After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life 9781479882632

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After the Party

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 Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV 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 Latinization of American Culture Frances Négron-Muntaner Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era Marlon Ross 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 Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled Michael Cobb Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias Eng-Beng Lim Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law Isaac West

The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings Juana María Rodríguez Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism Amber Jamilla Musser The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies Rachel C. Lee Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men Jane Ward Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance Uri McMillan A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire Hiram Pérez Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality Katherine Franke Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible Malik Gaines The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia Gayle Salamon Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody Melissa M. Wilcox After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life Joshua Chambers-Letson For a complete list of books in the series, see www.nyupress.org

After the Party A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life

Joshua Chambers-Letson

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York www.nyupress.org © 2018 by New York University All rights reserved Sections of chapter 2 first appeared in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, special issue on “Living Labor: Marxism and Performance,” vol. 26, nos. 2–3 (2016), edited by Aliza Shvarts and Joshua Lubin-Levy. Other sections also appeared in TDR: The Drama Review, special issue on “Reproduction and Performance,” edited by Rebecca Schneider. Vol. 62, no. 1, 2018. A subvention to support publication of After the Party was generously provided by Northwestern University’s Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. 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. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Chambers-Letson, Joshua Takano, author. Title: After the party : a manifesto for queer of color life / Joshua Chambers-Letson. Description: New York : New York University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017055001 | ISBN 978-1-4798-9017-0 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4798-3277-4 (pb : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Queer theory. | Performance art. | Minorities—Social conditions. Classification: LCC HQ76.25 .C425 2018 | DDC 306.7601—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055001 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

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Contents

Preface: The Manifesto of a Communist Party

xi

Introduction: I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free

1

1. Nina Simone and the Work of Minoritarian Performance

37

2. Searching for Danh Vō’s Mother

81

3. The Marxism of Felix Gonzalez-Torres

123

4. Eiko’s Entanglements

164

5. Tseng Kwong Chi and the Party’s End

197

Epilogue: 6E

241

Acknowledgments

243

Notes

245

Works Cited

269

Index

287

About the Author

299

Color photos appear as an insert following page 138.

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Preface The Manifesto of a Communist Party

The weekend after your death, everyone converges at your apartment. I get the call, but wait a day to catch my bearings before catching a flight from Chicago to New York. A cab through the Village to your building where your doorman doesn’t stop us and we walk right in. When the elevator hits your floor, the familiar sound of a party pouring through the opening doors and into the empty space beside us where you used to be. I don’t know why it surprised me that it would be a party. Even though, or maybe because it belonged to your employer, your apartment was our party’s headquarters. It was something you stole back to give to those who didn’t have a home. Now, in the wake of your death, every room is full of people who are full with the loss of you. Someone puts a drink in my hand. This is just the first of an endless string of parties. Our party was the formation of a new communist party. The party: an organic entity, a living, breathing being, a gathering together of the multiple in the one, an obscure order, a whole which is not one, a many that is singular, a kind of provisional “we” at difference with itself from the inside out. The party, writes Fred Moten, “could be called the house party but don’t let that mislead you into thinking that house implies ownership; this house party is of and for the dispossessed, the ones who disavow possession, the ones who, in having been possessed of the spirit of dispossession, disrupt themselves.”1 The party is as much a site of refuge as it is the site of revolutionary planning, but “even though the party is, and takes place in, and takes place as, a kind of refuge, refuge still indicates that those who take it are refugees and people tend not to want to have to live like that.”2 The party, as refuge, is a place to catch one’s breath when you can’t breathe. It is a way of staying alive and of keeping each other alive. In your case, it was a way of sustaining your life after xi

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your death. And it was akin to what you called the punk rock commons or the “commons of the incommensurate.”3 Our parties go on for days, for years. They would begin around ten a.m., when the hangover was starting to wear off and we’d roll from one gathering to the next: cocktails, a memorial, breakfast with drinks, lunch with drinks, a family dinner, an impromptu gathering at someone’s house, a joint on the balcony, a talk in the hallway. Repeat. After your first memorial, we pick up drinks to take to a friend’s apartment and converge with an endless flood of smiling faces smiling sometimes. They verge, fall, pull toward and apart from each other. All the wars are briefly suspended and for a few flickering moments, as Wallace Stevens might have said, “We collect ourselves, out of all the indifferences, into one thing.”4 Though we were collected out of indifference by the shock of your death, we remain in difference from each other, which is to say that we’re not quite one thing but instead a singular being made up of the many, or what Jean-Luc Nancy calls being-singular-plural: “Being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence.”5 So rather than the coercive “we” that dominated the communist parties of historical communism, we became a “we” in difference from itself, gathered together in the wake of your death. I’ll be honest, I was kind of devastated.6 After your death I spent a lot of time trying to find you in the places you used to hide and especially the songs you used to listen to. The first thing I put on was the Germs (you loved Darby Crash) but that didn’t last long. I never shared your attachment to punk. Being manifestly uncool, my relationship to punk was pretty much Siouxsie Sioux, to whom I cathected around the age of twelve. There was something about her rejection of the domestic, suburban, and normal that made sense to teenage me—a queer black, brown, and blue boy adrift and alone in Northern Colorado. I don’t think you had strong feelings for Siouxsie one way or the other, but there is more than a passing resemblance between my teenage attachment to Siouxsie and yours to Crash. Both began as bad objects in their scenes: Crash in Los Angeles and Siouxsie in London. They were unlikely figures for two queer of color kids to identify with, least of all because both attempted (and failed) to appropriate (ironically or otherwise) the symbols of white supremacy by

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employing the swastika in their early acts. The swastika was something Siouxsie tried to atone for and that Crash refused to atone for and didn’t have time to do anyway because he, like you, died too young. Siouxsie’s name was itself an appropriation of the tribal name of the Sioux people, another chapter in the ongoing dispossession of the already dispossessed. We shouldn’t forget these transgressions, their unnerving entanglements with the violence of whiteness and white supremacy, but something about them nonetheless helped us sustain life in spite of the odds stacked against us. And the odds are stacked against queer teenagers of color in these United States. Darby’s and Siouxsie’s performances became the stage for what you described as the punk rock commons, “a being with, in which various disaffected, antisocial actants found networks of affiliation and belonging that allowed them to think and act otherwise, together, in a social field that was mostly interested in dismantling their desire for different relations within the social.”7 In this punk essay, you cited Tavia Nyong’o, who argues that the word “punk” owes a debt to blackness, queerness, and the violent measures through which a phobic world responds to both.8 Siouxsie acknowledged a part of that debt when describing the queerness of the parties that gave birth to London’s early punk scene: “It was a club for misfits, almost. Anyone that didn’t conform. There was male gays, female gays, bisexuals, non-sexuals, everything. No-one was criticized for their sexual preferences. The only thing that was looked down on was being plain boring, that reminded them of suburbia.”9 Notice here how Siouxsie’s party resonates with the one described by Moten: “This is the party of the ones who are not self-possessed, the non-self-possessive anindividuals. This is the party of the ones in whom the trace of having been possessed keeps turning into this obsessive compulsive drive for the total disorder that is continually given in continually giving themselves away.”10 Which is a way of saying that our party owes a debt to the black radical tradition as much as to the radical tradition of black and brown queer house parties on Chicago’s South and West sides. Unlike Crash, Siouxsie survived the early 1980s and with her survival came the emergence of a new sound characterized by thick, textured melodies, lush orchestration, and heavily processed vocals. Some people described it as post-punk and others described it as goth, but

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everyone seemed to agree that it lingered in the darkness—perhaps an unacknowledged way of acknowledging her debt to blackness. Like blackness, Siouxsie’s darkness wasn’t merely negative space.11 Her darkness was from the underside, the B-Side, the upside-down world of the normative, retrenched, dystopian, suburban, white, neoliberal hell that took hold in Thatcher’s Britain and Reagan’s United States. Siouxsie’s darkness was a pharmakon to the annihilating “light” cast by the shining city on the hill. It was dense, dark negation as the negation of the negation. Darkness, for the members of Siouxsie’s party, was a place where the freaks could gather, take cover, and keep each other alive as the “light” tried to burn them out of their holes and snuff them out of existence. If their party was increasingly imperiled by the normative regimes of social comportment demanded by Thatcher and Reagan, the 1986 song “Party’s Fall” tells the story of the breakdown and falling apart as a condition of possibility. In the song, the collapse of each party becomes the condition for the emergence of something new the next night: Your parties fall around you Another night beckons to you Your parties fall around you Another night beckons to you12

That the party falls apart only to come back another night is why, following Moten, “the party I’m announcing is serially announced.”13 In “Party’s Fall” the present is always returning to itself, as Siouxsie points us toward a future in which the very thing that has fallen apart (the party) reconstitutes itself. Which is a good thing, it turns out, because the party is the one thing standing between the subject of her address and annihilating loneliness. About a year after your death, a friend and I are talking about you in a bar. He looks at his drink and says, “I used to be alone. And then I met him and I wasn’t alone. Now he’s gone and I’m alone again.” The party is a way of ameliorating loneliness, and the endlessly renewable capacity to throw another party becomes Siouxsie’s condition for a practice of being with in which the misfit’s loneliness becomes the conditions for a relation of being together in difference and discord with other misfits

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that are lonely and (un)like her. I suspect that this is why we threw so many parties after you died. They were a way of bringing you back to us, of making us a little less alone again. Ours was not a political party, like The Communist Party. Political parties endure, but they often endure through coercion, violence, and force. Instead, I mean our communist party as a name for what Siouxsie describes as the endlessly renewable chain of events performed into being by a plurality of broken people who are trying to keep each other alive. For you, Crash’s performances were an antidote to (but not a denial of) loneliness. Loneliness is common, and it is often crushing for queers and trans people of color. But it can also be a condition for the emergence of queer sociality and the undercommons. While it would be easy to assume that your punk essays are about the white boys in them (Crash in particular), it would be more accurate to say that they are about the work to which queers of color put these performances while struggling to stay alive, get free, and open up other ways of being (and surviving) in the world together. “Through my deep friendships with other disaffected Cuban queer teens who rejected both Cuban exile culture and local mainstream gringo popular culture,” you wrote in Cruising Utopia, “and through what I call the utopia critique function of punk rock, I was able to imagine a time and a place that was not yet there, a place where I tried to live.”14 Today, we place an emphasis on “tried.” Near the end of Siouxsie’s song, she utters the phrase “maybe you’re alone,” breathlessly as if it were an aside. But this is the kind of aside that matters so she repeats it again, supporting the voice with the fullness of a wail. As she sings this bridge to nowhere, you would have noticed that the lyrics reach melodic resolution, which has been otherwise absent in a song that lingers in the minor key. Siouxsie’s wail stretches across the lyric, her voice breaking on the word “happiness”: “My happiness depends on knowing / this friend is never alone / on your own.” I can’t help but imagine that as she begs her friend not to cry, applying her signature wail to the lyric and promising “a party on our own,” that she’s singing to a much younger version of you or me or some other teenage queer and trans black and brown boy and girl perched on the precipice of self-obliteration. Her wanting for a commons (to be with and take care of a friend in need) is Siouxsie’s precondition for a life in happiness. It was yours as well.

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If I follow you, Siouxsie, and Moten in suggesting that the party has some kind of relationship to the making of the (under)commons, I am also following Nancy when he writes that it is death that gives birth to community. After all, our communist party was formed in the wake of your death. “It is death—but if one is permitted to say so it is not a tragic death, or else, if it is more accurate to say it this way, it is not mythic death, or death followed by a resurrection, or the death that plunges into a pure abyss: it is death as sharing and as exposure,” he writes, “it is death as the unworking that unites us.”15 Our party was born from your death. So in the wake of your death we threw parties to resurrect you. Though yours was a death without resurrection, performance and parties were a way of sustaining you, bringing you back, and keeping you alive. Your death was tragic, brutal in its suddenness. But in spite of what people might think, there was nothing mythic about it. It was mundane. You were another gay brown man dead before fifty. To say that queer and trans of color death is mundane is not to diminish their horror, but on the contrary to name the shocking fact of this kind of death’s everydayness. Trans and queer of color life is lived in constant and close proximity to death. “In any major North American city,” writes Rinaldo Walcott, “the numerous ‘missing’ black women (presumed murdered), the many ‘missing’ and murdered trans-women, the violent verbal and physical conditions of black life often leading to the deaths of gay men, lesbian women, and trans people remain a significant component of how black life is lived in the constant intimacy of violence on the road to death. Death is not ahead of blackness as a future shared with others; death is our life, lived in the present.”16 For similar reasons Christina Sharpe describes black life thus: “I want . . . to declare that we are Black peoples in the wake with no state or nation to protect us, with no citizenship bound to be respected, and to position us in the modalities of Black life lived in, as, under, despite Black death.”17 If I think of your death in relation to the forms of black life and death named by Walcott and Sharpe, it is not to suggest that they are commensurable. This would distract us from the way the history of black death in the Americas from the Middle Passage forward produces a present in which, as Walcott insists, “Black people die differently.”18 But what I could see clearly in the wake of your departure is that black and brown queer and trans death, like the deaths of women of color, produced by

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different yet overlapping histories of colonialism, capital accumulation, white supremacy, and cis-heteropatriarchy, share something with each other not in spite of but because of their difference. I want to suggest that black and brown people’s emancipation from these conditions are mutually implicated, not in spite of but in relation to our incommensurability. What we share is that under such conditions, which are far beyond our ability to control them, survival can be hard. So, if I call your death mundane, it’s not to underplay the importance of your life. It’s only meant to serve as a bitter acknowledgment of the ubiquitous and disproportionate distribution of death toward queers, women, and trans people of color. Dying for different reasons, often dying before really living, but dying nonetheless. It can be as hard to survive as it is to live on in the wake of those who didn’t. But you taught me that performance is imbued with a weak power of resurrection, or at least the power to sustain some fragment of lost life in the presence of a collective present. Performance, you wrote, is what allows minoritarian subjects to “take our dead with us to the various battles we must wage in their names—and in our names.”19 And performance is also a way of drawing people together. Throwing parties was a way of resurrecting you and keeping you alive. Being with each other was a way of being with you. In the wake of your death we became common to each other. We became communists. In the months after you died there was a proliferation of memorials. One friend joked that we were trapped in the Memorial Industrial Complex. After one of them, a group of us stole away late in the afternoon, collecting ourselves in the basement of a West Village nightclub, (Le) Poisson Rouge. The event recalled the kind of queer happenings that used to occur in places like SqueezeBox!, Club 57, or in the basement of the Fez, but no doubt sadder and muter. There was a bar against the wall of a cramped, black, downstairs room and a platform set up at the front, before which people huddled on the floor, or stood wherever they could find a spot. Carmelita Tropicana emceed a host of performances for and inspired by you: Guinevere Turner read a concrete poem composed of your better voicemails, Matmos reperformed Darby Crash’s signature circle burn (burning a circle into the skin with a cigarette), and Nao Bustamante arrived as a grieving punk widow, draped in a fur coat with billowing black veils shrouding her face. The costume, an ostentatious

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bid for the role of prime griever, materialized what she would later describe as her performance’s “aesthetics of grief.”20 Before grieving, however, the awkward tedium of the live. Accompanied by a guitarist dressed in a horse mask, Jason Martin, Nao began assembling the stage. It took some time—too much time— and at one point Carmelita, who was working hard to fill the air, teased, “You know, I think they’re just going to do this and they’re not doing anything. It’s going to be a durational performance.” But soon enough, the performance began. Nao stood at the front of the space, dropping the coat, exposing her body to the room, with a skinny bikini-esque bottom and top, high-heeled boots, and the lengthy veil reaching down to her midsection. She danced enthusiastically to a vintage Spanish-language beach song before setting the record to a slower, sultrier number. Laying on the platform, torqueing her body in a host of directions and pulling a microphone to her face, she sang, but instead of singing she was screaming. Something between a Darby Crash or Alice Bag rendition of “Somewhere My Love” and the howl of indescribable grief. After I got the call that you were dead, I sat in the middle of the street for a few minutes, early morning Chicago traffic driving around me, before calmly walking back home and through the front door, where I began to howl. A few years later I sit in Nao’s Los Angeles studio and ask her about that performance. “All performance is an expression of pain,” she told me. “It’s kind of like a primal scream.”21 As she screamed the song her voice was frayed, shredding at its outermost limit and shrieking the lyrics into the broken air: “Someday we’ll meet again my love.” A lie, perhaps, but the truth was harder to bear, and as if to help her carry the burden, some people in the audience began to shriek along with her. She was bringing them together. Performance “is like hosting a party,” she says.22 The naked vulnerability of Bustamante’s screaming body reminded me of your description of her 1992 performance, Rosa Does Joan, in which “exhibitionism is a mode of comportment that insists on a certain decibel of emotion, one that like many aspects of Latino culture are considered too loud or unharmonious by normative ears . . . [and] scrambles the public/private dictates of normative desire.”23 You called her a “vulnerability artist,” transforming her body into a conduit for “ugly feelings” and affective excess, while revaluing and revealing both to be queer, brown ways of creatively negotiating and living in a limiting world.24

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Figure P.1. Photo of America the Beautiful in Nao Bustamante’s studio, July 9, 2017. Photograph by the author. (Reproduced with artist’s permission.)

It is a lot for one body to bear this kind of burden, but in performance the burden is shared out amongst the many. While she screamed into the microphone, one could catch shades of her character in America the Beautiful, who you described as “an individual in need of public feelings, a character representing a raw need for public emotion and recognition.”25 In that piece, Bustamante’s character (a brown woman) reaches to attain (and fails spectacularly to realize) the impossible, self-negating ideal of whiteness. The screaming mourner before us, however, stubbornly clings to the darkness and to the black and brown recesses of queer of color grief and rage. But she is no more likely to be successful since she was reaching for someone who could not come back. Martin’s guitar goes wild and Bustamante’s screaming stops as she slowly rolls her body off the platform and into the audience. They part, making way for her, as she swims through them like a body surfer floating on (or, rather, wriggling through) a mosh pit. The act was entirely improvised. “I didn’t have a plan for after. After the screaming. I didn’t

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have a plan,” she told me. “How do you get out of that kind of performance?”26 Then, as she made her way around the room, something happened: People started to reach out to touch her. At first to help her move, lifting and prodding her body through the packed space. But then it was something else, as if they were taking care of her. “It wasn’t rehearsed,” she said; “the whole point of the piece was to lose it.”27 In losing it, she became common to us and we become common with her. Touched by her breakdown, we reached out to touch her, sometimes literally, as if responding to and sharing her “raw need for public emotion and recognition.” “It was healing,” she surmised, “not that anyone can heal that quickly.”28 And then the performance didn’t end so much as she crawled up next to the bar, where she stood up and ordered a drink. She was “not letting it end by never ending it.”29 Which is maybe another way of saying that the end was just the beginning of a new durational performance: life in the time after your death. There is something communist about the way a performance can draw a room together, allowing radically different people to share life (and death) as they try to take care of each other. Each person touching Bustamante’s body had a different proximity to you, to her, or to the scream, and it was that difference that constituted the grounds of our being together. Whatever our relation of being together was, it was founded in difference, rather than a relation of equivalence. In the “Critique of the Gotha Program,” Marx describes communism as a system of redistribution founded on relations of nonequivalence: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”30 Communism was necessary, Marx argued, because the capitalist mode of production takes things that are “distinct, possess different properties, are measured in different units, are incommensurable” and reduces them to “a numerical relationship” in which they are measured by way of a general equivalent, thereby “mak[ing] them commensurable.”31 In order to foster a world of boundless exchangeability, capitalism flattens difference into equivalence, making singularity into commensurability. In the place of capital’s commons of equivalence, communism calls for a commons of incommensurability: a sphere of relation structured less by the flat social fictions of possession, equality, and equivalence, than by a mode of sharing out, just redistribution, and being together in racial and sexual particularity.

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You located the communism of incommensurability in the work of, and relationship between, Eve Sedgwick and Gary Fisher: I use the term “communism” to help us think a certain communing of incommensurable singularities that can be enacted through even impersonal sex. But I also mean just plain communism. But let me be more exact, by “just plain communism” I do not mean to invoke the communism of a mythical society of equals, but, instead, the communism of living within a sense of the commons, a living in common. . . . Communism is first and foremost about the precondition for emancipation. But emancipation from what, we might ask? Here we come to understand emancipation as freedom from historical forces that dull or diminish our sense of the world. Nancy points out that Marx himself argued that the commune was the antithesis of empire. Communism would therefore be antithetical to our inner and outer colonialism, those blockages that disallow our arrival at an actual sense of the world, which is the world as a plurality of senses.32

By placing decolonial praxis and minoritarian emancipation at the center of your conceptualization of communism, this conception of the communism of incommensurability calls for a form of “being-with, in difference and discord” where racial and sexual differences are not extinguished, but shared out with each other: “This commons, this experience of being-in-common-in-difference, offers [us] a map of life where singularities flow into the common, enacting a necessary communism.”33 Communism being necessary, here, because it labors to sustain freedom and More Life for queer and trans people of color. Minoritarian performance can be, as it was for those few flickering moments of Bustamante’s scream, the means through which this “necessary communism” shifts from mere ideality to (albeit ephemeral) reality. Performance, like communism, like the party, is an ephemeral, temporary happening in which singular beings crash into each other for a time to become a being singular plural. But then the dawn breaks, the performance ends, the party comes undone, and they slip away from each other, falling back into the void. The party is the communism of incommensurability where, as Siouxsie described it, an “aura of sadness abounds [in] you” but gives way to being-with and being together-indifference, where the past isn’t lost, the future isn’t foreclosed, and the

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present is the presence of infinite, boundless, and renewable life. For Nancy, this is “the condition of the ever-renewed present.”34 And for you, it was, and was akin to, performance: “This potentiality is always in the horizon and, like performance, never completely disappears, but instead, lingers and serves as a conduit for knowing and feeling other people.”35 What allows the party, or a performance, to serve the will toward freedom and More Life is that another night beckons and that it can happen again. And again. And again. At first, after you died, I couldn’t find you. I wandered the halls looking for you. I screamed out your name but you did not come. And then you started to return: in the songs that you used to listen to, the things you wrote, the books you read, art you adored, sometimes in dreams, and most of all in the company of the people you loved. Throwing parties was a way of performing your resurrection, even if, like a performance, your return was always ephemeral or impermanent. You took a part of us with you when you died. Like the parties we threw, I wrote this to bring you back. This book is about minoritarian subjects who keep each other alive, mobilizing performance to open up the possibility for new worlds and new ways of being in the world together. I wrote it for the other ones who are lost, left behind, and living in the breakdown, but it is addressed to you, in particular, because in spite of the mundanity and ubiquity of queer and trans of color death, each of those deaths remains singular, particular, and personal for those of us who live in the wake of them. We can never forget that. To write a book about minoritarian death, survival, and freedom (which was also to write a book about queer of color grief, life, and insurgency) is always to write about the particular, singular people (like you) whom we have loved and lost. I wrote this book for you. And I wrote it to keep some part of you alive and with me (with us) in order to take you with us to the various battles that we will wage in your name—and in our own.

Introduction I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free

Montreux, Switzerland. July 3, 1976. On the stage of the Montreux Jazz Festival, the pianist takes a seat behind the piano. She is forty-three years old, and it has been a few years since she played to such a large crowd. At various points during the concert she expresses disdain for the audience. She wanted to write a song for them, but then, she says, “I decided you weren’t worthy. Because I figured that most of you were here for the festival.”1 They weren’t really there to see Nina Simone. Sometimes performance is just a job, and she needed this job. Money wasn’t coming in the way it once did. A few years before Montreux she walked away from a tumultuous, violent marriage. Her ex-husband was also her manager, so when she left him, the money dried up or disappeared. White audiences, alienated by her commitment to the struggle for black freedom, were becoming restless. The other work that sustained her, in spirit at least, was also evaporating, as the once promising movement for black emancipation was falling apart. By the mid-1970s, her friends Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry were dead, Dr. King was dead, Malcolm was dead, and Stokely Carmichael and Miriam Makeba had been chased out of the United States by the reactionary forces of state-sanctioned antiblackness. Reeling from all this loss, she spent the mid-1970s in self-imposed exile in Barbados and Liberia, before returning to work on that stage in Switzerland. The lights glide across her arms, accentuating the deep hues of her shimmering dark skin. Black dress. White necklace. White audience. She puts her hands in place above the keyboard, and they start to dance, pressing hard at surprising intervals, grabbing hold of the ear, before getting soft, loose, and quick again as baroque flourishes erupt from the fingertips. She sits still, her back straight and arms extended loosely in front of her, eyes concentrating on her hands. And then, after a while, 1

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she leans her head back just slightly and starts to sing into the silver microphone: “I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.” A wish for freedom can be hard to sustain so as she pushes it into the air in front of her, her voice falters, and the word crackles apart. Her expression is opaque, and the vocal cord tightens, holding onto the sound as it slips out from between her lips. Then the wish rematerializes for the second lyric: “I wish I could break all the chains still binding me.” Still. Still binding. Still. Still.

Baton Rouge, Louisiana. July 16, 2016. The woman stands still with her feet flat against the asphalt, blocking a highway that runs beneath her and parallel to the horizon. A line of witnesses, mostly journalists, have assembled to watch. She is facing a flank of police in riot gear. The expression on her face, like that of the pianist, is opaque. The air around her lifts up the flaps in the lower portion of the dress, like wings, exposing the skin on her legs. Her right arm is pulled

Figure I.1. “Taking a Stand in Baton Rouge,” 2016. Photographer: Jonathan Bachman. (Courtesy of Reuters.)

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across her torso, hand relaxed against her abdomen. The left arm draws straight down from the shoulder, muscles tensed, as the arm curls at the elbow to reach forward and toward the right side of her body. Her hand, weighed down slightly by a gold bracelet or watch, curls back toward her. She looks like a dancer, body suspended as she prepares for her next move. Two white police officers dressed in black battle armor move in her direction. They wear helmets. The gray light of the sky reflects against the clear shields that wrap the space in front of their faces and block significant portions of their expressions. Guarded, she looks toward but not necessarily at them. Their guns are strapped to the holsters on their right hips and white plastic handcuffs dangle from the left sides of their utility belts. Behind them, a flank of police wearing the same defensive shielding, like a dystopian futuristic army except the future is in the present. Glints of pale skin peek out from their armor. They, too, are still. Though the singular details change, the woman on the highway is playing a role in a by-now familiar masque, scenario, or performance event with dramaturgy routine and reportorial. The inciting incident: fifteen days ago Alton Sterling, a thirty-seven-year-old black man, was wrestled to the ground and shot at point blank range by the Baton Rouge police for selling CDs. This keeps happening: Eric Garner choked to death by the New York City PD for selling untaxed cigarettes; twelveyear-old Tamir Rice shot to death by the Cleveland PD for playing with a toy gun in a park; Philando Castile shot by the Minneapolis PD for riding in a car as his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and her two-yearold daughter watch him bleed to death; twenty two-year-old Rekia Boyd shot in the back of the head by an off-duty Chicago police officer because her boyfriend raised his phone into the air as they walked in an alley with friends; Sandra Bland, who died in Waller Country police custody after being pulled over for a traffic violation. The rising action: a family in shock with grief assembles a press conference and, in person or through lawyers, issues calls for justice and peace. Reporters descend on the scene, protestors (like the woman in Baton Rouge) take to the streets, mobilizing the black body in performance to draw attention to the persistent devaluation of black life and degradation of black flesh. The climax. In the rare instances where an uprising rises up, the police face down the protestors, beat down the

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protestors, reload, repeat. Falling action. Investigations and committee reports, staff changes and press conferences, new policies and training protocols are announced. The screaming of the mourning is drowned out by an ocean of white noise. Conclusion. Fuck you, Aristotle. For people of color in the United States of America there’s no such thing as resolution, let alone a solution, because we are always already conceived of as the problem.2 So the cycle simply stops when the next thing happens and the country moves on. Until the pageant starts again with the sound of another gunshot. With the sound of another gunshot. With the sound of another gunshot. Or the sound of a makeshift noose snapping taught in a Waller County, Texas, jail cell. In the wake of Alton’s murder, the woman stands still with her feet flat against the asphalt as the police advance. “It wasn’t very violent,” said the man who photographed her stand. “She didn’t say anything. She didn’t resist and the police didn’t drag her off.”3 But it was violent, she was saying something, she was resisting. A black woman does not stand on a highway to face down a battalion of heavily armed white police officers in either silence or acquiescence. Her body is the utterance and it sounds a collective “no.” In performance the body can be a resounding articulation of the negation of the negation.

Right now. Where you are. We live in the face of historical and social conditions that produce an unjust distribution of death toward, and exploitation of, black and brown life and queer and trans bodies, actively shortening black, brown, Asian, indigenous, queer, and trans of color life with alarming and mundane regularity. This book argues that performance is a vital means through which the minoritarian subject demands and produces freedom and More Life at the point of the body. Minoritarian performance is what Nina Simone described as the art of “improvisation within a fixed framework,” working within limited coordinates to make the impossible possible.4 As Alexandra Vazquez argues, in performance, “The minoritarian subject can be understood as improvising with the world around them—even in its most flawed or false rendering.”5 This project thus follows and builds upon a host of minoritarian intellectuals who have accounted for the ways

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minoritarian subjects mobilize performance to survive the present, improvise new worlds, and sustain new ways of being in the world together.6 This book tells the stories of minoritarian subjects like Simone or the woman in Baton Rouge, who mobilize performance in both the realm of the aesthetic and the everyday to sustain the fugitive flight and revolutionary fight to produce freedom and More Life in the face of subordination, exploitation, annihilation, and negation. More than anything, this book is intended to function as a travel guide and as a kind of tactical manual. In 2013 two of my closest friends died, both with little or no warning. One committed suicide in January, and the other, who was both a teacher and family, became ill and died suddenly a few days later in December. Both were brown queer men; one was in his early thirties, the other was in his mid-forties. This book is something of a journal of the places, performances, art, people, and theory that I took refuge in to survive their loss. While queer of color life is at the center of the frame, queerness comes in and out of focus in this text as I draw on both the traditions of queer of color critique and woman of color feminism to think about the affinities and forms of social solidarity (and rupture) that move across and between queers of color, women of color, and other minoritarian subjects in the collective attempt to survive conditions of negation and annihilation. I wrote the book for and to my missing friends, and to the people they left behind, but it is written for all people of color, and especially queers of color, trans people of color, and women of color. It is a book for the still living, recounting the story of people, like us, for whom performance is a refuge and a means for surviving and producing something the singer wishes she knew how to feel. Simone has a significant presence in this project because her body of work offers a particularly good example of the work of minoritarian performance. It was not uncommon throughout her long, storied career for the pianist to put performance to work in the service of both survival and the emancipatory will. There were times that freedom came to her through the act of performing. In 1970, Peter Rodis directed a short film about Simone, in which he asked her at one point, “What’s free to you?”7 She is seated on the ground, dressed in a dashiki awash with hues of brown, black, and white, and she thinks seriously on the question for a minute before she begins to answer, shaking her head from side

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to side, “It’s just a feeling. It’s just a feeling. . . . You can describe things [like freedom or love], but you can’t tell them. But you know it when it happens. That’s what I mean by free. I’ve had a couple of times on stage where I really felt free.”8 Her body becomes animated as she props herself up, leaning in, voice transforming into a charged whisper, before a shout: “And that’s something else. That’s really something else!” Her tone changes to bemusement, and she continues, “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me. No fear. I mean really, no fear. . . . That’s the closest, that’s the only way I can describe it. That’s not all of it. But it is something to really, really feel. [It’s] like a new way of seeing. A new way of seeing something.”9 Freedom, for Simone, was only positive content when it was realized as an ephemeral sense, or feeling: the “couple of times onstage when I really felt free.” If it came to her primarily as a sense, it is because Simone, like most of us, knows freedom primarily through its negation, or simply as the surfeit of fear that makes freedom unimaginable. But onstage she was able to practice or perform freedom, and in so doing, she brushed up against the emancipation of her senses, opening up “a new way of seeing. A new way of seeing something.” Freedom is a problem. Freedom has been colonized, absorbed, stolen, and made a utility by and for white liberal political reason. Freedom, within white supremacist liberal capitalist modernity, is largely understood to be a possession or right: the freedom to own, to enter the market, or to buy and sell one’s labor. As Lisa Lowe argues, “Liberal ideas of political emancipation, ethical individualism, historical progress, and free market economy were employed in the expansion of empire [and these] universalizing concepts of reason, civilization, and freedom effect[ed] colonial divisions of humanity, affirming liberty for modern man while subordinating the variously colonized and dispossessed peoples whose material labor and resources were the conditions of possibility for that liberty.”10 Following Mimi Thi Nguyen, after a century and longer of US military imperialism, freedom is not only colonized by liberalism; it is a discourse through which liberalism justifies colonial and imperial violence.11 Freedom, within liberalism, is an impossibility—a cruel joke or what Lauren Berlant describes as cruel optimism. “Optimism,” she writes, “is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving.”12

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And, still, freedom is that which we cannot not want. Especially those of us descended from the children of the children of slaves, against whom the liberal conception of freedom was and is constructed. For them—for so many of us—freedom is not experienced as a right, a possession, or an ability to enter the market, buy and sell. Instead, freedom is experienced as negation and/or the priority of a desire to move beyond the annihilating historical reality of violence, denial, and bodily dispossession and the intergenerational sense memory of having been bought and sold. When Assata Shakur was asked what freedom was to her, she responded, incredulously, “Freedom? You’re asking me about freedom? You’re asking me about freedom? I’ll be honest with you. I know a whole more about what freedom isn’t than about what it is, because I’ve never been free. I can only share my vision with you of the future, about what freedom is.”13 Following Shakur, any defense of freedom must begin by admitting that we don’t know what freedom is and don’t remotely have the conditions through which we could know what freedom would be except as vision. Vision: sense, aesthetic encounter. But as Simone also suggests, we might yet have the capacity to experience freedom as sense, materializing it in and on the body through performance. This sense of freedom is not located in the future, but in the present. Though ephemeral, when this sense of freedom is generated across the body through performance, the body becomes aware that the rest of the time something’s missing, something better than this is possible, and that something must be done. This kind of freedom is not used on or against us, but is something we put to work against those forces that dull and diminish us, making it impossible to even wish for the knowledge of what freedom would feel like. Or at least, it’s something we put to work as we try to survive those forces. Through performance Simone opened up and shared an insurgent sense of freedom with her listener. She did this before she even knew that she was doing it. Early in her career, she was touched and surprised to learn that the radical, young civil rights activists of the Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) played her records during their meetings: “My friends in SNCC told me that when they got started and had their meetings to discuss strategy—meetings which often turned into parties later—there would always be Nina Simone records in

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whoever’s house the meeting was held in.”14 These albums, like Little Girl Blue (1959) or Nina at Newport (1960), featured seemingly a-political folk tunes, jazz standards, and gospel songs. But the students sensed something insurgent on her records, and they were touched by the sense of freedom radiating from them: “All those afternoons when [her friend] Lorraine [Hansberry] had been telling me there was a struggle going on which I had to get involved in, I had been involved anyway.”15 Performance was the site of her struggle and if the insurgent sense of freedom produced in her song lasted only for the time the record played, the ephemeral instantiation of something better than this in her voice affirmed the validity of the wish for freedom and More Life. So the activists in SNCC kept playing her records as they did the hard work of building a better world for everyone. The title of this project refers to that which comes after the party: the moment when the record comes off, and the students move into the streets of Selma or Birmingham, mobilizing the body in performance and protest to articulate their demands for black freedom and More Life. But it also refers to what happens when a party comes undone, when the last of the meetings has taken place, and the movement has fallen apart. It’s a reference to life that is lived after your friends and loved ones have died, and it is a gesture to those lingering moments in the early dawn when there is nowhere left to go, though you and your people are still trying to find refuge together. Throughout this project, I insist that the incompletion experienced in the moment after the party’s fall, though often crushing, can be an invitation to throw a new party the next night: the party’s fall is grounds not for nihilism, but for action and praxis. It is in this sense that the title also refers to materialist struggles for freedom and sustainable life that continue to surge in the twenty-first century, despite the collapse of communism, which once seemed (if only for a few flickering moments) a promising vehicle for collective emancipation. Given the crimes and failures of historical communism, communism is an odd thing to call for. By insisting that communism is not-yet-here and has never-been-here, I am following José Muñoz and Fred Moten, as well as C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Grace Lee Boggs (of the Johnson-Forest Tendency), who concluded, in their midcentury critique of Stalinism that not only was socialism nowhere present in any of the revolutionary societies of the day, but that the revolutionary

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parties in places like the Soviet Union and Tito’s Yugoslavia were instruments of fascist domination in which workers remained subordinate and subject to the cold exploitation (at best) and brutal, fascist machinations (at worst) of “the bureaucratic-administrative one-party state.”16 Still, they did not advocate a retreat from Marxism, which would cede the world’s development totally to the annihilating tendencies of capitalism. Rather, they insisted, as James wrote elsewhere, that “Marxism is the doctrine which believes that freedom, equality, democracy are today possible for all mankind.”17 As the capitalist mode of production drags the world ever closer to the precipice of total destruction, our survival may rely now upon the realization of communism’s promise, whether we call it “communism,” or by another name.18 In place of racial capitalism’s market-based commons of race, sex, gender, and class stratified, yet formally colorblind equivalence, a communism of incommensurability is a sphere of social relation structured less by the social fictions of possession, equality, and exchange, than by collective, entangled, and historically informed practices of sharing out, just redistribution, sustainability, and being together in difference. This kind of communism might take its cues not so much from the failed political parties of historical communism, as from the parties the SNCC activists threw while listening to Simone’s records or the performance-rich parties of queer of color nightlife. Not because these spaces were perfect—they were and are replete with their own violences—but because they were trying to produce something else, something we don’t even have a vision of. Yet. This book undertakes a self-consciously heretical deployment of the tradition of Marxist aesthetic criticism, mobilizing Marxism in an (often uneasy) alliance with critical race theory, feminist theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, and minoritarian performance theory. Marxism, here, is a means not to be mistaken for the end. As Ernst Bloch insisted, “Marxism in its entirety, even when brought in in its most illuminating form and anticipated in its entire realization, is only a condition for a life in freedom, life in happiness, life in possible fulfillment, life with content.”19 Marxism cannot produce freedom, but it labors to bring about the conditions from within which we might finally begin to imagine, sense, or see what freedom could be or feel like. But to pursue this goal, Marxism must reconcile with its own fundamental limitations.

