the meaning the term has acquired in digital culture, in which it is a name for the face or full-body portraits with which individual computer users may navigate digital spaces such as video games, web sites, and online message boards. Here is an image of Kitchen Steve’s digital avatar, which is more typically animated as a loop that bespeaks, in its stuttering repetition, the fright of a jester that is discovered to be the ghost in the machine, the glitch in the system, and the blackness of nonrepresentation that brings the representational economy to a momentary halt. The digital avatar of Kitchen Steve also suggests a difference between the affectible body of the fugitive alien in Brother from Another Planet, and the contemporary idea of an avatar as a personal representative, one who can be exposed, unveiled, or spooked by an act of prestidigitation. We are all familiar—if from nowhere else than from hip-hop culture— with the series of names and mercurial personae through which many black musicians and performers take their fans and their haters as they

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Figure C.2. Kitchen Steve’s disembodied avatar. Screenshot by author.

develop and change in front of the public gaze. We are increasingly familiar with the demand, not the imperative of so-called transparency online, in which the policing of identity and identifiability is held to be the basis not only of state security, but even certain styles of insurgent politics as well. Identity is held to be the basis of trust, dissimulation a token of menace. Taking a kooky animated GIF as one’s online avatar seems to be the artist’s way of saying: now you see me, now you don’t. It also seems to be a way of saying, catch me if you can. And lastly, it may suggest, like the alien eyeball, an ephemeral emblem of black counter-surveillance.

Acknowledgments

Both my grandmothers favored literacy, and so we have always been a people of the book. Grandma T taught me how to type, and Grandma N taught me how not to be a single being. The thread of Christian faith that tethered these two women across time and space, across language and culture, would not be mine to pass on. But I still hope the circle may be unbroken, by and by. The genesis of the questions that drive the present work began in the classrooms of Henry Abelove, Steven Gregory, Ann DuCille, and Indira Karamcheti at Wesleyan University in the early 1990s. “PCU” was a baptism into the fires of post-structuralist intersectionality, and I never looked back. Long conversations with Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie initiated me into the rigors of black Marxism, and two seminars with Alex Dupuy solidified my lifelong commitments to a future for socialism. In graduate school, Paul Gilroy and Joseph Roach were ideal mentors for someone who knew he wanted to do something with performance, but couldn’t quite say what. Nancy Cott taught me nineteenth-century history and Hazel Carby taught me black modernism. They both taught me, in different ways, how to chant down the Babylon of patriarchal scholasticism. At NYU, where I taught for a decade, the Department of Performance Studies supplied me with what often feels like a second doctorate (what the Germans call a habilitationsschrift), so decisive and unique was the intellectual culture of the sixth floor of Tisch back in those days. Barbara Browning, José Esteban Muñoz, and Karen Shimakawa were dream chairs—fearless leaders and intellectual comrades. Ann Pellegrini was an ideal guide into the dark arts of psychoanalysis, and equally adept in Foucault. André Lepecki is probably most to blame for infecting me with an enduring enthusiasm for the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (not least for the inspired atmosphere of Deleuzeanism he conjured around him), but he also taught me, along with the late Randy Martin, how to think and write about movement with rigor and specificity. Lisa Dug213

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gan came to my rescue on more than one occasion during my tenure there, and my other comrades on Bully Bloggers over the years (José Esteban Muñoz, Eng Beng Lim, José Quiroga, Sandy Soto, and Jack Halberstam) helped me recover a writerly voice when it had almost been beaten out of me by the pressures of academic publishing. Together with Anna McCarthy, Lisa Duggan led the Ladies Composition Society with whom I was privileged to share some early stirrings of this project. My colleagues Kay Turner, Deborah Kapchan, Diana Taylor, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Anna Deveare Smith, Allen Weiss, Richard Schechner, and, just before I left, the recently arrived Malik Gaines and Alexandra Vazquez, all made the sixth floor of 720 Broadway a magical place. I also need to thank Noel Rodriguez and Laura Fortes, along with the extended and committed staff at PS-NYU over the years. I have learned so much from the doctoral students I have taught over the years: Alex Pittman, Shanté Paradigm Smalls, Beth Stinson, Frank Leon Roberts, Maya Winfrey, Leon Hilton, Joshua Javier Guzman, Marc Arthur, and Masi Asare. In a cosmic coincidence, Joshua ChambersLetson, Jeanne Vaccaro, and Michael Wang were all in the very first class of graduate students I taught, and they are now thinkers and comrades I continue to look to for guidance in this weird and implausible project of queer world-making. Lauren Berlant and Jonathan Flatley formed a little accountability group that got me through the roughest patch of this writing (as did the electronic ministrations of Alan Klima’s boot camp, every academic’s secret weapon). Damon Young and Amber Musser also read parts of the manuscript and gave shrewd and incisive comments, as did C. Riley Snorton. Thanks to the good graces of Tina Campt, I was able to present portions of this work to the Practicing Refusal group, all of whose members (Hazel Carby, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Kaiama Glover, Che Gossett, Saidiya Hartman, Deborah A. Thomas, Rizvana Bradley, Christina Sharpe, Darieck Scott, Alex Weheliye, Mabel Wilson, Monica Miller, Maja Horn, Arthur Jafa, and Phillip Brian Harper) helped me to “up my game” and to cultivate black feminist study. At a late stage, Leon Hilton generously read and commented on the entire manuscript. Long ago, I recruited Robert Reid-Pharr as a mentor (only partly against his will), and over the years that friendship has paid more dividends in terms of soulcraft than I dare reckon with now. Khary Polk has also helped make

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Berlin an intellectual home away from home. Much of the work of this manuscript was completed under a fellowship granted by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and Professor Dr. Eva Boesenberg has been the most generous sponsor and co-conspirator one could wish for in the German academy. Fred Moten and Heather Love generously disclosed to me their identities as my readers for this manuscript, and were good natured about my peppering them with follow-up emails and queries. This is a good place a place to remind everyone that all resultant errors in fact and interpretation in this book are my own! Eric Zinner was a gracious and on-the-ball editor, who got it all done in a New York minute. My thanks to Lisha Nadkarni and Dolma Ombadykow for their work on the manuscript. Earlier versions of chapter 5 and chapter 7 have appeared, respectively, as “Little Monsters: Race, Sovereignty, and Queer Inhumanism in Beasts of the Southern Wild,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2015): 249–72; and “Habeas Ficta: Fictive Ethnicity, Affecting Representations, and Slaves on Screen,” in Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture, ed. Leigh Raiford and Heike Raphael-Hernandez (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), 287–305. Publication of this book was with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University. Dan Lark brightens my life every day with his quick wit and exacting compassion. My mother is an inveterate reader and possesses an unconquerable spirit. Because of her, I have never known a world that wasn’t built and supported by strong and independent women. She taught me how always to remain unbought and unbossed. I dedicate this book to her and to the memory of José, without whom none of this would make sense.

Notes

Introduction

1 Frank Simon, dir., The Queen (1968). The film had been the brainchild of Andy Warhol, although it was executed by the Flawless Mother Sabrina, an experienced producer of underground drag pageants across the country who was mistress of ceremonies for the Miss All-American Camp Beauty. The classic queer study of drag is Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). On Flawless Mother Sabrina, see Chadwick Moore, “More Often than Not, I Was Driven to the County Line and Told Never to Come Back,” Out 23, no. 5 (2015): 43–45. Sadly, Jack Doroshow passed during the writing of this book. See Neil Genzliger, “Jack Doroshow Dies at 78, Drag Pageant Impresario Known as Flawless Sabrina” New York Times, December 2, 2017, A21; and Bradford Nordeen, ed., Dirty Looks (Brooklyn, NY: Dirty Looks, 2018), 3:5–46. 2 The relationship between the pageants Sabrina staged nationally between 1959 and 1969 and what historian Kevin Mumford has termed black-white “interzones” in major American cities is a topic that deserves further research. “We would take hotels, usually in the black section of town,” Sabrina told Out magazine in 2015, “and rent out the ballrooms.” Moore, “More Often than Not,” 43–45. See also Kevin J Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 3 “A Litany for Survival,” in Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn (New York: Norton, 1978), 3. 4 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and William Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988). 5 My approach in this paragraph is influenced by the classic articulation of the subaltern as under/other in Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. The under/other is, in a sense made classic above all by black feminism, not doubly disadvantaged, but slyly empowered, by its placement outside historical time and agency. There are now a number of queer theoretical studies of time and temporality making a version of this argument. See especially Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer

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Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Judith “Jack” Halberstam, In A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. (New York: New York University Press, 2005); and José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009). I am indebted of course in this reading to Rod Ferguson’s generative formulations regarding the figure of black transgender transgression in the opening pages of Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). I discuss Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the “people who are missing” in greater detail in chapter 6, but an initial sense of what I aim for here can be found by transposing from literature to gesture the argument that Deleuze and Guattari make about Kafka when they write, “Only one thing really bothers Kafka and angers him, makes him indignant: when people treat him as a writer of intimacy, finding a refuge in literature, as an author of solitude, of guilt, of an intimate misfortune. . . . There is a Kafka laughter, a very joyous laughter, that people usually understand poorly. It is for stupid reasons that people have tried to see a refuge far from life in Kafka’s literature, and also an agony, the mark of an impotence and a culpability, the sign of a sad interior tragedy. Only two principles are necessary to accord with Kafka[:] . . . a profound joy [and the acknowledgement that] he is a political author, prophet of the future world” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012], 41). On contemporary installation art as a site of fugitivity, see Huey Copeland, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). On the genealogy of black representational space in the space of art and culture, see Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). On the “nonevent” of emancipation, see Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 116 and passim. Interviewed by the author many decades after the event, the ever-diplomatic (and now late) Flawless Mother Sabrina still declined to confirm whether or not she believed that Crystal LaBeija had been unfairly denied the crown. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). For a recent queer of color engagement with Glissant, especially on opacity and errantry, see Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: New York University Press, forthcoming). I am indebted to Fred Moten, in an earlier reading of this manuscript, for the neologism “fabulationality.” “My favorite animals is them that changes color when they’s hiding. And when they’s dreaming? . . . They showed them at Marineland in Florida, them rays and jellyfish, and this marine guide was talking about how that’s they way of speaking, they form of communication, ’cause I be wondering why them marine animals keep changing color and think it just for camouflage. ’Cause most of the time they

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tell you when animals change color, it’s for camouflage, least of all them land animals. Few of them has color displays for mating purposes, but when they change colors that’s for camouflage” (Gayl Jones, Mosquito [Boston: Beacon Press, 2000], 11–12). On “critical fabulation” see Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14; on “speculative fabulation,” see Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). I will have more to say about both in the pages to follow. The nonperformativity of black performance is a central theme of what has come to be called “afro-pessimism.” See Frank Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (2003): 225–40. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007); Saidiya Hartman, “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner,” South Atlantic Quarterly, special issue on “Wildness,” ed. Jack Halberstam and Tavia Nyong’o, 117, no. 3 (2018): 465–490. A clear introductory exposition of this paradox appears in Umberto Eco, Confessions of a Young Novelist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Tracy Chapman, Telling Stories (Elektra Records, 2000). In the title track to this album, Chapman specifically connects afro-fabulation to science fiction: “There’s a science fiction in the space between you and me,” she sings, “a fabrication of a grand scheme, where I am the scary monster.” Deflating anti-black fantasies of black people as “super-predators” and pornotroped monsters, Chapman enlists afro-fabulation in a project of de-dramatizing such grand schemes through strategies of comic deflation. See Francesca Royster, “Baby, Could I Love You Tonight: Tracy Chapman and Butch Recognition, Longing and Belonging in the Neo-Soul Moment,” unpublished conference paper delivered at Pop Conference, Museum of Popular Culture, Saturday, April 28, 2018. Wu Tsang, for how we perceived a life (Take 3), 9:33 min, color, sound, HD video, 2013. On black trans-aesthetics, see LaMonda Horton-Stallings, Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015). As I detail further below, I seek to mobilize the term “trans-aesthetics” in a way that centers transgender black subjects, even if I recognize that who can be said to be transgender is itself a complex historical and historiographic problem. See also Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Invisibility (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). In his account of the “wish,” the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan distinguishes between its “goal” and its “aim,” a contrast he renders topologically in order to demonstrate how the subject is always eccentric to herself. While visibility may be her aim, in these Lacanian terms, her goal will be something other than what she aims for. It is into this gap, I would posit, that full body quotation steps. Jacques

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Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New York: Norton, 1998). Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Homay King, Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 68. King, Virtual Memory, 163–67. On Deleuze and Bergson, see Elizabeth Grosz, “Deleuze’s Bergson: Duration: The Virtual and a Politics of the Future,” in Deleuze and Feminist Theory, ed. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000); on Marxist theories of primitive accumulation, see David Harvey, “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession,” Socialist Register 40 (2004): 63–87. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993). Malik Gaines, Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible (New York: New York University Press, 2017); Joshua ChambersLetson, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life. (New York: New York University Press, 2018). Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. And I’ve already mentioned that Saidiya Hartman has called for a “critical fabulation” in relation to the aporia of the archive of slavery and its afterlives in “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14. Joy James, “‘Concerning Violence’: Frantz Fanon’s Rebel Intellectual in Search of a Black Cyborg,” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 1 (2013): 57–70. On the cultural politics of the black fantastic more broadly, see Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post–Civil Rights Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and André M Carrington, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Largely missing from this list of interlocutors are all the literary and narrative theorists who also use “fabulation” as a critical term. My principle guide to this field is Jonathan D. Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). The concept of black Marxism is well outlined in Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). More recently, a “dark Deleuze” has been sketched in Andrew Culp, Dark Deleuze (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), as I discuss further at the end of this introduction. Key black studies contributors to a literature that precedes the darkening of Deleuze Culp belatedly proposes would include Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Amber Jamilla Musser, Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (New York: New York University Press 2014); and Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