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For Fredric Jameson, following Lenin, the lesson of system is that, “one cannot change anything without changing everything.”20 But the dominant Marxist tradition has long subordinated questions of race, colonization, indigeneity, sex, gender, and sexuality to the question of class and political economy—even when this reduction was and is unsustainable in the face of the complexity of actually occurring historical events. As Cedric Robinson argues, “Western Marxism, in either of its two variants—critical-humanist or scientific—has proven insufficiently radical to expose and root out the racialist order that contaminates its analytic and philosophic applications or to come to effective terms with the implications of its own class origins. As a result, it has been mistaken for what it is not: a total theory of liberation. The ensuing errors have sometimes been horrendous, inducing in their wake dogmas of certainty characterized by desperation.”21 While this book cannot pretend to solve this problem, it suggests that the aesthetic is one place to look for answers and/or experiment with possible solutions. For as much as Marxism opens up our understanding of the labor undertaken by performance, Marxism has much to learn from minoritarian freedom struggles carried out within the domain of performance.

The Middle Passage. Four hundred years ago. But also, today. In Baton Rouge. And where you are. We’re back in Baton Rouge. We never left. Here on this highway, the chains from which Simone wishes to break free are both metaphorical and literal. The woman’s name is Ieshia Evans, and she is a thirty-five-year-old nurse and mother.22 Police, plastic handcuffs, guns in holsters, battle armor, the law, thirty-five hours in a jail cell. These are the expensive, but impoverished, things that the state mobilizes to quash her rebellion. A body, a dress, two shoes, the names of the dead, and a wish for freedom and More Life make up the poor, yet rich, materials of her act of resistance. All minoritarian performance, like Simone’s wish or the woman’s stand on the highway, are animated by the drive toward freedom. This book’s theorization of minoritarian performance, though deeply informed by Asian American studies, Latinx studies, and other areas of minoritarian thought, owes a particular debt to black studies, black

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performance studies, and black feminist theory. For Fred Moten, black performance is “the universalization or socialization of the surplus, the generative force of a venerable phonic propulsion, the ontological and historical priority of resistance to power and objection to subjection, the old-new thing, the freedom drive that animates black performances.”23 To be clear, when I suggest that Moten’s conceptualization of the freedom drive that animates black performance is foundational to the theory of minoritarian performance, I do not mean to sublimate the blackness of black performance into the abstraction of minoritarian performance. Rather, I am suggesting that blackness and black performance animate what I’m describing as minoritarian performance, as much as I’m thinking of minoritarian performance as that which struggles for the long-deferred liberation of all black people. Black performance and minoritarian performance do not subsume or sublate each other so much as they are entangled within, determinative of, and determined by each other. The ontological and historical priority of black performance’s resistance to (white) power was (to steal language from Althusser) “originary; not derived.”24 The chains that bind, or “hold,” the pianist and the plastic handcuffs that threaten the woman in Baton Rouge share a lineage that traces back to acts of black resistance at the moment of capture. In The Black Jacobins, C. L. R. James insists that from slavery’s beginning, black resistance and the will toward freedom prefigured the masters’s brutal tactics of corporeal domination: “Contrary to the lies that have been spread so pertinaciously about Negro docility, the revolts at the port of embarkation and on board were incessant, so that the slaves had to be chained, right hand to right leg, left hand to left leg, and attached in rows to long iron bars.”25 Stolen from their homes, stripped of their names, sold apart from their families, and held in chains, people were transformed into living property, and slaves were reduced to “flesh,” or what Hortense Spillers calls “that zero degree of social conceptualization.”26 But, still, they fought back and fought to be free, and when they had nothing left but a body reduced to flesh, they often put the flesh to work in the service of the revolutionary will toward freedom. For as Amber Musser writes, “within studies of difference [flesh] oscillates between being a symptom of abjection and objectification and a territory ripe for reclamation. Despite its resonance with objectification and the negation

Figure I.2. Carrie Mae Weems, Ebo Landing, 1992. Two silver gelatin prints and one screen print text panel, 20 x 20 inches (each), 60 x 20 inches installed. (©Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.)

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of subjectivity, flesh has become an important political space.”27 Stripped of everything else, a body could still perform, and through performance the flesh could fight for freedom and More Life. Carrie Mae Weems’s Sea Islands Series is an atmospheric study of the Gullah Islands composed of combinations of text and photography, offering us a vision of the complex entanglements between performance, the slave’s body, freedom, and death. The Gullah Islands—famous setting of Julie Dash’s seminal 1991 film Daughters of the Dust—are an isolated archipelago off the Georgia and South Carolina coasts. “Because of the islands’ physical isolation from the mainland and their majority black population,” writes curator Kathryn E. Delmez, “the residents were able to retain many aspects of African culture throughout the period of slavery and into the present day.”28 In Ebo Landing (1992), Weems stages a horizontal triptych: a body of text with photographs of the islands’ wetlands above and below it. The text forms a circle to tell a story: One midnight at high tide / A ship bringing a cargo of Ebo (Ibo) / Men landed at Dunbar Creek on the / Island of St. Simons. But the men refus- / ed to be sold in to slavery; joining hands / together they turned back toward the / water, chanting, “the water brought us, / the water will take us away.” They all / drowned, but to this day when the / breeze sighs over the marshes and / through the trees, you can hear the / clank of chains and echo of / their chant at Ebo Landing.

It’s hard not to hear the “clank of chains and echo of their chant” in the photographs, as if their ghosts are lingering, still chanting on the marshes of Dunbar Creek. Weems produced the piece while pursuing a graduate degree in folklore at UC Berkeley. In a single, condensed passage, the text’s folkloric tone conjures the conclusion of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon or Ovid’s Metamorphoses.29 Even if (or especially because) the story is lore, we know that it refers to something that happened: Black people were dragged to these shores against their will, but once here, they improvised (often through performance) ways to fight back against capture. As Weems’s image performs for the spectator, it keeps some part of the dead (and their insurgent demand for freedom) alive.

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It is not that the woman, as she stands her ground, or the pianist, as she presses her hands into the keys, is the same as the rebellious slave struggling to get free of the ship’s hold. Rather, it is that the history of black subjection and objectification that springs from the primal wound of slavery accumulates in the present of both the pianist and the woman on the highway, expressing itself in the performance scenario as it is enacted at the point of each woman’s performing body. As performance shuttles between past and present, rearranging the spaces that divide them in the process, it rips open history and disorganizes our movements through time and space.30 In the time of performance, as Rebecca Schneider teaches us, time folds across and through itself.31 The “time of slavery” similarly undoes any logic of linear progression and any clear demarcation between past and present. As Saidiya Hartman writes, “The ‘time of slavery’ negates the common-sense intuition of time as continuity or progression, then and now coexist; we are coeval with the dead.”32 The material effects of slavery continue to characterize and determine the conditions under which black life presently exists, including “the diffuse violence and the everyday routines of domination, which continue to characterize black life but are obscured by their everydayness.”33 The scenarios of torture and subjection devised by the masters for the black body (scenarios of violence still visited upon the descendants of slaves) carved into the black body what Spillers describes as the “hieroglyphics of the flesh.”34 Spillers invents a certain strand of performance studies (which is to invent Joseph Roach and then Diana Taylor) when she queries, “We might well ask if this phenomenon of marking and branding actually ‘transfers’ from one generation to another, finding its various symbolic substitutions in an efficacy of meanings that repeat the initiating moments?”35 Isn’t this how Roach and Taylor describe performance insofar as performance affects a “symbolic substitution” that transmits and transfers the “initiating moment” from spectator to witness, generation to generation, performer to performer, body to body?36 Wasn’t George Zimmerman’s execution of Trayvon Martin or Sandra Bland’s death in a noose made of sheets an echo or a reperformance of the lynching of Emmitt Till or Mary Taylor? Don’t these acts of violence stage the “act of transfer” that rematerializes and reproduces the burning brand of white supremacy as hieroglyphics in black flesh? And doesn’t

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the woman’s insurgent stand or the pianist’s performance of a wish for a not-yet-known sense of freedom preserve, transmit, and transfer the echo of that ontologically and historically prior act of resistance to power? As she performs, her body reverberates across a historical slipstream to conjure back into the present an echo of those first uprisings at the docks, “an echo of their chant at Ebo landing.”

Havana, Cuba. 1967. Throughout these pages, the reader will encounter José Muñoz, whose thought serves as another major theoretical anchor for this project. Muñoz’s Disidentifications was one of the earliest texts to popularize the use of “minoritarian” for contemporary readers in queer theory, performance studies, and critical race theory. This book draws on Muñoz’s use of “minoritarian” as a shorthand to describe a communism of incommensurability made up of the often fractious and incommensurable, but no-less necessary alliances forged between people of color (and especially women, queers, and trans people of color). For Muñoz, minoritarian describes less an identity than a commons marked by the exigencies of social identity-in-difference: “Although I use terms such as ‘minoritarian subjects’ or the less jargony ‘people of color/queers of color’ to describe the different cultural workers who appear in these pages, I do want to state that all of these formations of identity are ‘identities-in-difference.’ ”37 Elaborating on this point, Vazquez notes that Muñoz also “defines the ‘minoritarian subject’ in relationship to the majoritarian public sphere in the United States. The public sphere in this sense is one that privileges whiteness, the masculine, the ‘native born,’ and the heterosexual.”38 Minoritarian being is, in this sense, defined by a set of relations and proximities to the major (“the ‘native born,’ and the heterosexual”). I don’t mean to use “minoritarian” to subsume, flatten, or obliterate the differences between the different types of subjects who might choose to gather under that name. Rather, it describes a place of (often uncomfortable) gathering, a cover, umbrella, expanse, or refuge under and in which subjects marked by racial, sexual, gender, class, and national minority might choose to come together in tactical struggle, both because of what we share (often domination in some form by the major,

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or dominant culture) and because of what makes us different. Though I will expand on these entanglements to a greater degree in the fourth chapter, my conceptualization of the minoritarian subject is directly inspired by Du Bois’s theorization of the dark proletariat, which Du Bois described as a “dark and vast sea of human labor in China and India, the South Seas and all Africa; in the West Indies and Central America and in the United States—that great majority of mankind, on whose bent and broken backs rest today the founding stones of modern industry.”39 By spatializing the dark proletariat, Du Bois suggests that this insurgent community is defined less at the level of identity than through position: by one’s proximity to empire, nation, capital, power, and the entanglement of these systems with white supremacy. Racial formation, for Du Bois, was not anathema to the development of capitalism in the United States; it was a foundational component of it. Indeed, modern global capitalism was both goal and effect of the slave trade. And to dispel the moral dissonance that the trade in black flesh posed to the liberal ideals of the white bourgeoisie? The invention of racial ideology in Europe and the United States, which could justify the contradiction posed by slavery and colonization through the dehumanization of black people held in bondage and of non-white people across the world who were conquered by “reason,” “enlightenment,” and “liberty.”40 Thus, as Cedric Robinson writes: “In contradistinction to Marx’s and Engels’s expectations that bourgeois society would rationalize social relations and demystify social consciousness, the obverse occurred. The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism.”41 The marriage of white supremacy to liberal capitalism produced its own set of internal contradictions. From the founding of the republic, as the United States has (to appropriate the words of Lisa Lowe) “sought to serve capital, this contradiction between the economic and the political spheres was sublated” and violently worked through by way of the dehumanization, disenfranchisement, and subjugation of the black body, the dispossession, murder, and removal of the indigenous body, and the domination, exploitation, and exclusion of Asian and Latino bodies.42 This has critical implications for even the possibility of freedom. As Du Bois

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concluded, our freedoms are tangled up within each other: “The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown, and black.”43 If the dark proletariat has never fully materialized as a politically active force, we still regularly catch a glimpse of it in the realm of the aesthetic, and performance in particular. In Simone’s 1967 collaboration with Langston Hughes, “Backlash Blues,” for example, Simone assumes the perspective of a working class black woman, addressing “Mr. Backlash,” who is a personification of white supremacy. In the song, she references the insurgent power of a much larger racialized commons: When I try to find a job To earn a little cash All you got to offer Is your mean old white backlash. But the world is big Big and bright and round And it’s full of other folks like me Who are black, yellow, beige and brown44

Like Du Bois, Simone describes and calls for a revolutionary alliance between people of color who collectively struggle against shared conditions of domination, exploitation, and death, without relinquishing the particular, but overlapping histories that have produced their marginal, or minor, relationship to dominant systems and structures of power. The difference between majoritarian and minoritarian being is not a question of statistical or numerical majority or minority; it’s a relation structured by proximities to power and alliance. For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri, majority is assumed when a particular class (the bourgeoisie, white people, colonists, heterosexuals, men, cis-gender people) assumes the position of a universal metric, or constant. “Majority,” they write, “implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate it.”45 But majoritarian being also implies a privileged relationship to power, often resulting in the domination of descendent or minor classes (the proletariat, people of color, indigenous people, queers, women, trans people) whose deviation from

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the constant paradoxically confirms the norms, borders, and boundaries by which the ascendant (or major) class is defined: “Majority assumes a state of power and domination, not the other way around.”46 Through the appropriation of the materials produced by (and productive of) the dominant (or major) culture, minoritarian cultural practitioners improvise and perform into being routes toward freedom and survival that would otherwise be impossible. “Even when major,” they write, “a language is open to an intensive utilization that makes it take flight along creative lines of escape which, no matter how slowly, no matter how cautiously, can now form an absolute deteritorialization.”47 Following Deleuze and Guattari, Berlant notes that their theorization of the major/minor suggests that “sensual locations of political marginality might provide an unpredicted energy for reconfiguring power, identity, and collective knowledge.”48 In minoritarian performance, we find a means for taking “flight along creative lines of escape” in order to improvise new worlds and new, common or collective ways of being in and knowing the world. But the revolutionary, world-making commons, or “we,” that is produced through minoritarian performance is not without its dangers and limits. Vazquez insists on a nuanced approach to theorizing and complicating the “we” produced by minoritarian performance. In a comparative study of two post-revolutionary Cuban music documentaries, she describes the “nosotros” deployed in both films as an insurgent “we” characterized by radical social heterogeneity. This “nosotros,” she writes, is a form of “we” that ultimately “prevent[s] the reduction of the project of making music (or nation) to a select few and open[s] it up to a heterogeneous societal whole. The worlds incorporated in the films place pressure on the tyrannies, ideological and otherwise, that often overdetermine the ‘we.’ ”49 The need for this pressure is particularly acute within the context of post-revolutionary Cuba and the empire to the north, where much of Cuba’s diaspora settled. In both Cuba and the United States, the tyranny of totalitarian power can be disguised as collective will, or the authorizing will of “We/the People.” As Vazquez observes, “Because it is often evoked to muffle difference and dissent, and because it has been employed to repressive effect in regimes everywhere, the ‘we’ can be intolerable. This is especially true in Cuba where each generation is continually called upon to

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sacrifice mind and body for the national ‘we.’ ”50 In the final instance, Vazquez, like Muñoz, describes the “nosotros” or “we” produced by minoritarian performance as a form of being together in difference: it does “not necessarily have to report back to an official ‘public’ or an official ‘nosotros’ or ‘we.’ This space of being is within and at the same time gestures towards the possibility of being outside of the ‘we.’ ”51 Minoritarian performance produces a “we” that includes but does not enclose; it is a form of being with by being “within” and also “outside” of “we.” “We” is ontologically enmeshed with performance and performativity. As Jean-Luc Nancy observes: “Only in such a case can we speak of a ‘we’—or better, only in this case is it possible that a we comes to be spoken. Better still: if the we can only and each time be a speech act, then only a we existentially spoken may perform its significance.”52 The “we” of minoritarian performance is temporary and never fully authorized, but its ephemerality and lack of authority give it the capacity to remain fugitive from the majoritarian and totalitarian tendencies of the revolutions of historical communism, while appropriating and amplifying their most revolutionary impulses and drives toward democratic and collective being. Under such circumstances, minoritarian performance isn’t just a part of the revolution; it is the revolution. “Minoritarian performance labors to make worlds,” writes Muñoz, “worlds of transformative politics and possibilities. Such performance engenders worlds of ideological potentiality that alter the present and map out the future.”53 As minoritarian subjects mobilize performance to produce a common sense, they speak as a “we” capable of “envision[ing] and activat[ing] new social relations. These new social relations would be the blueprint for minoritarian counterpublic spheres.”54 This, ultimately, is the work of minoritarian performance.

New York, New York. Sometime in 1964. And London. 1857. Simone recorded jazz pianist Billy Taylor’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” for her 1967 album, Silk & Soul. Composed in the early 1950s, the song gained traction as the struggle for black emancipation erupted into a series of organized movements by the middle of the century. The song’s opening, where Taylor introduces the melody, is slow. The notes are extended by the drag of the bassist’s bow pulling across

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the strings, while Taylor stretches out the spaces and gaps between the phrases, taking on the tone, air, and tempo of a somber church processional. But in the second verse the pace revs up, the bassist begins plucking the strings as a percussionist joins the fray. Taylor comes back around for another, looser pass at the melody, and a few voices erupt in the background as hands begin to clap. As these various elements crash into each other, the sense of the song takes shape and it begins to produce (or make) a world. To describe Taylor’s performance as producing, or making a world, is to brush up against a problem faced by Marxism and performance theory alike: What does the labor of performance produce, or make? Peggy Phelan might say that as pure expenditure, performance produces nothing but itself, but Marxism, a realm of thought wholly invested in the question of production, opens up another set of possibilities.55 Marx was sure that performance “produces something,” he just couldn’t decide what this something is.56 In an attempt to provide an answer, he turns his attention in a passage in the Grundrisse to the example of a piano player. He begins, as he so often does, by playing the part of (and ventriloquizing) his archenemies (bourgeois economists), asking their question: “Is it not crazy . . . that the piano-maker should be a productive worker but not the piano-player, although surely the piano would be a NONSENSE without the piano-player?”57 In response, Marx distinguishes between the reproductive labor of the piano-maker and the apparently unproductive labor of the piano player: “The piano-maker reproduces capital; the pianist only exchanges his labour for revenue.”58 Put otherwise, the piano-maker makes a commodity with measurable value, whereas the pianist produces no thing; the pianist merely performs. Much later in the text he contradicts himself, describing performance as a productive form of labor: “Actors are productive workers, not by virtue of the fact that they produce plays, but in so far as they INCREASE THEIR EMPLOYER’S WEALTH.”59 I turn to this internal debate because, in the final instance, Marx’s confusion over the contradictory nature of performance teaches us more than his attempts to resolve it. His confusion reveals performance to be that which confounds quantification, confuses definition, and reorganizes the very notion of value, opening up new ways of conceptualizing and organizing the world beyond the limits defined by the capitalist mode of production.

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Whatever Taylor produces as he labors at the piano undoes quantification insofar as it is “not productive for capitalization.”60 Still, Marx insists that the pianist is producing something: “Doesn’t the pianist produce music and satisfy our musical ear; doesn’t he also produce the latter to a certain degree? In FACT, he does so.”61 And notice that it’s not merely that Taylor produces sense (“music,” the song), but that in so doing he produces the listener or, more accurately, a community of listeners (“our musical ear”) who now listen for the sense of freedom (“how it would feel to be free”).62 The pianist makes this new kind of subject in the form of the listener, as much as the listener oriented toward the sound of freedom’s becoming calls the song into being. Marx understood the creation of an audience, a public, or common sense as the work of aesthetics: “An objet d’art—just like any other product—creates a public that has artistic taste and is enjoying beauty. Production therefore produces not only an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.”63 Production cultivates a subject with a taste or desire for an object (“Production therefore creates the consumer”), a process through which production makes two things: the “material to satisfy a need, but it also provides a need for the material.”64 Like the younger Marx (of 1844), who argues that the regime of private property reduces people’s senses to the singularly impoverished “sense of having,” the Marx of 1857 argued that capitalism manufactures the “sense of having” by creating a feeling of need and the desire to have: “The need felt for objects is created by the perception of the object.”65 Aesthetic production, like any other form of production, not only produces objects for consumption (“the material to satisfy a need”); but also produces the sense of needing itself (“the need for the material”), and thus a “subject for the object.” Taylor’s song calls for and produces listeners who listen for the sound of freedom’s feeling. His melody follows a fairly simple pattern: four couplets, followed by a bridge back to the top. Repeat. But each time the group returns to the start of the circuit, Taylor’s fingers express a fugitive, improvisatory drive, dancing across the keys and constructing new patterns of sound or innovative lines of flight from within the limited coordinates set by the melody. Perhaps “standard,” these jazz improvisations still insist that wandering and exploring might be the most interesting route toward freedom—a kind of always pushing away, breaking

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off, going somewhere and toward something. As the song posits the wish for freedom, it gives concrete, corporeal form to this wish at the level of the sound. Simone’s friend, Lorraine Hansberry, insisted on the documentary and transformative functions of the aesthetic in her midcentury call for young black writers to “write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be.”66 As Shana Redmond describes it, Hansberry’s “insistence that art be used also accounts for what it should be used in the service of; she argued that [the writers] must tell the story of ‘our people,’ whose stories speak to not only the present at hand but also the future that will someday exist.”67 This praxis was exemplified by the playwright’s use of the stage in the service of black freedom struggles, where performance functions as a means for both indicting present conditions and rehearsing and realizing other possible futures. Performance reaches into a spectator through the senses, and it also produces sense in and for the community of spectators. In so doing, it may produce a collective consciousness, or common sense. As Robinson writes, “The shared past is precious, not for itself, but because it is the basis of consciousness, of knowing, of being.”68 Such shared consciousness, or what Kara Keeling calls “common sense,” may reify the dominant order by providing, “in the form of clichés, a way of continuing present movements.”69 But common sense may also “enable another type of mental and/or motor movement to occur, thereby enabling an alternative perception.”70 In such circumstances, common sense may provoke, and inspire alternative perceptions to surface. It aids the birth of new consciousness and the new worlds that spring forth from such consciousness. It may simply be the sense of being together, of sharing something, but it can also be the seed of revolutionary praxis. Performance, in Louis Althusser’s assessment, has the capacity to produce “a new consciousness in the spectator,” but recognizing the zone of indeterminacy between an art object and the spectator, he insisted that this consciousness will be “incomplete, like any other consciousness, but moved by this incompletion itself, this distance achieved, this inexhaustible work of criticism in action.”71 Rather than functioning as deficit, the encounter with incompletion can drive the spectator toward action, or praxis: “The play is really the production of a new spectator,

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an actor who starts where the performance ends, who only starts so as to complete it, but in life.”72 To be “moved” by incompletion is to recognize, as Bloch wrote (citing Brecht), that “Something’s Missing,” and then do something about it.73 Aesthetics are imbued with a powerful capacity to envision and foster change. As conceptual artist Adrian Piper writes, “One reason for making and exhibiting a work is to induce a reaction or change in the viewer. . . . The work is a catalytic agent, in that it promotes a change in another entity (the viewer) without undergoing any permanent change itself. The value of the work may then be measured in terms of the strength of the change, rather than whether the change accords positively or negatively with some aesthetic standard.”74 Herbert Marcuse similarly argued that art achieves its revolutionary power not by virtue of its explicit political content or formal quality, but because of its ability to play with and transmute form, while catalyzing a transformation in the spectator’s consciousness: “The critical function of art, its contribution to the struggle for liberation, resides in the aesthetic form. . . . By virtue of its aesthetic form art is largely autonomous vis à vis the given social relations. In its autonomy art both protests these relations, and at the same time transcends them. Thereby art subverts the dominant consciousness, the ordinary experience.”75 Art’s formal alienation from the “real world” (its translation and abstraction of reality into the aesthetic dimension) opens up the possibility for subverting and sublimating the existing world—like Taylor’s improvisations, which move past the constant (the melody) from which his song is continually breaking free. His song rehearses but also realizes (in aesthetic form) the ceaseless capacity for new possibilities to emerge into the world as it trains the listener in a fundamental revolutionary truth: that which merely is (the norm, the constant, the straight line, the melody) is not the only way things have to be. But Marcuse is careful not to exaggerate art’s emancipatory capacities: “Art is also the promise of liberation . . . the promise is wrested from established reality. It invokes an image of the end of power, the appearances (Schein) of freedom. But only the appearance; clearly, the fulfillment of this promise is not within the domain of art.”76 Instead, like Althusser, Marcuse argues that the fulfillment of this promise ultimately falls to the people who encounter the

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work: “Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world.”77 A performance’s end always carries with it the promise of a new horizon. Take James’s description of the iconic conclusion to Charlie Chaplin’s movies: “And you know his famous endings: after all the trouble, you see him walking off into the distance along the road, into the horizon. He has been in a lot of trouble, he has been defeated, but he is still unconquered, and he is going off. And the next time he turns up as bright as ever. His vision of the good life is undying.”78 Following James, Muñoz argues that performance offers “more than a vision of a future moment; it is also about something new emerging in the actuality of the present, during the scene of performance. The stage, like the shop floor, is a venue for performances that allow the spectator access to queer lifeworlds that exist, importantly and dialectically, within the future and the present.”79 Performance doesn’t just rehearse a different world, it makes it anew, again and again.

New York, New York. August 21, 1967. Simone first recorded “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” in August of 1967. As in Taylor’s version, the song’s introductory passages carry us back to church, but with a much faster tempo. In the place of the accompanying double bass, the pianist lends her voice, offering a lyrical content that does not describe the feeling of freedom so much as it narrates the desire to sense a freedom that remains just beyond her capacity to grasp, know, and share it: I wish I knew how it would feel to be free. I wish I could break all the chains holding me. I wish I could say all the things that I should say. Say ’em loud, say ’em clear, for the whole round world to hear.80

Freedom, for Simone or for Taylor, is not a thing; nor is it an empty, abstract, ahistorical, universal ideal: their music was produced within and as contributions to ongoing struggles for the concrete realization

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of black freedom. Following their lead, throughout this book I think of freedom less as a point of arrival, or as a right that one possesses, then as an ephemeral sense and a practice of becoming that is performed into being by the body within tight and constrained spaces. In a study of improvisatory dance, Danielle Goldman describes performance as a “practice of freedom.”81 To think of freedom as practice and/or performance (as that which is ephemeral, embodied, and flickering in and out of being) is to understand freedom not as something to be had or used, but instead as something to be collectively improvised, produced, and made by and for the undercommons. As James described it, following Hegel, this form of “freedom is creative universality, not utility.”82 We might say that the freedom named in Simone’s song is marked by a subterranean and black communism. The first verse’s wish to break the chains resonate, for example, with Marx and Engels’s famous directive to the world’s proletarian masses: “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.” In these two sentences, which Simone most certainly encountered in her studies in Marxism with Hansberry, Marx and Engels offer a vision of a new world where emancipation emerges through common struggle. But the breaking of chains, as Bloch would say, is only a precondition for a life in freedom, not freedom itself. And a precondition to this precondition is the coming together of a being in common (the united workers of the world) to build a new world capable of sustaining freedom and More Life for everyone. In Marx, this new world liberates the senses as much as it is graspable as sense. For the young Marx, sense plays a critical role in the constitution of communism as much as communism will ultimately achieve the liberation of the senses. In the 1844 Manuscripts he teaches us that sense is the means through which the individual knows or apprehends difference, the other, and the external world: “Each of his [sic] human relations to the world—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving—in short all the organs of his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form, are in their objective orientation or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of that object.”83 Simone, too, was a theorist of the relationship between sense, the senses, and collective emancipation. At the beginning of her version

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of the song, her voice is compressed, and it strains as she reaches for the upper shelf where she’s installed the word “wish.” But in the second verse, she returns to “wish,” this time supporting the lyric with more breath, letting the voice reach out to touch, grab, and brush up against the listener with confidence. At this point, the wish for freedom is described in more detail as a freedom to share (out) a sense of the self with the world: “I wish I could share all the love that’s in my heart/ I wish I could give all I’m longing to give.” Simone’s longing to share, give, and say articulate a precondition for freedom: the capacity to share a sense of the self with the world in a fashion that is, as Karatani Kojin might say, “simultaneously free and mutual.”84 Sharing in order to support and sustain all life is the mode of exchange common to the commons and it is what is common to all forms of communism. That Simone’s wish is always articulated from the point of deprivation locates it within the domain of the incomplete. Sharing through sense is always an experience of incompletion, but here incompletion is not a deficit so much as a condition of possibility. The incompletion of sharing is part of what allows plural-beings to exist in a common relationship, to be with each other, without flattening or obliterating the singularity and difference of each other. As Nancy describes it, “Sharing is always incomplete, or it is beyond completion and incompletion. For a complete sharing implies the disappearance of what is shared.”85 While the totalitarian tendencies of historical communism planned for complete sharing, often at the expense or even disappearance of great numbers of the masses that the party was supposed to liberate and work for, a communism of incommensurability is predicated on relations of incompletion and nonequivalence, expressed by Marx most directly in the Gotha Critique: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”86 To the pianist, the ability to share out the self with others and with the world (“I wish I could share all the love that’s in my heart / Remove all the buzz that keep us apart”) is interrupted by conditions, or a “buzz,” that individuate the singular subject, keeping “us” apart. The undoing of these divisions would produce a new relationship between the listener and her senses but also reorient those senses toward the creation of a new world in which “you’d see and agree that every man should

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be free.” Marx effectively describes the whirling vortex of the capitalist mode of production as “the buzz that keeps us apart.” Capitalism individuates and diminishes each person’s senses (including their sense of others), while reducing the individual subject’s capacity for sense to the sole “sense of having.”87 But as he wrote those words in 1844, he could not or would not imagine that for his black contemporaries, the trade in flesh reduced a slave’s senses to a sense of being had. The ontological and historical priority of black resistance that animates black performance is thus fundamentally rooted in a yearning to emancipate sense, to open sense out into a plurality of alternative possibilities of sense for the black body and for black people across the world. If sense was, as Marx implied, foundational to the definition of the human being, the violent denial, destruction, and negation of the black body’s capacity for sense was one of the master’s primary mechanisms for achieving the dehumanization of black people during (and after) slavery. Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection describes the central role performance played as the masters set about devising and staging scenes of subjection to transmit, reproduce, and reify the dominant racial ideology.88 The masters’ violence was often deployed to negate or control the slave’s capacity for sense, yet the slave’s body went on sensing, even if all she could sense was pain.89 For as James insisted, the slave pushed back by continuing to sense, to feel, and thus to claim an ontological status as a human being: “The difficulty was that though one could trap them like animals, transport them in pens, work them alongside an ass or a horse, and beat both with the same stick, stable them and starve them, they remained, despite their black skins and curly hair, quite invincibly human beings; with the intelligence and resentments of human beings.”90 So whether we are following Simone, James, Du Bois, or Marx, the conclusion that we reach might be the same: The emancipation of all people requires the long deferred freedom of black people, people who labor under the remaining effects of having once been property. The freedom of black people, in turn, requires the liberation of the senses, which itself requires the abolition of private property. Simone’s conclusion, that “you’d see and agree that every man should be free,” resonates with Marx’s suggestion that the transcendence of private property could lead to emancipation and, in particular, the

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emancipation of sense: “The transcendence of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all the human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human.”91 A world where “every man [is] free” would necessarily be a new world, one that would reterritorialize what it means to be “man” or “human.” Indeed, the concept of Man itself might simply wither away in such circumstances, giving way to new and better ways of being a being, and being together, in the world.92

The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division. New York, New York. July 29, 2016. There is one thing that no one can be fully emancipated from. Death, like performance, is a central site for the production of collective being, and in the face of death’s unjust distribution to black and brown queer and trans people, minoritarian performance becomes a means for sustaining life—life that is still living, as well as the lives that we have already lost. Of central concern throughout this book will be the world-making dialectic of queer life and death. Sometimes, minoritarian performance is about freedom. But much of the time it is simply about survival. And we need the latter to get to the former. Even before a performance begins, the world of the audience begins to come together. Voices converge, fall apart; bodies brush up against each other, repel each other, collide back together in new configurations; old friends talk in clusters, and new acquaintances exchange awkward banter; exes avoid eye contact, which is hard in such a small space; there are drinks and there is noise and art in weird places. And then people start to take their seats in folding chairs arranged in rows, stretching from the screen and microphone at the front of the room to the book display at the back. People without seats gather at the perimeter, they line up along the ramp that stretches up the length of the room. Someone takes the mic and an anticipatory air settles in as the audience turns the volume down and the faint parameters of a world flicker into being. The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division is a queer bookstore, exhibition space, and event center located in a compact room at the back of (but autonomous from) New York’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual &

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Transgender Community Center. The Bureau’s representative at the mic explains that the Bureau is part of a government that “doesn’t exist yet.” In the meantime, the Bureau has been itinerant, moving through a host of different spaces since its founding in 2012. The evening’s events celebrate the launch of the seventh issue of Apogee, a literary journal featuring the work of writers of color, queers, feminists, and other workers in the minoritarian subcultural sphere. Apogee is proof that in dark times people are getting together, and they’re making a plan. There is a fundamental relationship between what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call “planning” and the work of minoritarian performance. “Planning,” as they use it, must be distinguished from the forms of central planning enacted by the regimes of historical communism, in which “the plan” was often a means for subordinating the multitudes to dictatorial state authority.93 Against this, Moten and Harney define planning thus: “This ongoing experiment with the informal, carried out by and on the means of social reproduction, as the to come of the forms of life, is what we mean by planning; planning in the undercommons is not an activity, not fishing, or dancing, or teaching, or loving, but the ceaseless experiment with the futurial presence of the forms of life that make such activities possible.”94 The planners are neither a ruling elite, nor a vetted aristocracy. They’re the kids in SNCC listening to Simone and throwing a party. In planning, rather than being ruled by the plan, the planners “are still part of the plan,” and they are planning because the plan is to change the world.95 Both planning and minoritarian performance are the continuum of “ceaseless experiment[ation]” through which minoritarian subjects materialize life-sustaining futurial forms of life that don’t yet exist. Early in the program the playwright moves to the front of the room to read a section from his contribution to the issue, “Notes on Returning to San Francisco Twenty-Five Years Later.”96 Jorge Cortiñas stands behind the microphone holding his text, a few sheets of paper stapled together and creased in the middle. The paper is recycled and printed on the back are pages from a New Yorker article about (then-candidate) Donald Trump’s (lack of) reading habits. He speaks with a steady tone, moving through an enumerated sequence of observations about a return to a city full of ghosts and, even more, full with the people who have built luxury condos on the grounds where the dead lived and died.