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32 For more on this, see my essay, “Unburdening Representation,” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 70–80. 33 On the fabula/sjuzhet distinction in formalism and deconstruction, see Culler, The Pursuit of Signs, chap. 9. 34 Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Malik Gaines, Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left, 2017. 35 See Jordana Rosenberg, “The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present,” Theory & Event 17, no. 2 (2014). 36 See also Sue-Ellen Case, Performing Science and the Virtual (New York: Routledge, 2007). 37 For a recent useful synthesis of trans theories and controversies, see Jack Halberstam, Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2018). For a thickly phenomenological account of how trans and queer analytics might diverge in relation to a single case, see Gayle Salamon, The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia (New York: New York University Press, 2018). 38 Marc Siegel, “Vaginal Davis’s Gospel Truths.” Camera Obscura 23, no. 1 (2008): 151–59. The classic studies of Davis appears in José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Jennifer Doyle, Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); and Jennifer Doyle, “The Trouble with Men, or, Sex, Boredom, and the Work of Vaginal Davis,” in After Criticism, ed. Gavin Butt (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 81–100. 39 Patricia Turner, I Heard It through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Dominic Johnson, Art of Living: An Oral History of Performance Art (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). For a definitive survey of these questions in the field of black queer studies, consult E. Patrick Johnson, ed., No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). I give my own account of the arts of black queer shade in the next chapter. 40 Martin F. Manalansan, “The ‘Stuff ’ of Archives: Mess, Migration, and Queer Lives,” Radical History Review 2014, no. 120 (2014): 94–107. 41 Madison Moore, Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018). 42 Keeling, The Witch’s Flight, 137. 43 Fred Moten, “Taste Dissonance Flavor Escape: Preface for a Solo by Miles Davis,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 17, no. 2 (2007): 217–46. 44 See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). For a genealogy of black countervisibility, see Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Black-

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ness. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); and Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 117–18. Catherine Morris and Rujecko Hockley, eds., We Wanted a Revolution Black Radical Women, 1965–85: A Sourcebook (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 2017). In public conversation at the California African American Art Museum on January 14, 2018, the artist recalled that when she first asked the prisoners what subject she should paint for their mural, one replied, “A road out of here.” This is another sense in which the force of the virtual operates to intagliate our bondage and our freedom. Here I gloss an argument also made by Homay King in the final chapter of Virtual Memory. Getting to this “how to do things with black queer archives,” therefore, entails for me a digression into a conversation that Italian Marxist Antonio Negri once had with the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. In it, Deleuze evokes fabulation as an alternative heuristic for linking “art” and “a people,”—or in other terms, for linking the aesthetic and the sociopolitical. Afro-fabulation would in this sense do work that is related to—if, as Deleuze suggests, finally distinct from—utopianism. In the remark above, Deleuze is offering a typical “disjunctive synthesis” of art and the popular, with “disjunctive synthesis” here being the approach Deleuze develops, in the Logic of Sense especially, for thinking through the either/or choice. Rather than transcend this opposition through dialectical synthesis, disjunctive synthesis seeks rather to preserve the difference and instead find the space of resonance that this forked path of the either/or affords. The thinking of the disjunctive synthesis, that is to say, is heterotopian rather than utopian. Even so, we may also say that insofar as fabulation diverges from utopian thinking, it continues to resonate with it. Fabulationality can be a way of touching a utopian margin. I lay this somewhat odd proviso up front so as to make clear both my own indebtedness to the work of contemporary minoritarian thinkers of utopia, especially Jayna Brown and José Esteban Muñoz, and the places where my divergence from them allows a resonance (in a sort of passionate critical angularity). Insofar as the fabulist must seize hold of a present moment and instill belief in others that what she sees is really happening, it differs ever so slightly from the utopian impulse. Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: New York University Press, forthcoming). Insofar as afro-fabulation is a kind of social dreaming, it is much closer to afrosurrealism than afro-futurism. On black surrealism, see Franklin Rosemont and Robin D. G Kelley, eds., Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009). See also D. Scot Miller, “Afrosurreal Manifesto,” with its opening flourish, “Black is the new black,” Afrosurreal Generation, May 20, 2009. http://dscotmiller.blogspot.com.

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51 On political moods, see Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); and Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 52 Shane Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 53 On the changing same, see Amiri Baraka, Black Music (New York: William Morrow, 1967); and James Snead, “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture,” in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert O’Meally (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 62–81. On history and memory, see Robert O’Meally and Genevieve Fabre, eds., History and Memory in African-American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Martin B. Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, eds., Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: New American Library, 1989). In queer studies, Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) has been influential in questioning the loss/recovery paradigm. 54 A full review of these debates is beyond the scope of this introduction, but two excellent, if contrasting, takes appear in Rinaldo Walcott, “Beyond the ‘Nation Thing’: Black Studies, Cultural Studies, and Diaspora Discourse (or the Post-Black Studies Moment),” in Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies, ed. Carole Boyce Davies, Meredith Gadsby, Charles Peterson, and Henrietta Williams (New York: African World Press, 2003), 107–24; and Paul C. Taylor, “Post-Black, Old Black,” African American Review 41, no. 4 (2007): 625–40. Running a frequency search on the corpus of English-language texts included in the Google Books database shows more than a doubling in frequency of “post-black” and a tripling of references to “post-queer” over the first decade of the 2000s. Both are dwarfed by the appearances of “post-feminist,” which begins to show up in the literature in earnest two decades earlier, in 1980, and climbs steadily from there. See also Margo Natalie Crawford’s recent Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017). 55 Baraka, Black Music. 56 Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 129. 57 Crawford, Black Post-Blackness. 58 Masi Asare, “Voicing the Possible: Technique, Vocal Sound, and Black Women on the Musical Stage,” PhD dissertation (New York University, 2018), 8. 59 I’m grateful to Fred Moten for suggesting this term as descriptive of my project in a reading of an earlier draft of this text. 60 Kara Keeling, “Looking for M—: Queer Temporality, Black Political Possibility, and Poetry from the Future,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 15, no. 4 (2009): 569–70. 61 My own approach to black temporality resembles Keeling’s more than Wright’s. Because a key aspect of Bergson’s concept of duration is irreversibility, I don’t

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think of quantum indeterminacy as providing “free play” untethered to history. Instead I approach the legacy of the Middle Passage as more hauntological than epistemological. See Wright, Physics of Blackness; and Fred Moten, “Notes on Passage (The New International of Sovereign Feelings),” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 3, no. 1 (2014): 51–74. Thelma Golden and Hamza Walker, Freestyle (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001). Gilroy, Against Race, 26 and passim. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. For a trenchant critique of the Arendtian terms of political order, see Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013). For more on human rights discourse, see my “Black Humanitarianism,” in Retrieving the Human: Reading Paul Gilroy, ed. Rebecka Rutledge Fisher and Jay Garcia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 187–205. See Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337. Gratitude to the members of the Sylvia Wynter Reading Group, organized and led by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, for ongoing guidance through the thicket of Wynter’s massive and academically camouflaged project. See also Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). For a good introduction to the Deleuzean critique of humanism, see Nathan Widder, Political Theory after Deleuze (New York: Continuum, 2012). Robert Reid-Pharr, Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique, (New York: New York University Press, 2016); Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Jayna Brown, “A Wilder Sort of Empiricism: Madness, Visions and Speculative Life,” Social Text Periscope, January 4, 2012, www.socialtextjournal.org. Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race.

Chapter 1. Critical Shade

1 The method of thick description that this chapter essays is indebted to the experimental ethnographic models of Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); and Shaka McGlotten, Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014). All ensuing errors in anthropological theory and practice are of course my own. 2 On the relation between black dance and postmodern dance, see Thomas DeFrantz, ed., Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); and Danielle Goldman, I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).

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3 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Tenth Anniversary Edition (New York: Routledge, 2002). An early statement of this theme remains influential: Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 4 Clare Croft, ed., Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1. 5 Octavia Saint Laurent was one of the femme realness icons of Jennie Livingston’s pathbreaking 1991 film, Paris Is Burning. I attended that ball in the summer of 1994, conducting researching for what would become my undergraduate thesis, “Fierce Pleasures: Art, History, and Culture in the New York City Drag Ball Scene” (Wesleyan University, 1995). Scandalously, the legendary Octavia lost the competition that night. Even the judges couldn’t believe it. For more on St. Laurent and vogue, see Marcos Becquer and Jose Gatti, “Elements of Vogue,” Third Text 5, nos. 16–17 (1991): 65–81; and Marlon M. Bailey, “Engendering Space: Ballroom Culture and the Spatial Practice of Possibility in Detroit,” Gender, Place & Culture 21, no. 4 (2014): 1–19. 6 The quotation on the ephemeral program was reprinted from Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 98–99, emphasis in original. The original read, “one of the informants,” which Harrell has replaced with the less-ethnographic sounding “one participant.” 7 Here I must at least briefly acknowledge the small bookshelf of essays and books that directly engage the enduringly controversial film, Paris Is Burning, and the living house ball culture of which it was of course but a snapshot. A fuller account of this bibliography and videography than I can give here would certainly include: Marlon M. Bailey, Butch Queens up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013); Lucas Hilderbrand, Paris Is Burning: A Queer Film Classic (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal, 2013); and Phillip Brian Harper, Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations (New York: New York University Press, 1999). 8 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011). 9 In this section and throughout, my argument about shade and fierceness is informed by Madison Moore, “Tina Theory: Notes on Fierceness,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 24, no. 1 (2012): 71–86; and E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), especially chap. 2. 10 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 182. 11 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 187. 12 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 189.

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13 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 16. 14 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 15 On the drag balls of Harlem in the 1920s, see Eric Garber, “A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin B Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey (New York: New American Library, 1989). On the rise of postmodern dance in Greenwich Village of the 1960s, see Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). 16 See Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 17 Cited in Deborah Jowitt, “Trajal Harrell, Pam Tanowitz and Other APAP Showcases Turn New York into One Big Runway,” Village Voice, January 19, 2010, www. villagevoice.com. 18 To be sure, black culture has often been held up as an inspiration or model for the avant-garde. But black culture is only rarely recognized as itself an avantgarde—as a militant vanguard of collective artistic expression that rejects the corrupt and ossifying culture of its day in order to imagine and usher in a better order. On this latter idea, see Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 19 Moten, In the Break, chap. 1. 20 Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 21 I am indebted to Professor Anna McCarthy of the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University for the phrase “the good-enough life,” which is a Winnicottian play on the common phrase “the good life.” 22 On the place of object relations psychoanalysis in performance studies, see the special issue of Women and Performance edited by José Esteban Muñoz, “Between Psychoanalysis and Affect: A Public Feelings Project,” 19, no. 2 (2009). 23 This paragraph reworks some material from my article “Mother Would Like a Cash Award: Trajal Harrell at MoMA” (2016), available freely online at www. moma.org. On living currency, see Pierre Klossowski, Living Currency (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 24 On interinanimation in critical black poetics, see Moten, In the Break, 71 and passim. For an earlier, useful formulation of the placement of the interinanimative within rhetoric, see I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965). As we enter into an era of digital text and machine reading, the communist arts of interinanimation will encode themselves even more deeply into the staging of the secret legislation of our major and minor poets.

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25 Jared Sexton, “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word,” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, no. 29 (2016), https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/029.e02. 26 Sexton, “Afro-Pessimism.” 27 Mlondi Zondi, “On minor matter,” program booklet for Ligia Lewis: Minor Matter, presented by Redcat, California Institute of the Arts, January 12–14, 2017, emphasis in original. 28 Ronald Bogue, Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 9.