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“One.” San Francisco? “It’s changed,” he says. It’s no longer a brown frontier at the edge of the edge. Today, capital is rapidly reterritorializing the city for the financial elite, bringing with it the whiteness that gentrification aggressively imposes upon increasingly imperiled black, brown, and queer urban lifeworlds. “The people you moved to the Mission District to get away from? They live there now.” He pauses for emphasis and then, forceful, precise, sharp: “Two.” Little pause, followed by “It doesn’t matter where you walk; you keep walking past the apartments of dead people.” Three and Four. He wonders at the intermixture of the beauty of the landscape, which is populated by the ghosts of the no longer here. The playwright uses performance to bend time, taking us back to the first wave of the AIDS pandemic, when death was every day, and the “city was full of vacant apartments”: “That battered city suggested you might be left alone and back in 1989 the hope of being left alone was the best your country had to offer you.” Only a few years before, in the 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick, the United States Supreme Court declared itself “quite unwilling” to recognize a “fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy.”97 In effect, queers had no right to be left alone, even and especially when fucking. But the desire to be left alone is not the same thing as the desire to be alone. Fucking doesn’t usually happen alone, nor does one move to a city, even or especially a “battered city,” to be alone, although cities can certainly be lonely. The playwright’s fugitive flight to the Mission might have been to get away from the people he had to get away from so he could have some chance of survival, but it was also to get to the people he would need in order to survive. There, he helped to produce a world as much as this world helped to (re)produce him. As he writes in the penultimate “Note,” which he did not read that night in the Bureau, “When you were young and moved to San Francisco, new friends took you in and made you anew. San Francisco and your friends made you anew.”98 They made each other anew to keep each other alive. And when More Life was no longer an option, they carried each other to death, and beyond it. They had to. The country would rather they die, and when the plague came to take them, the country was happy to let it. Five. Six. “You can’t stop crying.” Seven. When the plague came, they got in formation, got organized, and got to planning. Moten and Harney insist that planning can happen

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in “any kitchen, any back porch, any basement, any hall, any park bench, any improvised party, every night.”99 It used to happen in coffee shops as well: “You and your friends went to coffee shops to hold committee meetings and always found a large table to commandeer. In exchange for, say, an Orangina, you wrote press releases and planned acts of civil disobedience.” Of course, they were already being disobedient. Queerness, blackness, and brownness is itself disobedience, the swerve, the ontological and historical priority of resistance, and a break from the standard measure, the constant, the straight line, or of the major. Eight: “Turns out you had realized fairly quickly that being left alone was not enough.” When we haven’t got anything else, we’ve still got each other and ourselves. And we need each other in order to keep each other alive. Nine. Ten. Twenty-five years later, the coffee shops in San Francisco are no longer the sites of planning, but extensions of the techno-economy. The playwright can’t find a seat. Eleven and then the final note, “Twelve,” with which the playwright concludes the performance: “You can’t remember the names of everyone who died. None of your friends can. You have to ponder old photographs. You ask each other. Remember him? What was his name?” Quiet. A beat. A rumble of applause passes through the Bureau. He pulls the paper to his side and shuffles away from the microphone, before dissolving back into the audience. Remember him? What was his name? The index of the playwright’s question (the missing friend) is an absent referent that you should remember but you can’t because it’s hard to keep track of all of the people who aren’t here anymore. You can’t remember the names of everyone who died, which is terrifying, because you worry that in forgetting them (or parts of them), you might be killing them a second time over. In the unread fourteenth note, Cortiñas writes that “memory is not any one person’s task: memory is something we build together. The reason for this is because memory is a burden.”100 Performance, as it was on that night, can be a means of sharing this burden and of keeping the dead alive. And we need More Life.101 If minoritarian performance serves the will to More Life, it does so out of necessity. Death stalks people of color. Just a few years before his performance that night in the Bureau, the playwright lost José Muñoz,

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who was one of his closest friends. In a 2014 essay on that death, and on the significance of each and every queer brown death, Cortiñas wrote the following: The dominant social order has always been hostile to or cavalier about brown queer lives. It’s not just the marginalization brown queer lives are subjected to or the way brown queers are always fodder for someone else’s metaphor; it’s the way brown queer lives are actively shortened. The aim is to erase brown queer lives, diminish them, gentrify them out of the neighborhood, deport them, profit from them, pave them over, and be done with them. I want to invite us to resist this praxis and to guard closely against finding ourselves in service of its decimating logics. I would suggest, given the myriad ways the present social order exploits brown queer lives, that until we have radically reorganized the present we might begin by suspecting that every brown queer death is premature. Such a posture might generate new insights into the enormous challenges brown queers face when building (many times from scratch) the resources and systems we need to learn and practice mutual care.102

Death, for queers and trans people of color, is a constant threat, an always-unfolding material reality produced by and through system. “Resisting the decimation of brown queer lives,” Cortiñas writes, might require an understanding of “death not as an abstraction but as socially constituted and distributed unjustly.”103 In a section of the “Notes” not performed in the Bureau, the playwright offers a ledger of the forms of destruction distributed toward minoritarian subjects: Trouble seems to stalk the lives of your friends like bruises erupting years after the blows were delivered. You ready yourself to hear which of your friends seroconverted (six of them), were homeless for a while (three of them), struggle with addiction (five of them), had a recent hospital stay (one of them), were assaulted on the street (three of them), were evicted (six of them), or lost their tenured teaching job (one of them). Be prepared to revisit the stories of former activists who died from overdosing (two), who died from the strain of detoxing (one), or died after they stopped taking their medication (one). Be prepared to

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hear about the mutual friend who has become a hoarder (one), never leaves his apartment (another one), or is depressed (five).104

These quantitative abstractions add up. They are the kinds of burdens that can’t be borne alone. They have to be shared out, lest we, too, get pinned to the earth beneath their weight. Under such conditions, the commons produced by and in minoritarian performance is, in Muñoz’s words, a response to “the necessity for communal practices that speak to the current genocidal crises affecting black and queer communities globally.”105 Surely we have to read the playwright’s performance as addressing and offering qualitative and even quantitative evidence of the unjust death and destruction distributed to queer and trans people of color. But this narrative is tangled up with, and indeed inextricable from, a story about survival. “You doubt you will be able to keep this up,” he writes about the constant barrage of bad news, “but it turns out you are, in fact, able to, you’ve had practice. . . . Mostly it makes you wonder at how it is that any of you are still here.”106 Stillness, like the woman standing still in Baton Rouge, can be a form of durational performance, persistence, and even resistance. To remain alive, still, in the face of annihilation can itself be a revolutionary act. This is to think of still life as, in the words of C. Riley Snorton, the “even so and as yet of living.”107 Black life, like brown queer life, is often lived in close proximity to death, and as Snorton reminds us, black trans life often bears an even closer proximity to death. But if death stalks black and trans life, the fact of still being alive is rich with a world-changing, revolutionary power: “In the future imperfect . . . [the activist formation of] Black (Trans) Lives Matter provides a conceptual framework to understand the ongoing struggle in the present by way of a future (aspiration) in which black lives will have mattered to everyone. For some, including and following Fanon, that future effectively means the end of the world. And perhaps black and trans lives mattering in this way would end the world but worlds end all the time. . . . Even so and as yet, there is still life.”108 Black or brown, queer and trans, our differences are many. What we share is a need for More Life, and structural conditions that often make this impossible. When minoritarian performance functions as the “rehearsal for the example,” it can be decent “practice” for what comes next. And when

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you get to what comes next, it can be the means of keeping alive and carrying on to the next thing after that. Performance, as the playwright mobilized it that night in the Bureau, is a way of lingering, sustaining, and staying. Of remaining here still. Still here. Still. Still.

The Mission 1989 Virginia 1619 Fukushima 2011 London/Edo 1857 Baton Rouge 2016 RCA Studios 1967 Washington Square Village 2013 Vietnam 1975 Rossmore 1990 Rather than providing a survey of minoritarian performance, the following chapters are organized around artists whose work exemplifies some aspect of this labor. Chapter 1 turns to the live performances of Nina Simone to offer a deeper engagement with this book’s key terms: “work,” “performance,” “freedom,” and “survival.” The second chapter turns to the work of four artists (Danh Vō, Ryan Rivera, Martin Wong, and Audre Lorde), offering a meditation on the relationship between reproductive labor and performance’s mode of reproduction, while considering the ways women of color and their queer children mobilize performance to sustain queer of color life, both before and after death. The third chapter is a study of “The Marxism of Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” which argues that Gonzalez-Torres mobilized performance to effect a system of redistribution that could foster the collective sharing (out) and survival of black and brown queer life.109 Dancer Eiko’s A Body in a Station occupies the fourth chapter’s exploration of a choreography of emancipation, while theorizing the entanglements that constitute and are constituted by minoritarian performance. The book closes with a study of performance artist and conceptual photographer Tseng Kwong Chi to ask how we survive the party’s fall and the end of the performance.110 Inspired by these artists, and as Gonzalez-Torres insisted, “I’m still proposing the radical idea of trying to make this a better place for everyone.”111 While this objective may seem naïve, minoritarian performance has always traded in the miraculous capacity to make the impossible possible. Describing Simone’s performance practice, Malik Gaines argues that “the singer and pianist’s expressive approach [consists of] performing agency where it’s a structural impossibility.”112 You catch a sense of this

Figure I.3. Utagawa Hiroshige, Fukagawa Susaki and Jumantsubo, No. 107, from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, 5th month of 1857. 14 3/16 x 9 ¼ in. Brooklyn Museum. Gift of Anna Ferris, 30.1478.107. Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 30.1478.107. (Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum.)

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in her version of “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.” Near the conclusion of the song, she takes flight, describing the “wish to be like a bird in the sky.” Her voice climbs the octave up the word “wish” into the upper register, soaring as she surveys the world beneath: How sweet it would be if I found I could fly. I’d soar to the sun and look down at the sea. Then I’d sing cause I’d know how it feels to be free.”

This lyric recalls Hiroshige Utagawa’s 1857 ukiyo-e (woodblock print), Fukagawa Susaki and Jumantsubo. Produced the same year Marx began the Grundrisse, the print features a black eagle in flight, swooping into the top third of the frame as snow falls behind it. Beneath the eagle is a snow-covered landscape and undulating waves surrounding a fish trap that floats at the center of a sea shaded with deep gradations of blue. The viewer’s perspective is fixed at a height nearly parallel to the descending eagle, offering a vision of the ground that is akin to what a flying bird would see. Well before humans took to the skies, Hiroshige’s print mobilized the aesthetic encounter to give his audiences (mostly middle- and working-class Edo [Tokyo] spectators) the sense of flying.113 Through performance, Simone, too, mobilizes the aesthetic to do the impossible, soaring up to the sun and looking down to the sea. As she shares out that sense with her listener, she manifests the work of minoritarian performance.

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Nina Simone and the Work of Minoritarian Performance

Side A: Emancipation I made you a mix tape, but in truth, it’s not a mix tape. In the twenty-first century, we have its less affectively charged, immaterial digital descendent: the playlist. It’s hard to describe the pleasures that came with a tape that a friend had carefully DJ’d and dubbed for you. Analogue technology could make big feelings happen. Truthfully, the mixtape is an anachronistic metaphor because this is a Nina Simone mixtape and at the time Simone produced these recordings, the mixtape didn’t exist. I’ll tell you why I’m playing out this anachronism later, but for now let’s just pretend that’s what this is. Slip on your headphones and slip back to April 7, 1968—three days after the assassination of Dr. King. This is the beginning of our Nina Simone mixtape. I made it for you. I hope that it can provide some kind of something. Something. Whatever it is that you need tonight.

Track 1. “Sunday in Savannah” Press the play button and listen to the applause of the audience competing with her hands as they stretch across the keyboard with a displaceable attentiveness to the sound. Her piano doesn’t so much accompany her monologue as it meanders purposefully beside and beneath it. We’re listening to a cut from the extended version of Simone’s 1968 album, ’Nuff Said!, consisting mainly of recordings from a performance at the Westbury Music Fair in Jericho, New York, on April 7, 1968. Introducing the song “Sunday in Savannah,” she speaks in earnest, not singing; but in earnest she is singing in the way that she speaks: We’re glad to see you. And happily surprised that so many of you. We really didn’t expect anybody tonight. And you know whyyyyyy. Everybody knows everything. Everything is everything. Everything is everything. 37

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You know why. But we’re glad that you’ve come. To see us. And hope that we can provide. Some kind of something. For you. This evening. This particular evening. This Sunday evening. At this particular time in 1968. We hope that we can give you something. Something. Whatever it is that you need tonight.1

It’s hard to translate into language what it does to you to listen to her voice as she sings her way across these spoken passages. How the voice glides up the word “why” and meanders in the spaces between “everyone” and “everything.” Her cadence and the repetitive recitations of “something,” “everything,” “why,” and “particular” are like a steady drumbeat drawing the ear toward something and somewhere, without giving away the what or where. All these pauses and breaks, giving the listener a second to breathe, think, and ask the following: What kind of something? On this particular evening in 1968 something was missing. Some kind of something. And not just something: someone. Three days earlier, on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel, a shot rang out and a great hope died. She doesn’t have to say it because it’s already been said. Everybody knows everything. Everything is everything. But still, she insists on the fragmenting singularity and incommensurable particularity of the moment (the parts of the performance that will disappear and withdraw from presence). “This evening,” she says, before looping back to emphasize the singularity of “this particular evening,” before looping back to draw us into “this Sunday evening,” before looping back to “this particular time in 1968.” And then the offer of a gift she can’t but fail to give: “We hope that we can give you something.” What thing? Something that is everything and so nothing and can’t be named but has to be named because we need it. Something for which we could use the word “freedom,” but knowing that every word imaginable is insufficient to name that thing (whatever it is), let’s settle instead on the capaciousness of something. Some kind of something. Whatever it is that you need tonight. Simone was many things: a brilliant recording artist, a classically trained pianist, a formal iconoclast, an A-list celebrity, an intellectual, a freedom fighter, a black woman, a mother, and a theorist and practitioner of black freedom. She was a performer, which is to say that performance was her job. She toured extensively, recorded prolifically, and this labor took a toll. But as Daphne Brooks, Shana Redmond, Salamishah

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Tillet, Amber Musser, and Malik Gaines have all variously taught us, Simone put performance to work to effect an insurgent black feminist disorganization and reorganization of the limits and conditions cast upon her body in order to conjure into being something else, something new.2 It was through performance that Simone appropriated the limited materials proffered by a limiting world to improvise new lines of flight, carrying her listener toward something like black freedom. Some kind of something. Whatever it is that you need tonight.

Track 2. “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” Press play and listen as she improvises on the theme of freedom. An interviewer asks her, “What’s free to you?” She responds by telling a story about the work of minoritarian performance. Freedom, she explains, is a sense. It’s a feeling that exceeds and refuses containment by language: “It’s just a feeling. It’s just a feeling. It’s like how do you tell somebody how it feels to be in love? How are you going to tell anybody who has not been in love how it feels to be in love? You cannot do it to save your life. You can describe things, but you can’t tell them. But you know it when it happens. That’s what I mean by free. I’ve had a couple of times on stage when I really felt free. And that’s something else. That’s really something else.”3 It’s just a feeling because “words don’t go there,” to quote Fred Moten quoting Charles Lloyd: Language is inadequate to the task of communicating that which is incommunicable.4 You can describe things, but you can’t tell them. Freedom as just a feeling is fugitive from linguistic capture. In this way, it’s not unlike sound. “On the one hand,” writes Moten, “‘words don’t go there’ marks the inadequacy of verbal representation of sound while at the same time signaling the excessive, out-from the-outside motion and force with which sound infuses the verbal. Words don’t go there; words go past there.”5 Freedom as just a feeling, like sound, infuses the body with an out-from the-outside motion and force that resonates across, through, and beyond the body. Simone’s music bodies forth the going past and going beyond the “what should be” of freedom’s horizon. Freedom, for Simone, is “really something else.” A few years earlier, in 1964, when Ernst Bloch and Theodore Adorno gave a joint account of the material, revolutionary, and world-making capacities of utopian

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aesthetics, they too stumbled upon some kind of something. As Bloch remarked to his friend “Teddy,” while imagining the horizon of communist society: Thus, now, if a world were to emerge that is hindered for apparent reasons, but that is entirely possible, one could say, it is astonishing that it is not—if such a world, in which hunger and immediate wants were eliminated, entirely in contrast to death, if this world would finally just “be allowed to breathe” and were set free, there would not only be platitudes that would come out at the end and gray prose and a complete lack of prospects and perspectives in regard to existence here and over there, but there would also be freedom from earning instead of freedom to earn, and this would provide some space for such richly prospective doubt, and the decisive incentive toward utopia that is the meaning of Brecht’s short sentence, “Something’s missing.” This sentence, which is in Mahoganny, is one of the most profound sentences that Brecht ever wrote, and it is in two words. What is this “something”?6

For Bloch, utopian longing—wishing, hoping, and dreaming of and for something better than this—is that which allows us to survive and sustain in the face of negation and deprivation. To know that “something’s missing” is to feel the absence of something, an encounter with lack that “activates and galvanizes us towards the goal of a better life.”7 Something missing could also be the lack of action and galvanization. In the wake of the murder of four little girls in the 16th Street Church, Dr. King gave a sermon: “They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. So they have something to say to us in their death.”8 Lauren Berlant associates King’s “something” with the “something” that surfaces in two novels animated by the 16th Street Church’s bombing: Toni Morrison’s 1977 Song of Solomon and Michelle Cliff ’s 1989 No Telephone for Heaven. In the latter, “something” appears in the text thus: “Today there is a story which should have caused the sun to eclipse the earth—something . . . something in the heavens should have objected.”9 In these three cases, Berlant argues, Something . . . stands for the irreducible violent sublimity of American racism in 1963, 1977, 1987, and beyond; something, a word that holds the

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place for a demand to produce something like a language . . . which in this instance might attest to the random encounter of systemic racial violence with individuals who happen to be somewhere, at some time, doing, then suddenly not doing, some “thing.” Always crucially after the fact, these texts take the “fact” back so they create a decolonized history of the “something” that didn’t happen, the thing to be specified, endlessly, just beyond what seems possible.10

Something “stands in” for that which doesn’t have, but needs, a language. Something is an attempt to name “the irreducible violent sublimity of American racism,” the fact that something “didn’t happen,” as well as that something which is “just beyond what seems possible.” If it’s anything, freedom is something that’s just beyond what seems possible. Something, for Berlant’s King, holds the future of justice. It is mobilized “on behalf of creating at least a prosthetic future where a real scene of justice might take the place held, here, by the word something.”11 So while Simone’s description of freedom illuminates the disruptively and productively excessive, uncontainable capacity of black performance to go past there (“just beyond what seems possible”), it also points to the impossibility of freedom within the conditions secured by the present. Freedom is something that’s missing, so freedom is just a feeling. For Bloch, the “feeling of freedom” is a kind of placebo—an appearance of freedom that arises to cover over the fact that freedom isn’t here. Within liberal capitalism’s regime of individual (and individuating) civil rights, the “feeling of freedom” masquerades as something like freedom while being tautologically “guaranteed by freedom.”12 For this reason, Bloch derisively observes that, “freedom as feeling does not appear in utopia but in natural law.”13 Freedom, within liberalism and capitalist modernity, is a legal fiction (in terms of rights), rather than an ontological condition; it’s just a feeling. That’s all it is. What we need is freedom of a material kind. This notion of freedom is not the freedom secured by the bourgeois revolutions (the bondage of the “freedom to earn”) but some other kind of freedom that comes with “freedom from earning.” Press the button and loop back around to the top, but layer the tracks so that it’s Bloch and Simone singing in syncopated polyphony. When we have nothing else, the longing for the feeling of freedom might be the only thing we’ve got to keep us alive. Especially for those with nothing

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but their labor to sell. So, it’s not our fault that we don’t know how to imagine freedom, that it comes to us as just a feeling. Black people know that freedom is mostly because we know what it is not to have it. We might thus differentiate between the experience of freedom as a sense (Simone’s “just a feeling”) and the Blochian “feeling of freedom” promised by the liberal order. That is, we might consider how Simone mobilizes black performance in order to produce a means to sustain people “with courage and hope, not by looking away from the real, but, on the contrary, by looking into its progress, into its horizon” and by letting the sense of freedom radiate out from her performing body to sustain her listener in turn.14 Between the space of the imaginary and the corporeal (which is the realm of performance), the feeling of freedom glimmers as both concrete reality (as experienced in the body) and anticipatory dawning. When Simone posits freedom as “just a feeling,” she is describing something that is not yet freedom. This something is akin to the way Bloch describes utopia, “it is not yet in the sense of a possibility; that it could be there if we could only do something for it.”15 Whatever freedom is, and whatever something we could do for it, our experience of it has been paradoxical. We have never been free, but we have been being free.

Track 3. “Little Girl Blue” Press the play button and listen as the right hand introduces us to the familiar melody of “Good King Wenceslas” before folding the song into a Rodgers and Hart tune prepared in the style of Bach. As the right hand climbs the keyboard, the left hand journeys in the opposite direction toward a lower register that keeps us tethered to the earth. The voice hovers between the two as she enters with a lyric that gives a name to herself: “unhappy little girl blue.” Developed during her earliest performances in a small, forgettable bar in Atlantic City, “Little Girl Blue” became a central part of Simone’s repertoire during the mid to late 1950s and it lent its name to her debut album, released by Bethlehem records in 1959.16 Years later, when she performed the song at Montreux in 1976, she amended the lyrics slightly to refer to herself as “liberated little girl blue.”17 How, one wonders, does one get from “unhappy” to “liberated”? Minoritarian subjects know about the need for freedom, but we also

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know that emancipation is not the same thing as freedom. Emancipation is the ritual act of becoming free, but what comes after is usually not freedom, but its disappointment. There is a resonance between minoritarian performance, which stages the becoming of freedom’s becoming, and what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a “minor literature.” “How many people,” they ask, “today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve?”18 Twenty years before they wrote this, Simone was already offering a lesson in becoming minoritarian and the deterritorializing capacities of minoritarian performance. This was perhaps most evident in her appropriation of Bach. To get a sense of what this sounds like, press play and wander back into Simone’s first performances on the stage of an Atlantic City bar. Little Girl Blue was recorded with little production support in a single, grueling fourteen-hour recording session at New York’s independent Beltone studio.19 As Brooks describes the album, “It remains the first (public) record(ing) of Nina Simone’s counterintuitive brilliance as an artist who defied the center, ran circles in the margins, and wove together ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ forms to create an off-beat repertoire that was what some might argue, ‘emo’ before ‘emo,’ Afropunk, folk eclectic, jazz torch song magic.”20 In order to grasp the significance of Little Girl Blue as an event, it’s important to understand how the new sounds contained on that album emerged from the domain of performance as work and Simone’s mobilization of performance to effect the unworking of work.21 But one needs to clarify and distinguish the work of minoritarian performance from performance as a form of labor (or a job) for minoritarian subjects. At the beginning of her career, Simone’s work as a popular musician was merely employment: a means to raise money for a formal education in classical music. “I didn’t even think of it as music,” she would later reflect; “it was a job.”22 José Muñoz insisted on a minoritarian performance theory that would be “disarming of a celebratory precritical aura that shrouds some performative research. It is important to keep in mind that not all performances are liberatory or transformative.”23 Capitalism transforms every conceivable area of human activity into a source

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for the extraction of value.24 Performance, as labor, is no exception. Within a racialized division of labor, people of color in the United States are commonly denied access to sustainable and fulfilling employment. Performance has long been one of the few means for getting dinner on the table, but it’s not always an emancipatory one. “Minoritarian subjects do not always dance because they are happy,” wrote Muñoz; “sometimes they dance because their feet are being shot at.”25 Performance is work. Hard work. And when performance is reduced to work for the minoritarian subject, it comes with what he describes as a “mandate to ‘perform’ for the amusement of a dominant power block. . . . Performance, from the positionality of the minoritarian subject, is sometimes nothing short of forced labor.”26 When freedom is reduced to the “freedom to earn,” masquerading as the “feeling of freedom,” our access to freedom is blocked by work, which in turn blocks our capacity to imagine other ways of being beyond the “freedom to earn.” “The problem with work,” Kathi Weeks tells us, “is not just that it monopolizes so much time and energy, but that it also dominates the social and political imaginaries.”27 So when performance becomes work, it too becomes a blockage to freedom. This is why it’s critical to issue a distinction between performance as work for the minoritarian subject and the work of minoritarian performance (which is the emancipatory unworking of work). If Simone’s repeated insistence that performance was her job teaches us anything, it is that not all performances by women of color, queers of color, or trans people of color will be minoritarian performance. To this extent, Simone’s own (auto)biography is expressive of the antagonism between the emancipatory work of minoritarian performance and performance as a form of minoritarian labor. Press play and let Little Girl Blue tell you a story about what it might have been like to watch twenty-year-old Simone performing in a dark, smoky bar. Presaging Phillip Auslander’s observation that early forms of mediated performance often strove to reproduce the experience of live performance, Simone once described Little Girl Blue as a reproduction of one of her famed sets at the Atlantic City bar where she was discovered: “When you listen to that Bethlehem album you’re hearing the songs played as they were at the Midtown Bar.”28 In addition to the title track, the lineup included her surprise hit cover of Gershwin’s “I Loves

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You, Porgy,” the show tune “Love Me or Leave Me” (featuring an inversion of Bach’s Inventions, discussed below), and a version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” mashed up with Beethoven’s “Midnight Sonata.” The sound of Little Girl Blue was the cumulative effect of a life spent working as a performer. From an early age, Eunice Kathleen Waymon, as she was known back then, pursued her mother’s dream to “become the first black American concert pianist.”29 Raised in a musically inclined family, she began playing piano in the home. She cultivated her prodigious talent as she learned the fundamentals of improvisation and audience engagement in the black church, playing piano at services and revivals to support her mother’s Methodist ministry.30 “Gospel music was mostly improvisation within a fixed framework,” she wrote. It “taught me about improvisation, how to shape music in response to an audience and then how to shape the mood of the audience in response to my music.”31 Framing improvisation as a formal aesthetic register, technique, and collaborative practice, Simone reminds us that improvisation is something that a performer learns (whether being taught by another and/or by oneself). In doing so, she avoids the reduction of improvisation to an intrinsic, inherent, or biologically determined trait of black artists. If improvisation is often associated with black people, this proximity might be best apprehended as evidence of the creative genius by which black people adapt to conditions of annihilation, learning how to improvise freedom and sustain life from within the fixed coordinates determined by white supremacy. Even as a child, while accompanying her mother’s ministry, performance was her job. As her talent gained recognition from both white and black community members in the small, segregated town of Tyron, North Carolina, a group of women (led by Simone’s mother) worked together to raise funds for formal training with a local piano teacher named Muriel Mazzanovich. Throughout her childhood, Eunice performed concerts of Bach and Rachmaninoff to segregated audiences in order to raise money for her education—first with Mazzanovich and later at the Allen School (a private boarding academy in Asheville, North Carolina). Following graduation, Mazzanovich helped her to secure a scholarship for study at the Julliard Academy in New York in order to prepare her to audition for Philadelphia’s famed Curtis Institute

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of Music. Waymon was ultimately denied admission to Curtis and you know why. The rejection gutted her and played a critical role in the development of her race consciousness.32 After being rejected from Curtis, she had to get a job to support her training as well as her family so she started to work as an accompanist and vocal coach. Working as a private tutor gave Eunice access to the vast trove of popular music that would eventually comprise her repertoire. She would dig through boxes of sheet music looking for obscure show tunes to teach her students, committing the songs to memory “rather than us[ing] sheet music [because] it saved time.”33 Soon she got hip to the fact that you could make even more money playing music in local bars than teaching private lessons, and she landed a seasonal gig in Atlantic City at a place called the Midtown Bar. All the while, she continued her training, enrolling as a private student with Vladimir Sokhaloff (an instructor at Curtis). It was at the Midtown that Nina Simone was born. She assumed the stage name to hide from her minister mother the fact that she was playing “the Devil’s Music” for a living. While her gigs may have helped with material survival, in the beginning they were hardly emancipatory. Above everything else, it was waged labor: “I performed from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m., with a break of fifteen minutes every hour. For that I got ninety dollars a week plus tips.”34 The Midtown was a dark, narrow room dominated by a long bar and featuring a small stage with a piano set up at the back. In spite of the inauspicious surroundings, Nina treated her Midtown sets as if she were playing in a premiere concert hall. When she was a child, Mazzanovich trained her in the corporeal habitus of a classical musician, issuing lessons in “how to bow after a recital, how to walk gracefully on and off the stage, and how to sit up straight at the piano and look elegant and composed while I was being introduced.”35 She incorporated all the seriousness of her training into her first performances in the bar, embodying these rituals, and even donning a chiffon evening gown while sipping on a glass of milk as she played popular songs for an often empty room of drunk regulars.36 Simone made a distinction between the emancipatory work of performance, which she felt when performing classical music, and the alienating drudgery of her job in the Midtown Bar. The performance of

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classical music was a means through which she could touch upon the promise of autonomy and a life in freedom in happiness. To the young Eunice Waymon, the music of Bach, Czerny, and Liszt “was real music, and in it I found a happiness I didn’t have to share with anyone.”37 But while she initially regarded popular songs with relative disdain, rather than succumb to the drudgery of her 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift, she began to play with her material, transforming her work at the Midtown into a condition of possibility. She started by imagining the performance as occurring elsewhere, “closing my eyes and pretending I was somewhere like Carnegie Hall or the Metropolitan Opera.”38 But soon enough she mobilized her performances to improvise a way out of the stultifying and disappointing prospects of her job as a bar musician: “So the only way I could stand playing in the Midtown was to make my set as close to classical music as possible without getting fired. . . . The strange thing was that when I started to do it, to bring the two halves together, I found a pleasure in it almost as deep as the pleasure I got from classical music.”39 If Simone’s performances at the Midtown began as the alienating experience of work, it was through performance that Simone was able to emancipate herself (if only momentarily) from the depressing drudgery of work: “I sat down, closed my eyes and drifted away on the music.”40 Through performance Simone was able carve out a zone of autonomy, pleasure, and happiness in which she could begin a song in the Midtown Bar and close her eyes to travel to a concert hall in her imagination where she could be some kind of free. To use the language of autonomy is to highlight a resonance between what Simone was doing on the stage at the Midtown and what Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi describe as the “central theme of ” the Italian workerist Marxism known as “Autonomia”: “the struggle against work, the refusal of work.”41 Inspired by the young Marx, the Autonomists have long understood the regime of work to be an alienating domain of coercion and unfreedom. The collective refusal of work (paradigmatically exemplified in the general strike) is one of the few means laborers have to force capital to alter its course of development.42 But the refusal of work also promises a path out of capitalism, as Lotringer and Marazzi suggest: “Only when the worker’s labor is reduced to the

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minimum is it possible to go beyond, in the literal sense, the capitalist mode of production.”43 Young people began to gather nightly for her sets, as she improvised a new aesthetic born from a unique fusion of popular standards, show tunes, gospel, hymns, and classical composition: “I knew hundreds of popular songs and dozens of classical pieces, so what I did was combine them. I arrived prepared with classical pieces, hymns and gospel songs and improvised on those, occasionally slipping in a part from a popular tune.”44 While performing popular music, she eschewed the shortform traditional pop standard to transform each piece into an extended theme and variation that could last for the entirety of the set: “Each song—which isn’t the right way to describe what I was playing—lasted anywhere between thirty and ninety minutes.”45 Improvising beyond the limits of genre, Nina Simone was producing and setting free a new sound: “I was creating something new, something that came out of me.”46 As she performed, she was offering her audience members a lesson in how it would feel to be free.

Track 4. “Love Me or Leave Me” Performance and pedagogy are conjunctive terms. Pedagogy often relies on the embodied rituals and protocols of performance and theatricality as much as performance has a pedagogical function. Think, for example, of Joseph Roach’s enigmatic definition of performance as “the process of trying out various candidates in different situations—the doomed search for originals by continuously auditioning stand-ins.”47 This definition productively and curiously makes no immediate reference to the expected vocabulary of presentation, theatricality, and aesthetics, focusing instead on embodied processes of exploration, transfer, and surrogacy—all elements that are critical to the pedagogical scene. Diana Taylor expands on this line of thought to consider the epistemological valences of performance. For Taylor, performance functions as a means for the transmission of knowledge and affect vis-à-vis embodied practices defined as the repertoire. “The repertoire requires presence,” writes Taylor. “People participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by ‘being there,’ being a part of the transmission.”48 What, we

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could ask, is pedagogy but a performance of the transmission of knowledge? But if Taylor insists on presence, her position on this point is ameliorated by her simultaneous insistence that the act of transmission can reconstitute (often in a new form) that which has seemingly disappeared or is no longer present: “Multiple forms of embodied acts are always present, though in a constant state of againness. They reconstitute themselves, transmitting communal memories, histories, and values from one group/generation to the next.”49 In other words, performance is pedagogical: “Embodied and performed acts generate, record, and transmit knowledge.”50 If minoritarian performance is a means for realizing the freedom drive, the pedagogy of minoritarian performance is the transmission and sharing out of the feeling of freedom. Press play and jump forward to a master class in minoritarian performance on Little Girl Blue’s “Love Me or Leave Me.” We can only imagine what a twenty- to thirty-minute version of “Love Me or Leave Me” might have sounded like in the Midtown Bar, but the central passage in both of Simone’s major recordings of the song (and a live performance on TV in 1959) offers us a hint. As the first verse comes to a conclusion, Simone’s dominant hand stretches right to play around in a higher register, jumping across the keys in syncopated rhythm until a melody coheres into a riff evocative of Bach’s Inventions. The Inventions were designed as teaching tools, and Simone’s routine employment of Bach and his Inventions is perhaps indicative of the fact that, next to gospel and Mazzanovich, Simone credited Bach with being one of her most influential teachers. Of all the composers Simone played (and played with), Bach was her favorite. As she studied him, she came to study with him. In the pedagogical scene, Bach was conjured from the past, into the presence of Simone’s performing present. To say that Bach was one of her teachers is also to say that it was through Bach’s compositions that her teacher (Mazzanovich) taught. Early in their training together, Mazzanovich abandoned the primers designed for introductory music students to introduce her prodigious pupil to Bach.51 As strict as Mazzanovich may have been, her pedagogy was no mere imparting of knowledge into a willing, passive receptacle, or what Jacques Rancière describes as teaching born from “the explicative order.”52 Instead, Simone describes her training as an experience

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of opening up to an encounter with the pleasures of performance: “It was hard work, but Miz Mazzy had shown me how good it could be to spend time in the company of genius, so the more familiar I became with Mozart and Beethoven, Czerny and Liszt, and my beloved Bach, the more I enjoyed it. As I grew older I had a sense that my future was as much in my own hands as in those of my teachers—that they pointed me in various musical directions, but I was doing the exploring on my own.”53 This gesture to “my teachers” could just as well be a reference to Mazzanovich and Sokhaloff as to Mozart, Beethoven, Czerny, Liszt, or her “beloved Bach.” In Mazzanovich’s home, Bach was more than just a composer for Nina to master. He was a presence in the room with Eunice and Mazzanovich. “You must do it this way Eunice,” Mazzanovich would say. “Bach would like it this way, do it again!”54 Conjured by Eunice’s teacher, Bach entered the room, speaking and teaching through Mazzanovich as much as Mazzanovich spoke and taught through Bach’s composition. Simone conceived of the pedagogical scene less as a hierarchy of transferred knowledge than as an intersubjective encounter in which the construction of her future as artist “was as much in my own hands as in those of my teachers.” Having asked us to look at the hands of her teachers, however, she offers a clue as to what she needed from them, asking us to look at what their hands were doing: “They pointed me in various musical directions.” This image of the teacher’s pointing hand is resonant with a passage in Eve Sedgwick’s essay on pedagogy, where she describes the problematic of conceiving of the Buddha’s record of pedagogy (his “many sutras”) as akin to a finger pointing to the moon.55 The problem, she observes, is that the student often becomes attached to the sutras (the finger) and mistakes the lesson for being the moon itself. For Sedgwick, “The implication of the finger/moon image is that pointing may invite less misunderstanding than speech, but that even its nonlinguistic concreteness cannot shield it from the slippery problems that surround reference.”56 The student attached to the pointing finger risks mistaking the means (pointing) for an end (the moon), getting lost in the swamp of slippery reference while failing to grasp that the moon is not an end that is reached through the proper execution of the teacher’s presumed (but to a degree unknowable and unknowing) intentions. This is why it is critical that Simone follows the pointing fingers

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of her teachers not to a presumed destination but, instead, to a realm of improvisation, exploration, and pure means. And it’s for this reason that her incorporation of Bach’s Inventions into “Love Me or Leave Me” must be understood as a master class in getting free. To get a sense of what I’m trying to say, press the play button to go forward but you’re really going back before 1968 in Jericho before 1959 at the Beltone studios before 1941 in Muriel Mazzanovich’s house. Go all the way back to a classroom in Leipzig, Germany, in 1723 and listen to the sounds of Bach as he teaches through performance, playing the Inventions for a student in order to teach the student how to play. Inventions were short pedagogical exercises composed and used by Bach (and his German contemporaries) to teach students how to play (and compose for) the new and increasingly popular clavier (or harpsichord).57 By Bach’s own account, the Inventions were meant to teach students “a plain way . . . to play neatly . . . to play correctly . . . [and] not only to acquire good ideas, but also to work them out themselves, and, finally to acquire a cantabile [a smooth, flowing, singing] style of playing.”58 The intended result was not the domination of the pupil, however, but instead the emancipation of students’ creative and exploratory potential, achieved by allowing them to gain “a strong predilection for and foretaste of composition.”59 The Inventions are thus marked by a productive tension between the imposition of a newly established order and the disorder of the creative, emancipatory freedom drive of compositional practice. I like to think that Nina turned to Bach because she sensed Bach’s minoritarian tendencies. Caught in the break between order and freedom, Bach is both major and minor. As Bloch describes him, “Bach speaks out of the lyrically attained self of hoping, albeit intricatelyconsummately, and as the eternal corrective to all beyond within the dramatic form.”60 Bach shuttles frenetically between the emancipatory hopes and drives of minoritarian becoming and the normative correctives issued and enforced by the majoritarian order. He is undoubtedly major in that he’s Bach, but one also senses his minority insofar as (in spite of or perhaps because of his attempt to produce a well-organized world in which every note falls into its absolutely perfect place) there is an exhaustively imaginative, great going beyond to Bach that cannot be contained.