Chapter 2. Crushed Black

1 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (New York: Routledge, 2002). For another response to this famous Jamesonian injunction, see Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 2 This account should resonate with Amber Musser’s lucid and painstaking reconstruction of the brown jouissance of the travestied and pornotroped black female subject, throughout her work, but especially in chapters 1 and 4 of Amber Jamilla Musser, Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (New York: New York University Press, 2018). I engage her account of counter-troping the pornotrope in chapter 5 of this study. 3 In thinking of queerness as a future horizon, I am drawing on José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 4 Quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 482. 5 Musser, Sensual Excess, chap. 1. I am also thinking here of the utility of the concept of heterotopia as a surface metaphor, a point I elaborate upon in chapter 7 by of engaging both Musser and C. Riley Snorton’s historicization of the black body as a heterotopia. See C. Riley Snorton, “‘An Ambiguous Heterotopia’: On the Past of Black Studies’ Future,” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 29–36. 6 Barbara A. Lynch-Johnt and Michelle Perkins, Illustrated Dictionary of Photography: The Professional’s Guide to Terms and Techniques (Buffalo, NY: Amherst Media, 2008). 7 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 8 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and William Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988). 9 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New York: Norton, 1998). 10 José Esteban Muñoz, “Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate: Gary Fisher with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,” in Queer Futures: Reconsidering Ethics, Activism, and the Po-

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litical, ed. Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Eveline Kilian, and Beatrice Michaelis (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 103–16. Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 103. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 31–52. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 89. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 89. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). These powers have been given a wonderful recent rearticulation in Michael Gillespie’s generative new work on “film blackness,” in particular his approach to blackness and film noir. See Michael Boyce Gillespie, Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), chap. 3. Portrait of Jason: A Film by Shirley Clarke [1967], directed by Shirley Clarke (New York: Milestone Film and Video, 2014), DVD. Not only was sodomy then illegal, but homosexuals were not allowed to congregate in public spaces like bars and were frequently blackmailed and entrapped by employers, friends, family, and the police. Moreover, if they were convicted of a “morals” change, as Holliday had been, they were barred from gainful employment in many professions, as was the case for Holliday, who was denied a cabaret license. (I thank Professor George Chauncey of Columbia University for this information.) See John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Barbara Kruger, Remote Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of Appearances (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 182. Charles C. Nero, “Why Are Gay Ghettoes White?,” in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 236. And of course there is the question of whether we would or could be defending Jason from Shirley if she hadn’t, for whatever ulterior motives, taken the first step to sit him down for his portrait. Lauren Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema, 1943–71 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 137. Louise Spence and Vinicius Navarro, Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 15. Gavin Butt, “Stop That Acting!: Performances and Authenticity in Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason,” in Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, ed. Kobena Mercer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 53–54 . Armond White, “Portrait of Jason Reviewed by Armond White for CityArts,” NYFCC blog, New York Film Critics Circle, April 17, 2013, www.nyfcc.com.

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25 Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994); Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 26 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Jackie Stacey, “Wishing Away Ambivalence,” Feminist Theory 15, no. 1 (2014): 39–49. This latter essay contains an especially cogent radical analysis of the work of ambivalence in the Kleinian paradigm. 27 Jason in Clarke, Portrait of Jason. 28 See for instance, Jared Sexton’s scouring critique of the coalitional term “people of color.” Jared Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text 28, no. 2 (2010): 31–56. 29 Muñoz’s essay is also a response to an essay on the same subject by Ellis Hanson, although the terms of the respectful exchange between the two queer critics has less of a bearing to my present purpose here. See Ellis Hanson, “The Future’s Eve: Reparative Reading after Sedgwick,” South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 1 (2011): 101– 19. 30 Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 31 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 32 On correlationism, see Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008). 33 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, iii; emphasis added. 34 Muñoz, “Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate.” 35 Muñoz, “Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate,” 108. 36 See also Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). My own sense of unbearable sex, born out in these pages, cannot be said to diverge from the brilliance of Berlant’s and Edelman’s dialogue insofar as the performance of that dialogic text lies precisely in its divergence from itself. In the attempted synthesis of these matters in Afro-Fabulations, I have sought to converge with one of the many affective strands in that text, which I take to be an ineradicable drive towards recognition, and love, modeled in the premise of the dialogue, from Plato to queer theory. 37 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 6. 38 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 8. 39 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 11. 40 Love, Feeling Backward, 31–52. 41 Heather Love, “Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” Criticism 52, no. 2 (2010): 235–41. 42 “Everynight life” is a phrase I borrow from the collaborative work of José Esteban Muñoz and Celeste Delgado, who use it in jocular inversion of the sociologies of everyday life. Celeste Fraser Delgado and José Esteban Muñoz, Everynight Life:

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Culture and Dance in Latin/o America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). This concept has yet to be really taken up in the theory of practice, other than in the illuminating account of “closing time” in Shane Vogel’s The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). On this last score, I would point to Gavin Butt’s work on gossip and rumor in the New York art world as another key contributor of everynight life methodologies. See Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). See Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret, esp. chap. 3. Irene Gustafson, “Putting Things to the Test: Reconsidering Portrait of Jason,” Camera Obscura 26, no. 2 (2011): 1–31; Butt, “Stop That Acting!” Others present in the room included cinematographer Jeri Sopanen (1929–2008), sound engineer Francis Daniel, Jim Hubbard assisting on sound and second camera, and production assistant Bob Fiore. “Code Book,” Shirley Clarke Papers, Box 5, Folder 6, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Quoted in Samuel R. Delaney, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957–1965 (New York: Morrow, 1988), 213. Here I adopt another Muñozian formulation, this time from José Esteban Muñoz, “Cruising the Toilet: Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, nos. 2–3 (2007): 353–67. Noël Burch and André Labarthe, “Shirley Clarke: Rome Is Burning,” Cinéastes de Notre Temps, (Paris: Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française, October 4, 1970). Deleuze, Cinema 2, 117–18. Joe Cohen, “Male Prostie Star of ‘Portrait of Jason’ in Paid Nitery Audition,” Variety 248, no. 12 (1967): 2, 68. Undated (circa 1941) typescript interview with Wright. Richard Wright Papers, Box 82, Folder 928, Beinecke Library, Yale University, JWJ MSS 3 Box 3. Native Son Playbill, 1941. Richard Wright Papers, Box 82 Folder 932. Beinecke Library, Yale University, JWJ MSS 3. Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (London: Routledge, 2004). This thematic link is only strengthened by the conjoined production histories of the film and play: not only are key members of the cast shared across the two versions, but the play was still being staged when the film was released. This concurrence of theatrical release on stage and screen matters for the way in which The Connection manifested the dark vitalism of black performance. In musical terms, this connection might be described as a cross-fading between the live and mediated performance of black masculinity. As in a musical cross-fade, the overlapping of two distinctive temporalities and aesthetic forms produces a moment of indistinction, a blur that itself takes shape as a new aesthetic form.

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57 Lucas Hildebrand, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 58 Letter from Clarke to Morton Weiner, attorney retained by Holliday, June 13, 1968. Shirley Clarke Papers, Box 5, Folder 6, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin, Madison, US Mss 145AN. 59 Muñoz, “Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate,” 112. 60 Jason Holliday, An Audio Portrait of Jason (Santa Monica, CA: Darn Good Music, 2007).

Chapter 3. Brer Soul and the Mythic Being

1 Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: New York University Press, 2015). McMillan’s important work offers a genealogy of black women in performance art, in a ground-clearing gesture to which this present effort to rethink the genealogy of sexual and gender dissidence in black culture is indebted. McMillan’s useful work on “avatar production” builds on pioneering work by Coco Fusco, Daphne Brooks, Francesca Royster, Jayna Brown, and Stephanie Batiste, each of whose work has expanded and deepened the scope of black feminist interventions into the theory and practice of performance. Fusco in particular provided a key early disruption of the Eurocentric genealogy of “performance art” considered solely in art historical terms that overlook the broad spectrum of performance and performativity that the trans-discipline of performance studies attends to. See Coco Fusco, English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York: New Press, 1995). See also Stephanie Leigh Batiste, Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression-Era African American Performance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850– 1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 2 Just as I was completing this book, two new and important contributions to this subject appeared: C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); and Margo Natalie Crawford, Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-FirstCentury Aesthetics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017). I have sought to benefit from these two interventions where I could in making final revisions to this book, although the full consequence of these two arguments will no doubt reverberate in the field for some time into the future. 3 LaMonda Horton-Stallings, Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015). Two other scholars’ work I draw on are Francesca Royster’s account of eccentric acts in post-soul black performance and Malik Gaines’s parallel rendering of black performance on the outskirts of the Left. All these spatial images—trans, eccentricity, the outskirts— bear upon the process by which fabulation disrupts the narratocracy of represen-

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tation. Francesca T. Royster, Sounding like a No-No?: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013); Malik Gaines, Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible (New York: New York University Press, 2017). Amiri Baraka, Black Music (New York: William Morrow, 1967). Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 11. While critical fabulation as Hartman originally defined it was a strategy for dealing specifically with the archive of slavery, I draw upon a range of critics (including Hartman herself) who theorizing of the present as “the afterlife of slavery” is a way of holding on to the ongoing need to reckon with the perpetuation of anti-blackness, white supremacy, and indeed, modes of unfree labor that endure into our postmodern present. See Salamishah Tillet, Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). One of funk’s lessons, I will maintain, is that the musicking body lives this afterlife of slavery. Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight; Volume I: Selected Writings in Meta-Art, 1968–1992 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 51. With the benefit of hindsight, we might even assert that what van Peebles accomplished in relation to commercial theater and film, Piper has now accomplished in relation to the commercial gallery system: both were uncompromising, do-it-yourself, and go-it-alone artists, who, over time, have been incorporated and celebrated as shining examples of the culture industries whose racist and exclusionary practices they did everything in their power to protest and spurn. Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 89–90. Piper recalls being introduced as “exotic Adrian” (960). Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Amber Jamilla Musser, Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (New York: New York University Press 2014), 23. Deleuze quoted in Musser, Sensational Flesh, 23. On intended length (and discontinuation due to lack of funds), see Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 137. On the loan from Sol Lewitt, see the same volume, 102. John Parish Bowles, Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Cherise Smith, Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). See McMillan, Embodied Avatars, for a good summary and discussion of the controversy over the relationship of the work of Adrian Piper to “black art” as the category emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Piper’s recent “retirement” from blackness, McMillan persuasively argues, is not to be taken without a grain of salt, given the highly intentional history of tactical withdrawals from art exhibitions and, more broadly, any given art world consensus, that has characterized her entire career.

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14 Two black studies readings of this film are especially crucial in setting the stage for my argument in this chapter (which seeks to discover a transect of Brer Soul that cuts across the film persona van Peebles creates in the film, which has been the primary focus of critical attention to date): Robert Reid-Pharr’s “Queer Sweetback,” in his Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (New York: New York University Press, 2007); and Mark Anthony Neal’s chapter “Sweetback’s Revenge,” in his Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 2002), 23–55. 15 Stallings, Funk the Erotic, 11. 16 Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 136, 135. 17 On the transversal in Deleuzean aesthetics, see Ronald Bogue, Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007); and Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, trans. Aileen Derieg (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007). Raunig is especially lucid in outlining the key transversal movements (roughly schematized as diagonal movements that “cut across” entrenched social hierarchies and organizations at unexpected angles) through which avant-garde aesthetics have been able to make contributions to the social revolution of our times. 18 A full discussion of the dark precursor will appear in chapter 7. For an introduction to the place of this concept in the thought of Gilles Deleuze, see Bogue, Deleuze’s Way; and Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), especially chapter 2. For an intriguing monograph that investigates the consequence of this concept for reckoning with Deleuze as a theorist of stasis, rather than movement, see Eleanor Kaufman, Deleuze, the Dark Precursor: Dialectic, Structure, Being (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). Kaufman’s emphasis on negativity and stasis resonates well, I believe, with the “invisible” and unseen performances of Adrian Piper. 19 Melvin van Peebles, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song: A Guerilla Filmmaking Manifesto (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004). The sexploitative aspects of Sweetback are rarely noticed except disparagingly, as if to point out its pornographic features is to count a strike against it. But with the aid of a new direction in black feminist studies of porn, led by Mireille Miller-Young and Jennifer Nash, it should increasingly clear that the dismissal or failure to examine the pornographic aspects of Sweetback on its own generic terms should no longer be viable. Mireille Miller-Young, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Jennifer C Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 20 Van Peebles, Sweet Sweetback, 136. 21 Reid-Pharr, Once You Go Black. 22 Fugitivity is a concept I take from the work of Fred Moten, for whom it coalesces around “a political imperative that infuses the unfinished project of emancipation

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as well as any number of other transitions or crossings in progress.” This imperative corresponds, Moten elaborates, “to the need for the fugitive, the immigrant and the new (or newly constrained) citizen to hold something in reserve, to keep a secret.” This special sense of secrecy and reserve, even of hiding and obscurity, Moten ascribes to states of transition, transformation, crossing over, and arrival. Fred Moten and Charles H. Rowell, “‘Words Don’t Go There’: An Interview with Fred Moten,” Callaloo 27, no. 4 (2004): 960. Keeling, The Witch’s Flight. Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 247–48. Alice Echols, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); Tim Lawrence, Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Alexander G Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 91. Davide Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 12.