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Music theorist Vasili Byros (following David Ledbetter) teaches us that “Bach’s general predisposition—and possibly his pedagogical prescription [in the Inventions]—was for ‘assimilating styles’ and ‘mixing styles into new composites.’ ”61 The result of this sonic hybridity led Bach’s friend and contemporary Johann Adolf Sheibe to complain of the “disorder” of his compositions: “Everything is so chaotically mixed together that one cannot find a dominant style or a proper expression.”62 Against Sheibe’s condemnation of Bach’s disorganizing effects, I am suggesting that it is the refusal to reproduce “a dominant style or a proper expression” that made Bach into Simone’s unlikely professor in the art of minoritarian performance. Describing the experience of performing Bach, Simone mobilized the seemingly chaotic metaphor of a “great storm,” emphasizing the creative capacities of his disordering and reorganization of sound: “When you play Bach’s music you have to understand that he’s a mathematician and all the notes you play add up to something—they make sense. They always add up to climaxes, like ocean waves getting bigger and bigger until after a while when so many waves have gathered you have a great storm. Each note you play is connected to the next note, and every note has to be executed perfectly or the whole effect is lost.”63 Simone assimilated Bach into her repertoire, mixing the classical with the popular to produce a new composite. When listening to Simone’s rendition of “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” during her first performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1959, for example, one encounters an extraordinary piano-guitar duet with lifelong collaborator Al Schackman. The variations, extension, and development of the melodies that comprise their duet “add up” to produce (or make) something new; they make sense. And at the precise moment the notes produced by her piano and his guitar “add up” to something, they also exceed it. Crashing up against the limits of containment “like ocean waves getting bigger and bigger,” the ordering of sound gathers into the simultaneously creative and destructive force of the tempest of freedom’s becoming in the song’s explosive conclusion. That this development occurs through an improvisation in the style of the Inventions is of critical importance. Simone is teaching us something in the style of her teacher.

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In 1873 Philipp Spitta published a Kant-inflected study of Bach’s life and work.64 In the section focusing on the Inventions, Spitta teaches us about Bach as a teacher. “Of all the great German composers,” he reflected, “Bach is the only one round whom are grouped any great number of disciples—men, too, who do not owe their chief glory to their masters.”65 By Spitta’s account, Bach developed the Inventions to teach techniques that would transcend the harpsichord’s mechanical and “soulless tone.”66 He affected the “intrinsic animation [of the clavier] by means of polyphony and rich harmonic treatment, of a steady and thoroughly progressive melodic development; and . . . of increased rapidity of action.”67 On the one hand, the Inventions disciplined the pupil’s body so that it could “cleanly” and “neatly” perform these feats. But on the other hand, they affected the emancipation of the body from itself, disorganizing, dehabituating, and deterritorializing the extremities in order to free the player’s body up to new possible uses and the invention of Bach’s new sound.68 To an extent, Bach’s Inventions aim for the unworking of the body, rendering inoperative both the body and its expressive functions. Inoperativity can be thought of as a practice of deactivating a thing or a body as much as it can be a process that brings about the cessation and abolishment of work in and for the thing or body. Nancy describes inoperativity as the “unworking of work,” but it is Giorgio Agamben who thinks the concept in relationship to the realm of performance.69 Agamben insists that inoperativity is pure means, or a means without end, most commonly activated through play. As pure means, play “emancipates” and “liberates” habituated behavior, but may also emancipate subjects from the relations of subjection and domination that are produced through behavioral routines.70 In the realm of human activity, performance becomes a way of playing with the body and rendering it inoperative: “Consider the dancer as he or she undoes and disorganizes the economy of corporeal movements to then rediscover them, at once intact and transfigured, in the choreography.”71 In performance the body’s corporeal activity is placed on display while its movement and gestures are liberated from their traditional uses, ends, and modes of signification in order to “dispose [the body] toward a new use, one that does not abolish the old use but persists in it and exhibits it.”72

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Spitta notes that Bach would often teach his students through performance, “urging them on to higher aims with all the earnestness of a teacher, by performing the examples he had set them.”73 Then, he images the scene: To release the note, the tips of the fingers were not so much lifted as withdrawn; this was necessary to give equality to the playing, because the passing of one of the middle fingers over the little finger or the thumb could only be effected by drawing back the latter; and it contributed to the cantabile [singing style] effect, as well as to clearness in executing rapid passages on the clavichord. The result of all this was that Bach played with a scarcely perceptible movement of his hands; his fingers hardly seemed to touch the keys, and yet everything came out with perfect clearness, and a pearly roundness and purity. His body, too, remained perfectly quiescent, even during the most difficult pedal passages on the organ or harpsichord; his pedal technique was smooth and unforced as his fingering.74

We learn many things from this passage. First, we learn that (with unforced fingering) Bach had the potential to be pretty good in bed. Sex, like performance, is the realm of corporeal inoperativity and Bach’s (and Simone’s) climactic compositional structure mimics the cumulative force of orgasmic climax. But we also see how, like good sex, the Inventions opened up the performer’s body to a new use and the creation of a new sound. And, in the end, we learn that, rather than resulting in the complete emancipation of the player’s body, Bach’s pedagogy tames and contains it in perfect quiescence. As Bach performs, sound emerges from a motionless player “with perfect clearness” from fingers that “hardly seemed to touch the keys [and the] scarcely perceptible movement of his hands.” At once emancipated from its previous habits, the player’s body is freshly dominated by the order imposed by the technical demands of the composition. It was as if, by mastering the technical demands required of playing “neatly” and “correctly,” the body of Bach’s student had to be contained as the sound was cleaved from the disruptive messiness of the flesh. If we could say that the soul was finally infused into the soulless clavier, this was achieved only by alienating it from the body of the performer in the process.

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Both the proletariat and the black performer know that there’s an inherent danger to corporeal alienation and the disciplining of the flesh: the making of the body “perfectly quiescent.” Simone’s play on and intervention in work like Bach’s Inventions would broker no such comportment. Willfully refusing the order demanded by his pedagogy, she exceeded it and journeyed into the great beyond that it simultaneously promised and foreclosed. But this is not failure, or if it is, it is the kind of queer failure that opens up new ways of being in the world.75 “Love Me or Leave Me” is exemplary of what I mean when I talk about the emancipatory pedagogy of minoritarian performance. Appropriating the Inventions for the song, Simone realizes their emancipatory will, their intention to disorganize the body. But she also refuses their command to be neat and orderly and instead follows them through to the creative space to which Bach was drawn, but could not fully free himself up to get to. Performing the song on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1959, her fingers move across the keys “executing rapid passages,” but with a heavy and at times kinetic force that draws the spectator’s attention back to her body, centering and emphasizing the fact that it is a black woman who is producing this ingenious sound. Toward the conclusion of this passage, the wandering figurations crash into and explode against each other, abandoning the “neat” and “clean” sound desired by Bach. Now press fast forward and jump to 1966, when Simone re-recorded the song for Phillips Records and included it on the album Let It All Out.76 Here, Simone is finally capable of emancipating the Inventions from Bach’s call to order in order to explore the emancipatory terrain of the “attained self of hoping” that Bloch located in Bach. Start the track and listen as about fifty seconds into the recording, the voice withdraws to give the keys center stage. Simone launches into a standard improvisational jazz solo. But soon, as if the fingers couldn’t be contained by the demands of genre, the right hand erupts into rapid, baroque embellishments. At times, these incursions appear to have the “clean” precision demanded by Bach, but at others the notes willfully and forcefully crash together, issuing miniature disruptions that take the sound in a new direction. As you listen, she is sucked back into the swinging impulses of a mediocre show tune, which she animates with a life-giving, disruptive

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blackness. Then notice as the baroque returns with greater confidence. The right hand begins to wander through the upper keys and after a while the left hand moves through a series of broken chords: arpeggios moving below and beneath the melody. At first the left cedes dominance to and supports the right, developing into a subtle counterpoint. But then an expansion and melodic development as the minor hand goes off exploring on its own, introducing an unapologetic harmonic alternative as the two hands produce a polyphonic sphere composed of a unity of sonic difference. A great explosion of sound erupts from the keyboard and Simone’s hands crash down across the keys and each other, moving through and between polyphony and cacophony, reaching out and beyond the limits imposed by Bach to point toward some kind of something else. Minoritarian performance is sometimes an act of maroon banditry. It takes what it needs from the major and disorganizes/reorganizes it so that we can improvise new means without end. By putting the major in concert with the minor, minoritarian performance disorganizes the major, rendering it inoperative. It emancipates the minor from the major and opens up new, previously impossible possibilities within it. “The activity that results from this,” Agamben writes, “thus becomes a pure means, that is, a praxis that, while firmly maintaining its nature as a means, is emancipated from its relationship to an end; it has joyously forgotten its goal and can now show itself as such, as a means without end.”77 When Simone initially took to the stage at the Midtown, “I had no idea of the shape of music I would play.”78 What surged forth from the piano “came out with Bach’s technique, but they were my songs, and I wrote new ones every night.”79 By smuggling Bach into songs like “Love Me or Leave Me,” Simone smuggled that which is minoritarian out of Bach. Through this disidentificatory performance, she emancipated Bach from Bach, bringing blackness to Bach to reveal the blackness of Bach: his expansive imagination and improvisatory freedom drive. She must have sensed a resonance between this latter element of Bach’s pedagogy and the lessons taught by her very first musical teacher (the Southern black church) from which she learned the art of “improvisation within a fixed framework.” Simone liberated Bach’s minor key from its majoritarian tendencies, rendering his disciplinary technique inoperative, and opening it up to her

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expansive new sound. In a sense, this was the perfection of Bach’s desire for the student to learn “a strong predilection for and foretaste of composition.” What happened on the stage of the Midtown Bar was an example of a student following and moving past the teacher’s pointing finger as she explored the creative and emancipatory realm of pure means just beyond it. It is in this sense that pedagogy puts itself in the service of the emancipatory will, because the teacher is always, to some degree, teaching the student how to emancipate herself from the state of tutelage as she moves into the great, exploratory beyond that lies past the teacher’s pointing finger.80 To an extent, a teacher teaches because she knows that one day she won’t be able to stand beside her pupil and point the way. Sometimes this is because the student surpasses the teacher. Mazzanovich, for example, knew that Eunice would one day go beyond the limits of what she could teach her and helped her student to continue her studies at the Allen School and, later, Julliard. But there is also the fact that no teacher can live forever. In an essay about the loss of her teacher, Muñoz, Vazquez writes: “Our teachers leave behind care instructions for any and all kinds of arrivals and departures, and they have everything to do with the penultimate, the acquisition of gender, and the pedagogical.”81 As Muñoz himself would note in an essay on pedagogy and minoritarian knowledge production, the scene of pedagogy is always an embodied exchange, a sharing out that occurs on an avenue of arrivals and departures. Describing the familiar resemblance between pedagogy and the psychoanalytic scene of transference, Muñoz suggested that “the production of knowledge and, more specifically, the production of the desire for knowledge, is a two-way street.”82 On the terrain of this street (which Roach describes as a “vortex of [performance] behavior”) the distinction between teacher and student can dissolve.83 The student becomes a teacher, the teacher becomes a pupil, and when the teacher is gone, the teacher is sustained in the student’s performing body. Vazquez’s essay is organized around Barbara Johnson’s account of receiving the news that her teacher, Paul de Man, had died. In a different essay, Johnson described the student’s venturing beyond the limits of the teacher as a central implication of de Man’s pedagogy: “His pedagogy was a pedagogy of self-difference and self-resistance within a traditional understanding of canonical texts and questions. It is up to us to open the subversiveness of his teaching further—without losing the materialist

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conception of language that remains de Man’s truly radical contribution.”84 So there is, on the one hand, the imperative to develop and “open up the subversiveness of [the teacher’s] teaching,” while on the other hand a need to preserve (or at least not to lose) the core content of the lesson, while still venturing beyond its limits. Even when the student is emancipated from the guidance of her teacher, the teacher never quite leaves the student. For both Bach and Mazzanovich, emancipatory pedagogy was realized through the protocols of performance, which has the capacity to reanimate, reactivate, and sustain the traces and glimmers of a previous encounter with a longlost teacher (one that—like Eunice’s Bach—the student may never have met).85 In fact, Simone regularly credited Mazzanovich’s pedagogy and maintained a close relationship with her teacher throughout her adult life. When she took to the stage of Carnegie Hall in 1964 in order to change the world with “Mississippi Goddamn,” Mazzanovich was there in the audience both to celebrate and learn from her student. To go beyond or even in some cases to issue an emancipatory break with one’s teachers is never really to leave them behind. Bach and Mazzanovich followed Simone throughout her life and even as she persisted in the hard work of emancipating Bach’s minor from his major, this effort was still a way of continuing to learn from, with, and alongside him. Stuart Hall describes this valence of the pedagogical process in his reading of Marx’s introduction to the Grundrisse. There, he notes that Marx was a student of Hegel and classical political economists as much as he was the locus of their disorganization: “He never ceased to learn from Ricardo, even when in the throes of dismantling him. He never ceased to take his bearings from classical Political Economy, even when he knew it could not finally think outside its bourgeois skin.”86 To this end, Marx’s famous act of disorganizing, dismantling, and effecting self-emancipation from Hegel was not the neat break described by Althusser.87 Rather, as Hall contends, Marx continued to think with and learn from his teacher: “As far as the 1857 Introduction is concerned, time and again, Hegel is decisively abandoned and overthrown, almost at the very points where Marx is clearly learning—or re-learning—something from his dialectical method.”88 In a similar key, it was through her interventions in Bach’s Inventions that Simone became an exemplar of the emancipatory pedagogy of

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minoritarian performance. She taught her audiences about the capacity for opening up and going beyond the majoritarian ordering of the world by improvising new possibilities and even new worlds into being through performance. Certainly, Simone was schooling her audiences: training them in how to show respect for her brilliance, to recognize her genius and her technical skill. To know just a fragment of the multitudes a black woman can be: an artist, a classical musician, intellectual, genius, revolutionary, mother, and so much more. But she was also offering lessons to those who were willing to become her students. The audiences that flocked to Simone’s performances at the Midtown bar were largely comprised of young people, “students working in Atlantic City.”89 She trained the gathering crowds in proper audience comportment, and she began to differentiate between the general members of the audience and those whom she affectionately referred to as her “students”: “My attitude to performing was that of a classically trained musician: when you play you give all your concentration to the music because it deserves total respect, and an audience should sit still and be quiet. That’s how I played at the Midtown and my students understood it.”90 Becoming Simone’s student meant entering into the emancipatory pedagogy of minoritarian performance, learning how to improvise freedom from within constrained spaces, and working with the material provided by the major in order to unleash the world-making storm of minoritarian becoming. And for some it meant learning new ways to survive. [End of Side A. Turn the tape over.]

Figure 1.1. Nina Simone performing with Sam Waymon in London for the Sound of Soul television special, September 14, 1968. Video still from Nina Simone: Live in ’65 & ’68 (Reelin’ in the Years Productions, 2008.)

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Side B: Survival Back in the day, this is when you’d flip the tape over. The playlist has destroyed the serious business that was picking exactly the right song to conclude the A-side. It had to be good, so good your anticipated listener wanted more. You’d imagine her moving to the tape deck to start the B-side. You could reset the tone, start over in some of the places you got it wrong, and keep it going strong with the parts that were working. But in the era of the playlist, it’s one seamless progression through homogenous time. So, consider this your break. Go, get a snack. And when you come back, pretend like you did the work to flip the tape over and press play. Act like you could lift up the case and see, in familiar handwriting, scribbled in the right column, the name of our next song: “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life.”

Track 1. “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life” Simone once described the present as a “crucial time in our lives when everything is so desperate and everything is a matter of survival.”91 When everything is so desperate, minoritarian performance can be the matter of survival. Push the button to go forward, which takes you back to September 14, 1968, a few months after the concert at Jericho. Nina is in London, sitting at the piano, playing a little bit with the keys while taping a British TV special, Sound of Soul.92 This concert featured a number of the tracks she performed five months earlier in Jericho, including the band’s tribute to Dr. King, “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead),” her insurrectionary collaboration with Langston Hughes, “Backlash Blues,” and a cover of the songs “Ain’t Got No” and “I Got Life” from the Broadway musical Hair. Nina often talked about performance as labor. It was a job and not always a job she enjoyed, though it was one she excelled at. I can’t shake the suspicion that this gig (playing for all these bored white kids in London) was “just a job” for Simone. By the mid-1960s, she was an international celebrity, and though she found great moments of freedom and happiness in performance, performance remained work for her, and exhaustingly hard work at that. As Simone shifted from local, to national, and then international fame, she assumed a grueling schedule.

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“We toured eight months of the year and recorded while we were off the road,” she recalled. “I was tired every night.”93 Her endless retinue of work led her to describe herself as “a performing machine.”94 At the same time, throughout the mid-1960s she was increasingly radicalized by her commitment to the struggle for black liberation such that performance once more became a means for affecting the unworking of work. Simone’s praxis lay at the intersection of black life and living death. It was through performance, writes Shana Redmond, that “Simone constructed a music-politic that would both eulogize the dead and mobilize the living.”95 Circulating through the vibrant undercommons of both the Village and Harlem, she fell in with the queer arts wing of the black radical tradition, developing friendships with Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka (known then as LeRoi Jones).96 As Malik Gaines observes of Simone’s circle (and the first three in particular): “Simone’s political tutors, like herself, brought to their works a sense of race complicated by gender difference, underscoring a sense that race and gender are always critically entangled. All three of these authors expressed what could now be called queer affinities.”97 These queer affinities inaugurated a new era of planning and black study.98 Her studies began with Hansberry, who “started off my political education” and engaged Simone in conversations about “Marx, Lenin and revolution—real girls’ talk. . . . Through [Lorraine] I started thinking about myself as a black person in a country run by white people and a woman in a world run by men.”99 Simone’s commitment to liberation struggles for black people, and black women, also inaugurated a new era in her performance practice, which was, according to Redmond, “composed of a dense theory-praxis inspired by those around her,” and Hansberry in particular.100 Her labor in the concert hall increasingly shifted from being work to exemplifying the work of minoritarian performance: “My music was dedicated to a purpose more important than classical music’s pursuit of excellence; it was dedicated to the fight for freedom and the historical destiny of my people.”101 By the time she got to London in late 1968, however, the party was falling apart. Her friends were leaving her, or dead, and Simone was exhausted after a wave of losses and setbacks for the movement. Before Hansberry died in 1965, Nina came to her hospital bedside to perform “In the Evening by the Moonlight” for her friend. The song is a

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disidentificatory, Bach-infused appropriation of a minstrel tune, which Simone transformed into a stormy narrative about black creativity in the face of work’s exhausting claim to the body. She performed the song during her triumphant first appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960 and would perform it again at Lorraine’s funeral. Langston died in 1967, and in April of ’68, Martin was murdered. The tour of Europe a few months later was no labor of love. She endured it only to promote ’Nuff Said! in the wake of its surprise commercial success.102 Simone’s London set is exemplary of the structure that she designed to capture her audiences, a prodigious dramaturgy that echoes the orgasmic gathering storm she located in the compositional strategies of Bach: “To cast a spell over an audience I would start with a song to create a certain mood which I carried into the next song and then on through into the third, until I created a certain climax of feeling and then they would be hypnotized.”103 As Gaines writes, reflecting on this passage, “Simone’s own magical description barely conceals a science of performance grounded in intention and achieved through a specific process. Simone combines the language of bewitchment with a rational technique.”104 In keeping with this approach, the London set opened with a simmering, angry, but slowed down rendition of “Go to Hell” (from her 1967 album Silk & Soul). From this, she transitioned into “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life,” building the song into a sonic storm that swirls around and dissipates across the word “freedom.” Freedom and its negation, freedom and its relationship to the body, are two central themes in her sublime, insurrectionary, dialectical appropriation of two songs from Hair.105 As she did with so much of the material she assimilated from majoritarian sources, Simone took the song back to black. As it was written for the theatrical stage, “Ain’t Got No” is a song without resolution. It quickly builds and abruptly ends. Unlike the rapid, aggressive tone of the Broadway incarnation of “Ain’t Got No,” or even the driving (if not, at moments, upbeat) pace of the studio recording of the song included on ’Nuff Said!, the Simone of September ’68 slowed the pace down, extending and doubling the verses (from two to four), stretching it out it with a funereal tempo and a dirgelike tone. The structure of each phrase is exactly the same. The singer sings “ain’t got no” and then she tells us what she hasn’t got. As it was originally

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written, the song conjoins each lyric into a pair or a triplet so that the first phrase is offered at the top of the octave before the second drops down to the bottom. The effect is a shuttling back and forth that lends itself well to the mounting intensity of Simone’s Bach-like gathering storm. As the energy builds across a single verse, however, the intensity quickly falls away at the conclusion of each stanza, where the listener is gently returned to the place that she began. In the first verse, Simone hews relatively close to the original lyrics, but if you listen closely you notice that she replaces the original “scarf ” with “skirt,” “gloves” with “sweater,” “bed” with “perfume,” and “cot” with “love.” She is drawing our attention to her body and, in particular, her body’s gender. In the second verse, too, Simone issues a revision of the original list, which originally included “mother,” “culture,” “friends,” “schooling,” “shine,” “underwear,” “soap,” “A train,” and “mind.” While she holds to “mother” and “culture,” she jettisons the rest of the original lyrics to tell a story of familial disruption, as she has no father, brother, children, aunts, uncle, and, ultimately, mind. Missing from the London set is another thing Simone doesn’t have, which she would include in other performances of the song: “Ain’t got no name.” “My country needs me,” Hortense Spillers once famously declared, “and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.”106 Simone was the invention of a history that won’t stop hurting and of the mutually implicated forces of capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy, which became the thematic core of song’s like “Four Women,” “Pirate Jenny,” and “Mississippi Goddamn.” “Within their efforts to tell the stories of the African descended,” Redmond observes of Simone and Hansberry, “both women also materialize the systems that made the world in which they lived.”107 But long before Simone and Hansberry’s friendship would change the shape of the struggle for black freedom, the historical forces of racial capitalism transformed black bodies and black women, in particular, into commodities circulating on the market. The slave trade was not, as Marx would have it, a vestige of a previous mode of production.108 As Cedric Robinson describes it, “For more than 300 years slave labor persisted beyond the beginnings of modern capitalism. . . . From whatever vantage point one chooses, the relationship between slave labor, the slave trade, and the weaving of the early

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capitalist economies is apparent. . . . Historically slavery was a critical foundation for capitalism.”109 So when Marx would claim in 1857 that the circulation of capital “can be compared to the circulation of blood,” what he should have meant to say was that the circulation of capital was (and remains) the circulation of blood.110 For not only was an extraordinary amount of the value that was thrown into economic circulation during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries extracted from black labor (both waged and enslaved), but great sums of value were also produced through the trade in black flesh as commodity. Resonating with and in response to Simone’s resonance, Spillers travels back to the moment of capture to describe the slave trade’s alchemical conversion of African people into commodities as the “field of captives . . . is divided among the spoilers [and] no heed is paid to relations, as fathers are separated from sons, husbands from wives, brothers from sisters and brothers, mothers from children—male and female.”111 Black people become recognizable within modern capitalism primarily as commensurable, fungible quantities measurable as exchange value. Fungibile things, though easier to trade on a market, are also a lot easier to discard and devalue, and in slavery, says Saidiya Hartman, “The figurative capacities of blackness and the fungibility of the commodity are directly linked.”112 Under slavery, the black body is reduced to a state of stateless unbeing in which she is palpable (and valuable) as living property. To achieve this, the masters undertook (following Spillers) “the destruction of the African name, of kin, of linguistic, and ritual connections.”113 Denied fundamental claims to being a being, and circulating across the Black Atlantic as commodities, black people in the Middle Passage transformed from somebody to nobody and nothing but a no-named thing.114 What I do not want to do is claim that Simone is the same as the enslaved woman. What I mean to suggest, instead, is that the recursive temporality of performance (in which the performing body serves as a conduit for trans-temporal reanimation) makes visible the resonance of history as it continues to continue to reverberate through and across Simone’s performing body. Following Hartman’s theorization of the “Time of Slavery,” we might say that it is not that Simone’s performing body is equivalent with or even represents the enslaved body of a woman in the Middle Passage, but rather that the bodies of these two

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women (which remain spatially and historically incommensurate from each other) share something and resonate with each other through her performance. Performance makes visible the claim of history to the body in the present—the way history resonates across the body and won’t let it go. “Ain’t Got No” stages and confirms Simone’s historically overdetermined relationship to that African woman made body reduced to flesh made exchange value made commodity made possession made thing. This historical fact is what allows Spillers to ask whether “this phenomenon of marking and branding actually ‘transfers’ from one generation to another, finding its various symbolic substitutions in an efficacy of meaning that repeat the initiating moments”?115 This is why it’s so critical that Simone will not let us forget that her state of fleshy dispossession is a gendered state of dispossession: the inheritance of slavery’s ungendering of black women. The process through which a black woman’s flesh was made body made commodity made quantity made possession was also a process of ungendering the black woman in captivity (at least in terms of normative, white, bourgeois ideals of gender). “Under these conditions,” writes Spillers, “one is neither female, nor male as both subjects are taken into account as quantities.”116 As Sojourner Truth, Angela Davis, and Deborah Gray White all demonstrate, black women were subjected to conditions of hard labor that their “enlightened” Western masters could not imagine as the province of properly gendered femininity, thus reifying and reproducing the ungendering of the black female body in chains.117 Davis is instructive on this point: “Since women, no less than men were viewed as profitable labor-units, they might as well have been genderless as far as the slaveholders were concerned.”118 The relations of ownership disrupted the most basic relationship of kinship for mother and child and indeed made it impossible for her to claim the status of mother, let alone woman.119 And as Amber Musser argues, the particular form of “fleshiness” experienced by black women in slavery was “marked by a particular conglomeration of sexuality, violence, and objectification. This is flesh that has been caught in the perpetual wound of slavery, so that agency cannot even be illusory: it has already been foreclosed.”120 During the antebellum, the gender difference of black female slaves was registered primarily as a measure of exchange value enriched by her

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use value as a commodity that could biologically (re)produce other commodities. As Jennifer Morgan argues, “Slaveowners appropriated [black women’s] reproductive lives by claiming children as property, by rewriting centuries-old European laws of descent, and by defining a biologically driven perpetual racial slavery through the real and imaginary reproductive potential of women whose ‘blackness’ was produced by and produced their enslavability.”121 So if, as Sylvia Federici has shown, reproductive labor (including domestic labor) has been gendered as women’s work, black women in slavery were not allotted even the prison of domesticity designated for their white counterparts.122 When not being appropriated by the masters, the reproductive labor black women performed in the slave quarters was fragmented by the constant and violent reorganization and dissolution of the domestic sphere as their families were sold away from them, tortured, debased, and murdered in front of them, or worse. But in spite of slavery’s negation, black women in slavery improvised within a fixed framework to survive and perform into being new conditions of possibility for their kin, their people, and themselves. This is why it would be difficult for me to read Simone’s performance of “Ain’t Got No” as a song about bare life. Agamben describes “bare life” as a juridico-ontological condition in which the subject is absolutely stripped, dehumanized, and exposed to the elements.123 The sick joke, of course, is that the slaves had nothing and still gave everything to hold on to life and make freedom a possibility, while the masters (and their descendants) traded away their humanity for a cheap profit. While “Ain’t Got No” certainly indexes the inhuman conditions that slaves were forced to endure, and that their descendants are forced to endure, it is also tied to the affirmation of More Life: the one thing Simone’s got. Bare life has its utility as a concept, but it can’t account for the fugitive ways black people perform the emancipatory will from within the conditions of greatest deprivation, and for the material and psychic transformations that such performances can open up. As Alexander Weheliye says, the “theorization of bare life leaves no room for alternative forms of life that elude the law’s violent embrace.”124 Simone’s performance in London is a paradigmatic example of the materialization of such “alternative forms of life.” Indeed, in the face of dispossession she insists that the one thing she does have is life and her body, which combine in performance to function as the ground of black feminist insurgency.

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In the transition from “Ain’t Got No” to “I Got Life,” Simone asks two questions: “What have I got?” and “Why am I alive anyway?” We’ll get to the second question later, but for now, listen to the first. She asks it twice, the second time expanding on and clarifying the question, “What have I got? Nobody can take away?” She answers, drawing the listener’s attention to the particularity of the parts that make flesh into a body: her “arms,” “hands,” “fingers,” “lips”, “feet,” “toes,” “liver,” and “blood.” But if she is listing the flesh that comprises a body, she emphasizes at every stage that that this is her body and that it is a body of a black woman (“I’ve got my sex”) in particular. “In this instance,” writes Musser, “Simone reterritorializes her flesh. She takes back her body from a landscape of lack and flatness.”125 Claiming her body as her own, she reclaims and stands “in the flesh,” as Spillers might say, as a black woman who is proper unto no one but herself. Redmond isolates a resonance between “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life” and Hansberry’s To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, insofar as both offer a “formulation of life throughout [that is] not simply a request for breath, [but] a dense articulation and practice that holds within it the dichotomy of despair and hope that fascinated both Simone and Hansberry.”126 In the song, she performs an inversion and refusal of the four-hundredyear-old history through which black women’s bodies have been cast as fleshy commodities, the private property of others, exchange values to be thrown into circulation, and objects for amusement, callous trade, and violent disposal. All the parts of her body are adding up to make sense as Simone sings verses that build like ocean waves getting bigger and bigger until after a while, when so many waves have gathered, the song erupts into a great storm animated by the tempestuous winds of freedom’s becoming. Like tidal waves washing up and spreading across the shore, the band arrives at the song’s conclusion with the having of “life” and “freedom.” In the transition, she opens her mouth to let the sound escape from her throat and she closes her eyes. As the word “life” passes from her lips for the last time, she holds onto to the note, but her eyes remain shut. Performance, although it seems to give the spectator access to the performing body, can be a way of mobilizing surfaces to deflect, protect an interior, or provide cover as the performer carries out a hidden agenda in plain sight. For Rey Chow and Kevin Quashie, ethnic subjects (Chow)

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and black people (Quashie) are commonly hailed as always already resistant, largely becoming recognizable as subjects by way of protestant or resistant acts.127 Though we cannot do without resistance, Quashie insists that resistance alone is “not nuanced enough to characterize the totality of black culture or expression.”128 Resistance can’t account for the full range of expressive yet inexpressible experiences that “fall away” (as Neferti Tadiar might describe it) from power’s grasp.129 “Quiet,” Quashie writes, “is often used interchangeably with silence or stillness, but the notion of quiet . . . is neither motionless nor without end. Quiet, instead, is a metaphor for the full range of one’s inner life—one’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, fears.”130 As Simone’s eyes close, the spectator is shut out for a moment. One can entertain the possibility that in the darkness and in her own quiet way, Simone was running toward autonomy and brushing up against some kind of something. In Women, Race, & Class, Angela Davis teaches us that black women invented Autonomia long before Italian Marxists claimed the name in the 1970s. As does Simone in “Ain’t Got No/I’ve Got Life,” they often did so through performance and primarily through the performance of reproductive labor (commonly described as women’s work). Davis uses the language of performance to describe this work: “Precisely through performing the drudgery which has long been a central expression of the socially conditioned inferiority of women, the Black woman in chains could help to lay the foundation for some degree of autonomy, both for herself and her men.131 She continues: “As they tried desperately and daily to maintain their family lives, enjoying as much autonomy as they could seize, slave men and women manifested the irrepressible talent in humanizing an environment designed to convert them into a herd of subhuman labor units.”132 Performing this drudgery became a means for opening up conditions of autonomy, even pleasure, from within conditions meant to strip slaves of their humanity. Achille Mbembe also notes the significance of performance as a means of refusing the dehumanization of the slave: Treated as if he or she no longer existed except as a mere tool and instrument of production, the slave nevertheless is able to draw almost any objects, instrument, language, or gesture into a performance and then stylize it. Breaking with uprootedness and the pure world of things of

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which he or she is but a fragment, the slave is able to demonstrate the protean capabilities of the human bond through music and the very body that was supposedly possessed by another.133

Through performance, the body reduced to flesh is still capable of opening up a route toward survival and freedom. Improvising within the fixed coordinates otherwise called the rituals of everyday life, minoritarian subjects often employ performance as a means for sustaining life, experiencing autonomy, animating the emancipatory will, and bodying forth aesthetic practices that humanize an environment designed to negate our humanity.134 These creative, life-extending, and life-giving performances transfer across successive generations, sustaining new life in the face of perpetually renewed foreclosure.