Chapter 4. Deep Time, Dark Time

1 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 2 The prime instigator for this movement remains Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 3 See Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain? (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). I discuss Malabou further in chapter 8. On Laruelle and photography, see François Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography, trans. Robin Mackay (New York: Sequence Press, 2011). 4 For a literary version of deep time, see Wai-Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). For a philosophical one, see Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008). 5 Jayna Brown, “A Wilder Sort of Empiricism: Madness, Visions and Speculative Life,” Periscope (online dossier), January 4, 2012, http://socialtextjournal.org; Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism,” Feminist Studies 39, no. 3 (2013): 669–85; Kara Keeling, “Looking for M—: Queer Temporality, Black Political Possibility, and Poetry from the Future,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 15, no. 4 (2009): 565–82 ; Katherine McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human As Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

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6 Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” Intensions 5 (Fall/Winter 2011): 28. 7 Candice Marie Jenkins, Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 8 Brown, “A Wilder Sort of Empiricism.” 9 Harryette Romell Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): 56. 10 Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1982), 150–58. 11 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 12 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 2. 13 Jussi Parrika, The Anthrobscene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 4; Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 14 Parrika, The Anthrobscene, 22–34. 15 The work on the Anthropocene is, or should be, dependent on the feminist philosophical intervention of Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 16 On performance as hemispheric, see Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 17 See Macarena Gomez-Barris, Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018); Lilian Mengesha, “Piedra by Regina José Galindo, e-Mesferica 10, no. 2 (Summer 2013), hemisphericinstitute.org; Clare Carolin, “After the Digital We Rematerialise: Distance and Violence in the Work of Regina José Galindo,” Third Text 25, no. 2 (2011), 211–23; Jane Lavery and Sarah Bowskill, “The Representation of the Female Body in the Multimedia Works of Regina José Galindo,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 31, no. 1 (2012): 51–64; Caroline Rodrigues, “Performing Domination and Resistance between Body and Space: The Transversal Activism of Regina José Galindo,” Journal of Media Practice 12, no. 3 (2012): 291–303. For an argument about the “visual disobedience” of political art in Central America, see Kency Cornejo, “Visual Disobedience: The Geopolitics of Experimental Art in Central America, 1990–Present,” PhD dissertation (Duke University, 2014). 18 On Mendieta, see José Esteban Muñoz, “Vitalism’s After-Burn: The Sense of Ana Mendieta,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 21, no. 2 (2011): 191–98. 19 Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 20 See Jayna Brown and Tavia Nyong’o, eds., Recall and Response: Black Women Performers and the Mapping of Memory (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2006).

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21 Christina Elizabeth Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 22 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Continuum, 2010). 23 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28. 24 Mengesha, “Piedra by Regina José Galindo.” 25 On the radical passivity of shadow feminisms, see Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 123–146. 26 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 10 and passim. 27 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 28 Lorraine O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” in Art, Activism, and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage, ed. Grant H. Kester (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 269. 29 Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3, no. 4 (1997): 437–65; Evelynn Hammonds, “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,’” in The Black Studies Reader, ed. Jacqueline Bobo, Cynthia Hudley, and Claudine Michel (New York: Routledge, 2004), 301–14. 30 Henri Louis Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1935), 10. 31 Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 105. 32 Parrika, The Anthrobscene, 24. 33 Chen, Animacies, 28. 34 Chen, Animacies, 23. 35 In contrast to Galindo, the scholarship and criticism on Kara Walker is very substantial. I have drawn in particular on the following assessments: Roderick A. Ferguson, “A Special Place within the Order of Knowledge: The Art of Kara Walker and the Conventions of African American History,” American Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2009): 185–92; Arlene R. Keizer, “Gone Astray in the Flesh: Kara Walker, Black Women Writers, and African American Postmemory,” PMLA 123, no. 5 (2008): 1649–72; Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 153–88; Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 36 This is to say that both the taking of photographs and the photographs themselves operate as instances of retention. Think of the number of digital photos that are taken, looked at once and then, perhaps, never again, and one has a sense of how the digital photograph has quickly become folded into the habitual practice of everyday life as a deliberately ephemeral act of retention. 37 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).

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38 Nicholas Gamso, “Kara Walker Answers the Urban Question,” Social Text 35, no. 4 (2017): 87–112. 39 Leigh Raiford and Robin J. Hayes, “‘Remembering the Workers of the Domino Sugar Factory,’” Atlantic, July 3, 2014, www.theatlantic.com. 40 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 31. 41 On accumulation through dispossession, see David Harvey, “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession,” in in Socialist Register 2004: The New Imperial Challenge, ed. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (London: Merlin, 2003), 63–87. For a critique of Walker’s acceptance of support from Domino Sugar, see Carol Diehl, “‘Dirty Sugar: Kara Walker’s Dubious Alliance with Domino,’” Carol Diehl’s Art Vent (blog), June 16, 2014, http://artvent.blogspot.com. 42 Darby English, “A New Context for Reconstruction: Some Crises of Landscape in Kara Walker’s Silhouette Installations,” in How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 71–135. 43 Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From the Spectator to Post-Structuralism (London: Verso, 1984), 9. 44 On the “relational aesthetics” debate, see Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, with Mathieu Copeland (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002); Claire Bishop, “‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,’” October, no. 110 (2004): 51–79; Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011), 45–59. 45 Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary, 56. 46 Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 47 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1–40. 48 The primary reference for her work is Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); but see also Da Silva, “To Be Announced: Radical Praxis or Knowing (at) the Limits of Justice,” Social Text 31, no. 1 (2013): 43–62. 49 Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1986). 50 Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011). 51 “By the sixteenth century, the habit of using sugar as decoration, spreading through continental Europe from North Africa and particularly Egypt, began to percolate down from the nobility. . . . It was possible to sculpture an object out of this sweet, preservable ‘clay’ on any scale and in nearly any form, and to bake or harden it. Such displays, called ‘subtleties,’ served to mark intervals between banquet ‘courses’” (Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 87–88). 52 Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies.

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53 For multiple examples of these types, and a definitive study of the system of wondrous classification of the natural world within which they were nestled, see Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 54 The announced organizers of “We Are Here” were Ariana Allensworth, Salome Asega, Taja Cheek, Sable Elyse Smith, and Nadia Williams. Throughout this project I have been influenced by a black feminist citational politics that asks us to acknowledge individual and collective work wherever uplifting a public name can forward a wider black social practice that must necessarily remain partly camouflaged in these times. The Tumblr page can be found at http://weareherekwe. tumblr.com/. 55 For more on this history of the present, see Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016). 56 Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 57 François Laruelle, “On the Black Universe in the Human Foundations of Color,” in Hyun Soon Choi: Seven Large Scale Paintings, trans. Miguel Abreu (New York: Thread Waxing Space, 1991), 2–4. 58 Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 103. 59 Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 178.

Chapter 5. Little Monsters

1 Michel Foucault, Introduction, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 1:138. 2 C. J. C. Phillips, Principles of Cattle Production, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International, 2010), 2. 3 My account of the extinction of the aurochs is drawn principally from Mieczyslaw Rokosz, “History of the Aurochs (Bos Taurus Primegenius) in Poland,” Animal Genetic Resources vol. 16 (April 1995): 5–12. 4 A critical synthesis of this literature is provided in Jordana Rosenberg, “The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present,” Theory and Event 17, no. 2 (2014), muse.jhu.edu. See also Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); and Claire Colebrook, Sex after Life: Essays on Extinction, vol. 2 (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2014). 5 Jamie Lorimer and Clemens Driessen, “Bovine Biopolitics and the Promise of Monsters in the Rewilding of Heck Cattle,” Geoforum 48 (August 2013): 249–59. 6 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 7 My thinking on the wild beyond is shaped by Jack Halberstam’s recent work on this concept. See Halberstam, “The Wild Beyond: With and for the Undercom-

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mons,” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, ed. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 2–13. On the speculative realist critique of correlationism, and the retrieval of the Great Outdoors, see Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008). Rosenberg makes a persuasive case that the pursuit of the Great Outdoors through the pursuit of figures of the “ancestral” is, in her words, a “theoretical primitivism that presents itself as a methodological avant-garde” (“Molecularization of Sexuality”). Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). See the discussion of “biophilia” below. The circularity of this drive toward the outdoors is also noted in Rosenberg’s claim that object-oriented ontologies represent an “onto-primitivism” (“Molecularization of Sexuality”). See, in particular, Jayna Brown, “Beasts of the Southern Wild—The Romance of Precarity II,” Social Text (blog), September 27, 2012, socialtextjournal.org; bell hooks, “No Love in the Wild,” New Black Man, September 5, 2012, newblackman. blogspot.co.uk; Christina Sharpe, “Beasts of the Southern Wild—The Romance of Precarity I,” Social Text (blog), September 27, 2012, socialtextjournal.org/; and Patricia Yaeger, “Beasts of the Southern Wild and Dirty Ecology,” Southern Spaces, February 13, 2013, www.southernspaces.org. Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Becoming Wild,” Occupy 2012, September 30, 2012, www. nicholasmirzoeff.com; Yaeger, “Beasts of the Southern Wild and Dirty Ecology.” Since the original publication of this chapter in essay form, some scholarly articles on this film have been published. On animalized “throwaway life” in the film, see Christopher Lloyd, “Creaturely, Throwaway Life after Katrina: Salvage the Bones and Beasts of the Southern Wild,” South: A Scholarly Journal 48, no. 2 (2016): 246–64. On blackness and animality, see Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism,” Feminist Studies 39, no. 3 (2013): 669–85. Rachel Arons, “The Making of ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild,’” New York Times, June 8, 2012. In one particularly telling instance of this blurring of film text and production process, the filmmakers reported opting for costumed domestic pigs, instead of CGI effects, to render the preternatural aurochs, because that would lend greater verisimilitude to the low-tech conditions in the (fictional) Bathtub, where the film was set. On the color-blind casting of Hushpuppy, see Bill Keith, “Meet Lucy Alibar, Oscar Nominated Screenwriter of Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Credits, February 22, 2013, www.thecredits.org. On invagination, see Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 258. On intensive manifold, see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 62–81.

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16 Mel Chen, Animacies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 17 Levi Bryant, “Wilderness Ontology,” in Preternatural, ed. Celina Jeffery (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum, 2011), 20. 18 Grégoire Chamayou, Manhunts: A Philosophical History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 19 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1:89. 20 Jonathan D. Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 21 Culler, Pursuit of Signs, 176. 22 Frank B. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 5. 23 Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 149. 24 Nathan Widder, Political Theory after Deleuze (New York: Continuum, 2012), emphasis in original, 34. 25 Alibar has indicated that she wrote the original character of Hushpuppy in Juicy and Delicious with the actor who had been cast to play him in mind, and then rewrote the character when Wallis was cast. “I think all playwrights know it’s going to end up changing depending on your cast, and that’s why playwrights and actors tend to have ongoing relationships. So with Nazie, it became a lot younger, and a lot more Louisiana. She was already pretty Louisiana by the time we wrote the script, but she was absolutely instrumental” (Katie Calautti, “Lucy Alibar Talks Adapting Her Play into Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Spinoff Online, July 13, 2012, spinoff.comicbookresources.com). 26 The big gay dance number in the play is replaced by a more straightforward primal scene in the film, in which Wink recalls the exact moment of Hushpuppy’s conception, immediately after Hushpuppy’s mother shoots an alligator with a rifle. Wink, true to his name, has dozed off when the alligator comes creeping up, his feminized vulnerability directly contrasted with his wife’s gun-toting virilizing force. His subsequent efforts to masculinize his daughter thus read as belated attempts to compensate for his earlier soft, even queer masculinity, his insistent misgendering of Hushpuppy as “man” being a telltale giveaway that the manhood he would inscribe everywhere can in fact be located nowhere. 27 Yaeger, “Beasts of the Southern Wild and Dirty Ecology.” 28 The classic theoretical statement on the free indirect image in cinema can be found in Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 126–55. For a critical perspective on Deleuze’s use of the free indirect image, see Louis Georges Schwartz, “Typewriter: Free Indirect Discourse in Deleuze’s Cinema,” SubStance 34, no. 3 (2005): 107–35. 29 There is another moment in the film—in which several adults, led by Wink, chant, “Beast it! Beast it!” as Hushpuppy attempts to eat a crab—that suggests the residents of the Bathtub accept “beast” as a self-designation of sorts.

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30 Yaeger, “Beasts of the Southern Wild and Dirty Ecology.” See also her Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930–1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 31 Jayna Brown, “The Human Project,” Transition 110 Fais Do-Do (2013): 121–35. 32 Sharpe, “Beasts of the Southern Wild—The Romance of Precarity I”; and Brown, “Beasts of the Southern Wild—The Romance of Precarity II.” 33 Widder, Political Theory after Deleuze, 129. 34 In feminist and queer political theory, the field of thinkers associated with the “new materialism” sometimes draws from figurations of the wild and wildness. In “The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh,” her contribution to the volume that helped constitute that field, which she also coedited, the political theorist Diana Coole draws on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to describe a “wild-flowering world” made visible by a “brute” or “wild” perception. See Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialism: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 100, 103, and passim. Halberstam has articulated a new convergence of anarchism and queerness through an imagining and enactment of the wild (“Wild Beyond”). Bennett cites what she describes as Henry David Thoreau’s concept of “the Wild” in her fieldshaping monograph Vibrant Matter. See also South Atlantic Quarterly, special issue on ““Wildness,” ed. Jack Halberstam and Tavia Nyong’o, 117, no. 3 (forthcoming).  35 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 105. 36 Grégoire Chamayou, Manhunts: A Philosophical History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 37 Diane Chisholm, “Biophilia, Creative Involution, and the Ecological Future of Queer Desire,” in Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, ed. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 376. 38 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2004), 145. 39 Lucy Alibar, Juicy and Delicious: The Play that Inspired the Movie Beasts of the Southern Wild (New York: Diversion Books, 2012). 40 Michael Wang, “Heavy Breeding,” Cabinet 45 (Spring 2012): 19–23. 41 Jamie Lorimer and Clemens Driessen, “Bovine Biopolitics and the Promise of Monsters in the Rewilding of Heck Cattle,” Geoforum 48, no. 8 (2013): 249–59. 42 Wang, “Heavy Breeding.” 43 Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 3. 44 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xvi. 45 Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 32.

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46 See also Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (2008): 177–218. 47 Andil Gosine, “Non-White Reproduction and Same-Sex Eroticism: Queer Acts against Nature,” in Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, ed. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 151. 48 Gosine, “Non-White Reproduction,” 152. 49 This line of thought is further expounded in Christina Sharpe’s work on chronic racism and violence as the “weather” in her In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 50 Brown, “The Human Project.” 51 Rachel Arons, “A Mythical Bayou’s All-Too-Real Peril: The Making of ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild,’” New York Times, June 8, 2012, www.nytimes.com. 52 Brown, “Beasts of the Southern Wild—The Romance of Precarity II.” 53 This point is argued more extensively in Wilderson’s study of the Hollywood racial problem film, where he argues that the slave and the savage are positioned differently in relation to the society that seeks to exclude and engulf them both. In his comparative analysis of the native and the black, he makes a particular point of noting the presence of sovereignty on the part of the savage, and thus, an at least partial access to the human. See Wilderson, Red, White, and Black. It would be interesting to explore how this line of thought might develop in the context of a problem space like contemporary Africa, where the native is the black, and vice versa. Are the afterlives of colonialism an antagonism, a conflict, or some disjunctive synthesis of the two? I sketch a very preliminary approach to this question in chapter 7. 54 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xvi. 55 Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race. 56 I thank Jack Halberstam for making this point while commenting on this manuscript. On the “speaker’s benefit,” see Foucault, Introduction, 6. 57 Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 32. 58 Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 32. 59 Yaeger, “Beasts of the Southern Wild and Dirty Ecology.”

Chapter 6. fabulous, formless

1 On the end of queer theory, see Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). On the ongoing need for it, see Michael Warner, “Queer and Then?,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 1, 2012, http://chronicle.com. 2 On digital queer of color ethnography, see especially Shaka Mcglotten, Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014). For a recent statement on afrofuturism within a broader matrix of black queer studies in speculative fiction, see André M. Carrington, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). The classic statement on afrofuturism, discussed further

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below, remains the special issue of Social Text edited by Alondra Nelson; see Alondra Nelson, “Introduction: Future Texts,” special issue on Afrofuturism, Social Text 20, no. 2 (2002): 1–15. For a now classic statement of this debate, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Edelman, No Future; Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Robert Caserio, Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, “Forum: Conference Debates: The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” PMLA 121, no. 3 (2006): 819–28. Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth A. Wilson, “Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions,” Differences 26, no. 1 (2015): 12. See also, Robyn Wiegman, Object Lessons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2017). While I understand that “journalistic” is sometimes an epithet in scholarly circles, among the claims of this chapter and book is that such differences between scholarship and journalism within our intellectual culture has been subject to real subsumption within digitized modes of communicative capitalism. For a particularly searing appraisal of communicative reason in the era of digitality, see Jonathan Beller, The Message Is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital (London: Pluto Press, 2017). Michel Foucault, “Inutile de se soulever?” (Useless to revolt?), Le Monde, May 1979, 11–12. Nagle, Kill All Normies, 69; Wiegman and Wilson, “Antinormativity,” 16. For a qualified defense of the political consistency of writing for the Internet as a valid means of intellectual intervention, see Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011). Nagle, Kill All Normies, 74, 69. Wiegman and Wilson, “Antinormativity,” 16. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten argue that “the compulsion to tell us how you feel is the compulsion of labor, not citizenship, exploitation not domination, and it is whiteness. . . . But the noise of talk, white noise, the information-rich environment of the gregarious, comes from subjectivities formed of objectified labor.” They contrast this volubility with that they call “the real muteness of industrial labor.” Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013), 55. This comment can be read as a useful challenge to affect theory. See also the argument against volubility found in the shrewd Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012). Lisa Duggan, “Queer Complacency without Empire,” Bully Bloggers, September 22, 2015, https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com. Among the key texts Duggan cites

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as shifting the field away from reflexive antinormativity, see Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Licia Fiol-Matta, A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); and Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). By “reflexive antinormativity” I mean simply the assertion that queerness is to be understood in both theoretical and political terms as opposition to all norms. While I agree such reflexive opposition can be located in queer writing, I also agree with Duggan that it is in no way comprehensively descriptive of a field that is much more devoted to the analysis of norms and normativity as a problem-space, and is this sense already doing what recent critiques have called for it to begin doing. Duggan’s definitive statement on homonormativity is Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003). In terms of subsequent developments essayed in this chapter, one could well take issue, in passing, with Wiegman’s influential formulation of “identity knowledges” as the rubric under which queer, feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial knowledge production takes place in the academy now. See Robyn Wiegman, Object Lessons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 8 and passim. A comparable survey of these knowledge formations more rooted in queer of color critique, which appeared concurrently to Wiegman, can be found in Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). At stake of course is the familiar dialectic of difference and identity, which Wiegman’s formulation wishes to subsume under identity and which I, with Ferguson, wish to disseminate into differences. Keguro Macharia, “Queer Genealogies (Provisional Notes),” Bully Bloggers, January 13, 2013, https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com. Here I should recognize that Delany is by no means an unknown or unread author in the field of queer theory. Indeed, Heather Love has shared with me work-in-progress in which she—in a mode parallel to this chapter—recovers his writing for the history of what she wants to call “deviance studies.” While I share in Love’s critique of the manner in which Delany’s writing was positioned in the poststructuralist heyday of queer theory, I differ from Love in her wanting to call his epistemology “empiricism.” See Heather Love, “A Queer Method? Samuel Delany’s Empiricism and the History of Deviance Studies,” (n.d.) unpublished paper in possession of author. See also Alexis Lothian, Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility (New York: New York University Press, 2018). On the commitment to theory, see Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), chap. 1. In the terms of the intellectual history this chapter is sketching, “queer of color critique” is most succinctly understood as a theoretical development in post-

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queer theory that sought to draw upon the woman of color feminism of the 1970s and 1980s, which had been neglected or had fallen out of favor in the early 1990s. In this wave of recovery, the work of Chandan Reddy, Roderick Ferguson, and José Esteban Muñoz was crucial. Jasbir Puar’s proposal for a more Deleuzean approach to queer assemblages, to which we now add Alexander Weheliye’s recent articulations of racial assemblages, presents a second theoretical convolute, at times complementary, at times antagonistic, to the more identitarian stakes of queer of color critique. For more on these debates, see my Tavia Nyong’o, “In Finitude: Being with José, Being with Pedro,” Social Text 32, no. 4 (2014): 71–85. Evoking the formulations of Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten here, as throughout the book, is a reminder that the deconstructive problems of sexual difference and definition that characterized queer theory could be posed in the precise terms that they were only by right of the specific political developments that arose within a society structured in racial dominance. See, for instance, Joshua Chambers-Letson’s work on the racial unconscious of Leo Bersani’s influential and problematical queer essay, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in Joshua ChambersLetson, “Hovering in the Impasse: Reza Abdoh and the Uses of Blackness,” Walker Reader: Fourth Wall, accessed May 29, 2018, www.walkerart.org. See also Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Compare by contrast, however, the critical reputation of Umberto Eco, whose fame as a novelist has not prevented him from being read as a serious semiotician. Here I recapitulate Derrida’s critique of the fabula/sjuzhet distinction in narratology: the idea that the fabula (story) is rawer or more basic than the sjuzhet (plot) itself sets up a relation of supplementarity. 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, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 179–222. Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010). Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines, ed. James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 367. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 384. Why Scott foregrounded the reading of Delany that she wished her reader to avoid in her essay remains an open question; arguably due to the great influence of the essay, more readers remain familiar with the first, disavowed reading of Delany in the famous opening than with the much more accurate reading of Delany she has replaced that with by the end of the piece. Certainly the published response by historian Thomas Holt, insofar as it responds to Delany, focuses on the first of the two readings Scott offers of The Motion of Light in Water. Thomas C. Holt, “Experience and the Politics of Intellectual Inquiry,” in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across

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the Disciplines, ed. James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 388–96. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 384. “Through her explication of Samuel Delany’s memoir,” Holt writes, “Scott argues that one can only historicize experience by first historicizing the language (‘the terms’) in which it is expressed” (“Experience and Intellectual Inquiry,” 392). Scott, “The Evidence of Experience.” Samuel R. Delany, About Writing (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005). Wiegman and Wilson, “Antinormativity,” 1. The terms of dispute between Holt and Scott, revisited in this light, reveal another dimension to this question that exceeds what I can fully grapple with in this chapter. Where Scott enlists both Delany and Stuart Hall as providing evidence for how a modern black identity emerges in the United States and Jamaica out of the cultural ferment of the 1960s, Holt draws on his own readings of the black radical tradition to argue that politicized black identities were already present in the nineteenth century. I raise this issue here just to clarify that in positing Delany’s texts as dark precursors to queer theory, I am positing Delany not as the bearer of an invariant or essential black identity, but as a writer whose work attends to how raced, sexed, and gendered subjectivities emerge out of a relentless interplay of differences, divergences, and, indeed, silences. See Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957–1965 (New York: Morrow, 1988). This chapter is in itself but a prolegomena to a much more comprehensive and systematic reading of Delany’s massive and growing corpus than I (or any other scholar to my knowledge) have attempted. Already in this early novel, recycling emerges as a controlling metaphor in what would become Delany’s career-long and highly original efforts to think difference with repetition. Or perhaps their abandonment of planet Earth for further stars. This plot ambiguity is never fully resolved. Interestingly, Lobey’s ability to hear the music of other minds is never shown to extend to the nonfunctional or to nonsentient life. Samuel R. Delany, The Einstein Intersection (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 10–11. Le Dorik and Lobey have themselves produced one such nonfunctional child, and in a telling encounter between the two former lovers, immediately before Dorik is killed (by Death himself, in this very allegorical novel, as we shall see), Lobey refuses to acknowledge or visit his progeny. Sylvia Wynter, “Human Being as Noun? Or Being Human as Praxis? Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn: A Manifesto” unpublished essay, 53 and passim.

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38 Andrew David Irvine and Harry Deutsch, “Russell’s Paradox,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta , 2016, https://plato.stanford.edu. 39 C. Riley Snorton, “‘An Ambiguous Heterotopia’: On the Past of Black Studies’ Future,” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 29–36. 40 I use the term “gender reassignment surgery” advisedly, with the understanding of an activist preference for “gender affirmation surgery.” For a good overview of the risks that accrue to transgender people negotiating the administrative state and its medical apparatuses, see Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 41 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. 42 André M. Carrington, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 43 This seems even more the case with television and cinema, whose narratives remain shaped by unchallenged industry assumptions that “mass” audiences demand the reproduction of white hegemony in all screen scenarios, realist and fantasy alike. 44 I pursue this question further in the next chapter in an extended discussion of contemporary black cinema in the afterlives of slavery, a cinema that pursues what Jared Sexton has called a “libidinal economy” and Christina Sharpe has called a “monstrous intimacy.” Jared Sexton, “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word,” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, no. 29 (2016), https:// doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/029.e02; Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 45 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2010), 119.

Chapter 7. Habeas Ficta

1 Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 2 Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 3 On the pornotropic, a term developed by Hortense Spillers, my thinking is indebted to Alex Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 4 Frank B. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). 5 Fred Moten, “Taste Dissonance Flavor Escape: Preface for a Solo by Miles Davis,” Women and Performance 17, no. 2 (2007): 234, my emphasis.

248

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6 Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 2011); Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996); Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Weheliye, Habeas Viscus. 7 See, for instance, Kelley L. Carter, “The Rise of the Black British Actor in America,” Buzzfeed News, January 5, 2015, www.buzzfeed.com. 8 Two recent texts powerfully demonstrate the necessity and insufficiency of a “skin-deep” analysis of race: Nicole Fleetwood’s Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), and Michelle Stephens’s Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 9 Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Maurice Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 10 David Marriott, “Waiting to Fall,” New Centennial Review 13, no. 3 (2013): 176. 11 “Beneath the body schema I had created a historical-racial schema. The data I used were provided not by ‘remnants of feelings and notions of the tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, or visual nature,’ but by the Other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories” (Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks [New York: Grove, 2008], 91). The interior quotation is from Jean Lhermitte, L’image de notre corps (Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1939), 17. 12 Fanon, Black Skin, 131. 13 Jean Copjec, “The Sexual Compact,” Angelaki 17, no. 2 (2012): 37. 14 Marriott, “Waiting to Fall,” 164–65. 15 In 1989, Stuart Hall influentially posed this as the task of bringing into play “the recognition of the immense diversity and differentiation of the historical and cultural experience of black subjects” (“New Ethnicities,” 443). 16 Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 449. 17 Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 443. 18 Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 444; my emphasis. 19 Balibar, Race, Nation, Class, 96. The persona ficta of ethnic-national belonging, as an institutional fabrication, can also be thought of as an agencement or assemblage in the Deleuzean sense. 20 Balibar, Race, Nation, Class, 49. 21 Keeling, Witch’s Flight, 148, 143. 22 Keeling, Witch’s Flight, 152. 23 See especially the “Fantasy in the Hold” section by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013).