Track 2. “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black”: A Mixtape in a Mixtape If I’ve been learning from black feminist theory, it was my mother—a black/Japanese woman who worked as a public school teacher most of her working life—who first taught me a lesson about black women mobilizing performance in the service of emancipation, survival, and More Life. First, she taught me about black women like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman who didn’t run away just to be free, but ran back, again and again, to get other people free, too. And then, in 1984, my mother joined the Sanctuary Movement and performed the mundane rituals of daily life to work for El Salvadoran refugees (other women and their children), in their dangerous, fugitive, undocumented flight across the Mexico-US border. They were intellectuals and dissidents, and the mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, and children of the disappeared. They were part of an exodus of over a million refugees, who received no asylum or material support from the United States, while fleeing the devastation of civil war and the repressive violence of a right-wing government that received plenty of military aid and economic support from the United States.135 I was a toddler and she’d take me with her. We traveled in a small caravan of cars driven by middle-class white women. All except the green Honda Civic commanded by my thirty-something mother, the daughter of a black marine and a Japanese Hiroshima survivor. Before we’d

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leave, Mom would take an hour or two to dub a mixed tape. She’d slip it into the car’s tape deck, and driving south, we’d listen to revolutionary feminist anthems like Chaka Khan’s “Through the Fire,” Joan Baez’s “Las Madres Cansadas,” Miriam Makeba’s “West Wind,” Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” Raffi’s “Baby Beluga” (for me), and Simone’s tribute to Hansberry, “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black.” Mom would sing these songs to me while she was driving and taught me to sing along with her. The caravan would stop in Nogales, Mexico. There, the green Honda Civic would fill up with El Salvadoran refugees, mostly women, whom Mom would dress in our clothing, costuming them in the camouflage of the privileged US bourgeoisie. At the border, the caravan of cars was meant to look like a group of girlfriends returning home from a day trip to Mexico. Mom hoped the border guards would take in the spectrum of brown and black skin and racially ambiguous features in the car and cast us as kin. And as she told the Washington Post in 1985, under the pseudonym Lonnie, “I bring [my son] along mostly for the companionship, but there’s no question he’s a help. With a little kid in the car, somehow it makes it hard to think anything illegal could be going on.”136 These carefully orchestrated performances of black motherhood must have been disarming and effective enough because the border guards always waved the green Honda Civic through to Arizona to the sounds of her mixed tape. In 1987, near the conclusion of my mother’s era of fugitive flights across the border, Spillers came to the following conclusion regarding the paradox of historical forces that shaped the commodification of black female flesh during slavery and that continue to reverberate across black women’s bodies in the present: “In this play of paradox, only the female stands in the flesh, both mother and mother-dispossessed. This problematizing of gender places her, in my view, out of the traditional symbolics of female gender, and it is our task to make a place for this different social subject. In doing so, we are less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness than gaining the insurgent ground as female social subject.”137 To stand in the flesh, in this capacity, is to transform (and perform) the ungendering of black (female) flesh into a condition of possibility, thus opening up new ways of doing gender, being a being, being black, being in the body, and being together. For as Weheliye writes, “To subsist in the force field of the flesh, then, might just be better than not existing at all.”138 Like Simone, my mother

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performed in the flesh to improvise a route toward More Life. In so doing, she was delivered to the ground of black feminist insurgency.

Track 3. “Backlash Blues” Back in London. After “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life,” the next song Simone plays is her 1965 collaboration with Langston Hughes, “Backlash Blues.”139 Performing the song, she once again stands in the flesh as a working black mother (“You raise my taxes, freeze my wages / And send my son to Vietnam”). In it she warns “Mr. Backlash,” a personification of white supremacy, of the coming insurrection if the backlash doesn’t quit. After Hughes died in 1967, Simone added a verse, which she performed in London: I tell you when Langston Hughes, when he died. He told me many times. He said, Nina keep on working ’Til they open up the door now. When you’ve finally made it and the doors are open wide. Make sure you tell ’em exactly where it’s at, So they’ll have no place to hide.140

As she delivers this new passage, her piano punctuates the vocal delivery with sharp, piercing eruptions as the voice drops into the deep contralto tenor that Daphne Brooks identifies as a register of the voice that serves “as a space where black women artists—from Nina to Marian Anderson, from Moms Mabley to Meshell Ndegeocello—revise and convert their hegemonically constructed discourses of ‘suffering’ associated with black womanhood into creative agency.”141 Delivered to the ground of insurgency, in the wake of Langston’s death, she reframes the song as a revolutionary anthem animated by both black rage and grief. As she emphasizes Langston’s death, she highlights her aims to “open up the door” not to gain entry into the institutions productive of a “white backlash,” but to mount an insurgent attack “so they’ll have no place to hide.” But her performance also reminds us of the way black people are forced to live with the dead and how that proximity to constant and mounting death can lead one to question one’s own ability to stay alive.

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Press rewind and take the tape back to a few minutes ago when she was working her way from “Ain’t Got No” to “I Got Life.” Loop back around to the moment when she asked, “What have I got? Why am I alive anyway?” Pause there. I want to linger for a moment and listen to her second question: “Why am I alive anyway?” Jorge Cortiñas calls for us to “radically reorganize the present” not because we just don’t like the way things are, but because the way things are produce and are produced by a disproportionate distribution of death, loss, grief, and violence toward black, brown, femme, queer, and transgender bodies.142 He thus conceives of death “not as an abstraction but as socially constituted and distributed unjustly.”143 So we need to talk about how those conditions not only force us to ask the question, “How am I to stay alive,” but also often push many to ask, “Why am I alive anyway?” We need to talk about black girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. Simone’s question rings in my ear, punctures me, resonating with the “soft strains of death” that cluster around the seven black women at the center of Ntozake Shange’s 1974 choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf.144 I also hear in it the devastating final moment in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, when Sarah, the titular character, completes her suicide: “the LIGHT GOES BLACK and we see her hanging in the room.”145 Brooks first identified the resonance between Simone’s music and Kennedy’s drama, which she defines as “a contralto piece” in the tradition of “Afro-Sonic Feminist Praxis.”146 As she observes, “The very tragic dimensions of Negro-Sarah’s literal fate in the narrative have weighted this play with what some critics read as a kind of grim certitude about the inevitability of black abjection.”147 Brooks listens for and opens up the tones of possibility that resonates across both Simone and Kennedy’s work: When we see the hanging figure of Negro-Sarah as the curtain comes down on Kennedy’s play, we might read the thick, ominous, dark possibilities of this event. We might listen for the sound of troubling style of which Simone sings the fugitive grace note [in “Four Women”], and we might hear the way that Funnyhouse reignites a conversation with the dead, the “gone but not forgotten” selves of Sarah sacrificed here in the name of generating postmodern black womanhood.148

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Shange’s choreopoem is also rich with the contralto tenor of “troubling style” flowing from “Four Women” and Funnyhouse. You catch this in for colored girls near the conclusion of the lady in brown’s opening monologue: sing her song of life she’s been dead so long closed in silence so long she doesn’t know the sound of her own voice her infinite beauty.149

Notice that here, too, the utterance of a “fugitive grace note” becomes a means for generating new possibilities for black womanhood beyond the limits of living death: sing the song of her possibilities sing a righteous gospel let her be born let her be born & handled warmly.150

Through performance, the living not only enter into communion with the dead, they find new routes for giving and sustaining (new) life. As Simone repeatedly performed her elegiac conjuring of Langston’s advice, imparted “before he died” and repeated “many times,” we are reminded that the dead return to us through performance. As Kennedy repeats throughout the play (referring to Sarah’s father), and especially during the sequence that stirs us to grieve Sarah, the dead keep returning: But he is dead. And he keeps returning. Then he is not dead. Then he is not dead. Yet, he is dead, but dead he comes knocking on my door.151

Langston, Lorraine, and Martin were knocking at Nina’s door by the end of the 1960s. This was clear when she introduced her audience to

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“To Be Young, Gifted and Black” at New York’s Philharmonic Hall on October 26, 1969: “Weldon Irving and I got together and composed a tune in memory of her [Hansberry]. And, um, I think that very soon now, maybe four or five weeks, I won’t be able to sing it anymore for each time I do it she comes a little closer and I miss her a little bit more. So, for her, for she is here with us and she approves, ‘To Be Young, Gifted and Black.’ ”152 Our dead ones keep knocking on our door. It takes a toll. But we also conjure the dead in performance. “Through the composition of the song and its performance,” writes Redmond, “Hansberry still lived and was ushered to her rightful place on stage by Simone through her dedication.”153 After the dedication, Simone would again bring the dead back into the room in a passage of the song incorporating friend Miriam Makeba’s South African freedom prayer “West Wind.” By this point, her voice is tired so it breaks across their names: “Hear me West Wind. Hear me Miriam. Hear me Stokely. Hear me Mama. Hear me Daddy. Hear me everybody. Calling on ’em. Lorraine, hear me. Langston hear me. And help me.” As she calls out for her dead friends to help her, I hear an echo of her question during the bridge from “Ain’t Got No” to “I’ve Got Life.” Between “help me” and “why am I alive anyway,” I can’t un-know the fact that Simone struggled directly with the question of suicide. I reference this not to make a spectacle of or reduce her genius to her personal suffering, but because it offers an opportunity to talk about the proximity with which minoritarian subjects often live in relationship to death, and to suicide as a particularly common form of black and brown queer death. Queers of color, women of color, and trans people of color ask and answer this question with all too much regularity. The answer is often marked by a finality that is difficult to absorb for those of us who are left behind, and its articulation should not be disarticulated from the social, material, and economic conditions under which the answer is given. If I think of Simone’s own relationship to suicide as she asks this question, and its breaks me to do so, I am also thinking of the last text that my brilliant and beautiful friend Sam Pedraza sent me on January 6, 2013, two days before his death: “You did not call me yesterday, sir. I hope you’re ok. I’m floundering about myself.” In times like these, when everything is so desperate and everything is a matter of survival, I can’t

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help but linger in the space of “Why am I alive anyway?” a moment longer. If for nothing else than to think seriously about how we are to survive the seemingly unsurvivable, which includes the mounting losses that seem to never end.

Track 4. “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)” The last song Simone performed for the 1968 London broadcast was the band’s tribute to Dr. King, “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead).” Simone’s bassist, Gene Taylor, wrote it in the scant days between King’s assassination and their performance in Jericho. Let’s press the button to fast forward, which is in fact a way of going backward from London, toward that first, grief stricken performance of the song in Jericho. “Why?” gives sound to the political despair produced in response to the majoritarian sphere’s endless delivery of the following message to black people in the United States: You shouldn’t have been here and you shouldn’t be here and we don’t want you to be in the then and there. This form of political depression is the connective tissue that links “why (was he shot dead)?” to “why (am I alive anyway)?” In the afterlife of King’s afterlife, the truth was again laid bare: death stalks people of color. “We want to do a tune,” she said to the audience at the top of the number, “written for today, for this hour, for Dr. Martin Luther King. . . . We had yesterday to learn it and so we’ll see.”154 A painful reminder that in documentation of a performance, “the traces of the thing are not the thing itself ”: The powerful speech we’re listening to was left on the cutting room floor in post-production and edited out of the album that RCA eventually released as ’Nuff Said!. I’ve included her remarks on our mixed tape so we can listen to them together. She sings and after what seemed like the conclusion of the song, she stops to speak, and as she speaks, the soft sound of her voice is fragmented and fragmenting, breaking apart, becoming exposed, and coming undone. Then, as she attempts a transition to the next song, she gets tripped up in the thick, heavy grief of the children of sixty million and more: “Uh, last year, a year ago, maybe more, longer than that now, Lorraine Hansberry left us and she was a dear friend. And she had her favorite song. And then Langston Hughes left us. Coltrane left us. Otis Redding left us. Who can go on? Do you realize how many we have

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lost?” Grief undoes the speaking subject and rearranges her experience of time. “Last year” gives way to “a year ago” gives way to “maybe more” gives way to “longer than that now.” Three years, in fact, since Lorraine died. Now: a chain of names marking the absent places where our dear friends used to be. And then the breakdown. As she continues to speak she gestures to performance, and the realm of the aesthetic, insofar as both help to sustain us: “But we have remaining Monk,” she says as a voice rises up from the audience (or band) to holler “Miles,” which leaps into her throat as she repeats it back into the microphone for everyone to hear. And then another voice shouts, “Nina.” She laughs, and the rest of them applaud. “I love you too,” she says, followed by another laugh. But the grief creeps in again, “And of course, for those that we have left, we’re thankful, but we can’t afford any more losses. Oh my god.” Her voice shatters across this invocation of the absent divine. “Oh no,” she weeps, now coming completely undone, “Oh my god. They’re shooting us down one by one.” Two rising notes on the piano and her tone shifts, bossier and insistent: “Don’t forget that. ’Cause they are.” The voice skips slowly across the next few words in resignation: “Killing us one by one.” Here, one could think of the names of Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. But also, Alton Sterling, Freddie Gray, Rekia Boyd, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, and Michael Brown. And trans people of color like Blake Brockington, Lamia Beard, Papi Edwards, Ty Underwood, Michelle Vash Payne, Taja Dejesus, Ashton O’Hara, Shade Schuler, Amber Monroe, Kandis Capri, Elisha Walker, Tamara Dominguez, Keisha Jenkins, and Zella Ziona. The list goes on. Who can go on? Do you realize how many we have lost? Under conditions like these, survival isn’t merely a drive; it’s an imperative. It is a command to stay close to each other and take care of each other because we need each other in order to stay alive with each other. What we’ve got, when there’s nothing else, not even the feeling of freedom, is our flesh, life, and each other. We can’t afford any more losses. We need More Life. She continues: “Well, all I have to say is that, um.” A pause, to think, and she searches for the words. What more can she say? Words don’t go there. But the voice returns: “Those of us who know how to protect those of us that we love, stand by them and stay close to them.” Now an

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aside: “And I say that if there’d been a couple more a little closer to Dr. King he wouldn’t have got it. You know? Really.” Less an assignation of blame than a moment to imagine a different world in which, as Sedgwick once wrote, the past “could have happened differently from the way it actually did.”155 A past in which our being together and being a little closer to him might have kept him with us for one day longer: “Just a little closer to him,” she muses. “Stay there. Stay there,” before she loops back around to say it again: “We can’t afford any more losses.” One can’t end in death, though death is what ends us. But death is also, as it was on that particular night in Jericho, that which is common to us. Who can go on? We must. And she does go on, for after insisting that “we can’t afford any more losses,” her voice picks up the tune again and carries it to a conclusion that sounds with the force of a million hurricanes. In the afterlife of King’s afterlife, Monk left us. And then Miles left us. And after Miles, Nina, too, left us. And then Sam Pedraza and José Muñoz also left us. I didn’t respond to Sam’s last text fast enough. If I could go back I would have gathered the others who loved him and flown to his side, moved just a little closer to say this to him: Do you realize how many we have lost? We can’t afford any more losses. Stay there. Stay there. We can’t afford any more losses. *** I wish I could have given him something. Some kind of something. Whatever it is that he needed that night.

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Hidden Track. “Let It Be Me” Long pause. You think the tape is over and then a hidden track. If things are going well (and I’m not saying that they’re going well), the hidden track gives you the feeling that this good thing could keep going on forever. This isn’t just a new song but also an opportunity to go back to September 1968 and listen for something that we missed. For the first half of “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life,” Simone sings alone. But as she shifts to the second half of the song, enumerating the parts of her body, another voice joins the fray. At first, we can’t find the source. But then the camera pans back and we see him on an elevated platform to the right of her: Simone’s baby brother, Sam, singing into his microphone and playing the tambourine. They stand in the flesh together. She’s got her brother. He’s got his sister. For the first two verses and the bridge they sing in perfect synchrony, and their voices resonate at the back of each other’s throats. But then listen as they separate and their voices dance through, across, and over each other and on and on. Together, they soar and together they arrive at the word “freedom.” Not triumphantly, but hesitantly, because we have been taught not to trust the ruse of freedom’s promise. As they sing the word “freedom” their voices cling to the sonorant “m” opening out to a vowel, then a surging sigh cast around the exclamation “oh” as they climb into the atmosphere of the up-there and the on-high, toward some kind of something. As biographer Nadine Cohodas writes, “Nina and Sam reveled in their time onstage.”156 You get a sense of this as their voices dance across each other in “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life,” but their lifelong and life-giving duet is probably best documented in a recording of Nina’s and Sam’s performance of “Let It Be Me” in Fort Dix, New Jersey, on November 18, 1971. The concert was organized by Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland for their “Free the Army Tour,” and Simone wanted to play the show “for black GIs just back from the war . . . so that I could play at least once for my own people.”157 Not only is this the last track on our mixed tape, but “Let It Be Me” was also the last song that they performed that night in Fort Dix. Nina introduced the song by introducing Sam, “[This] is my brother and we’re going to leave you with this one.”158 Voices rise up from the

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crowd, begging: “Don’t go now!” But they’ve already started to sing, two voices and a piano, folding into each other. After she completes a verse on her own, she affectionately calls out, “That’s it, Sam,” and his voice takes over where hers leaves off. But she’s right there with him, her piano dancing across and through as his voice soars, like Hiroshige’s eagle, before their voices converge, journeying together toward some kind of something. They are woven tightly into each other’s resonance, and then Nina lets out a playful, surprised, full-bodied laugh, and they draw the song to an end. The sense of freedom that flashes into being as Nina and Sam sing with each other is more than Bloch’s “rehearsal for the example” of a better world.159 There is a felt concreteness to it as it radiates out from Sam’s and Nina’s performing bodies. This is freedom incarnate, this is freedom made flesh in and through performance. It speaks of the epistemological valences of performance: “You know it when it happens.” Performing the feeling of freedom, as Simone so often did, gives a name to the negation and deprivation of freedom, while staging the possibility of this limit’s supersession through the proliferation of More Life. It’s something. It’s really something. It’s some kind of something. Whatever it is that you need tonight. We hope that we can provide.

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sustain The film begins with the title centered in white text against a black background: sustain. Sustain—to exist or be with, endure, suffer, support, bear, lift up, experience, or carry. To live on. We see a woman stooped over. She is swaying back and forth; a veil of dark hair conceals her face and an earring peeks out on one side. There is a percussive drag as she slides a scrubbing brush back and forth against the basin of a bathtub. Her left hand and knees bear the burden of her body’s weight and of her repetitive movements. She wears black underwear and a white bra that contrasts against her exposed light brown skin. The tub is dry. There’s no trace of water or cleaning agents. She doesn’t scrub the tub to clean it. The point is to sustain and endure the labor of the gesture. At the conclusion, the film abruptly fades to black. The woman shows no sign of stopping, however, as if her work will endure indefinitely and in perpetuity. sustain was a collaboration between the artist Ryan Rivera and his mother. Rivera’s small but important body of work includes video art, photography, sculpture, and performance. In the sole existing study of his practice, Sandra Ruiz turns to Rivera to perform a meditation on “Ricanness, brownness, queerness, and racial ontology.”1 Ruiz writes in a groove that echoes and resonates with José Muñoz’s theorization of queerness as horizon, describing brownness as “a projection into that which is not yet here”: “Brownness rests alongside the path of incompletion, in which the present continuous sustains Being.”2 When the brown queer subject persists or sustains in the present continuous, she takes an insurgent orientation toward conditions that routinely deliver women, trans, and queer people of color to the permanent past tense. Ruiz’s reading of Rivera guides us toward the chilling conclusion that being, for brown women and for brown queers, is structured by and constituted through endurance: sustaining, bearing, and enduring in 81

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time (often without end) the interlocking logics/systems/effects of capital, nation, empire, colonization and the technologies of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, and class. As is evidenced in sustain, Rivera’s work is rich with these themes, abstracted into representations of violence, force, mediation, repetition, and duration as they play out across the Puerto Rican body—usually Rivera’s and in this case his mother’s. Through his work, in Ruiz’s words, the spectator encounters a “queer Brown subject that is thrown into the world to endure the bodily residue of historical violence.”3 In 2002 Rivera was included in the biennial of New York’s El Museo del Barrio, where sustain was shown in El Teatro, a vintage theatre attached to El Museo’s Museum Mile campus on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Shortly after, his mother suddenly died. She came down with pneumonia-like symptoms one day and she was simply gone. He never really got to say goodbye. I know this story because at the time Ryan and I shared neighboring cubicles on an upper floor of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a New York HIV/AIDS service organization. Ryan gave me my first job out of college, and in that year at GMHC I thought of him as a kind of mother. He was one of many “mothers” who taught me how to find and make a place in a world where I didn’t think there was one. sustain is a unique piece. In it, both types of mother (queer and biological) crash together as the spectator catches a glimpse of the complicated worlds inhabited and bodied forth by women of color and their queer children. E. Patrick Johnson describes the queer of color mobilization of terms like “mother” and “family” to describe chosen family thus: “By appropriating heteronormative tropes of domesticity, black gay men challenge the notion of the domestic site as only a heterosexual paradigm, constituting a reconfiguration of the very notion of ‘family.’ ”4 Johnson’s own theories of blackness, “quareness,” and black mothering have long shown how the “reconfiguration of the very notion of family” doesn’t require the obliteration of the queer of color’s biological family.5 As José Muñoz writes, while “it is true that not all families of color affirm their queer sons and daughters,” for queers of color “the generalized gay community often feels like a sea of whiteness . . . and thus the imagined ethnic family is often a refuge. It is a space where all those elements of the self that are fetishized, ignored, and rejected in the larger queer world are suddenly revalorized.”6 So while the performance of queer or

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nonbiological kinship can open up “family” for queers and trans people of color (which is a necessity when one’s biological family has failed or disavowed you), it can also remake the notion of kinship such that your biological mothers have a place at the table next to your queer mothers. These overlapping forms of family can be of critical importance: queer and trans of color children need all the help they can get if they are going to survive this world. The same goes for their mothers. Though I could not appreciate this until I was well into adulthood, my mother (like other black and brown mothers of queer children) had the burden of raising a child who is not supposed to exist. Describing a fundamental difference between the conditions faced by white feminist mothers and black feminist mothers, Audre Lorde writes: “Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying.”7 Such fears are steeply compounded for black and brown women with queer and trans children, who are subject to a wide range of annihilating forces, including homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny as well as racism. To an extent, the privileged form of the heterosexual couple is quite inadequate to the task of raising a trans or queer of color child to survive this world. But in spite of this fact, more than a few biomothers have performed considerable feats to overcome this impasse. In the months after his mother died, I listened to Ryan cry on the other side of the thin partition dividing our desks. We spoke about her when he wanted to, but mostly he was quiet. I couldn’t then understand the nature of his loss. One day he described the making of sustain and told me that he focused the camera on his mother’s diamond earrings in order to highlight the “dignity” of her work. Cruelly, the fullness of one’s debt to one’s mother may not be revealed until after her death. But with what language would he have told her how he felt while she was still alive? The camera’s focus on the diamond earing, however complicated this symbol of wealth and consumption is, seems to have been one attempt to put it into some kind of language for her. We have little vocabulary to account for the complex, but no less lifesustaining relationships that many women of color have with their queer and trans children. For women of color, mothering is always already

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complicated, rearranged, negated, and interrupted by the forces of racialization and the racialized and gendered division of labor. Take the famous example of the Moynihan report, where a black mother’s relationship to her child is described as the root of blackness’s inherent social pathology and lack of development. While this is particularly true for black mothers, this logic extends (in differential ways) toward brown, Asian, and indigenous mothers. And it is especially so for the racialized mother whose child turns out to be queer or trans. She is either blamed for making the child like that or blamed for not disavowing the child fast enough when the child is. When viewing sustain, the spectator gets a sense of how hard it must be for a mother to labor under these conditions. Working, always, to sustain herself, but also her children. Never getting a break. A constant drag. We did not always remain as close as we were that year. People drift. But Ryan was a part of my life for many years until an email arrived in 2010 with the news that he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of forty-five. It can be hard for people of color (especially queers, women, and trans people) to sustain life in the United States. It’s awful how you start to steel yourself for the next communication informing you that another one of your friends, teachers, acquaintances, ex-lovers, or family members (biological or otherwise) is gone too soon. It’s likely that Ryan’s brief, but brilliant career as an artist would be forgotten if it were not for the work of a woman of color intellectual who has maintained what she can of his archive, reproducing it by way of her scholarship. Ruiz shared a digital copy of sustain with me. Though the quality isn’t very good (the definition of the original film has wildly degraded), I teach and watch it regularly, both because it is an important piece, but also because it reproduces and reanimates some minute feature of Ryan (and of his mother). It keeps them alive; it sustains them. Performance theory has long grappled with the nature of performance’s mode of reproduction.8 As Rebecca Schneider argues, performance can be “an act of survival, of keeping alive, as passing on (in multiple senses of the phrase ‘to pass’).”9 When we conceptualize performance as that which sustains and reproduces life, we get a sense of what Aliza Shvarts describes as “a submerged connection between the aesthetic and the biological: one that demonstrates how embodied feeling and bodily reproduction condition concepts of representation and deliverance.”10

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By describing this relationship as “submerged,” Shvarts delivers us to a critical question: If performance theory has explored the relationship between performance and reproduction from a range of vantage points and through a host of often economistic metaphors, why—with important exceptions that include Diana Taylor and Shvarts—has it generally avoided the metaphor of maternal reproduction?11 After all, to borrow language from Nicole Loraux, performance seems to “appropriate the function of the mother,” reproducing and sustaining life, even after it has been seemingly extinguished.12 Performance’s mode of reproduction can facilitate the reproduction of imperiled life; it can sustain life. It is unsurprising, then, that queers of color and trans people of color often mobilize performance in the service of survival and More Life.13 In this chapter I explore what we learn when we bring the submerged connection between performance’s mode of reproduction, maternal reproduction, and the reproduction of capital to the surface. How, I ask, does performance’s capacity to sustain and reproduce life open up a path for considering the submerged or elided relationships between women of color and their queer children? The path forward is not straight, and it requires us to begin at the beginning: the mother.

On Emma Chambers Reproductive labor is not marginal to the reproduction of capital; it sustains it. As Sylvia Federici writes, “The reproduction of human beings is the foundation of every economic and political system, and . . . the immense amount of paid and unpaid domestic work done by women in the home is what keeps the world moving.”14 But as sustain reminds us, within racial capitalism reproductive labor is both gendered and racialized. Brutal historic practices of capital accumulation (empire, colonization, slavery) have tied reproductive labor to the bodies of black, brown, Asian, and indigenous women, just as (per Federici) emergent forces of globalization have shifted “a large amount of care-work on the shoulders of immigrant women.”15 We find this in the ongoing commodification of black women’s reproductive labor, or the exportation of Filipina nurses and domestic workers (globally).16 Indeed, in the United States, the legacy of slavery’s complete appropriation of black women’s reproductive labor and the twentieth-century emancipation of white, middle-class

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women from the home gave birth to the industrial professionalization of domestic and care work, which continues to target, exploit, and appropriate black, Asian, indigenous, and Latinx women’s reproductive labor. For women of color, white bourgeois gender norms (including norms attached to mothering) have been denied or disrupted by these histories. The case of the expropriation of black women’s reproductive labor and the historical relegation of black women to domestic service is particularly instructive on this point. In an ethnography of his own grandmother, Johnson describes the way black domestic workers in the south gave up and were denied time with their daughters and sons because they were taking care of other people’s sons and daughters.17 “Except for a few days out of the year (excluding holidays),” he writes, “Mary never had a day off. On some days, after she completed her chores at the Smiths, Mary was able to visit with her own family, who lived across town”18 In order to provide for her family—to be a mother—Mary had to give up nearly all of the time she might have spent with them. I text my mom and ask: “What did Grandmommy do for work?” “She was a domestic housekeeper for Dr. Bondi,” she replies, “who lived in Montview in Greater Park Hill. She had to wear a uniform. White dress, white apron.”19 Emma Chambers, my great-grandmother, was a black woman and the granddaughter of emancipated slaves who wore a white dress and white apron to work in the house of white people. Mom, too, worked as a maid while supporting my father through medical school. On occasion, she arrived at a home to discover that it belonged to one of the white women whose husbands worked beside him at the hospital. They rarely recognized her as a peer. She was just another colored girl come to clean the toilets, and they treated her accordingly. My great-grandmother helped to raise me, but mom barely knew Emma when she was a child because Grandmommy was away in Dr. Bondi’s home, taking care of white people’s children. Mom learned how to clean from her (Japanese) mother, Tatsuko, who worked as a hotel maid for much of her four daughters’ childhoods. “What was your first English word?” I asked my grandmother (Tatsuko) once. “Broom,” she replied. I am beginning to move across the places in which radically different histories of black, brown, and Asian immigrant mothering resonate with and brush up against each other, even becoming entangled with each

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other. Clearly, these radically different histories of racialization require us to distinguish the work of a black mother performing reproductive labor from that of Latinx or Asian immigrant mother performing domestic work. By thinking in this fashion, my aim is simply to foreground the ways in which the racialized and gendered division of labor within racial capital has generally targeted women of color for domestic and reproductive labor. In doing so, I want to pursue a preliminary sketch of the ways in which this general movement has created shared conditions among different racialized reproductive workers, which disrupt and reorganize the relationships between women of color’s bodies and the realm of reproductive labor. This, in turn, profoundly complicates (if not forecloses) relationships between women of color and their children, queer or otherwise. My thinking, here, is clearly indebted to black feminist theory, and I have to emphasize, following Hortense Spillers, that for black women in the United States, “enslavement relegated them to the marketplace of the flesh, an act of commodification so thoroughgoing that the daughters labor even now under the outcome.”20 From slavery and the colonial period to the present, the racialization of reproductive labor disrupted and continues to disrupt normative formations like “mothering,” “kinship,” “femaleness,” and “home” for black women. Under slavery, as Jennifer Morgan teaches us, black mothers did not give birth to children so much as they produced commodities.21 This historical trajectory, following Spillers, disrupts the normative link between a black woman’s body and even the word “mother.” It underscores a “fatal misunderstanding” within white supremacy, which “assigns a matriarchist value” to black culture, as it in fact “misnames the power of the female regarding the enslaved community. Such naming is false because the female could not, in fact, claim her child, and false, once again, because ‘motherhood’ is not perceived in the prevailing social climate as a legitimate procedure of cultural inheritance.”22 Today, in an ongoing extension of the commodification of black women’s reproductive labor, black women’s singularity and subjectivity are often occluded behind, or subsumed within, the (misnomer) of “the mother.” That is, they are disappeared behind the name “mother,” “maid,” or, worse, “mammy.” My analysis is also particularly indebted to feminist critiques of the Marxist tradition. Classical Marxism, a realm of thought obsessed with

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rematerializing the scene of labor, hasn’t been particularly good at giving prominence to the domain of “women’s work,” let alone its racialized and colonial dimensions. For as long as I’ve been studying and teaching Capital, the cover of Ben Fowkes’s popular English translation of Volume 1 has featured a detail from painter Adolph von Menzel’s 1875 painting Eisenwalzwerk.23 Depicting a group of muscular men working a fiery metal forge, Eisenwalzwerk features a Boschian palate of smoky, dusty grays, interwoven with rust, red, black, and brown, punctuated by pools of burning light cast by the hellfire of the forge. In both Menzel’s and Bosch’s paintings, bodies contort and twist as they endure their various punishments. But unlike Bosch’s paintings of hell, in which the exposed bodies of women and men are common among the damned, the hell of industrial capitalism depicted in Eisenwalzwerk is represented as a punishment endured solely by male workers. Save the bottom right corner of the painting, where a woman stands stooped over a basket of provisions around which a couple of workers gather to eat and drink. Her pose is a near-mirror image of the position assumed by Rivera’s mother in sustain. But unlike Rivera’s mother, her eyes raise to meet the spectator’s own gaze. She is the only subject in the painting to stare back at us. It will come as no surprise that the detail of the woman in Eisenwalzwerk is altogether cropped out of the cover to my edition of volume 1. As in much of Marx’s work, Eisenwalzwerk describes a world in which value is primarily forged and reproduced by male workers. Women are either excluded, stripped of their difference within, or detained at the margins of the picture. Where, then, stands the mother? To sketch an answer to this question, I return to the question of the queer of color’s mother and begin a search for the figure of the mother in the work of contemporary artist Danh Vō.