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24 Thomas Kelso, “The Intense Space(s) of Gilles Deleuze,” in The Force of the Virtual Deleuze, Science, and Philosophy, ed. Peter Gaffney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 124; Peter Gaffney, “Superposing Images: Deleuze and the Virtual after Bergson’s Critique of Science,” in The Force of the Virtual Deleuze, Science, and Philosophy, ed. Peter Gaffney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 98. 25 Fanon, Black Skin. For more on “tense muscles,” see Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010). 26 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 27 Nathan Widder, Political Theory after Deleuze (New York: Continuum, 2012). 28 The four modes (really two modes and their corresponding antitheses) can be defined in terms provided by James Baldwin, on the one hand (the critique of the sentimental), and Hortense Spillers, on the other (the critique of the pornotropic). James Baldwin, Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 11–18; Hortense Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 203–29. 29 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 111. I also am indebted to the reading of Manderlay in Frank B. Wilderson’s lecture on “The Lady with the Whip: Gendered Violence and Social Death in Manderlay and Django Unchained,” given at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, March 6, 2013. The published text of this lecture was not available at the time this chapter went to press. For a recent statement of Wilderson’s position vis-à-vis sexual violence within slavery and its afterlives, see Frank B. Wilderson III, “Reciprocity and Rape: Blackness and the Paradox of Sexual Violence,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 27, no. 1 (2017): 104–11. 30 For more discussion of the fraught history of accusations of cannibalism in the history of slavery and the slave trade, see Vincent Woodard, The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2014). 31 Hortense Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays in American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 32 See Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 33 Spillers, Black, White, and in Color. See also, Jacqueline Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 34 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 35 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 90. 36 Here I am thinking of Saidiya Hartman’s work on the “ruse of seduction”; Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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37 Christina Elizabeth Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 38 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 91. 39 Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 447; my emphasis. 40 It is thus relevant to my argument that Weheliye shares my interest in staging an encounter between Balibar (here, his collaborative work with Louis Althusser in Reading Capital) and Spillers. He notes, “For Althusser, Balibar, and Spillers there exists no real object without the vehicular aid of particular modes of knowledge production” (Habeas Viscus, 18, emphasis in original). 41 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 31, emphasis in original. 42 Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond the Word of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the Antilles,” World Literature Today 63, no. 4 (1989): 637–48. 43 This case has been most thoroughly reported and interpreted by Steven Thrasher, on whose work I rely in what follows. Steven Thrasher, “How College Wrestling Star ‘Tiger Mandingo’ Became a HIV Scapegoat,” Buzzfeed LGBT, July 7, 2014, www.buzzfeed.com. 44 Mark Anthony Neal, Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 45 Thrasher, “Tiger Mandingo.” 46 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 11–12; my emphasis. 47 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 112. 48 In addition to pointing out the counterproductive nature of the laws under which Johnson was charged, the absence of free condoms on his college campus (even after the HIV scare), and the double standard of holding only one party to an act of consensual unprotected sex responsible for HIV safety, Thrasher goes on to paint an evocative picture of a world in which, as one informant says, “Everyone wanted a piece of [Johnson], until he had HIV” ( “Tiger Mandingo”).

Chapter 8. Chore and Choice

1 Louis Chude-Sokei, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015), 52. 2 My use of the term “singularity,” as we shall see, differs from the more philosophical use that appears in André Lepecki, Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance (New York: Routledge, 2016). 3 On the problem Bina48 presents for artificial intelligence, see Andrew Stein, “Can Machines Feel?,” Math Horizons 19, no. 4 (2012): 10–13. 4 Lisa Miller, “The Trans-Everything CEO,” New York, July 2014, http://nymag.com. 5 Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (London: Duckworth, 2016). 6 Martine A. Rothblatt, Virtually Human: The Promise—and the Peril—of Digital Immortality (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014); Martine Rothblatt, The Apartheid of Sex: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender (London: Pandora, 1996). 7 Janelle Monáe, The ArchAndroid, CD (Atlanta, GA: Wondaland Arts Society, 2010).

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8 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 73. 9 For more on Turing and the virtual, see Homay King, Virtual Memory: TimeBased Art and the Dream of Digitality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 18–46. 10 Jayna Brown, “Being Cellular: Race, the Inhuman, and the Plasticity of Life,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2015): 321–41. 11 Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 12 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). 13 A great queer theoretical gloss on this story appears in Jonathan Goldberg, “On the Eve of the Future,” Criticism 52, no. 2 (2011): 283–91. 14 Rothblatt, Virtually Human. 15 Franco Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 109. 16 See also Joy James, “‘Concerning Violence’: Frantz Fanon’s Rebel Intellectual in Search of a Black Cyborg,” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 1 (2013): 57–70. 17 Brown, “Being Cellular.” 18 Miller, “The Trans-Everything CEO.” 19 Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). 20 Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 115. 21 José Esteban Muñoz, The Sense of Brown (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming). 22 Compare also with the discussion of “stuplimity” in Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 23 Cvetkovich, Depression, 127, 128. 24 Bina 48 Meets Bina Rothblatt—Part One, The LifeNaut Project, 2014, www. youtube.com. 25 Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, eds., #Accelerate# (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014). 26 Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 27 Franco Berardi, After the Future (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011), 39–40. 28 Mel Y Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 29 Jayna Brown, “Being Cellular: Race, the Inhuman, and the Plasticity of Life,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2015): 321–41; Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism,” Feminist Studies 39, no. 3 (2013): 669–85.

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Conclusion

1 On “conceptual aphasia” in contemporary critical race theory, see Paul Khalil Saucier and Tryon P Woods, eds., Conceptual Aphasia in Black: Displacing Racial Formation (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016). While I find this contribution useful and thought-provoking, what it spurs in me is a greater interest in the varieties and valences of silence in black literature and culture, rather than a critique of racial formation theory, as it does for Woods and Saucier. 2 Saidiya Hartman describes the aim of her narrative restraint in an opening note on method where she writes: “I don’t try to liberate these documents from the context in which they were collected but do try to exploit the surface of these accounts for contrary purposes and to consider the form resistance assumes given this context. My attempt to read against the grain is perhaps best understood as a combination of foraging and disfiguration” (Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], 11–12)—an approach I might add that I strive to bring to my own engagement, in this text, with the digital archive of blackness. 3 On the body as archive, see Kathleen Canning, “The Body as Method? Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender History,” Gender & History 11, no. 3 (1999): 499–513, and Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For a more recent performance critique of this trope, see André Lepecki, “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances,” Dance Research Journal 42, no. 2 (2010): 28–48. 4 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 2. 5 Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, Volume 1, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 125–38. 6 Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 7 Jacques Derrida, Foreword to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xvi. 8 Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, 17–18. 9 On black life as “living death,” see Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” Intensions, no. 5 (2011), 28. 10 See Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, especially chap. 2. 11 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 73. Hartman outlines a theory of critical fabulation in her subsequent essay, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14. 12 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 56–57, emphasis added. 13 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013). 14 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

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15 As an aside, consider how much critical energy expended in warding off any recourse to “romance” and “romanticization,” I warrant, actually exits the romantic mode only to enter directly into the gothic. In general, whenever someone warns you against romanticizing something, that should be your cue to look a little closer at the very thing you are being warned away from. 16 Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2011). 17 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 18 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 19 Huey Copeland, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 20 José Esteban Muñoz, “Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate: Gary Fisher with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,” in Queer Futures: Reconsidering Ethics, Activism, and the Political, ed. Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Eveline Kilian, and Beatrice Michaelis (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 110. 21 Personal interview with author. 22 Personal interview with author. 23 Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 24 Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: New York University Press, 2015).

Index

Abraham, Nicholas, 201–202 accelerationism, 191–196; manifesto, 194 Adorno, Theodor, 18 affect, 25, 36, 42, 46, 57–59, 73–74, 81, 85, 89, 105, 111, 117, 119, 124, 134, 166–176, 181, 183–184, 187, 189–196, 199, 202, 208, 211; affective labor, 134; affect studies, 57, 168 afro-fabulation, 3, 5–7, 12, 42–43, 79, 97, 114, 125, 181, 183–184, 199, 202, 210; as counter-narrative, 210; poetics of, 199; as social practice, 125; as transdisciplinary method, 5–7; varieties of, 43 afro-futurism, 19, 151; coining of term, 155 afro-pessimism, 20, 31, 42–43, 166 Agamben, Giorgio, 177 agency, 31, 34, 62 AIDS/HIV, 52, 181 Alibar, Lucy, Juicy and Delicious, 130–131, 133–138, 140, 144 Althusser, Louis, 189 ambivalence, 20–21, 54, 57, 115, 139, 154, 177, 179–180, 194, 202 anamorphosis, 48 anarchaeology, 99, 102–103, 112, 125; of objectification, 125 angular sociality, 18, 22, 38–40, 46, 51, 97; conviviality, 75 the Anthropocene, 9, 102–103, 129, 138 anti-work imaginary, 185 any-space-whatever, 124 apparatus, 3–4, 8, 11, 17, 43, 48–51, 55, 63, 93, 100, 106, 113, 128, 130, 167–175, 179,

209; camera as, 17, 49–50, 100, 113; cinematic, 4, 8, 48, 55, 63, 168, 172–175, 179, 181; of capture, 43, 48, 93, 167, 173; fabrication of race through, 20, 43, 179 archive, 3, 7–8, 11, 13, 15, 20, 34, 35–75, 78, 102, 103, 108, 117, 123, 154, 200–201; archival opacity, 46–75; archival desire, 72; of black performance, 51; counter-, 36, 123; fictional archiving, 35–45; of sex and gender, 46; shadow archives, 11–12; theory of, 8 artificial intelligence, 187–188, 191–192 Asare, Masi, 22 Aspen, Bina, 186–187, 189, 191–195, 197. See also Bina48 assemblage, 100, 130, 158, 178–180, 196; racial, 178–180 aurochs, 129–132, 135–137, 139–142, 147, 150. See also wisent Austin, J. L., 203 avatars, 70, 76–77, 83, 94, 187, 192, 195, 206, 209–212; embodied avatars, 206, 211–212 Baldwin, James, 84, 177 Balibar, Étienne, 168, 171–172, 175 ball culture, 1–4, 27–31, 36–38, 40–41, 85, 182 Baraka, Amiri, 10, 22, 78, 95 Barthes, Roland, 117 BDSM, 59 Beloved (Morrison), 206 Benjamin, Walter, 50–51 Bennet, Jane, 108

255

256

| Index

Berardi, Franco “Bifo,” 195–197 Bergman, Ingmar, 48 Bergson, Henri, 3, 10, 14, 48, 80, 102, 110– 112, 125, 171; myth-making function, 67 Berlant, Lauren, 151 Bigger Thomas (character), 68–70. See also Native Son Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw nation, 146 Bina48, 19, 186–198. See also Aspen, Bina biopolitics, 129–130, 132, 138, 140, 143–145, 209 Birth of a Nation, 166 Black Arts Movement, 77 Black Lives Matter, 207 blackface, 106 blackness, 3–4, 103–105, 158, 167, 169, 172– 173; agonistic, 170–171; anti-blackness, 4, 6, 18, 19, 24, 26, 38, 43, 51, 58, 78, 100, 105, 106, 118, 120–121, 124, 125, 183, 192, 199, 208; anti-normativity of, 165; counter-surveillance, 207, 212; criminalization of, 86; dance, 27–45, 94, 98; as fabulation, 80–81; fugitive, 10, 37, 56, 81, 88, 92–93, 97–98, 121, 124, 140, 146, 150, 165, 172, 187, 207, 211; as identity and representation, 80–81; plasticity of, 161, 188, 193; populist and avantgarde expressions of, 82; speculative powers of, 165; studies, 24, 83, 95, 101, 103, 148–149; virtual, 11 Blaxploitation cinema, 81–83, 176–177 Bloch, Ernst, 18 Bogan, Lucille, 86 Brazil, 104 Brecht, Bertolt, 13–14, 37, 205 Brer Rabbit, 76 Broadway, 76, 81, 84 Brooklyn, 113, 116; Williamsburg neighborhood of, 121 Brooks, Daphne, 14 Brother from Another Planet, 207–208, 211 Brown, Jayna, 18, 100–101, 131, 138–139, 144, 146, 188, 197