Metal We meet outside a legendary performance space in Chelsea to see Metal. Mounted at The Kitchen from September 27 to October 18, 2014, Metal is a performance installation and collaboration between visual artist Danh Vō and the post-punk band Xiu Xiu. Entering the building, we hear booms and crashes tethered to something evoking the steady tick tock of a massive wooden clock’s escapement. We climb the stairs,

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passing through a hallway into a warmly lit performance space. People are scattered around the room’s perimeter, leaning up against the wall, crouching along the floors, and sitting on silver metal chairs spread at intervals. The space is framed with white plaster walls and there are two focal performance sites. As the spectator passes through the door, Nantapol and Pruan Panicharam are performing to the left at a gold pounding station where they use mallets to flatten 24-carat squares of gold into a block of gold leaf. Dominating the rest of the performance space, Xiu Xiu (Jamie Stewart, Shayna Dunkelmen, and Ches Smith) performs Stewart’s score, described in an accompanying pamphlet as “52 musical compositions, with a daily selection timed cumulatively to match the duration of the gold pounder’s labor.”24 Like sustain, Metal is an endurance work as much as it is about the endurance of work. The event is staged in the room, full with elements curated by Vō, for three hours a day, five days a week over four weeks. That the Panicharams and Xiu Xiu’s performance resets and repeats daily elicits comparison to the mundane and repetitive cycle of work that is central to the reproduction of capital. The time it takes for the Panicharams to pound the gold leaf roughly determines the time of each day’s performance. Stewart’s compositions are divided by something that evokes a classic factory or school bell—sounds that mark the reproductive cycle of the workday. Xiu Xiu’s members take breaks, coming and going, enjoying the flexible, autonomous working conditions that increasingly characterize first-world (creative class) labor. The Panicharams, in turn, rarely abandon their workstation, pausing only for short breaks as they endure the repetitive, monotonous, and physically demanding routine of productive labor. A reperformance or echo of Eisenwalzwerk, Metal stages the paradigmatic scene of productive labor as commonly represented within the Marxist tradition: A group of male laborers endure physically demanding labor to produce value. Furthermore, the Panicharam’s process nothing less than gold, which was considered by Marx to be the king of commodities. Marx describes money as a performer who plays the part of “a universal measure of value, and only through performing this function does gold, the specific equivalent commodity, become money.”25 The worker confronts money as a universal measure of value. Gold performs as its

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universal form. Incidentally, Marx’s centering of the male proletariat in much of his work similarly transforms the male worker into the universal or general laborer. A brief contrast between Metal and sustain thus offers a sense of the representational matrix through which Marxist theory overwhelmingly represents and genders productive labor (labor that, in Marx’s words, “directly valorizes capital, or creates surplus value”) as masculine while consigning reproductive labor (labor that reproduces and sustains the laborer) to the realm of the feminine.26 Appropriating the sequence of maternal reproduction to describe the scene of production, in Marx the worker seems a mother, who transfers a portion of her life to her infant. The commodity is like the child who now stands outside her: “The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. . . . It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.”27 Alienated from its maker, the commodity, as it moves into circulation, takes with it the portion of life conferred upon it by the worker. The worker is erased in the process, or disappeared as “the movement through which this process has been mediated vanishes in its own result, leaving no trace behind.”28 So if, as Peggy Phelan famously argued, “Performance becomes itself through disappearance,” capital reproduces itself through the disappearance of the worker.29 In Metal, as the performance withdraws from the domain of presence, it takes with it the scene of the Panicharam’s productive labor. The only thing left behind is the gold, which bears no discernible trace of the workers who pounded it into gold leaf. The ephemeral nature of performance confuses most conceptions of value, and for a long time, the dominant logic held that, because of its nonreproducibility, performance (and in particular the tradition of body art) eschews commodification and thus, as Phelan writes, “clogs the smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital”: Performance in a strict ontological sense is nonreproductive.  .  .  . Performance resists the balanced circulations of finance. It saves nothing; it only spends. While photography is vulnerable to charges of counterfeiting and copying, performance art is vulnerable to charges of valuelessness and emptiness. Performance indicates the possibility of revaluing that

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emptiness; this potential revaluation gives performance art its distinctive oppositional edge. . . . Performance is the attempt to value that which is nonreproductive, nonmetaphorical.30

Phelan’s argument does more than merely employ the language of economy to push a rhetorical point. She uses it to demonstrate how, as performance disappears from the realm of reproduction and presence, it is fugitive from, eludes capture by, and antagonizes capital’s reproductive cycles. If performance long remained anathema to the production of monetary value in the age of mechanical reproduction, Vō’s market success (not in spite of, but in large part because of the mobilization of performance within his work) is a symptom of the fact that (as Schneider demonstrates) capital’s conversion of performance into a site for value extraction is well underway.31 Performance art is merely the latest casualty of the process of primitive accumulation through which capital endlessly seeks out “new” places to convert into sites for the production/extraction of value.32 In a callous rejoinder to performance studies’ hopeful insistence that performance art eschews value by avoiding the reproductive economy, the market now achieves the conversion of performance into a commodity by licensing the right to restage, reproduce, or “reperform” the original event.33 Performance, once antagonistic to the production of value on the market, increasingly becomes a fetish for commodification in and of itself by virtue of its unique mode of reproduction. For three hours every day, Metal reproduces itself through performance, but always with a difference. The Panicharams pound the gold as Xiu Xiu works its way through the score. But each day something breaks from the action of the previous performance as variations small and large proliferate. Invoking Spillers’s description of the maternal mode of reproduction, we could say that performance appropriates the mother’s reproductive function. It reproduces but with registers of simultaneous sameness and difference. “Among social bodies,” writes Spillers, the mother “is the only one who can reproduce sameness and difference at once: the child resembles the begetters, ‘borrows’ their tendencies, yet describes its own features of uniqueness.”34 First, a contradiction: Performance is at once nonreproductive (qua Phelan) and entirely reproductive (qua everyone else). Performance is a

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sterile womb and the womb’s mimic par excellence. To say this is not to join the chorus enumerating all of the things Peggy Phelan could have been by now if Jacques Lacan hadn’t been her mother.35 Phelan correctly insists that performance “becomes itself through disappearance [and] occurs over a time which will not be repeated.”36 But (like capital) performance has internal contradictions, and one of the central antagonisms constituting performance’s ontology is the paradoxical simultaneity of its ephemerality (its fugitivity from the sphere of reproduction and withdrawal from presence) and its inherent reproducibility (its capacity to reproduce the presence of that which has withdrawn or is lost). Performance’s mode of reproduction extends and sustains life and can be, in Schneider’s words, “an act of survival, of keeping alive.”37 At the same time, its ephemerality and fugitivity give performance the power to break free from the cycles that reproduce the existing order of things in order to give birth to something new. Thus, and as Fred Moten insists, “The conjunction of reproduction and disappearance is performance’s condition of possibility, its ontology and its mode of production.”38 If performance theorists have been reticent to call upon the discourse and metaphor of maternal reproduction, Marxist theory has been less shy about doing so. Marx appropriated metaphors of biological reproduction to illustrate the process of capital’s reproduction, but this move often results in the subsumption of actual mothers. In the Grundrisse, for example, Marx describes the commodity’s relationship to the worker thus: “It is the potentialities resting in living labour’s own womb which come to exist as realities outside it as a result of the production process.”39 The phrase “living labour’s own womb” at once conjures the mother and disappears her. A reproductive organ (the womb) stands in her place, concealing her in the process. In fact, she disappears from the scene of reproduction altogether and is replaced by an ungendered (godlike) “creator”: “the product of labour, objectified labour, is endowed with a soul of its own by living labour itself and establishes itself as an alien power confronting its creator.”40 Marx’s rhetorical removal and/or marginalization of the mother from/in the birthing scene is symptomatic of a general tendency of classical Marxist theory, whereby, as Neferti Tadiar writes, “The category of labor is constituted through a disavowed sexual differentiation of reproductive labor.”41 In classical Marxism, labor is often represented

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and theorized as ungendered, but commonly assumed to be (and represented as) male. Women are consigned to the realm of reproductive labor, which haunts the margins of the scene. That is, if it is not cropped out altogether, like the woman peeking back at us from the corner of Eisenwalzwerk. Marxist-feminist theorists have repeatedly shown that a comprehensive theory of capitalism must account for the central (but often elided) spheres of reproductive labor, or so-called “women’s work.”42 As Gayatri Spivak argues, we need to “interpret reproduction within a Marxian problematic” that recognizes “the possession of a tangible place of production, the womb, [and] situates women as agents in any theory of production.”43 An approach that restores, recognizes, and centers reproductive labor to the theory of capital’s reproduction accounts for women’s creative and agential power within the production process, but also opens up a means for sublating the limits of Marxism’s own patriarchal tendencies: “If the nature and history of alienation, labor, and the production of property are reexamined in terms of women’s work and childbirth, it can lead us to a reading of Marx beyond Marx.”44 Performance’s mode of reproduction can serve a critical purpose in the pursuit of this goal.

Tombstone for Nguyen Thi Ty A floating chandelier and a gravestone lain flat in a corner are the sole occupants of a grand room. The room: august and serious with massive, soaring white walls, and a humble doorway leading to the next gallery. The ceiling: elegant architectural flourishes and panels of window, with sunlight from the outside turning the glass an opaque baby blue. The chandelier, titled 08:03, 28.05 (2009): majestic, glittering crystal tear drops spilling from one tier to the next. Its metal skeleton is not silver in color, but brass, aged, with hues that creep toward blackness. The tombstone, designed by Vō for his grandmother and titled Tombstone for Nguyen Thi Ty: a replica of the façade of a washing machine, refrigerator, television, and crucifix cast in bronze, marble, granite, and wood relief. The same year that Vō was born, 1975, Saigon fell, and Vietnam was reunited. It wasn’t long before his family, including his grandmother, began their migration across the oceans. Vietnam’s partition started over

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Figure 2.1. Danh Vō, 08:03, 28.05, 2009, and Tombstone for Nguyen Thi Ty, 2009. Late nineteenth-century chandelier; marble, granite, bronze and wood relief. 86 5/8 x 23 5/8 x 7 7/8.” Installation view at Kunsthalle Basil. (Courtesy of Danh Vō.)

a century before with the establishment of France’s brutal, century-long colonial regime (with a brief, but no less unbearable period of Japanese Imperial administration during World War II). In the 1940s, Communist and nationalist forces, led by Ho Chi Minh, inaugurated a decade-long war for Vietnam’s independence. In the wake of French defeat, Vietnam was temporarily partitioned into Ho Chi Minh’s northern Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the southern State of Vietnam, which developed, by way of a coup, into a dictatorial police state governed by Prime Minister Ngô Đình Diệm. The Democratic Republic sought reunification but was also replete with its own violence and tyranny, as the revolutionary government instituted coercive and deadly land reforms. Like revolutionary regimes in neighboring Cambodia (the Khmer Rouge) and Laos (the Pathet Lao), the northern regime attempted to correct a past it believed to be tainted with colonialism and capitalism through

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forced erasure. “In essence,” writes Khatharya Um, “what was sought by revolutionary transformation under Southeast Asian communism was not simply the destruction of the old societal structure but a whole way of life. Submitted to a system that sought the ultimate severance from the past, social memory was systematically undermined as the regimes worked to revolutionize language, culture, and traditions and to destroy what they could not transform or suppress.”45 Survival, within these revolutions, often required forgetting. After a military coup toppled Diệm’s regime in 1963, the avowedly anti-Communist US government used a series of naval skirmishes with the Democratic Republic’s forces in the Tonkin Gulf to justify a ground war with both the north and their southern insurgent allies, the Viet Cong. The Vietnam/American War produced an unbelievable loss of life, including the deaths of millions of Vietnamese civilians. Though the war didn’t officially end until the fall of Saigon in 1975, its conclusion began when the Paris Peace Accords were signed by representatives of the northern and southern Vietnamese governments, southern insurgents, and the US government in the Grand Ballroom of Paris’s Hôtel Majestic on January 27, 1973. On that day, the proceedings were witnessed by a collection of chandeliers, which Vō later purchased at auction, naming each chandelier for the precise moment that it was deinstalled from the ballroom. Vō’s family left southern Vietnam four years after he was born.46 They were part of an exodus, beginning in 1975, of approximately two million refugees who left Vietnam by boat. In the year of their departure, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) closed their door to Vietnamese refugees, but refugees continued to pour into the seas. Many were turned away at the shores of places like Thailand and Malaysia, returned to sea, and left adrift atop the ocean. As Patricia Nguyen describes them, “The Vietnamese refugees existed in a state of suspension wherein chances of life and death were managed by the precarious conditions of the ocean and the competing claims between nation-state and multi-state entities.”47 It is for this reason that Nguyen suggests that we theorize the water “not only as a site for possibilities of freedom but also for death.”48 During their exodus from Vietnam, Vō’s family separated into different vessels to increase the chance that the “family line” would survive.49 The boats carrying the family were intercepted at sea. Nguyen

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was settled in Germany, while Vō, his siblings, and parents were taken to Denmark.50 After her arrival in Germany, the Immigrant Relief Program gave Nguyen a refrigerator, washing machine, and television. The Catholic Church provided a cross. Designed to encourage refugees to assimilate into their adopted Western homes, such “gifts” were meant to signal a break with a refugee’s past and her entry into the new terrain of subjectivity produced by and desirous of capitalist modernity—a terrain of subjectivity overdetermined by gender and the realm of reproductive labor (washing machine, refrigerator), faith (crucifix), and consumption (television, fridge). But to become a new subject is on some level to forget yourself—a dangerous proposition given the ways in which Vietnamese refugees were subject to erasure and forced forgetting, both at home and in the diaspora. If the ocean threatened oblivion, those who survived often encountered new forms of erasure when they reached new shores. As Um notes, “In the United States, Southeast Asian refugees also feel the oppressive weight of a history that receives little public acknowledgement, their losses and sacrifices expunged by the amnesia of a nation entangled in its own self-deception, culpability and guilt.”51 With Vietnamese refugees caught in the wake of such tides of forgetting, an account of it must reconcile, in Nguyen’s terms, with “the political stakes of witnessing the memory of statelessness at sea.”52 In Untitled, 2013, Vō stages a series of vintage postcards of Hạ Long Bay, a body of water bordering the Gulf of Tonkin.53 Printed across each postcard is a phrase written by Vō’s father and frequent collaborator, Phùng, in either English, Latin, or French (including “everything must go” or “Fiat veritas et pereat mundus” [let justice be done though the world perish]). The postcards are sepia toned, faded with time. On one, two rock formations rise out of the bay. Stamped in red ink, across the bottom: “268. TONKIN—Gaie d’Along—Les duex frères.” It is a postcard for tourists, with the name of Hạ Long Bay translated into “Gaie d’Along” and the rock formations described as “Les duex frères.” The viewer’s perspective is suspended within the bay, looking back toward land through “the two brothers.” Inscribed across the water, in black ink, Phùng has written the English phrase, “Born out of a uterus I had nothing to do with.”

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The postcard establishes a visual link between Vietnam and the water, appropriating the mother’s reproductive organs (“born out of a uterus”) to function as a metaphor for the national site of origin. The appropriation of women’s bodies to stand as a metaphor for the nation is a dangerous gambit, often displacing actual women in the process, as seems to occur here with the disavowal of the mother (“a uterus I had nothing to do with”). The two rock formations could evoke the walls of the birthing canal, fixing the spectator inside the mother’s body as she is born “out of a uterus” and into the water, toward Vietnam. But there is also the possibility that the spectator is looking back through the birth canal toward the body of the mother, in which case the mother’s body is nothing less than the bay and the land in the background. That land and sea become conflated as a site of origin is resonant with a Vietnamese linguistic formation in which water and homeland are signified by the same word. “The Vietnamese word for water, nước,” Nguyen writes, “also means the homeland, country, and nation.”54 In the visual convergence of land and water, “homeland” and birth canal, the postcard at once materializes the symbolic significance of Vietnam for a narrator (whose identity is not clear) and disavows Vietnam through the denial of a mother the narrator had “nothing to do with.” With the viewer’s viewpoint suspended in the middle of the bay, the postcard evokes Nguyen’s articulation of water as a major epistemological perspective through which Vietnamese refugees in the diaspora often pass. Following Yến Lê Espiritu (who draws in turn on the work of Viet Thanh Nguyen), I invoke the term “refugee” to signify “not . . . an object of investigation, but . . . a site of social critique, ‘articulat[ing] the incomprehensible or heretofore unspeakable.”55 If Vō’s postcard functions as a “site of social critique,” the perspective at which it is fixed (suspended in the water) suggests that we might be seeing things from the standpoint of a body adrift at sea, in which there is (in Patricia Nguyen’s words) “no closure, no finality, only an intensity built to a painful silence of drifting. It is adrift on the boat where refugees, with bodies stacked upon one another, are caught on the brink of drowning and floating across the ocean.”56 A challenge, then, as looking back to remember Vietnam might reveal the viewer to be surrounded by water, “adrift” and “on the brink of drowning.”

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The poet Ocean Vuong was born in Ho Chi Minh City in 1988. He migrated to the United States a few years later. In his poem, “Telemachus,” water surfaces not as a site for birth, but for death, as in the opening couplets: Like any good son, I pull my father out of the water, drag him by his hair through white sand, his knuckles carving a trail the waves rush in to erase.57

The poem’s narrator looks back to a city, which “is no longer / where we left it,” having been “bombed,” “the bombed / cathedral” now a gaping wound. Another wound, this one in the father’s back, where the water, as a harbinger of death, seeps into the body (“the bullet hole in his back, brimming / with sea water”). Like the river Lethe, the water washes the past away (“his knuckles carving a trail / the waves rush into erase”).58 At the poem’s conclusion, the narrator kisses the father—a kiss that becomes a template for the way they “kiss all my lovers goodnight,” each act of intimacy a queer reperformance and citation of this primal scene of loss: I seal my father’s lips with my own & begin the faithful work of drowning.59

The “faithful work” of memorialization (experienced as drowning) functions not as a means of closing the past, but of holding it open: a wound like the bullet hole in the father’s back, the bombed cathedral, or the trail in the sand into which the waters of forgetting still pour. As Fiona I. B. Ngô, Mimi Thi Nguyen, and Mariam Lam argue, “Remembrance is of course a particular problem after the devastation wrought by colonialism and war, and as such is less a recovery than a refusal to move on, which is to say leave behind.”60 But if both Vuong’s poem and Vō’s postcard conjure or instrumentalize the elided memory of Vietnam through the father, the mother remains an absent, if not disavowed referent. In “Telemachus,”

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for example, the father’s body, penetrated by the sea, is the passageway through which death enters the narrator’s world. But the act of mourning the father is embedded within another disavowal of the mother: the poem’s namesake, Telemachus, was Odysseus’s son, who joined forces with his father to violently overthrow the rule of his mother, the longsuffering Penelope, and her volatile court of suitors. But for Vō, even the vanquished past can be opened up in the present by way of performance. As the chandelier dances before the spectator, some part of the memory of an erased war comes flooding back into the room. And as it hovers above the tombstone, some part of Nguyen Thi Ty comes back as well.

16:32, 26:05, 2009 Though the postcard names the mother’s disavowal, in the great white room, where the chandelier floats above Nguyen’s gravestone, Vō draws an explicit link between the act of memorializing the Vietnam War and the faithful work of mourning a mother (or grandmother). In the tableau, the Vietnam War seems to cluster around and speak through the chandelier, which is drawn into a direct, tense relationship to the specter of Vietnamese death (by way of the tombstone). But what does it mean to suggest that these objects sustain the past within the presence of the present or to suggest that they keep some part of the dead alive within them? As we saw above, Marx appropriates the vocabulary of maternal reproduction in order to describe the secret histories of objects. For Marx, living labor is transferred to and objectified in the things that a worker makes: “In the production of the coat, human labour-power, in the shape of tailoring, has in actual fact been expended. Human-labour has therefore been accumulated in the coat.”61 In the passage from the 1844 Manuscripts, cited earlier, Marx describes the production process as one in which the worker “confers” his “life” on the thing he produces.62 The living labor that congeals in the object becomes a part of the commodity’s fetish, and it provides the vitality that allows the object to come back to life, as does the famous ghoulish, dancing table that haunts Capital’s first chapter.63 For Sarah Ahmed, the story of the commodity fetish is “a story not only of ‘things’ changing hands but of how things come to matter by

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taking shape through the labor of others.”64 She describes this as a commodity’s “background,” observing that Marx’s “table was made by somebody, and there is a history to its arrival, a history of transportation, which could be described as a history of changing hands.”65 If the circulation process scrubs a commodity of its background, the encounter with Vō’s work often reanimates or reproduces the trace or touch of this lost history sustained within an object. A curatorial plaque accompanying a fall 2015 installation of one of the chandeliers (16:32, 26:05, 2009) at the Whitney Museum of American Art describes the work in these terms: “By divorcing the opulent chandelier from its function and historical setting, this object, designed to convey elegance and celebration, holds within it the memory of the difficult moments in global history it has witnessed.”66 As if we needed more evidence of institutionally generated amnesia, a devastating war and its aftermath, with devastating repercussions for Southeast Asians, in particular, is reduced to one of many “difficult moments” belonging to “global history.” Still, the implication is that the history “witnessed” by the chandelier has been extended to it such that the memories held “within it” can be reanimated, reproduced, and sustained during the spectator’s encounter with it. Jean-Luc Nancy and Shane Vogel both argue that extension can be thought of as a kind of touch, an expanding out into the world or a sharing out of life or being, which reaches across space and time to touch other beings. In a critical revision of the Cartesian split between mind and body, Nancy writes that the “soul knows itself as what is extended, not across the body but along the body’s extension.”67 Extending the thought, Vogel argues that Nancy’s theorization of extension allows us to see how “the soul and the body are thus not fully separate, nor are they unified. Instead, they touch.”68 Just as Marx would suggest that as a worker touches an object, she extends some portion of herself to the object, art critic Michael Newman describes Vō’s work similarly: “In one way or another, all of these objects have been touched by their owners and the places through which they’ve circulated; or, using a photographic model, they have been touched through their exposure (to an event).”69 When an ignominious past extends to an object, the act of defacing that object can be a way of “holding on to” and wreaking vengeance on the past. During an installation of 16:32, 26:05 at the Museum of Modern Art, for example, Vō broke the chandelier down to its core components,

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disassembling it and arranging it across the floor in fragments, as if emphasizing its innate, leaden inertia, and/or lack of vitality. This (decolonial) act of destruction is still tied to a dialectic of rebirth and regenerated life. After all, the chandelier will later be reassembled and brought back to life for future materializations. In an enigmatic moment in the Grundrisse, Marx offers a picture of how “dead” objects come back to life. But first he describes what happens when living labor withdraws from the realm of (re)production as he imagines a mill without workers: “If, e.g. in time of STAGNATION OF TRADE, etc., the MILLS are shut down, then it can indeed be seen that the machinery rusts and that yarn is useless ballast, and rots, as soon as their relation to living labour ceases.”70 He returns to the abandoned mill in Capital when he writes, “A machine which is not active in the labour process is useless. In addition, it falls prey to the destructive power of natural processes. Iron rusts; wood rots. Yarn with which we neither weave nor knit is cotton wasted.”71 Once charged with the vitality extended to them by living labor, these objects now face the “destructive power of natural processes,” rusting and rotting, wasting and decaying, like a chandelier, dismantled and strewn across the floor. But when the worker returns to the mill, something happens: Living labour must seize on these things, awaken them from the dead, change them from merely possible into real and effective use-values. Bathed in the fire of labour, appropriated as part of its organism, and infused with vital energy for the performance of the functions appropriated to their concept and to their vocation in the process, they are indeed consumed, but [they also emerge as] new products, which are capable of entering into individual consumption as means of subsistence or into a new labor process as a means of production.72

As living labor revitalizes the objects in the mill, not only does it “awaken them from the dead,” but in coming back to life, the objects begin to perform their proper function and vocation. Reanimated, the objects, like the chandeliers, stand with their feet on the ground and begin to dance as if by their own free will. Through performance they come back to life, and as they come to life they begin to perform.

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Oma Totem (Grandma Totem) But what of the woman whose tombstone lies beneath the chandelier? In Eisenwalzwerk, the scene in Marx’s mill, Metal, and many of Vō’s collaborations with his father, the extension, sustenance, and reproduction of life occur through the labor of men. Women, mothers, reproduction, and reproductive labor are subsumed into a theory and representation of general (or universal) labor. Like Rivera’s mother or the reproductive laborer crouched at the margin of Eisenwalzwerk, when the specificity of gender is subsumed into a theory of labor in general, the female worker and the realm of reproductive labor is marginalized, and the mother disappears. Barbara Johnson argues that Marx “acknowledged women’s work (women’s labor) as primarily reproductive [but] in the workplace, men and women were [described as] equivalent.”73 By subsuming female labor (reproductive and otherwise) into a general theory of labor, Marx and Engels regularly flattened sexual difference, allowing them to theorize labor in general, while in fact centering the masculine figure in the realm of production and consumption, while displacing the gendered particularities of labor.74 But, following Johnson, “the concept of sexual difference is fundamental” to the genesis of the modern capitalist division of labor and patriarchy: “[After] the woman’s contribution to biological reproduction could no longer be denied, male dominance had to come up with a new justification for its existence, and it came up with the notion of ‘separate spheres.’ The potential competition between the sexes was to be minimized by assigning the woman to the home and the man to the world.”75 With women consigned to the space of interiority and domesticity, women’s work doesn’t quite disappear from the theory of general labor; so much as it is concealed within and absorbed into it.76 The result, as Tadiar explains, is that “the operations that enable the disappearance of the value created by reproductive work and its hidden expropriation by capital are repeated in the symbolic construction of the concept of the universal laborer.”77 Vō, too, frames his father’s calligraphic contributions to his work as abstract, general, or “pure” labor: “I like the idea that calligraphy can become an act of pure labor.”78 Rather than identifying calligraphy with the monastic, artisanal, or scholastic practices of the ascendant classes, however, Vō associates his father’s calligraphy with the domain of

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reproductive labor performed by working-class immigrants: “Over the past thirty years, I became familiar with my father’s handwriting from all the signs and menus that he handwrote for the various small food stalls he owned in Denmark. I like that writing calligraphy can become no different from making a burger.”79 To describe the work Phùng performed in the food stall as reproductive labor is to acknowledge contemporary capitalism’s globalization and feminization of productive labor, as well as the simultaneous professionalization and devaluation of women’s work (unpaid labor historically performed by women within the interiority of the home). Within capital’s ongoing proletarianization of women, immigrants, and people of color from the Global South, reproductive labor (care work, food production, domestic work) remains an accessible and available form of work for immigrants. Women, but women of color in particular, know how thin is the line that often divides “woman” and “mother” from “commodity” and “commodity production.” As Luce Irigaray famously argued, Marx’s story about commodity production might in fact be “an interpretation of the status of woman in so-called patriarchal societies.”80 For Irigaray, the “use, consumption, and circulation” of women’s bodies is “so integral a part of our sociocultural horizon that” sexual difference is less a product or effect of political economy so much as it is what “subtends economy as such.”81 Irigaray’s critique of Marx allows us to “interpret reproduction within a Marxian problematic” and invites us to conceive of the Marxian problematic as itself an appropriation and subsumption of maternal reproduction. But she situates her analysis largely within the realm of the symbolic, paying little attention to material conditions through which women of color have actually become commodities within the historical development of capitalism. Irigaray undoes Marx’s theory of the (implicitly male) general laborer only to produce a figuration of a general reproductive laborer from which the specificities of race and nation are abstracted away through a thinly veiled universalization of Western white femaleness. This is the “deadly metonymic playfulness” that Spillers critiques in the tradition of white feminism, whereby “a part of the universe of women speaks for the whole of it,” occluding women of color in the process.82 Like Marx, who dreams of commodities that speak without speaking much of or with “commodities who spoke,” Irigaray posits the commodification of

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(white) women as the paradigm for the development of a commoditiesbased market, without accounting for the historical significance of the fact that black women in slavery, alongside other colonized and racialized women, lived and live the vicious reality of her metaphor. Marxist analysis must guard against the tendency to abstract the gendered, racialized, and national particularities of labor, erasing in turn the “historical experiences” of gendered and racialized workers. As Neferti Tadiar writes: To the extent that the conditions and forms of labor in the post-Fordist economy, which are grasped in terms of servile labor, subsume the historically definitive features of colonial, immigrant, and women’s reproductive labor (not least of all in the appearance of this labor as their entire being), attempts to theorize the subjectivity of this new form of global labor will only negate through subsumptive abstraction the historical experiences, i.e., the cultural capacities and communicative and affective praxis, of those concrete populations who actually embody both new forms of labor and the colonial and postcolonial antecedents.83

If commodities speak, they (still) often speak with the voices of working women of color. Tombstone for Nguyen Thi Ty was developed from Oma Totem (Grandma Totem), a readymade sculpture that was produced and first exhibited in 2009. Oma Totem is composed of a black television stacked on top of a mini-refrigerator adorned with a wooden cross, stacked in turn atop a washing machine. For Phelan, live performance (perhaps even the live itself) refuses reproduction as it “plunges into visibility—in a maniacally charged present—and disappears into memory.”84 When the live “disappears into memory,” it recedes into “the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control,” refusing reproduction.85 This is true, but under conditions of annihilation, in which death stalks people of color, we simply can’t afford an ideology that assumes the nonreproducibility of the live and, by extension, life (least of which being the fact that to do so means that we must continue to forget the dead). If we insist that life is extinguished utterly and totally through the withdrawal of the live from presence and its recession into memory, we refuse the possibility that the lives of those we have loved

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Figure 2.2. Danh Vō, Oma Totem, 2009. Phillips television set, Gorenje washing machine, Bomann refrigerator, wooden crucifix, and personal casino entrance card. 220 x 60 x 60 cm. Private Collection, Turin Italy. Installation view at Zero, Milan, 2009. (Courtesy of Danh Vō.)

and lost can extend beyond the point of their death by way of memorial performance. In other words, we kill or lose them a second time. The reproductive faculty of memorialization is not necessarily annulled as a result of performance’s ephemerality, impermanence, and withdrawal from presence. Instead, when the encounter with the ephemeral trace of a loss object activates memory, the loss object is temporarily sustained, reanimated through the actions of memory. As Shvarts observes, “Reproduction here is not a metaphor but a material persistence or sustenance in time: reproduction is the physical process of engaging

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extended time.”86 Performance’s mode of reproduction is what allows us, in the words of Miriam Petty, to “say the names of the dead in a way that gives them some kind of power.”87 Still, when ephemera functions (following Muñoz) as “all of those things that remain after a performance, a kind of evidence of what has transpired but certainly not the thing itself,” some part of the loss object is lost, once more, in the process.88 When the spectator attempts to reproduce Nguyen from the fragments that comprise Tombstone for Nguyen Thi Ty or Oma Totem (four commodities, a name, and little else), she may realize that she still has very little of Nguyen to work with. These commodities, given to Nguyen upon arrival in Germany, are a literal materialization of what Mimi Thi Nguyen describes as the “gift of freedom,” whereby “freedom” figures as an impossible promise that justifies US imperialism (as in the US military’s “gift of freedom” to Vietnam by way of the war) and capitalist exploitation (the “gift of freedom” bestowed upon the refugees resettled in United States and Europe in the wake of the war). Since freedom, within liberalism, is commonly conceived of as a right or property, “the gift as the transfer of a possession from one to another shapes a relation between giver and recipient that engenders a debt, which is to say that the gift belongs to an economy that voids its openhanded nature.”89 Indeed, the gift conscripts the recipient into capital’s economy of exploitative labor. As Espiritu argues in her critique of dominant narratives that cast Vietnamese refugees as passive recipients of the gift of freedom, “By portraying the Vietnamese as a desperate people fleeing a desperate country, these scholars produce the Vietnamese worker to be naturally suited and even grateful to work in boring, repetitive, monotonous, low-paid, and insecure jobs.”90 The commodities “gifted” to Nguyen Thi Ty bespeak the gendered assumptions about the type of reproductive labor that the refugee may be called upon to perform in order to pay back the gift of freedom’s debt. Performing women’s work, especially when it is compulsory, can be a way of disappearing, or being disappeared. The mother is the symbolic reproductive laborer par excellence, and, because she surfaces as an ideal, hers is a subject position which is not one. “What the ideal of perfect motherhood excludes for the mother,” writes Johnson, “in any case, is—her life.”91 During the encounter with Oma Totem, Nguyen’s name is replaced by the name “mother” (oma, grandmother), and she is

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represented by a set of commodities. But the history of the reproductive laborer’s commodification has not stripped the reproductive laborer of all means for resistance. Irigaray writes that “as both natural value and use value, mothers cannot circulate in the form of commodities without threatening the very existence of the social order. . . . Their responsibility is to maintain the social order without intervening so as to change it.”92 Within this symbolic order, the mother is a commodity withdrawn from circulation, functioning as constant capital for her husband (her ostensible owner). Her primary (or sole) function is to sustain the reproduction of the social order. Yet she retains the capacity to perform as an antagonist within the order of capitalist patriarchy, most notably through her withdrawal from or refusal to perform reproductive labor (either within or beyond the home). This potentiality is largely contingent upon the mother’s class position, however, which within racial capitalism is always already racialized. As Federici notes, “As wives and mothers have ‘gone on strike,’ many of their previously invisible services have become saleable commodities around which entire industries have been built.”93 In the era of globalization, such industries require the ongoing commodification of reproductive labor as it is performed by women of color and immigrants from both the Global South and Eastern Europe.94 A general strike may be emancipatory for women of means, but for many other women it will simply mean more work. Under these circumstances, the racialized reproductive laborer has the potential to gain what Spillers describes as “insurgent ground” as much from a withdrawal from reproductive labor as from alternative (queer, feminist, minoritarian) practices of mothering.95 Shuttling between abjection, objectification, and subjection, it is when she claims status as agent and speaking subject that the mother gains the insurgent ground as female social subject, intervening in and antagonizing the existing social order by shaking its foundations and opening up new possibilities within it.

Mother Tongue Mother Tongue, the 2013 ink on paper print from which the Goodman exhibition drew its name, features the phrase “mother tongue” in

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Figure 2.3. Danh Vō, Mother Tongue, 2013. Ink on paper, writing by Phùng Vō. Installation view “Mother Tongue.” Marian Goodman Gallery, 2013. (Courtesy of Danh Vō.)

an ornate, nearly gothic font rendered by Phùng. Indecipherable and oblique, the text resists assimilation by the eye. An “m” followed by an “o” or maybe a “d.” The letters add up to the phrase “mother tongue,” condensed into a single word, misspelled (“MOTHERTORGUE”), and then broken apart into three justified bands. The phrase “mother tongue” may refer to more than a child’s first language and gesture also to the role that a mother’s reproductive labor plays in the reproduction of the social order. “The mother tongue is the child’s first language,” writes Johnson in a description of the Lacanian scene of language’s acquisition; “it is a language taught by the mother.”96 Since, for Johnson, it is through language that social subjects come into being, the mother’s pedagogy affects the subjectification of the child and, by extension, the reproduction of the social order: “A child beginning to speak does not always address anyone. But a mother teaching language to a child consistently speaks to that child even when teaching the child the names of things. Names, in other words, are addressed to the child by the mother-teacher. ‘What’s that?’ she says, constantly checking the lesson.

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A child comes into language through the mother’s address. It is her job to transform a little animal into a little human being.”97 If the mother tongue hails the child into subjectivity, effecting the reproduction of the dominant social order, in some cases it has the capacity to threaten, alter, or transform the social order in the reproductive process. Like many refugees, Vō’s father had neither the resources, time, nor opportunities, to learn the languages of his adopted home. Vō emphasizes this, writing: “Lower-class immigrants have greater difficulty assimilating into society. My father barely learned to speak, let alone write, Danish. All Western languages are alien to him. When he writes these letters, he recognizes the alphabet, but understands none of its contents.”98 For Mother Tongue, it is possible, likely even, that Phùng may not register the difference between the misplaced “r” and the missing “n.” As with much of Vō’s work, Mother Tongue is a study in internal contradiction: the father writes the word “mother,” underlining the mother’s absence; the phrase “mother tongue” refers to linguistic utterance but is registered as garbled written script (“torgue”); Phùng writes of a mother tongue in a language that is not his own. The Vōs’ mother tongue, Vietnamese, is itself marked by a linguistic cut obliquely referenced in the image. Mother Tongue is composed with letters from the Latin alphabet, which became dominant during Vietnam’s French colonial period and remains the contemporary Vietnamese alphabet at home and in the diaspora. As Vincent Rafael teaches us, the suspension of the mother tongue in the between of translation played a significant role in US and European colonial enterprise in Asia. In places like Vietnam or (in Rafael’s example) the Philippines, the colonizer’s language was established as the language of power and projected across and onto the tongue of the colonized. The colonizer’s tongue often became the major language while the indigenous mother tongue was reduced to minority, if it was not violently suppressed and destroyed. For the postcolonial subject who moves through the interstices of language, “the mother tongue often seem[s] like the other’s tongue.”99 Immigrants and refugees may thus live suspended in the break of translation. As much as this may lead to the experience of radical negation, the indeterminacy of language can also open up conditions of possibility. For Rafael, translation “exposes us to the fact” of language’s inherent aporia and “aporetic language . . . becomes an occasion for engaging in play.”100

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This decolonial mode of play disorganizes the major language in order to exploit language’s inherent indeterminacy, ambiguity, and undecidability. As the colonial subject mobilizes play, she may render the major language inoperative or reveal the operations through which language achieves the de/subjectification and/or subjection of the colonial subject. In this sense, Vō’s mangling of the word “mother tongue” might be indicative of what Rafael locates in the “responses of other historical agents—colonized peoples, working classes, and other subordinated groups—who . . . had been enmeshed in the language of colonizing power even as they wove their own traps to reverse and displace this power’s hold.”101 The mangled word might also be indicative of the fact that, in the United States, the non-English-speaking (and non-native–Englishspeaking) immigrant of color may find that her exclusion from English marks her as exterior to proper subjectivity. Like Phùng’s rendering of the phrase, she registers as indecipherable. The immigrant mother might still hail the child into subjectivity by teaching her daughter her mother tongue, but since it is a minor language, she may also find that the child becomes the teacher as she depends upon the child for translation to survive life within the major. An immigrant inversion in Johnson’s scene of linguistic pedagogy: “What’s that?” the immigrant mother asks, constantly depending on the child’s lesson to navigate and survive the world around her. When the mother faces negation due to her inability to speak or understand the major language, the child’s act of translation becomes the means for reproducing and sustaining her mother’s presence against the forces of social erasure. As Hyeyoung Kwon teaches us, the child may become the parent’s translator, which is often a fragmenting and injurious experience for the children of working-class immigrants of color and their parents.102 But, as Kwon also observes, resonating with Rafael, children and parents play with the act of translation in creative ways in order to negotiate and contest the majoritarian sphere by opening up conditions of possibility where there do not seem to be any.