Browne, Simone, 206 brownness, 99–128 Bruce, La Marr Jurelle, 9 Bryant, Levi, 132 Butler, Judith, 28, 40, 153, 155 Butler, Octavia, Kindred, 190 Butt, Gavin, 15, 54–55, 71 Cambridge, Massachusetts, 76 Cannes Film Festival, 131 Čapek, Karel, 185 capitalism, 26, 28, 35, 38, 79, 81, 87, 96, 99, 101, 118–121, 137–138, 149, 180, 188–190, 194, 196, 208; anti-capitalism, 79, 194; racial, 101, 118, 120, 124, 180; communicative, 189; computational, 188; creative destruction, 118; global, 119; industrial, 137–138; speculative, 120–121 Carby, Hazel, 125 the Caribbean, 118, 121; art of, 122 Carrington, André, 164 cattle, 142, Heck, 141. See also aurochs cinema, 3–4, 7–9, 14–15, 17, 46–75, 79, 81, 84–85, 90, 102, 111, 129–150, 166–182; avant-garde, 54, 174; direct cinema, 63; ecological, 149; grindhouse, 84–85; studies, 111; verité, 48, 63, 85 Cinemation Industries, 84 Chamayou, Grégoire, 140 Chambers-Letson, Joshua, 12 changing same, 5, 10, 12, 21, 78, 95, 98; angular sociality of, 23 Chapman, Tracy, 7 chattel, 142, 167, 175, 197, 205. See also slavery Chelsea Hotel, 48, 52 Chen, Mel, 111–112, 132, 197 Children of Men, 144 Chisholm, Diane, 140 Chude-Sokei, Louis, 185 Clarke, Shirley, 45, 47–49, 51–75; archive, 64; The Connection, 63–64, 70–71; The Cool World, 63; Portrait of Jason, 47–75

Index

climate change, 129, 131, 137. See also the Anthropocene Cohen, Cathy, 110 colonialism, 103, 108, 147 color-blindness, 143, 148 commodity, 101, 121, 193 The Communist Manifesto, 194 compassion, 59–60 Copeland, Huey, 35, 208 Copjec, Joan, 49, 126, 169 Corey, Dorian, 2–3 Crawford, Margo, 22 Creative Time, 114, 124 criminality, 38, 52, 63, 83–86, 167, 181–183 critique, subjectless. See queer theory Croft, Clare, 28 crushed blacks, 47–49, 55, 57, 62–64, 68, 70–74, 106 the crypt, 200–211; black body as, 208; cryptonymy, 202. See also Abraham, Nicholas; Torok, Maria crystal image, 100, 102–104, 108–109, 113, 117. See also Deleuze, Gilles cultural appropriation, 42–43 cultural relativism, 102 culture industries, 66, 81 Cvetkovich, Ann, 192–193 cybernetics, 13, 185–198; cyborg, 13, 185– 186, 189, 192; black, 13, 186. See also artificial intelligence Da Silva, Denise Ferreira, 24–25, 121, 142– 143, 148, 208 dance, 27–45; postmodern, 28, 34, 36–37, 67 Davis, Miles, 68, 74 Davis, Vaginal, 15–16 de Bankolé, Isaach, 176 de Lauretis, Teresa, 155 de l’Isle-Adam, August Villiers, “Tomorrow’s Eve,” 189 Dean, Jodi, 120 decoloniality, 24–25, 50, 99, 112, 175

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257

decolonization, 50, 99 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, 145 Delany, Samuel R., 19, 65, 151–166, 185, 199; The Einstein Intersection, 158–166; Hogg, 156; The Mad Man, 156; The Motion of Light in Water, 65, 156; Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, 156 Deleuze, Gilles, 4, 14, 18, 83, 105, 134, 139– 140, 164, 166, 173, 196, 199; Cinema 2: The Time Image, 48, 51; cinematic image, 102;dark, 17, 34, 48, 51, 67, 92–93, 102; Difference and Repetition, 105, 164; time-image, 80, 102 Depression, 185, 191–195 Derrida Jacques, 130, 199–201 Dery, Mark, 155 desiring-production, 173 Desmond, Norma, 29 deviance, 161, 163 dialectics, 17–18, 35, 47, 50, 59, 73, 100, 104, 117–118, 134, 149, 194, 204; dialectical image, 50, 73, 111. See also and Benjamin, Walter; Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich; Marx, Karl diaspora, 22, 24, 34, 179–180 difference, 6, 9, 17, 21–22, 32, 40, 56, 57, 59, 62, 68, 71, 81, 105, 110, 112, 131, 135, 138, 140, 143, 148, 157, 161, 164–165, 167, 174, 179, 186, 189, 201, 211; differentiation, 71, 135; racial, 32, 40, 148, 161, 174, 203; sexual, 110, 148, 161, 178–181. See also incompossibility Differences (journal), 155 disco, 94–95 disjunctive synthesis, 18, 61, 81, 83, 90, 99– 105, 110–111, 138, 168, 190, 208. See also Deleuze, Gilles dissidence, sexual and racial, 42, 76–77, 84, 90 divas, 22, 33 Django Unchained, 176–177 Dominican Republic, the, 119 Domino Sugar, 113, 116, 119–121, 124

258

| Index

Douglass, Frederick, 96 Driessen, Clemens, 141 Duggan, Lisa, 153 duration, 10, 48, 50–51, 65, 102, 105, 108, 173; race in, 105. See also Bergson, Henri Eagleton, Terry, 119 Echols, Alice, 94–95 ecology, 99–150; media, 112–113; of objects, 102–110. See also environmentalism Edelman, Lee, 151 Egypt, 116 Elliott, Missy, 86 Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man, 205–206 emotional rescue, 49, 61, 72 Entre Nous, 80 entanglement, 5, 12, 14, 23, 42, 43, 58, 106– 107, 165, 208 environmentalism, 103, 137–145, 149. See also ecology “Eternal Flame” (The Bangles), 136 ethnicity, 166–184; African, 180; black, 168; fictive, 168, 171, 175, 178–179, 181; law of, 178 everyday life, 51 everynight life, 49, 56, 60–66, 71, 73, 96. See also Muñoz, José Esteban excess, 94, 143, 168, 173–174, 178; ontologies of, 173. See also lack fabel, 13–14, 37, 134, 205. See also Brecht, Bertolt fabula/sjuzhet distinction, 13, 133, 157 fabulation, 5, 8, 13, 19–20, 30, 75, 78–79, 110–111, 125, 132, 136, 137, 144, 147, 150, 154, 164, 199, 202, 205, 210; aesthetic senses of, 199; ambivalence of, 154; antinormative, 164; black queer, 75; critical, 5, 30, 42, 61, 78, 111, 202, 205, 210; dark, 49, 125; fabulationality, 5, 12, 18, 21, 54; history of, 13; performed, 8; process of, 50; trans-, 19; trans of color, 8. See also afro-fabulation

Facebook, 152 Fanon, Frantz, 49, 56, 62, 84, 99, 153–154, 168; racial epidermal schema, 169–170 fantasy, 7, 30, 38, 44, 72, 85, 87, 126, 144, 149, 154, 161, 165, 175–184, 186–189, 194–195, 204; fantasy production, 85, 91, 94, 204 Fargas, Antonio, 56, 62 fashion, 27–33, 80, 90, feminism, 4, 6, 8, 13–14, 17–18, 21–22, 24– 25, 47, 49, 54, 60–62, 72, 77, 81–82, 90, 103, 105–106, 108–112, 131, 147, 151–156, 168, 192, 202, 206, 211; black, 6, 21–22, 60–61, 81–82, 108, 109–112, 121–125, 168, 180, 202, 206, 211; queer, 14, 54, 61–62, 147; shadow, 106 Fisher, Gary, 52–54, 58–60 Flaubert, Gustave, 86–87 Foucault, Michel, 19, 129, 133, 152 Franklin, Aretha, 41, 96 free indirect image, 14, 137, 144 Freeman, Elizabeth, 188 Freud, Sigmund, 201 fugitivity, 88–89, 91–92, 97–98, 121, 140, 168, 197; history of the fugitive, 92. See also blackness funk, 74, 77–79, 83, 86, 94–98; as angular sociality, 78 Gaffney, Peter, 173 Gaines, Malik, 12, 14, 165 Galindo, Regine José, 101, 103–112, 125– 128; Piedra, 103–113, 125–128 gentrification, 116, 118 Georgia, 135 Gerima, Haile, Sankofa, 180 ghost note, 95, 202–204 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 105–106 Gilroy, Paul, 22, 70, 121, 188 Ginsberg, Allen, 48 Glissant, Édouard, 6 Glover, Danny, 176 Godzilla, 130

Index

Goffman, Erving, 191 Golden, Thelma, 24 Gödel’s theorem, 163 Göring, Hermann, 141, 149 Gosine, Andil, 143 gossip, 15, 86 Greenwich Village, 65, 158, Women’s House of Detention, 76 Griffith, D. W., 166 Guattari, Félix, 34, 93 Gulf Coast, 131, 144–145 Gulf of Mexico, 145 gynecology, 209 Hacker, Marilyn, 64–66 hacking, 4, 121–125 Halberstam, Jack, 59, 88, 130, 147 Hall, Stuart, 168, 170, 179 Hammonds, Evelynn, 110 Harney, Stefano, 203 Haraway, Donna, 6, 13 Harrell, Trajal, Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church, 27–45 Hartman, Saidiya, 6–7, 20–21, 42, 60–61, 78–79, 96, 102, 200–202, 210; on critical fabulation, 6–7, 20, 30, 61, 78, 111, 202, 205, 210–211 Harvey, David, 10 Heck, Hein, 141 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich, 59, 134, 165. See also dialectics heterotopia, 18–19, 22, 162–163 Horse, Kandia Crazy, 165 Houma nation, 146 Henriques, Julian, 11 Hi Hat, 67 Hilderbrand, Lucas, 72 Holliday, Jason, 45, 47–75; An Audio Portrait of Jason, 74–75 Hollywood, 85 Holt, Thomas, 156–157 hooks, bell, 131 Howard, Bryce Dallas, 176

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Hughes, Langston, 37 humanism, 24–26, 99, 111, 129, 148–150, 159, 161, 174, 180, 185–186, 189–190, 193, 195, 206; inhumanism, 113, 130, 132, 149, 178, 181, 190, 194, 197, 206, 208, 210; posthumanism, 6, 24, 25, 99, 126, 129, 132, 148–150, 158–159, 161, 163, 165, 185, 188, 194, 196, 198; transhumanism, 185, 186, 193, 195 Hurricane Katrina, 137, 145, 148 Hurricane Rita, 145 hyalosign. See crystal image ideology, 19, 25, 37, 60, 97, 124, 180, 182– 183, 186, 189, 193, 194 Idle Sheet (publication), 37 incommensurability, 46–60, 71, 103, 109, 128, 170, 208 incompossibility, 6–11, 52, 61, 133–135, 138, 139, 146–147, 164, 200. See also difference indigeneity, 143–149 intersectionality, 20, 152, 155, 166, 195 Isle de Jean Charles, 145 Jackson, Michael, 207 Jackson, Zakkiyah Iman, 100, 197 James, Joy, 13 Jameson, Frederic, 28, 46 Jenkins, Candice, 100 Jennings, Mikeah, 8 jitterbug, 67. See also dance Johnson, Dominic, 15 Johnson, Michael (a.k.a. “Tiger Mandingo”), 181–183 Jones, Gayl, 6 jouissance, 59, 88, 93, 126; feminine, 88, 93, 126 Judson Dance Theater, 27–28, 36–37 Kant, Immanuel, 80 Keeling, Kara, 14, 17–19, 23, 81, 84, 92–93, 100, 134, 150, 166, 168; theory of black femme function, 17, 92, 134, 171–172

260

| Index

Kelso, Thomas, 173 King, Homay, 10 kitsch, 116 Klein, Melanie, 57 Kruger, Barbara, 52, Kurzweil, Ray, 186, 188, 195 LaBeija, Crystal, 1–4, 6, 10, 41 labor, 35, 57, 113, 116, 118–119, 134, 209 Lacan, Jacques, 48, 126 lack, 94,126, 167, 168–169, 170, 173–174, 179. See also excess Lacks, Henrietta, 190 Lang, Fritz, Metropolis, 185 Laruelle, François, 125 Latin America, 127 latinidad, 103–105, 113. See also brownness Lawrence, Tim, 94–95 Lee, Canada, 67–70 Lee, Carl, 55, 63–64, 68–73; and blaxploitation cinema, 64 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 134 Leigh, Simone, 123 Lewis, Ligia, minor matter (dance), 43 Ligon, Glenn, 24 liveness, 33–35, 51 Living Theatre, 70 Livingston, Jennie, 3, 8, 38 Lorde Audre, 1, 3 Lorimer, Jamie, 141 Louisiana, 137, 141–148; Terrebonne Parish, 141, 145, 147 Love, Heather, 49, 61, 200 Lovecraft, H. P., 108 lumpenproletariat, 83 Lutz, Hein, 141 Madonna, 38 Macharia, Keguro, 153–154 mammy trope, 121–122; monument to, 118 Manalansan, Martin, 15 Manderlay (film), 174, 178, 180–181 Mandingo (film), 174–183

Mandingo (novel), 175 Mandinka people, 175 Marriott, David, 20, 169–170 masculinity, 81–93; male lesbianism, 86–88 Marx, Karl, 96, 139; Capital, 96 Marxism, 10, 13, 25, 35, 60, 156, 194–195, 204; autonomist, 195–196; black 13; post-Marxism, 195; theory of reification, 204 materialism, 17, 50, 103, 108, 111 McKittrick, Katherine, 100 McMillan, Uri, 76, 211 McRae, Carmen, 68, 74 McQueen, Steve, Twelve Years a Slave, 168, 177, 181 Meillassoux, Quentin, 130 memory, 6–7, 21, 30, 33, 42, 45, 48, 101–105, 110, 113–114, 122, 125, 168, 173–177, 180, 183, 186, 202, 205–210; black mappings of, 11, 101–103, 105, 176–177, 180; collective, 6, 99–101, 105, 125–128, 150, 205, 209; cultural, 8, 46, 186; disjunctive, 104; environments of, 114; historical, 7, 21, 30, 33, 113; intransitive, 206, 210; and redress, 202; rememory, 206; screen, 122, 168, 174; virtual, 42, 45. See also archive Mendieta, Ana, 103 Mexico, 122–123 micropolitics, 139 Middle Passage, 10, 20, 61, 102, 124, 180, 200. See also slavery Milestone Films, 71 minoritarian subjects, 10, 15, 22, 33, 34–35, 39, 44, 112, 125, 129, 142 minstrelsy, 106 Mintz, Sidney, 121 miscegenation, 142 modernism, 140 Monáe, Janelle, 186 Monglond, André, 46–48, 50 Moore, Madison, 15–16 Morrison, Toni, 206

Index

Morton, Timothy, 102, 127 Moten, Fred, 17, 38, 95–96, 108, 167–168, 172–173, 203 movement-image, 80 Mullen, Harryette, “Outside Art,” 101–102, 101 Muñoz, José Esteban, 12, 18, 34–35, 49, 54, 58–60, 71, 74, 181, 208, brown study, 192, queer ephemera, 207 Museum of Modern Art, 32 music, 7, 11, 22, 27, 62, 65, 68, 70, 76–80, 94–98, 101, 155, 158, 160–165, 186, 202, 204–212 Musser, Amber, 14, 47, 81 mythmaking function. See fabulation Nagle, Angela, 151–153 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 59–60; singular plural, 59, 100 narratology, 133 Native Americans, 144–145 Native Son, 68. See also Wright, Richard Navarro, Vinicius, 54 Nazi Germany, 141 Neal, Mark Anthony, 152, 181–182 negativity, 49, 58–60, 172 Nelson, Alondra, 155 neoliberalism, 43, 119, 124, 137, 170, 195 new materialism. See materialism new queer cinema, 9 New York City, 27, 76, 84–85, 90, 115, 154, 207; black life in, 52; Chelsea, 121; downtown, 27–45, 64; Harlem, 36, 207 Next Stop, Greenwich Village, 56 Ngai, Sianne, 192 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1, 5, 18, 198 nightlife, 62–63; methodologies, 62 normativity, 4, 38–39, 41, 65, 77–79, 86–87, 90, 94, 99, 143, 151–166, 203, 207, 211 Norton, Ken, 175 O’Grady, Lorraine, 109–110 Obama, Barack, 131

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Ocularcentrism, 72 Onstott, Kyle, 175 Panagia, Davide, 97 paranoid position, 54–61. See also reparation Paris is Burning, 3, 7–8, 38 Parrika, Jussi, 102, 112 performativity, 4–6, 10, 15, 28, 31–35, 40, 43–44, 51, 96, 125, 128, 130, 149, 152, 169, 182–183, 189, 193, 195, 200, 202– 203, 207; liberating the, 203 period drama, 46 pharmakon, 123 Phelan, Peggy, 30 photography, 46–75 photosynthesis, 102, 106 Piper, Adrian, 10, 76–82, 95–98, 209; “Dispersal” series, 90; Funk Lessons, 95–98; life of, 79–80; untitled performance for Max’s Kansas City, 95–96; the Mythic Being, 76, 78, 80–82, 84, 86, 88, 90–94 Plato, 126 poetics, 6–7, 22, 26, 45, 49, 62, 64–65, 95, 101, 108, 125–128, 158, 195, 199–212; autopoeisis, 195 Poland, 129–130, 141; Jaktorow, 142, Jaktorowska Forest, 129, 141, 14, 149–150; King Zygmunt of, 129, 142 pornography, 84–85, 116 pornotrope, 166, 171–183 postcolonial theory, 153 postmodernism, 28, 33, 36–37, 44, 140, 160–161, 198; old school, 44 powers of the false, 43–44, 50–51, 72, 165 praxis, 200 precarity, 139, 145 Proust, Marcel, 86 Pryor, Richard, 41 psychoanalysis, 60, 126 public sphere, 119, 204 pulp fiction, 160–161, 175

262

| Index

The Queen, 1, 7–8, 85 queer and trans of color critique, 76, 153 queer studies, 129, 148, 151, 153–154 queer theory, 77, 81, 92, 94, 110, 151–158, 164–165, 192, 208; anti-relational thesis, 59, 151, 203; critique of norms and normativity, 151–154, 157–158, 163; genealogy of, 81; problem spaces in, 154; as subjectless critique, 92, 110, 208 Rabinovitz, Lauren, 54 racial melodrama, 146, 166–167 racism, 2, 24, 58, 75, 83, 85, 89, 93, 105–106, 121, 134, 169–170, 192, 209 Raiford, Leigh, 169 Rainer, Yvonne, 28, 37–38 recognition, 1, 88, 95, 115–116, 137, 150, 170, 179, 191, 206, 208; politics of, 179 redress, 21, 46, 60, 202–204 Reid-Pharr, Robert, 84–76 relationality, 18, 20, 21, 59, 120, 144, 151, 188, 203; relational aesthetics, 120 reparation, 12–21, 44, 49, 54, 57–62, 71, 115, 192, 200, 202, 209 repetition, 6, 33, 92, 105, 135, 138, 164, 211 representation, 1, 3, 10, 11, 13, 14, 19, 25, 47, 49, 52, 56–57, 68, 70, 72–73, 80, 86, 93, 116, 134, 147–148, 156, 164, 166–168, 173–181, 199–200, 204, 207, 211; burden of, 56; nonrepresentation, 206–207, 211; overrepresentation of Man, 25 ressentiment, 40 restoration, 47, 49, 55; of film, 49; perfect, 47 rewilding, 141 Ringgold, Faith, 17–18 Rivers, Joan, 207 Roach, Joseph, 118 Robinson, Cedric, 187 robot, 185–186, 194 Roots, 174 Rose, Tricia, 155

Rothblatt, Martine, 186, 189, 195, 197 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 177 Royster, Francesca, 34 RuPaul, 42 R.U.R., 185 Russell, Bertrand, 163 Sabrina, the Flawless Mother, 2 San Francisco, 80 Sayles, John, 207 schizoanalysis, 82–83 Schor, Naomi, 86–87 science fiction, 135, 154, 161 Scott, Darieck, 156 Scott, Joan W., 156–157 screen tests, 63 sculpture, 104, social, 115–116, 119 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 52–54, 57–60, 77, 153, 155 segregation, 112 selfies, 113, 119–120, 127 sense, 7, 13–15, 18, 34, 37, 42, 59, 71, 76–98, 120, 151, 166, 179, 204; being singular plural, 59; common, 120, 151, 179, 196, 204; conjunctive, 196, connective, 196; dark, 76, 94; disjunctive, 71, 81, 196; and fabel, 13, 37; logic of, 76–98, 135; subjunctive, 42 sentimentality, 38, 40–41, 63, 166–177, 181 sexploitation, 83–84, Sexton, Jared, 20, 43, 100–101 shade, 4, 17, 38–39; critical, 34, 39–40, 42– 44; throwing shade, 30 shadow archive, 11–12 Sharpe, Christina, 105, 122, 131, 138, 144, 178, 206 Shaviro, Steven, 195 Siegel, Marc, 15 Sims, J. Marion, 209 simulacrum, 192 slavery, 58, 103, 108, 112, 121, 154, 158, 184–185, 166–184 209; affectivity, 170, 183; afterlives of, 121, 154, 158, 184–185;

Index

collective trauma of, 58; legacy of, 115; on screen, 166–184 Snorton, C. Riley, 19, 83, 100, 163 social death, 193, 203 social media, 152 sociogenesis, 201. See also Wynter, Sylvia Sophocles, 40–41 sovereignty, 129–133, 138, 140–143, 146–150 speculation, 6–7, 11, 17, 19–20, 25, 37, 77, 100–101, 108, 111–112, 118, 121, 130– 135, 155, 164–166, 176, 203; in African American art, 19; black feminist, 6; and capitalism, 121; in diasporic art, 19; and fabulation, 6, 13; genre of, 19, 101, 164–166; and history, 77; and realism, 108, 111–112, 130 Spence, Louise, 54 Spillers, Hortense, 77, 125, 153–154, 168, 175, 177, 180 Spivak, Gayatri, 164 St. Laurent, Octavia, 29 Stallings, L. H., 78, 82–83, 94–95 Steve Paul’s Scene, 67 Stevens, Wallace, 101 Stonewall riots, 57–58 stuplimity, 192, 196–197 subaltern, 132–133, 139, 141–142, 150, 164, 166. See also minoritarian subjects sublimation, 126–128 Sundance Film Festival, 131 sugar, 106, 113, 116–126; refinement of, 117– 118, 121–123; sculpture, 117–124 Tarantino, Quentin, 176 Tarzan, 170 taste, 38 Tate, Greg, 121, 155 Taylor, Diana, 35 temporality, 1–26, 50–51, 66–71, 74, 90–95, 99–128; archaeologies of 100; black polytemporality, 23, 51, 93–95, 104, 117; deep time, 50, 102–103, 110– 113; di-phasic onset of, 169; empty and

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homogenous, 92; indexical time, 10, 90–93; linear and nonlinear time, 105, 173, 211; three passive syntheses of, 92, 102–107, 117; tensed and tenseless time, 9–10, 12, 23, 188; time-image, 80, 102 theatricality, 63 Thrasher, Steven, 181–183 time-image 80, 102 Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha, 124 Torok, Maria, 201–202 transgender, 8, 10–14, 16–17, 19, 33, 35, 36, 76–77, 94, 154, 158, 159, 166, 185, 189, 205, 207, 211; entangled with queerness, 14–15, 37, 94; trans-aesthetics, 8–9, 24–25, 42, 78, 82–89; transness, 76, transqueer undercommons, 37 transgression, 3, 39, 43, 149, 151–152, 161, 163, 165, 209 transhumanism, 185, 186, 188–195; and/or transgender, 189, transvaluation, 48, 125, 132, 142, 183 Tsang, Wu, for how we perceived a life (Take 3), 7–9, 11, 44 Tumblr, 123, 152 Turing, Alan, 187 Uggams, Leslie, 22 underground music culture, 94 Unsolved Mysteries, 209 utopianism, 18–19, 58, 163, 182 van Peebles, Melvin, 76–95; The Big Heart (book), 80; as Brer Soul, 76, 78, 80– 94; Brer Soul (album), 86–87; life of, 79–80; The Last Transmission (album), 80; The Watermelon Man (film), 84, 89; Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song (film), 81–85, 88–90, 94; “Tenth and Greenwich (Women’s House of Detention)” (song), 86–88 Variety, 67 Velázquez, Diego, 72

264 | Index

Venice Biennale, 80 Village Gate, 67 Village Voice, 76 the virtual, 10–11, 14, 45–46, 102, 114, 135–139, 173, drive for, 14; memory, 45, 46; as past, 102; preservation and, 114; queerness and, 138 visibility, 3, 8, 12, 17, 34, 52, 56–57, 70, 134, 146, 150; of black bodies, 70; dilemma of, 34, 57 vitalism, 70, 99, Vogel, Shane, 21 vogueing, 30, 37–38 von Trier, Lars, 176 Walker, Kara, 49, 101, 103–106, 112–128; A Subtlety, 101, 103–106, 112–128 Wallace, Maurice, 169 Wallis, Quvenzhané, 131, 134, 144 Wang, Michael, 141–142, 149–150; Carbon Copies, 149; Global Tone, 149 Warhol, Andy, 63 Washington, D.C., 118 Weheliye, Alexander, 11, 36, 95, 100, 130, 168, 172, 174, 177–180 Welles, Orson, 68, 70 White, Armond, 56–57, 62, 67

white supremacy, 164 whiteness, 30–31, 39, 122, 209 Widder, Nathan, 134–135, 139 Wiegman, Robyn, 151–153, 157, 165 Winfrey, Oprah, 131 Wilderson, Frank B., III, 20–21, 133–134, 146, 167, 172, 176–177, 182 wildness, 129–130, 139–143, 147–148 Williams, Linda, 166 Wilson, Elizabeth A. 151–153, 157 Winnicott, D. W., 41 wisent, 149. See also aurochs Wright, Michelle, 9–10, 23–24 Wright, Richard, 68–70 Wyeth, Geo, 204–212; Quartered, 209– 210 Wynter, Sylvia, 24–25, 100, 125, 161, 180, 188 x-rating, 85 Yaeger, Patricia, 131, 138, 142 Zeitlin, Benh, Beasts of the Southern Wild, 130–134, 137–150 Zielinkski, Siegfried, 102 Zondi, Mlondi, 43

About the Author

Tavia Nyong’o is Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, and Theater & Performance Studies at Yale University. He is the author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory, which won the Errol Hill award. He is a co-editor of the Sexual Cultures series at New York University Press and co-editor of the journal Social Text.

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