Audre Lorde’s “Man Child” Which brings us, once more, back to the question of the missing mother and delivers us, finally, to the question of the queer of color’s mother and

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of the queer of color mother. When the mother has the responsibility to maintain the social order without intervening so as to change it, her primary task is the reproduction of the dominant conditions of reproduction secured by cis-heteropatriarchy. She is supposed to reproduce children who will grow up to be productive workers, but above all else her children are supposed to grow up to be heterosexual mothers and fathers in their own stead. Radical women of color feminists such as Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams have asked how mothering is  redefined and reimagined by women of color as a radical and even revolutionary practice.103 As Cynthia Dewi Oka argues, in the ongoing “revolutionary struggle against a colonial, racist, hetero-patriarchal capitalism which has for centuries separated us . . . mothering is a primary front in this struggle, not as a biological function, but as a social practice.”104 Following this tradition, we might suggest that when women of color sustain the lives of their queer children or refuse to reproduce the heterosexual order upon which rests the reproduction of capital, they have the potential to gain Spillers’s “insurgent ground” and perform what Oka describes as “Mothering as Revolutionary Praxis.”105 In a world that all too often clings to what Eve Sedgwick described as the “wish that queer [and trans] people not exist,” the relationship between a mother and her queer or trans child becomes nearly impossible.106 As Sedgwick notes, in classical psychoanalysis the mother is blamed for the child’s undesirable homosexuality, and in the early psychological literature of acceptance she was shamed if she encouraged or affirmed her queer child’s gender non-normative comportment. As a result, Sedgwick concludes, “Mothers, indeed, have nothing to contribute to [the] process of masculine validation, and women are reduced in light of its urgency to a null set: any involvement in it by a woman is overinvolvement, any protectiveness is overprotectiveness, and, for instance, mothers ‘proud of their sons’ nonviolent qualities’ are manifesting unmistakable ‘family pathology.’ ”107 Though Sedgwick does not address this fact, this prohibition between the mother and the queer child is amplified and exacerbated by the racialization of motherhood. The example of black mothering in the United States bears this out, for, as Gumbs suggests, “The complexity of the term ‘mother’ (next to ‘Black’) requires

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a queer theory that deuniversalizes race and highlights the function of racism in reproducing the hetropatriarchal status quo.”108 If black mothers face the impossible task of raising children in a country that seemingly prefers that these children not exist, they are still often blamed for being the source and reproductive engine of black sexual and social aberrance.109 These conditions underscore the social insistence that black women distance themselves from queer or trans children, who seem only to confirm the fundamental, unshakeable deviance that is the black mother’s original sin. It would seem, then, that the still-pertinent refusal of the annihilating wish that queer and trans people of color not exist rests not on a repudiation of the mother of color’s role in reproducing black, brown, Asian, indigenous, queer, and trans life, but instead on an enthusiastic embrace and defense of it. The prohibition that renders silent most discussions about the positive role women of color may play in making their kids queer or trans (reproducing and sustaining either/both by teaching their kids how to stay alive) is made palpable less by a proliferating discourse of their pathology than by a lack of discourse at all. Lorde’s 1979 essay “Man Child” articulates an important alternative to this silence, offering a meditation on the relationship between Lorde (a black lesbian feminist mother and poet in an interracial relationship with a white woman) and her/their teenage son, Jonathan. At the center of the essay is this fundamental tension: “Our sons must become men— such men as we hope our daughters, born and unborn, will be pleased to live among.”110 Notwithstanding the fact that some sons will grow up to be women (and/or are daughters despite being mistaken for being sons), Lorde’s essay powerfully explores the forces that shape the reproductive scene between a black lesbian feminist and her child. As Amber Musser argues, the maternal “is a central, often-overlooked component of Lorde’s black lesbian feminist erotic [and] Lorde’s invocation of the maternal works to produce a particular mode of community formation across difference.”111 For Musser, “Lorde’s attachment to the maternal is not only about her role as a mother to two children but also about a link to a future with less suffering.”112 As Lorde described it, “Raising black children in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive. And in order to survive they must let go.

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This is what mothers teach—love, survival—that is, self-definition and letting go.”113 Lorde performs the work of the maternal as a black lesbian feminist, and she does so in a fashion that opens up space for the potential sexual and gender difference of her children. While she does not divulge her son’s sexuality, she holds space for the possibility that he might be queer: “It would be presumptuous of me to discuss Jonathan’s sexuality here, except to state my belief that whomever he chooses to explore this area with, his choices will be nonoppressive, joyful, and deeply felt from within, places of growth.”114 The revolutionary form of black queer feminist mothering that she performs aims to short-circuit the reproduction of the phobic social order in which she raises Jonathan: “I wish to raise a Black man who will not be destroyed by, nor settle for, those corruptions called power by the white fathers who mean his destruction as surely as they mean mine. I wish to raise a Black man who will recognize that the legitimate objects of his hostility are not women, but the particulars of a structure that programs him to fear and desire women as well as his own Black self.”115 This process, she notes, is easier said than done. Jonathan is a sensitive boy who does “not like to play rough games” or “fight” or “stone dogs. And all of this marked him early on as an easy target.”116 This is not to say that Jonathan’s sensitivity is equivalent to queer sexual desire so much as it acknowledges that he is “marked” by a queerness, whether it is imposed upon him by the external world as a result of the queerness of blackness, as an extension of his lesbian mothers, or by virtue of his gender nonnormative comportment. When Jonathan comes home crying, after being bullied, Lorde has to resist the urge to “hiss at the weeping child” and demand that he learn to fight back, for “this is the way we allow the destruction of our sons to begin—in the name of protection and to ease our own pain.”117 Denying the pull to turn him into a proper man (a violent fighter), she affirms his queerness, vulnerability and difference, sharing her own with him, so that he would know that “he didn’t have to fight if he didn’t want to, but somehow he did have to feel better about not fighting.”118 At every point, Lorde’s performance of queer black mothering functions as an antagonism within the order of reproduction that is inherent in both racial capitalism and cis-heteropatriarchy, holding open space for and fostering Jonathan’s blackness and his potential queerness. She

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refuses to play the disciplinary role of the mother, undoing the drive to punish Jonathan for gender non-normativity, and stages instead a mode of queer black mothering that aims not to extinguish the queerness and blackness of the child, but to let it breathe, live, grow into itself, and sustain. And in so doing, she reclaims the maternal from the violent clutches of capitalism and white supremacist heteropatriarchy through a performance of mothering that, as Musser describes it, “simultaneously recuperates matrilineality and the figure of the black mother.”119 If reproductive labor is the very site at which black women have been transformed into commodities, Lorde gains the “insurgent ground” by transforming the role of the black mother into a stage for accessing and embodying a queer practice of reproduction that is capable of sustaining and reproducing black queer life (her own and potentially Jonathan’s) without foreclosing the mother (herself) in the process.

IMUUR2 In “Man Child,” Lorde stages the historically commodified position of the black mother in a fashion that generates and sustains queer, black, and feminist forms of life and living. She stages the role of the queer of color mother in the service of insurgent survival. I was in the fifth-floor gallery of the Guggenheim Museum in the spring of 2013, when I first got a sense of how loudly commodities can speak in the muted but still insurgent voice of the queer of color’s mother, though from a differently racialized position than that of Lorde. Vō was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize in November 2012, and on March 15 of the following year he opened I M U U R 2 at the Guggenheim as part of the prize. In the gallery, a continuous frame of light wooden shelves wraps the room’s perimeter. The shelves are partitioned into horizontal and vertical rectangles of varying size, forming a patchwork of vignettes featuring the personal effects of Florence Wong Fie and her son, the late artist Martin Wong. Florence and Vō collaborated as he curated items for the piece, which Vō in turn presents as a meditation on the complex relationship between a Chinese American immigrant mother and her (dead) gay son. I M U U R 2 offers a rich portrait of the textured life between a queer son and his mother. These folds in the social are what Tadiar describes as “the political seeds of an alternative

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Figure 2.4. Danh Vō, I M U U R 2, 2013. Installation view. Guggenheim Museum, 2013. (Courtesy of Danh Vō.)

future which already exists in the form of devalued social modes of experience” that “fall away” from the omnivorous vortex of global capital.120 The work is estimated to contain from 3,500 to 4,000 objects, many of which are commodities that fell out of circulation decades ago.121 There is a box featuring Kuniyoshi Utagawa’s homoerotic 1860 woodblock print of a gratuitously muscled monk, Mongaku, doing penance beneath the Nichi waterfall. Elsewhere are cardboard boxes that Wong used to ship his latest finds to “Mom”—the address still written across the boxes. In one cubby, a flank of porcelain figurines guards a cardboard box with window cutouts revealing a statue of Shiva. “Happy Mother’s Day” is scrawled across the box in Martin’s handwriting. Drawn across the right side of the box the salutation is rendered in Wong’s signature sign-language hieroglyphics, which feature stylized hands in the shape of ASL letters. Cutting across the middle of the box is a dedication that draws attention to the many arms of the statuette: “for a lady that always has her hands full.” Some of Wong’s smaller paintings hang from the walls, as do other drawings, prints, and reproductions, including his collaboration with Miguel Piñero, Attorney Street (Handball Court

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with Autobiographical Poem by Piñero). One shelf features a black nativity and above it stands a line of ceramic animals guarding a skyline of books. A dark wood china cabinet houses Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck toys, clocks, and figurines. Elsewhere, unnerving huddles of racist kitsch compete for the spectator’s attention against clusters of antique Chinese statuettes. A poster of Aunt Jemimah (the paradigmatic figure of the mammy) haunts one of the lower shelves. Mammy, as Miriam J. Petty writes, is the ultimate personification of the mother who is not one: “Mammy is not a proper ‘mother,’ even as she performs most and sometimes all of the functions associated with motherhood. She is too old or too Black, differences that carefully distinguish her from the ‘real’ mothers for whom she plays a supporting role.”122 Mammy’s inclusion in I M U U R 2 subtly highlights the racialization of reproductive labor and its disruption of the line between the woman of color’s body and the role of the proper or “real” mother. I M U U R 2 was acquired by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2014, and the second time I encountered it, it was deconstructed and distributed through shipping crates in the Walker’s basement. I was standing in a room with concrete floors and shelves lined with framed prints and canvases. Curator Bartholomew Ryan told me that the museum’s curatorial team was trying to figure out how best to display the work. In the meantime, they were busy cataloguing all of the items in the piece. The basement had the feeling of Marx’s abandoned mill, full of objects waiting to come back to life so that they could again dance before the museum’s spectators. In I M U U R 2’s world of four thousand things the son’s possessions blend into the mother’s. Its title bespeaks a mode of being with, or being singular plural, as it underlines the work’s identificatory blur between Florence and her son, but also Vō and the spectator. The title is drawn from a collection of characters (“I M U U R 2”) that Martin printed on the back of his business cards and sometimes included in his paintings. When spoken aloud they sound the phrase “I am you, you are too,” which points to the dissolution of the space between self and other, a space that is always in question when we think the relationship between a mother and her child. The concrete opposition between “I” and “you”

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fades away for a second, reminding us that the condition of being with others is often an experience of a blur between self and other, subject and object, I and you, child and mother. Indeed, the original form of being singular plural may well be the mother-child relation. One can’t tell in the work where the son ends and the mother begins save that the son has already ended. Martin Wong died on August 12, 1999, another queer of color man felled by the plague. Florence and Ben Wong raised Martin in the Bay Area, where he graduated from Humboldt State in 1968 before becoming an active contributor to the legendary queer performance groups Angels of Light and the Cockettes. During the 1980s and early 1990s, the “Chino malo,” as his neighbors called him, became best known as a painter of the brown undercommons of New York’s Lower East Side and Chinatown, where he often lived and collaborated with Nuyorican poet Miguel Piñero. As Roy Pérez argues, Wong’s proximity to Nuyorico in both his life and his work produce “a poetics of proximity that capitalizes on his position on the margin [and stands] as an important archive of cross-racial contact that trouble deterministic and culturally facile conceptions of Latinidad [and we could add Asian Americanness] in which being too easily trumps doing.”123 While battling the later stages of AIDS-related illness, Wong returned to San Francisco in the 1990s to live with his parents and die amidst the collection he and Florence built. Through reproductive labor, Florence brought Martin into the world, sustaining him during the first decades of his life. It was her return to the realm of reproductive labor (caring for him as he died) that bore him out of life and into death. Care work is valued differently when it is directed toward the aging and the sick. “Like all reproductive work,” writes Federici, palliative and elderly care is “not recognized as work, but unlike the reproduction of labor-power, whose product has a recognized value, [it is also] deemed to absorb value but not to produce it.”124 In the twenty-first century, a host of shifting economic and social forces have increasingly redirected elderly and palliative care away from professional institutions and back to “families and kin with little external support, on the assumption that women should naturally take on this task as part of their domestic work”125 The forces of globalization amplify the distribution of care work toward women of color as “a new international division of

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reproductive work” and have “shifted a large amount of care-work on the shoulders of immigrant women.”126 When palliative care and elder work are subsumed into capital through professionalization, they often remain stratified within a racialized and gendered division of labor that targets women of color for the performance of this devalued form of work. As we will discuss in greater length in chapter 5, gay men and people of color were disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS. The devaluation of palliative care during the early days of the crisis became particularly acute, since it was amplified and complicated by the ongoing devaluation of populations most affected by the epidemic. People with HIV/ AIDS were not officially deemed worth saving, as evidenced in the testimony of former Secretary of Treasury Donald T. Regan (1981–1985): “The Reagan Administration realized that there was an AIDS crisis, but that it was being caused by immoral practices. And how far do you want to go to make the world safe for immoral practices? . . . How much of the taxpayers’ money do you want to spend to make that a safe practice?”127 Cast as immoral and biologically nonreproductive and stigmatized because of an infection bearing a terminal illness, persons living with HIV/ AIDS were framed as a fundamental threat to the reproductive order of heterosexuality, as a drain on state resources, and a danger to the health of the body politic. From the state’s perspective, their deaths were preferable to keeping them alive. For queers of color, like Wong, this was compounded with the negating forces of US racism, which have also pursued the removal, exclusion, and in many cases extermination and dehumanization of black, brown, Asian, and indigenous life. In spite of and often because of these annihilating conditions, complex networks of queer care and kinship developed to sustain and reproduce the lives of the first generation taken by the plague. Many gay men, lesbian women, and trans people affected by HIV/AIDS could not rely upon support from biological families who rejected them. Instead, they were sustained by queer kinship networks and activist communities comprised of lovers, ex-lovers, and friends, including women, and lesbians in particular.128 Men like Wong, who could return home, often fell back into the care of their mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and sisters. Martin’s father, Ben, also cared for him. But given the gendered nature of care work, especially within the home, women like Fie often assumed a

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disproportionate mantle of the burden and indeed, Ben, also ailing, died around the time as his son. But Florence’s work didn’t stop there. In the afterlife of Martin’s afterlife, Florence continued to labor to keep his legacy alive. She became an archivist of his things, preserving the objects he touched and made in order to sustain him in an unfolding now to which he could not otherwise be present. In a 2010 letter written to Sergio Bessa, then Director of Programs at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Florence lists a diverse catalogue of Martin’s work while expressing her desire to “help the Bronx Museum to collect more of Martin Wong’s paintings.”129 She reminds Bessa that “Martin did more than just painting, he made wood cuts + prints, drawings, ceramics, poem scrolls, poem books.” And she also includes a description of some of the “various items” from his/their collection: “oil paintings by his friends, Graffiti painting, Chinese scrolls, Japanese prints, Chinese porcelain, art books, Andy Warhol’s items, and some collectible items. I got a house full of collections. People come here they think our house looks like a small museum.” Through actions like these, Florence joined an unsung chorus of women who lost sons, brothers, lovers, comrades, and friends to the AIDS crisis and dedicated an impressive amount of labor to sustain this fallen generation after death.130 In an essay on I M U U R 2, artist and Wong’s friend Julie Ault writes that “Florence Wong Fie’s house is devoted to preserving and displaying everything that is Martin Wong, and the myriad collections that Martin and she accumulated.”131 In the absence of the son, a house filled with his personal property becomes a synecdoche for “everything that is Martin Wong.” From within this home, Florence’s reproductive labor sustains Martin’s being in the presence of our present. “As she has for decades,” writes Ault, “Florence fastidiously catalogs every moment in Martin’s career [and] wholeheartedly greets curators, researchers, old friends, and new enthusiasts of Martin’s work, making the material collection available for research and narrating the trajectories of what resides together in the house.”132 The mother who gave Martin life the first time over, having suffered his premature death, restores and reproduces his life through continued performances of reproductive labor that are tied to, if not in some cases hidden within, the home that Martin became.

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Though often described as a collaboration between Fie and Vō, I M U U R 2 is solely credited to Vō. But in this case, the occlusion of the mother may have arisen from a paradoxical attempt to honor the mother’s address. Ault cites a letter from Florence, in which Florence extends an invitation to visit the home, concluding with the following request: “But, please, if you would write anything, just write about Martin, not me. I would appreciate that.”133 Having argued that we need to listen for the mother’s address, I am in an awkward position, given that I have been largely writing about Florence, and not Martin. But there is a degree to which it’s impossible to honor Florence’s request: One can’t write about a child without simultaneously (if not directly) writing about the mother who touched, conferred life on, and kept them alive. Take one possible translation of the statement, “I am you, you are too,” in which the speaking subject recognizes the Other as a part of the self, but also as distinct, singular, and separate from the self. The son is the mother, and the mother is two: both Florence and also the portion of Florence that extended to and was sustained in the flesh of the son. Reflecting on Spillers’s invitation for the black male to recognize and “say ‘yes’ to the ‘female’ within,” C. Riley Snorton notes the gender transitivity of this scenario such that “the mother being inside the son and through her presence, the son becoming her daughter.”134 Which gestures to the possibility of “I am you, you are two,” in which the speaking subject recognizes the inherent social plurality between self and other, mother and child. The mother is the son and the son is two, both Martin and the portion of Martin’s life that was touched and sustained by the mother. This blur between self and other across gender allows the grieving mother to carry a portion of her son within her after his death; it also sustains Florence in Martin’s work, his things, and ultimately I M U U R 2. Though performance’s mode of reproduction may mimic the features of maternal reproduction, the reproduction of life through an aesthetic register ultimately occurs beyond and beside the matrix of heterosexual, biological reproduction. In sustain and I M U U R 2, it is the labor of a queer of color artist (Rivera and Vō) that sustains and reproduces the trace of the mother. In “Man Child,” it is the queer of color mother (Lorde) who teaches her black and potentially queer son to stay alive, as her aesthetic labor (as a writer) extends her life past the point of her premature death at the age of fifty-eight in 1992. Reproduction occurs

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in these works not as a result of heterosexual copulation, but instead by way of the (symbolically) impossible, but no less real relationship between women of color and their (potentially) queer children. To recognize the productive roles women of color play in sustaining themselves and their queer children, potentially reproducing queerness in the process, is not to say that these relationships are easy or painless. Vō mentioned to me, in an interview, that in spite of the obviously close

Figure 2.5. Danh Vō, 08:03, 28.05, 2009. Late nineteenth-century chandelier. Installation view at Jumex Foundation, 2014. (Courtesy of Danh Vō.)

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relationship between Martin and Florence, Martin’s sexuality lived behind a veil of prohibitive silence.135 This silence must have been painful for him to endure, as it often is for many queers and trans people who accept some form of prohibition in order to sustain relationships with biological families that sustain us in other vital ways. But in spite of the prohibition on Martin’s sexuality, Florence’s efforts to sustain and reproduce Martin and his work achieved the opposite. That is, by keeping Martin’s work alive after his death, Florence couldn’t help but sustain the force and vision of queer brown desire that animates so much of his work. Martin’s queerness, in I M U U R 2, is returned to us by way of performance’s quite queer mode of reproduction, wherein queer of color life is reproduced by an aesthetic gesture, rather than biological process. Indeed, performance’s mode of reproduction suggests that a mother need not be of biological relationship to the child to be a mother, nor must her status as mother be determined by her, his, or their biology.

Sustain In a 2014 installation of 08:03, 28.05 at the Jumex Foundation in Mexico City, a chandelier floats in a white room. It hovers just a small distance above the off-white wooden floors, suspended from a metal chain that is wrapped around industrial rigging which stretches down from a glowing white ceiling. The weight of the chandelier must be considerable, and the line is drawn taught. If just one chain link should give, the entire thing will come crashing to the ground, shattering and flickering out of being. But instead, it floats there, held up and carrying with it its history, which lingers and stays here still. Sustained. To sustain. To exist or be with, endure, suffer, support, bear, lift up, experience, or carry. To live on . . .

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The Marxism of Felix Gonzalez-Torres

“Untitled” (Felix) I have noticed this tendency amongst other queers of color: We often call the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres by his first name. Casually, as if we knew him, though most of us did not. Many of us were still kids when he was living, teenagers in 1996 when the plague took him. But one of Felix’s contemporaries, the artist Glenn Ligon, describes a similar relationship to his proper name: “Now, I didn’t know Felix GonzalezTorres. Felix Gonzalez-Torres wasn’t a friend of mine. And I’m no Felix Gonzalez-Torres. But Felix is the artist that artists of my generation feel on a first name basis with. It is his interviews and writings that we pass along to students; his work that we make pilgrimages to see; his passing that we most deeply mourn.”1 The name “Felix” has become something of a queer of color commons. Felix’s ascendance to art star and icon is not uncomplicated. As Ligon relates, “One has the sense that he was the artist that everyone in the early 1990s was waiting for: articulate, bright, clean, and a nice-looking guy. Felix was the artist of color whom curators and critics buzzed into the corridors of power, while the angry, torch-and-issue-wielding ‘others’ were told to go around to the service entrance or wait by the coatroom. To be sure, his work had ‘issues’ too, but the discussion of them rarely leaves predetermined intellectual comfort zones.”2 He bore many markers of privilege, making him palatable to an otherwise racist and homophobic art world: He was light-skinned, male, formally educated, and aesthetically oblique. Even this embrace has come with a cost. As art historian Miwon Kwon and curator Ann Goldstein separately observe, in spite of the wide range of meaning in Gonzalez-Torres’s work, certain critical approaches prevail, approaches that often remain within Ligon’s “predetermined intellectual comfort zones.”3 In particular, the black, brown, and sometimes queer “issues” at play in his work are commonly elided. 123

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Scholars and interlocutors of color have consistently resisted this tradition. Ligon gestures to one such exception, praising an essay by Gerardo Mosquera for “Mosquera’s insistence on the ‘Latinoness’ of Felix’s project.”4 Here, Ligon isn’t promoting a critical apparatus that essentializes Felix’s work, reducing it to his racial identity as a gay Cuban HIVpositive man living and working in exile in the United States. Rather, he recognizes that these factors were not only part of the complex context that informed the conditions under which Felix made his work, but that they were also often directly addressed by and within the work. The critical reticence around questions of Felix’s background are partially an effect of the artist’s own tactical attempts to disrupt or eschew what Muñoz described as “the facile conceptions of identity” that are often imposed upon people of color and queers by the dominant order.5 During his lifetime, for example, Gonzalez-Torres removed diacritical marks from his name for English publications—a tradition I have reproduced here, following his wishes, though with some reticence and ambivalence. “The roles that are available within dominant culture for Latino/a and other minority identities are narrow, static, and fixed,” Muñoz continued, “[and] in most instances, unable to account for the specificity of black and queer lives or any other . . . minority designations.”6 Felix, he concluded, “rejected the general strictures of identity and what he understood as the constraints of multiculturalism . . . but nonetheless called for what I see as a reconstructed identity politics. . . . GonzalezTorres’s art insisted on speaking queerly and speaking Latino in ways that were oblique. Consequently, his work functioned as a formidable obstacle to facile conceptions of identity.”7 Building on the work of Kwon and Carlos Basualdo, Ligon draws a similar conclusion. But for Ligon, instead of obliquity, it is Felix’s capacity for opacity that transforms the work into something that can be shared, intimate, and common to so many of us: “Like Kwon, [Basualdo] proposes that community brought into being by [Felix’s] public projects is premised not on a shared understanding of their imagery but on those images’ ultimate opacity.”8 What is shared, in this sense, is the unshareable, or what Muñoz ultimately described as the commons of incommensurability: a brown commons akin to queerness, which “is about the incommensurable and is most graspable to us as a sense rather than as a politic. Jean-Luc Nancy also suggests that there is something

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that exceeds politics, what he describes as nonequivalence, something incalculable that needs to be ‘shared (out).’ ”9 This sharing out of the incalculable—this commons of incommensurability—is ultimately what Muñoz was calling for in his call to return to the idea of communism. To share “Felix” is to share him not in spite of but because of our different and incommensurable proximities to him. “The challenge here,” as Muñoz wrote, “is to look to queerness as a mode of ‘being-with’ that defies social conventions and conformism and is innately heretical yet still desirous for the world, actively attempting to enact a commons that is not a pulverizing, hierarchical one bequeathed through logics and practices of exploitation.”10 When the queer of color commons takes form, and when it takes form through minoritarian performance, alternative practices of being with and sharing out are bodied forth as new, material realities. In these flickering instances, some kind of communism is. In one of Felix’s favorite poems, Wallace Stevens’s “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” Stevens describes a union of lovers who “collect ourselves, out of all the indifferences, into one thing.”11 Not the individuality of the “I” or the potentially coercive, fascist union of the “we,” but instead the incommensurable communism of being with and being together in the gaps and breaks between “I” and “we.” From time to time, we stitch ourselves loosely together and gather under a name like “Felix,” where we “make a dwelling in the evening air, / In which being there together is enough.”12 And in the halls of this dwelling we say the names of our dead out loud to each other. But what we are really saying is this: We were. We are. We shall be.

“Untitled” (Madrid 1971) It is a risky bit of provocation: putting Felix’s name in the same space as a call for communism. After all, he didn’t come to Marxism so much as Marxism came to him. Felix was born during the Cuban Revolution in Güaimaro, Cuba, in 1957. Before the revolution came to power in 1959, Cuba was subject to the dictatorship of Fulgencia Batista. When first elected to power in 1940, Batista garnished the support of the Cuban Communist Party, but by his second term he became avowedly antiCommunist (in part, to gain support from Washington, DC). He established an

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increasingly brutal dictatorship and police state, and in 1952 he canceled elections before staging a coup. There was no single revolution, but instead a proliferation of armed and political insurgencies. Of the various parties jockeying for power before and after the collapse of Batista, a new leadership eventually emerged via Fidel and Raúl Castro, alongside Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos, who, as the mythology goes, led a relatively small group of fighters in a successful campaign against the Cuban military before the revolution took Havana in 1959. The following years were marked with uncertainty and paranoia, especially among the wealthy and middle classes. Shortly after consolidating power, Fidel denied that the revolution was communist. But for years, as the revolution nationalized industries, instituted progressive social reforms, and struggled to disestablish the capitalist mode of production within Cuba, great debates waged, at the level of the street, about its nature: Was it communist or even Marxist? Was Fidel?13 Some parents (typically drawn from the privileged class) began to send their children away. As described by Alexandra Vazquez, “They couldn’t bear the uncertainties or what the swift changes happening around them would mean for their children. So, they sent them, alone, to a strange array of US cities. The separations were supposed to be temporary. Some families were reunited. Just as many were not.”14 In 1971, along with his sister, Felix was separated from his parents and sent to Spain before coming to the United States by way of Puerto Rico. It wasn’t uncommon for Gonzalez- Torres to incorporate the autobiographical into his work, and in a 1988 piece titled “Untitled” (Madrid  1971), he looked back on those early days of exile.15 “Untitled” (Madrid 1971) consists of two puzzles in plastic bags: an image of the artist as a thirteen- or fourteen-year old boy and a photo of a statue (possibly in Madrid). His portrait looks like a standard school photo; he stares back at us with a flat, pensive expression. The photograph of the statue is shot from underneath, which might induce a sense of domination for the spectator who looks up at the monumental figure from below. For Muñoz, the juxtaposition of the two images “gestures to the fashion in which identity is eclipsed by a system of national signs that do not constitute one’s citizenship but instead one’s alienation, displacement, and exile.”16 Printing the images on puzzles, Gonzalez-Torres

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Figure 3.1. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Madrid 1971), 1988. C-print jigsaw puzzle in plastic bag and wall lettering. Three parts, 15 x 18 in. overall; one part 9 ½ x 7 ½ in., one part 7 ½ x 9 ½ in., one part: ½ x 3 in. ARG# GF1988–012. (© The Felix GonzalezTorres Foundation. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, NY.)

stages this moment from his childhood as fragile, barely held together, and ever on the verge of falling apart. Making a puzzle of the statue underlines, as well, the fact that the seemingly monumental (the national or the symbolic) can be dissolved in a revolutionary instant. It also reminds us of the material costs incurred in the wake of revolution at the point of the body of a little boy. That one can trace this range of meaning from the relatively oblique materials supplied by the artist underlines the fact that, as Muñoz wrote, Gonzalez-Torres performed “a strategic obliquity that is antiidentitarian in the service of a reconstructed identity politics.”17 This reconstructed identity politics was the ground of the communal, the social, and the political as, in Gonzalez-Torres’ work, commonality is not forged through shared images and fixed identifications but fashioned

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instead from connotative images that invoke communal structures of feelings.”18 As a result, during an encounter with the work, what Muñoz describes as “exile and ethnos” can be experienced as a structure of feeling that clusters around the work. The work, in other words, is charged with brownness—a feeling that, for Muñoz, is incalculable and nonetheless needs to be shared (out).19 Art came early to Felix, well before he left Cuba. At seven or eight years old his father “bought me a set of watercolors, and gave me my first cat.”20 Cats and art would be a recurrent theme in his life until his death thirty years later. After Spain, he went to live with his uncle in Puerto Rico, where he studied art at the Universidad de Puerto Rico in the late 1970s, staging early experiments in performance and body art.21 He would not visit Cuba again until 1979, when he saw his parents for the first time after eight years of separation. Shortly after, they were reunited when his parents came to the United States as part of the Mariel boat lift. Around that time, he relocated to New York to complete a BFA at the Pratt Institute in 1983. One night that same year he met a boy who also loved cats at the Boybar. Felix’s chance encounter with the disarmingly handsome sommelier, Ross Laycock, would have an immeasurable impact on his life and work. “To say that Félix and Ross were close would scarcely do them justice,” wrote their friend Joe Clark. “Their lives would become intertwined like the strands of a helix.”22 Felix and Ross fell in love with each other and built a world in which they could sustain each other. For much of their relationship, Ross lived in Toronto, Felix in New York. Neither Canada nor the United States recognized the status of the relationship, so what time they had together they had to steal from a regime of homophobic policies separating queer partners at the worst possible time. The first wave of the AIDS crisis was starting to ravage queer urban lifeworlds in places like New York and Toronto and it was coming, soon enough, to Felix and Ross. Felix’s reunion with his family didn’t last long. His mother died in 1986. A year later he earned an MFA in photography from New York University, accepted an invitation to join the influential art collective Group Material, and continued to develop his solo practice. The world that Felix and Ross built to survive together became a kind of living toward death. Ross died of AIDS complication on January 24,

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1991, devastating Felix.23 With US immigration rules being kinder to pets than people, the artist wrote that in 1991, “Bruno and Mary, two black cats Ross found in Toronto, came to live with me.”24 In the wake of Ross’s death, he tried to rebuild, but “the world I knew is gone,” so he “moved the four cats, books, and a few things to a new apartment.”25 As his artmaking was one of the means through which he had sustained his dialogue with Ross, and unsure of where to go next, he began to make more work. From the late 1980s until his death on January 9, 1996, he appropriated the forms and strategies of conceptual art and minimalism to explore a range of themes. His work staged deconstructions of the binary between the public and private spheres, critiquing and intervening in the economic and social systems organizing and threatening queer, black, brown, and immigrant life. But rather than taking these issues on through direct representational means or political didacticism, he engaged in the tactical deployment of abstraction, obliquity, and opacity. His work took a range of forms exemplified in ten dominant series (listed in approximate order of emergence): c-print puzzles, framed Photostats (featuring chains of nonchronological nouns and dates), statues, paper stacks, candy spills, graphite drawings of bloodwork, beaded curtains, billboards, nonrepresentational portraits (also comprised of curated chains of dates and nouns), and strings of light. To be clear, when I describe the communism of Gonzalez-Torres’s work, or even the Marxism of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, I’m not making a claim that the artist was a communist or Marxist. Instead, I’m attending to the Marxist valences of his thought and the sense of communist sociality performed in/through the work. The praxis, tactics, and strategies of Gonzalez-Torres were at least influenced by, if not directly expressive of, a Marxist worldview.26 He told Joseph Kosuth that his work was animated by “psychoanalysis and Marxist analysis and feminism more than anything else.”27 He mobilized a Marxist vocabulary in interviews and writings, appropriating and employing key concepts from Marxism, while repeatedly acknowledging his debt to theory. It was no accident that many of the theorists he regularly turned to (Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, Louis Althusser) were situated within or proximal to the Marxist tradition. Without their work, he insisted, “I wouldn’t have been able to make certain pieces, to arrive at certain positions. Some of

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their writings and ideas gave me a certain freedom to see.”28 Theory and Marxist theory, in particular, could bring about an emancipatory form of demystification and the emergence of a new sense (“a certain freedom to see”). His relationship with Marxist theory was so self-evident that at one point he went out of his way to describe his desire for a public beyond the students of Marxist thought: “I don’t want to make art just for the people who can read Fredric Jameson sitting upright on a Mackintosh chair. I want to make art for people who watch The Golden Girls and sit in a big, brown, La-Z-Boy chair. They’re part of my public too.”29 Underscoring the communist impulses that animate his work, he named a desire to “make art for people,” describing the “people” as not just the artistic or intellectual elite, but also the common people (“people who watch The Golden Girls and sit in a big, brown, La-Z-Boy chair”). But, importantly, the person reading Jameson, sitting upright on a Mackintosh chair, was “part of my public too.” Gonzalez-Torres gave his work away to the public in a fashion akin to performance. From sculptures made of stacks of paper, to spills of glittering, wrapped candies staged and spread across the floor or piled into a corner, many of his works become themselves through performance’s dialectic of presence and disappearance as they are given away to their audiences. The artist described this as an intervention in the means of distribution. “A reading [of my work] that has been overlooked is the radicality of certain forms of distribution,” he said to Robert Nickas in 1991.30 “I am trying to alter the system of distribution of an idea through an art practice,” he told Tim Rollins in 1993.31 As Kwon observes, Gonzalez-Torres’s work posits “modes of exchange in the marketplace as integral rather than extrinsic to his work’s artistic meaning.”32 The work was an intervention into the market at the level of the market; distribution wasn’t just a component of his work—in many instances it was the work. But as much as his aesthetic strategies (using massproduced materials or public media, like billboards) aimed at achieving the (re)distribution of the work to the public, he was also uniquely invested in art’s ability to function as a means for affecting the redistribution of resources and knowledge for the commons. Mass distribution was not merely an endpoint for his practice; the artist appropriated the dominant means of distribution to transform the aesthetic encounter

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into a scene of redistributive sharing, and the sharing of minoritarian knowledge in particular. All of this, he would say, served his commitment to radical social change: “I’m still proposing the radical idea of trying to make this place a better place for everyone.”33 As Marx makes clear in the Gotha Critique (“from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”), communism and redistribution are intimately intertwined. This is a general problem for political economy. In the Grundrisse, for example, Marx notes that liberal political economists generally figure distribution as secondary to the primacy of production: “The structure of distribution is entirely determined by the structure of production. Distribution itself is a product of production, not only with regard to the object, [in the sense] that only the results of production can be distributed, but also with regard to the form, [in the sense] that the particular mode of participation in production determines the specific forms of distribution.”34 Marx later argues, in volume 3 of Capital, that the distribution of resources (and wealth) is the social “form” produced by distribution: “These are thus relations or forms of distribution, for they express the relationships in which the total value newly produced is distributed among the owners of the various agents of production.”35 The relations of distribution (including the distribution of labor, resources, and social hierarchy), again, follow from the relations of production, but as a set of social relations they are inseparable from each other: “The relations of distribution are essentially identical with these relations of production, the reverse side of the same coin, so that the two things share the same historically transitory character.”36 Given the primacy often attributed to production, it is unsurprising that historical struggles to realize just and equitable redistribution have placed so much emphasis on acquiring the means of production. The orthodox assumption is that if you conquer the means of production (and the institutions responsible for the reproduction of the relations of production—including the state), you necessarily reorganize the corresponding forms and relations of (unjust) distribution. Historically, communism revealed that assumption to be complicated, at best, and disastrous, at worst. And the fact that the distribution of resources, wealth, power and knowledge often also falls along lines defined by race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and/or citizenship—in excess of or as

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a contradiction within dominant economic arrangements—requires a radically modified approach. As revolutionary parties in places like Stalinist Russia planned for communism, the centralization of the means of production into the state often led to the modified replacement of the private capitalist class with a “bureaucratic-administrative one-party state.”37 But the reproduction of capitalism’s exploitative relations of production and distribution often remained in place in some form. As the Johnson-Forest Tendency (James, Dunayevskaya, and Boggs) insisted in 1951, the crucial question for Marxism was thus “Can the nationalized property be planned without having as the inevitable consequence the domination of a single party,” which in turn evolves into the tyranny of the political dictatorship of state capitalism?38 Gonzalez-Torres’s intervention at the point of distribution, and through aesthetic means, offers us one (bloodless) way of exploring the Johnson-Forest Tendency’s question. Though the work can’t provide an answer to the question, it rehearses and materializes the social conditions under which we might begin to develop one. There are a few moments when Marx theorizes the capacity for radical transformation to occur as a result of changes in distribution and it is in these moments that we catch an anticipatory glimmer of the Marxism of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Before declaring, in Capital, the “essentially identical” nature of the relations of production and distribution, the Marx of 1857 wrote that “the result at which we arrive is, not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they are all elements of a totality, differences within a unity.”39 While he maintained that “the process always starts afresh with production,” distribution (insofar as it distributes the agents of production) has its own productive powers and “is itself a moment of production.”40 While production determines distribution, exchange, and circulation, it “is in its turn also determined by the other moments.”41 As a result, “Changes in distribution . . . entail changes in production.”42 For the remainder of this chapter, I track Gonzalez-Torres’s interventions at the point of distribution to cast light on the moments when redistributive practices open up a horizon of queer of color communist sociality. But as Marx himself insisted, the world is full of contradiction. Which is to acknowledge that the Marxism of Felix Gonzalez-Torres is

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not without significant contradictions. Indeed, his interest in and relationship to contradiction was one of the primary characteristics of his Marxist praxis.

“Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) In the early winter of 2015 my friend Jeanne comes to visit Chicago. We go to see a show at the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago, where Gonzalez-Torres had a major solo exhibition in 1994. As we’re making our way out of the exhibition space, we pass the administrative offices. “Look,” I say, gesturing to two clocks side by side, perfectly timed to each other, and hanging on the office walls. “Yeah,” she whispers. A little sadness passes between us. Our late friend and teacher loved Felix, and an encounter with Felix is an encounter with missing him.

Figure 3.2. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), 1987–1990. Wall clocks, 13 ½ x 27 x 1 ¼ in. overall: two parts, 13 ½ in. diameter each. Edition of 3, 1 AP. Photographer Peter Muscato. (© The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, NY.)

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In the work “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), 1987–1990, one of the clock’s batteries will eventually give out and the pair will fall out of synch. If one, or both, clocks stop working, the work is de-installed until the clock is replaced (or its batteries are), and both clocks are re-installed, reset to a synchronous time.43 He began to exhibit the work to the public in 1988, and I like to think that the work might have been a love letter to Ross. “When people ask me, ‘Who is your public?’ ” he once said, “I say honestly, without skipping a beat, ‘Ross.’ The public was Ross. The rest of the people just come to the work.”44 Queer life and love in the 1980s was cruelly characterized by the knowledge that time was running out. Even if Felix didn’t make the piece for Ross, he inscribed a similar image in a love letter to Ross where he drew two clocks at the top, side by side, in blue ink. Beneath them he typed the words, “Lovers, 1988,” followed by an address: “Don’t be afraid of the clocks, they are our time, time has been so generous to us. We imprinted time with the sweet taste of victory. We conquered fate by meeting at a certain TIME in a certain space. We are a product of the time, therefore we give back credit were [sic] it is due: time.”45 In spite of the fact that time was running out, time also gave them to each other. Time bound them together, and they still had time together, before and beyond death. “We are synchronized, now and forever,” he concluded. “I love you.”46 Ross and Felix were together for eight years, and for much of that time they couldn’t be in the same place. But apart, they were in synch. They were with each other. Perfect lovers. A contradiction: This, generous, gentle, loving work is the result of exploitative conditions of production. The artist didn’t always physically make his pieces. His base materials were often industrially produced (two clocks, a stack of printed paper, a pile of candies, a strand of lights). He was as acutely aware that he was selling the products of other people’s labor (what Marx described as the merchant capitalist’s act of “buying in order to sell dearer”) as he was conscious of the implications of doing so on the art market.47 The move, he suggested, was tactical. It was performance, and he was playing a part: “It would be very expected, very logical and normal and ‘natural’ for me to be in alternative spaces, but it’s more threatening that people like me are operating as part of the market—selling the work, especially when you consider that, yes, this is just a stack of paper that I didn’t even touch. Those contradictions have a lot of meaning.”48

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During Gonzalez-Torres’s lifetime the market was (as it continues to be) driven by the enduring fetishization of the work of straight white male artists. The overvaluation of such often mediocre work (by, for example, Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst) coincided with the devaluation and derision of work by “people like me,” artists of color, queer, trans, and women of color artists who were, and continue to be, denied access to and support within the educational and exhibiting institutions of the art world. Gonzalez-Torres saw the tactical advantage that a performance of infiltration would give him, allowing him access to the institutions and apparatuses of the majoritarian sphere where he set out to appropriate the dominant mode of production and means of distribution in order to turn them against themselves. Performing the recognizable role of the institutionally sanctioned artist allowed him to function, in his own words, as a “virus that belongs to the institution. All the ideological apparatuses are . . . replicating themselves, because that’s the way culture works. So if I function as a virus, an imposter, an infiltrator, I will always replicate myself together with those institutions.”49 Majoritarian systems often diffuse the threat of minoritarian difference through controlled absorption, assimilating the threat of difference and neutralizing it in the process. When he took on the institutionally recognizable role of the conceptual artist or minimalist sculptor, GonzalezTorres did so less to assimilate into the system than to infiltrate it and function as an internal contradiction within it. “This type of work,” he once said referring to the stacks, “has this image of authority, especially after so many years of conceptual art and minimal art. They look so powerful, they look so clean, they look so historical already. But in my case, when you get close to them, you realize that they have been ‘contaminated’ with something social.”50 They are, in other words, charged with queerness and the sense of brown. The point I’m making, following Felix, is not that minoritarian subjects need to become bankers so that we can reform the ills of racial capitalism and cis-heteropatriarchy from within the bank. Rather, we need to learn how to play the part of the banker in order to get inside the bank, gain access to the vault’s codes, steal what’s inside, redistribute it to the people who need it, and fund the insurgency with what’s left over. Easier said than done. If we take seriously Jameson’s suggestion that art functions as the political unconscious of a given social order, we might see the production

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of value in Gonzalez-Torres’s work as a reflection of dominant modes of value production in the era of financialization.51 In the era of finance capital, value commonly emerges through what Franco Berardi describes as a “parthogenetic” process: “The monetization and financialization of the economy represent a parthogenization of the creation of value. Value does not emerge from a physical relationship between work and things, but rather from the self-replication of the parthogenetic force of finance.”52 The financial economy’s parthogenetic production of value thus finds a correlative in the form of value produced by the conceptual artist: “The financial economy (like conceptual art) is a parthogenetic process.”53 We catch an example of this with “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), 1987–1990, in which the artist plays no role in the clock’s material construction. For many of Gonzalez-Torres’s pieces, purchase results in the transfer of title of ownership, a certificate of authenticity with instructions for producing/assembling/materializing the work, but not always including a prefabricated art object-as-commodity. Gonzalez-Torres appropriated this tactic from the tradition of conceptual art, as in Sol Lewitt’s wall drawings. Lewitt insisted that a wall drawing only exists during the period of its materialization and exhibition, effectively constituting the work as a time bound performance event. As performances, the wall drawings at least complicate the process of capital accumulation insofar as they are not enduring objects (commodities) to which value can be attached. The market eventually figured out how to monetize conceptual and performance art, but the insurgent, value-confusing potentialities animating Lewitt’s or Gonzalez-Torres’s tactics are still by no means exhausted. Lewitt’s wall drawings explore what occurs when the artist appropriates the industrialized means and relations of production. Gonzalez-Torres expanded on this experiment, appropriating industrial means of production, but focusing his intervention at the point of distribution. Still, there remains the question of who physically produces the work and under what conditions? Even in the era of financialization, value still emerges from the physical relationship between work and things. An owner of “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) still displays the work in its objectified, material form (two clocks). What the spectator encounters is an art object that is the result

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of productive labor performed by someone other than the artist. Productive labor remains a central node for the extraction of value, and it is a form of labor that is increasingly gendered and racialized, having shifted from the factories of Europe and North America to the feminized productive centers of the Global South.54 So while the value extracted from “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) may be parthogenetic, Gonzalez-Torres must have understood that the exploitation of productive laborers remained a contradiction embedded within his work. Without the unnamed worker responsible for producing the clocks, there can be no “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) to infiltrate the market. This contradiction takes on added significance when we consider the fact that “people like” Gonzalez-Torres (people of color) aren’t supposed to be agents on the market; more nearly, they are meant to perform as the invisible labor that makes its machinery turn. Rather than reading this contradiction as an impasse, GonzalezTorres approached the matter dialectically. Performing the strategic infiltration of the art market and appropriating the dominant means of production, distribution, and exchange, he could cast light upon (and ultimately become) an antagonistic site of contradiction within the market. In the Marxist tradition, the dialectic proceeds through the contemplation and working through of the contradictions and antagonisms contained within a single system. To think dialectically is to understand that contradiction “is not that which blocks and suspends movement,” as Jameson observes, “but [that from] within which movement itself takes place.”55 In his conversation with Kosuth (which doubles as a tactual manual on infiltration), Gonzalez-Torres admitted, “And I think that maybe I’m embracing those institutions which before I would have rejected. Money and capitalism are powers that are here to stay, at least for the moment. It’s within those structures that change can and will take place.”56 For Jameson, a dialectician embraces contradiction, working through “the paradoxes, antimonies, and ultimately contradictions which then historicize the previous moment of ‘conclusion’ and enable a new dialectical ‘solution.’ ”57 Gonzalez-Torres described his primary goal similarly: “I want to work within the system. I want to work within the contradictions of the system and try to create a better place.”58 Marx

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himself describes the working through of contradiction as the engine of movement and transformation. “The exchange of commodities,” he writes, “implies contradictory and mutually exclusive conditions. The further development of the commodity does not abolish these contradictions, but rather provides the form within which they have to move. This is, in general, the way in which contradictions are resolved.”59 Capital contains its own antimonies and antagonistic forces, and Marx insisted that it was by working through the contradictions within the capitalist mode of production that labor’s revolutionary triumph over capital could be achieved. Gonzalez-Torres, too, understood the working through of contradiction as a necessary condition for the radical reorganization of the social. The artist’s strategies were unquestionably supported by registers of privilege. As Muñoz notes, the strategies of resistance and self-making performed by Gonzalez-Torres “are, for the most part, more readily available to subjects whose class privilege gives them access to systems of representation.”60 Still, Gonzalez-Torres’s agenda didn’t take as its end the assumption of a privileged, protected position of power, waiting for the dialectic to work itself out. Rather, the act of infiltration was a tactical attempt to amplify and manipulate the system’s contradictions. It’s here that we find the similarities between the Marxism of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and (what Georg Lukács described as) the Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg.61 For Luxemburg, “the breakdown” of the capitalist system will be the result of the weight and drag of its own internal contradictions.62 Capital’s sublimation by communism is not predetermined, however, so much as it requires the strategic antagonization of these contradictions. Furthermore, as Karatani Kojin would later remark, in order to avoid the manipulation of the breakdown by reactionary forces (or what Naomi Klein describes as “disaster capitalism”), “a noncapitalist economic sphere must be created.”63 That is, alternatives need to be in place as options for when the breakdown occurs. To experiment with and rehearse alternative practices of social and economic arrangement (by way of producer cooperatives, for example) is necessary “even if they are unable to immediately transcend capitalism,” since “the creation of an economic sphere beyond capitalism . . . gives people a foreshadowing of what it might mean to transcend capitalism.”64 What I am suggesting

Utagawa Hiroshige, Fukagawa Susaki and Jumantsubo, No. 107, from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, fifth month of 1857. 14 3/16 x 9 ¼ in. Brooklyn Museum. Gift of Ana Ferris, 30.1478.107. Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 30.1478.107. (Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum.)

Danh Vō, 08:03, 28.05, 2009, and Tombstone for Nguyen Thi Ty, 2009. Late nineteenthcentury chandelier; marble, granite, bronze and wood relief. 86 5/8 x 23 5/8 x 7 7/8”. Installation view at Kunsthalle Basil. (Courtesy of Danh Vō.)

Danh Vō, I M U U R 2, 2013. Installation view. Guggenheim Museum, 2013. (Courtesy of Danh Vō.)

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (March 5th) #2, 1991. Light bulbs, porcelain light sockets, and extension cords. Overall dimensions vary with installation. Two parts: approximately 113 inches in height each. Edition of 20, 2 AP. ARG# GF1991–012. (© The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, NY.)

Eiko & Koma, Naked. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, November 2010. Photo: Anna Campbell. (Courtesy of Eiko & Koma and Anna Campbell.)

Eiko, A Body in Fukushima. (On the Tracks, Momouchi), Summer 2014. Photographer: William Johnston. (Courtesy of Eiko and William Johnston.)

Eiko, rehearsal for A Body in a Station, October 2014. Photographer Anna Campbell. (Courtesy of Eiko and Anna Campbell.)

Tseng Kwong Chi, East Meets West Manifesto, 1983. (© Muna Tseng Dance Projects, New York. Courtesy of Muna Tseng Dance Projects.)

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here is that Gonzalez-Torres’s work offers an ephemeral experience of such alternatives from within the coordinates determined by and within capitalism. Gonzalez-Torres took on the role of the artist in a fashion that dissolved a division of labor that distinguishes the work of the artist from the work of insurgency: As Che Guevara said during the 1960s, whatever you do, that’s your trench. So this is my trench and I trust my agenda. People misunderstand this, thinking that for the “revolution” to succeed, everyone must literally go into the trenches. But no, we need hairdressers, bakers, carpenters, pastry chefs, artists—not just guerrillas. As it is impossible to ever escape ideology, maybe the only way out is to work with the different levels of contradiction in our culture.”65

In mobilizing performance to infiltrate the institutions of the art market, as well as the ideological apparatuses reproductive of the majoritarian sphere, he sought to “work with the different levels of contradiction” within that system and forge a “way out” from an inside (since there is no outside). Once inside, he set to subverting and undermining the basic assumptions that undergird the market’s mode of value production, transforming his work into hubs for the (re)distribution of the resources and knowledge necessary to sustain imperiled and minor life.

“Untitled” (Memorial Day Weekend) He began to grapple with the question of distribution early in his career, focusing first on solving a practical problem: how to get the work shown. He developed his first paper stacks in 1988. Among them, “Untitled” (Memorial Day Weekend) and “Untitled” (Veterans Day Sale) both consist of a stack of paper, each with an offset print featuring one of the parenthetical references to a national/commercial holiday. As spectators take the paper with them, the sculpture diminishes over time, but a certificate of authenticity stipulates that the stacks are to be replenished at the discretion of the owner (or exhibiting institution).66 Within the Marxism of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, destruction is tied to renewal and reproduction, and the work is achieved through its constant distribution.

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The use of the floor to display the sculpture helped solved the practical problem of distribution. “The first stacks I made were some of the date-pieces,” he said. “Around 1989 everyone was fighting for wall space. So the floor space was free, the floor space was marginal. I was also interested in giving back to the viewer, to the public, something that was never really mine to start with.”67 Turning to the minor or “marginal” space of the floor, Gonzalez-Torres inverted capital’s process of primitive accumulation (seeking out “new” or “untapped” sites for value extraction, often resulting in colonial and imperial enterprise).68 He appropriated marginal zones in spaces already developed by the market in order to transform them into distribution platforms where he could give his work away to the public that encountered them. While he staged the paper stacks in marginal spaces, the form they took appropriated the tactics of majoritarian artists, effecting what Muñoz described as a disidentificatory performance “strategy that works on and against dominant ideology.”69 Performing the role of the conceptual artist, or minimalist sculptor, allowed Gonzalez-Torres to produce minoritarian knowledge from within an art market and art-critical establishment that was (and continues to be) hostile to or exploitative of the innovations of artists of color, women, and queer of color artists. As curator Nancy Spector writes, “By appropriating and inhabiting classically ‘straight’ aesthetic genres—the documentary photograph, the macho graffitilike scrawl, the Minimalist cube, and so on—[queers, women, and artists of color] effectively infiltrated the art system and undermined some of its most conventional, complacent assumptions.”70 Mimicking “classically ‘straight’ aesthetic genres,” minoritarian artists deployed performance to infiltrate the exclusive structures of a majoritarian art sphere that was effectively predicated upon their exclusion. Once inside, Gonzalez-Torres appropriated the dominant means of distribution to facilitate the sharing out of his work and the redistribution of minoritarian resources and knowledge. Minimalist sculpture, largely associated with the work of straight white men, presupposed that the subject of sculpture was limited to what the spectator sees: the sculpture’s physical presence, its mass and matter. As Gonzalez-Torres observed, however, minimalism’s insistence on the work’s formal neutrality was ultimately a facile reproduction of the straight, white, male artist as a neutral, universal form of unmarked

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subjectivity. “After twenty years of feminist discourse and feminist theory,” Gonzalez-Torres replied to the minimalist’s declarations of neutrality, “we have come to realize that ‘just looking’ is not just looking but that looking is invested with identity: gender, socioeconomic status, race, sexual orientation.”71 (For many of us, when we look at a Carl Andre sculpture, for example, all we see is the outline of Ana Mendieta falling to her death from their high-rise apartment.) Working within the form’s own contradictions, at the same time that he dismissed the minimalist’s claim to absolute formalism, Gonzalez-Torres exploited the possibilities opened up by these experiments in form. “Minimalist sculptures were never really primary structures, they were structures that were embedded with a multiplicity of meanings.”72 When an artist “like” Gonzalez-Torres (a queer of color, Cuban immigrant) appropriates the aesthetics of the minimalists, the form’s presumed neutrality is exposed as a fiction serving the interests of the dominant power bloc. “Believe it or not,” he said, “I am a big sucker for formal issues, and, yes, someone like me—the ‘other’—can indeed deal with formal issues. This is not a white-men-only terrain, sorry boys.”73 As he declared that “this is not a white-men-only terrain,” GonzalezTorres insisted that race, sex, and sexuality still make a difference to and remain salient points of interrogation within the work. Indeed, his appropriation of the anti-representational, seemingly neutral, formalism of minimalism opened up new means for him to proliferate a multiplicity of meanings for what brownness and queerness can be (or what a queer Cuban American artist can do) beyond the limited presumptions attached to and projected across his body/body of work. Just as we should be suspicious of a critical scheme that reduces Gonzalez-Torres’s work to his various identities, we should be equally suspicious of formalist critical practices that ignore or erase the queer brown content of the work, neutralizing the effect that minoritarian subjects (“people like me”) can have upon the majoritarian institutions and forms that they infiltrate, appropriate, transform, and even destroy. Though you wouldn’t know it from the relative silence that the dominant critical tradition brings to bear on the question of race in Gonzalez-Torres’s work, brownness (and blackness), while not necessarily deterministic of the work, remained a central thematic concern for the artist.

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“Untitled” (Death by Gun) When describing his strategy of appropriating the gallery floor, Gonzalez-Torres claimed that “it was also about trying to be a threat to the art-marketing system, and also, to be really honest, it was about being generous to a certain extent. I wanted people to have my work. The fact that someone could just come and take my work and carry it with them was very exciting.”74 In the 1980s the United States art market began to recover from years of crisis and stagnation. As Lisa Phillips argues, after decades of radical experiments in performance art, minimalism, and conceptual art (which challenged the commodification of the enduring art object), the art world returned to elevating the conservative figures of the white male painter/sculptor embodied by the rise of Julian Schnabel or David Salle.75 Gonzalez-Torres described this as a “scary return of the bohemian painter . . . a very dangerous, anti-historical, anti-intellectual movement that served, very clearly, the needs of an artificially wealthy new clientele who wanted some art to decorate their new lobbies, apartments, and (now empty) offices.”76 While the Reagan administration was dismantling the public sphere (redistributing wealth upward through a combination of tax cuts, privatization, and mass deregulation), the financial class gained a new potency and influence over the institutions of cultural production.77 The art market increasingly emerged as a slush fund for the financial class, and the enduring art object returned to the international art market with a vengeance. Today, the art-object-as-commodity increasingly functions as a means for the financial class to store self-generating capital while avoiding taxation.78 Creating pieces that had to be given away to the public, GonzalezTorres infiltrated the market in order to invert its prevailing logic of private ownership. Though the responsibilities of the owner of a work are variable and specific to the piece, when a private investor purchases certain of his billboards, for example, what they may end up purchasing is a responsibility to share the work freely with the public. “They’re privately owned,” he remarked, “but always publicly shown. People can buy these billboards, but they have to put them in public—they have to rent a public space.”79 As an event, such works become a condition for the constitution of a commons. As Spector noted, “By inviting his viewers

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to share in the work . . . Gonzalez-Torres opens up a communal space in which a dialogic relationship between artist and audience becomes possible and in which the various meanings of the work begin to coalesce.”80 Having appropriated the market’s means of distribution to give his work away to the public, he designed the work to function as a nexus for the redistribution of resources and knowledge. As Gonzalez-Torres often argued, the technological innovations of late capital’s media-sphere have produced a deluge of information that short-circuits our capacity to locate meaning and thus to collectively mobilize resistance to the forces effecting meaning’s catastrophic implosion. His work invited the spectator to be a source of knowledge production and meaning-making, but equally important was the work’s function as a node for distributing knowledge in a way that could counter the hegemony of the majoritarian sphere. The work thus became a means for the (re)distribution of minoritarian knowledge: insurgent, counter-discursive forms of knowing and being in the world that disrupt the dominant hegemony and offer the epistemological alternatives of black, brown, queer, trans, feminist, decolonial, and anti-capitalist ways of knowing and being together. Against the eliding forces of the majoritarian sphere, minoritarian knowledge insists on the intelligence and the revolutionary intellectual faculties of minoritarian subjects. But as Muñoz describes it, “Within majoritarian institutions the production of minoritarian knowledge is a project set up to fail. Mechanisms ensure that the production of such knowledge ‘misfires’ as it is misheard, misunderstood, and devalued.”81 Minoritarian knowledge negotiates this limit, accounting for, announcing, and theorizing the world from a minor position. Minoritarian knowledge is the theory that imagines and articulates the vision of another world in which we might all continue to live together despite the promise of impending annihilation. Minoritarian performance is its praxis. Amada Cruz describes Gonzalez-Torres’s 1990 “Untitled” (Death by Gun) as a work in which “he is perhaps at his most didactic.”82 But we might also describe it as an explicit, unapologetic mobilization of his work to facilitate the distribution of minoritarian knowledge. The stack debuted in 1990, and printed on each page of the stack is a photographic montage of people killed in gun-related violence during a one-week

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Figure 3.3. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Death by Gun), 1990. Print on paper, endless copies, 9 in. at ideal height x 33 x 45 in. (original paper size). Installation view: 1991 Whitney Biennial. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. April 19–June 16, 1991. Catalogue. (© The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, NY.)

period in the United States. Accompanying each entry there is either a thumbnail portrait of the victim or a stock silhouette as well as the victim’s names, stats, and details of their death. The sheet is a collated reproduction of a July 17, 1989, article from Time Magazine divided into twenty rectangular frames. Each frame is a page from the Time spread, and every one contains approximately twenty portraits. While most of the thumbnails are the same size, about eleven of them are enlarged. One can pick individual profiles to read at will or work one’s way through the list of deaths sequentially. The serial repetition of the thumbnails recall Andy Warhol’s sequencing of images in the early 1960s with works that include 100 Dollar Bills (a serialization of the US dollar bill), Green Coca-Cola Bottles, and

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Warren (a portrait of Warren Beatty). “Untitled” (Death by Gun) has a particular visual resonance with Warren. Produced with silkscreen ink and pencil on linen, Warren is also a black and white image. The repetition of Beatty’s headshot virtually obliterates the singularity of the movie star’s handsome features, and the expression on Beatty’s face, repeated eighty times, becomes as empty as the vacant areas that occupy the right side of the canvas. When read in relation to 100 Dollar Bills or Green Coca-Cola Bottles, Beatty is figured as merely another mass-produced commodity issued from the machinery of the culture industries in the same way that soup cans, coke bottles, or paper money surge forth from a factory. Let’s imagine a gallery in which 100 Dollar Bills hangs between Green Coca-Cola Bottles and Warren. In such a configuration, the dollar bill would stand in as the “universal equivalent.” Through the mediation of money, the Hollywood star and the Coke bottles are figured as commodities that, in Marx’s words, “relate to each other merely as exchangevalues.”83 When we think of these three paintings in this imagined curatorial sequence, we get a glimpse of three incommensurable things (a coke bottle, a dollar bill, Beatty’s face) as they are flattened into a relation of equivalence by way of exchange value: “When a product (or an activity) becomes exchange value . . . it must at the same time be qualitatively transformed, converted into another element, so that both commodities become denominated quantities, in the same units, thus becoming commensurable.”84 But commensurability, necessary for market exchange, flattens the sensuous and detailed nature of life as it is actually lived. From within this imaginary gallery, picture “Untitled” (Death by Gun) placed on the floor in front of the Warhol sequence. When imagined in a relationship to each other, we begin to see the gunshot victims, like Beatty’s celebrity or the coke bottle, as a product of industry. We might grasp the fact that the arms industry doesn’t merely manufacture and distribute guns, but also produces death at a rapid pace. Furthermore, the surge in gun deaths in cities like Chicago is overwhelmingly distributed to black and brown people. Death can now be replicated at a mechanical rate, just as a Hollywood studio affects the mass production of the smiling celebrity. But if “Untitled” (Death by Gun) appropriates Warhol’s aesthetic strategies, it ultimately inverts their effect to tell

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a story not about the commensurability of things, but rather about the radical incommensurability of black and brown life and death. As we look into the individual faces of gun victims, reading their names and the summaries of their final moments on earth, we discover their irreducible incommensurability. Even in places where portraits of the victims apparently couldn’t be obtained, the stock silhouettes vary in shade and saturation. It looks as though someone photocopied the pages from Time, thereby lending a faded and grainy quality to some of the reproduced images. At various points in the print, there is an oversaturation of ink, producing crushed blacks (underexposed areas in a photograph where the details are too dark to be perceptible), which obscure or distort the image of the gunshot victims. Rather than a mere printing flaw, however, the over-inking of an image, as in Warhol’s Warren, can function as an aesthetic strategy. Given the historical optimization of film and photography equipment for lighter skin tones, crushed blacks often appear in portraits of dark-skinned people. My turn to the theme of crushed black is inspired by Tavia Nyong’o’s theorization of the crushed blacks that populate Shirley Clarke’s experimental film Portrait of Jason (a 1967 cinéma vérité study of black performer and hustler Jason Halliday). Nyong’o argues that we might understand crushed blacks as contributing “to the enigmatic shape and undecidability of the images . . . projecting outlines without interiors, surfaces without depths, and a history folded upon itself so as to perpetually produce doubles.”85 For Nyong’o, crushed black also becomes the subject of Clarke’s film “insofar as Jason is the quintessentially crushed black.”86 The formal element of crushed black thus becomes a metaphor for black and brown life in the United States. At the same time, in “Untitled” (Death by Gun), the “enigmatic shape and undecidability” of a figure in crushed black might be read as a form of concealed autonomy or possibility. Enigma, in this sense, holds to a place where a multiplicity of meanings and possibilities (beyond the limited and often deadly options currently available to black and brown people) can occur. “Untitled” (Death by Gun) features a large number of black and brown victims. To take in the crushed blacks in “Untitled” (Death by Gun) is to observe the disproportionate distribution of gun violence toward black and brown people, a reminder of the fact that, as Rinaldo Walcott writes, “Black people die differently.”87 The piece invites the spectator

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to see the inequity of gun violence’s racialized and gendered distribution in the United States and the attentive reader will notice that most of the women featured in the piece died in one of two ways, from suicide or within the context of domestic and sexual violence. (Black and brown people and women of color, too, die differently.) In the work, we meet Rachel Parris, a twenty-year-old black woman and a sex worker from Chicago, Illinois, who was shot while trying to get away from an eighteen-year-old man; Sylvia Contreras, a twenty-six-year-old woman who left her partner after nine years of domestic abuse only to be shot by him when she returned to rescue their children; or Whitney Rainey, a two-year-old black girl whose mother’s ex-boyfriend shot her during a fight with her mom. “Giving [my work] away,” Gonzalez-Torres once mused, “was a fair way of giving back something that was not even mine. This information belongs to everybody.”88 Insistent on the intellectual freedom of his spectator, he must have understood that the distribution of these stories would have different effects on different viewers. For some, it is a lesson in the distribution of gun violence toward black and brown bodies. For others, the encounter with the work mobilizes performance’s mode of reproduction to remember and keep some fragment of the dead alive. The work might also be creatively repurposed to serve as reading material during a break from work. “A page or stack in a gallery reads differently from one you see in an artist’s studio or one you see in a home or museum,” he once reflected. “I once went to the employees’ toilet in a museum in Germany and found one of my pieces, Death by Gun, pinned to the door of the toilet stall. The employees told me that they loved reading about all those people’s violent deaths while they were sitting. It helped them ‘go.’ ”89 I’m anxious about what it means to reduce Parris, Contreras, or Rainey’s final moments to bathroom reading, though it does feel like a fitting description of the way people often consume the destruction of black and brown life: in passing, as entertainment, something they “love” to read about. At the same time, I don’t want to underestimate the insurgent capacity that an encounter with “Untitled” (Death by Gun) might have, regardless of the setting. I can’t shake the way that a face-to-face encounter with their faces (or with the expanse of crushed black where their faces ought to be) might remind a spectator that “something’s

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missing.” Not only something, but someone. Nor should we devalue the way this encounter with loss and incompletion can inspire spectators to ask, wherever they are, “What is to be done?” Disturbed as I am by the German museum employees who “loved reading about all those people’s violent deaths while they were sitting,” I am yet interested in the queer valences of Gonzalez-Torres’s example, insofar as it occurs in a public bathroom. Like most gay men in the 1990s, he would have had at least an indirect (if not sensuous) awareness of the serious and playful forms of queer knowledge production and worldmaking that can occur in a toilet stall. He also would have been aware of the risks of systemic violence, policing, entrapment, and abuse that threaten these queer zones of sexual autonomy and social experimentation. (The link between queer sites of public sex and policing is a common theme in queer memoir work, from Samuel Delany to Reinaldo Arenas, to whom we’ll return in a moment.)90 These queer, sexuate ways of knowing and being can be necessary for queer survival, and we share them with each other as we try to sustain life in crushed blacks and browns. Unlike the experience with the endless reproducibility of Beatty’s celebrity or the green Coca-Cola bottle, as the spectator reads the stories in “Untitled” (Death by Gun), looks into their faces, and says their names, the dead need not be flattened into a relation of equivalence or commensurability. Rather, Gonzalez-Torres confronts us with a fragment of the detailed singularity, irreducibility, and incommensurability of every person. As in Moten’s description of black performance’s “revaluation or reconstruction of value,” “Untitled” (Death by Gun) reanimates and revaluates the singular lives of people who otherwise endure the living death of crushed black.91 Appropriating industrial means of production, the stack becomes a node for the distribution of minoritarian knowledge about the conditions of living death affecting black and brown people, as much as it serves as a conduit for the sharing out of their/our lives with the commons.

The Division of Labor And then there was his assault on that other effect of distribution within a capitalist system: the division of labor. In the third volume of Capital,

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Marx describes the division of labor as “an organization of production which has grown up naturally, a web which has been, and continues to be, woven behind the backs of the producers or commodities.”92 In the Grundrisse he also casts a perspective on the entanglements between distribution, production, history, and the division of labor: Conceived most superficially, distribution appears as the distribution of products, and thus further removed from production and quasiindependent of it. But before distribution becomes the distribution of products, it is (1) distribution of the instruments of production and (2) (which is another determination of the same relation) distribution of the members of society among the various types of production (the subsuming of individuals under definitive relations or production). The distribution of products is obviously merely a result of this distribution, which is comprised in the production process itself and determines the structure of production.93

What appears to be a “naturally” occurring arrangement is in fact the result of a sedimented historical process through which economic social relations (class, the division of labor) are shaped by the feedback loop between production and distribution. “At the very outset these [relations] may appear as naturally evolved,” he continues. “Through the process of production itself they are transformed from naturally evolved factors into historical ones, and although they appear as natural preconditions of production for one period, they were its historical result for another. They are continuously changed within production itself.”94 Similarly recognizing that the division of labor was anything but natural, Gonzalez-Torres’s work staged a practice of redistribution that took an undoing of the division of labor as one of its primary targets. On March 10, 1992, he delivered a lecture titled “Practices: The Problem of Divisions of Cultural Labor” at The Drawing Center in New York. Speaking at the height of the 1990s culture wars (charged disputes over queer, black, feminist representation, censorship, and public arts funding), he was largely critical of the notion that the culture wars even constituted a debate.95 Instead, he argued that the culture wars were an effective way for the Right to focus public attention on the spectacle of sexual and racial difference, often organized around the National

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Endowment of the Arts’ funding of “obscene art.” This focus served as a distraction from the state’s concurrent withdrawal from and privatization of the public sphere. “Why bother with the destruction of the environment or lack of adequate health care,” he asked elsewhere, “when we have a black-and-white photo of two men kissing?”96 The assault on free expression forced artists into a corner in which their energies were directed toward the defense of art and artistic expression, shifting the focus away from other, broader and connected systemic concerns. In short, the NEA debate reified a cultural division of labor that limited the proper province of the artistic laborer to questions of free expression.97 As Gonzalez-Torres pointed out, “The NEA debate is not actually a debate, but a rhetorical posturing about freedom of information, and the first amendment of so-called free speech—which was never free, you had to pay for it. It was about white, male, straight speech—or classical values. The Constitution was not written by single black mothers, or factory workers on a three-day work schedule somewhere in Chicago. No, it was written by free white men with properties and titles—what I call, ‘The other.’ ”98 His critique resonated with Marx’s position in “On the Jewish Question,” where Marx explains that the liberal discourse of rights encourages the subdivision of a social collective into property owning (that is, rights bearing) individuals.99 For Gonzalez-Torres, the division of cultural labor bars the artist from imagining her work’s relationship to a broader social collective. When artists are circumscribed to the practice of defending “art for art’s sake,” the artist fixates on battling censorship (and securing First Amendment rights), without necessarily developing effective means for combatting the system that produces the censors, if not altogether reifying the legitimacy of the legal order that makes the artist’s disenfranchisement and silencing a possibility. In response to these conditions, Gonzalez-Torres directed cultural workers to refuse the division of labor: “So if you ever get invited, or get invited again, to pretend that there is a debate about freedom, just remember a few things if you are a cultural producer. First, don’t act ‘artistic.’ Screw the division of labor really good, and don’t talk about how important it is for your ‘creative self ’ to smear shit all over your body as a metaphor.”100 Smearing shit all over the body may well serve

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as a powerful metaphor in artistic practice, but when the artist is boxed into responding only to a work’s controversy (a controversy that may be manufactured by an opponent who hasn’t even seen the work), the nuances of this position will most likely be obliterated by the fog of controversy. As Jennifer Doyle argues, “Attention to a work’s controversy actually suppresses attention to a work’s difficulty.”101 Rather than falling into this trap, Gonzalez-Torres argued that artists should instead “recite—at the drop of a hat—numbers and statistics about the increase in infant mortality, the new cases of tuberculosis, the defunding of supplement food programs for pregnant women, infants and children, the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) programs, by the supposedly profamily, pro-environment, pro-education administration.”102 Inviting the artist and critic to “screw with the division of labor,” he mapped a strategy for antagonizing the system from within its own contradictions: “By taking over issues of housing, health care, queer rights, women’s rights, the environment, the government coverups (and many more unfamiliar acts), we artists, critics, and art historians do in fact rearrange the divisions of cultural labor, and perhaps in this way, we might be able to put forward our own agenda.”103 If the division of labor reproduces the domination of the oppressed by isolating them, Gonzalez-Torres insisted that a refusal of the cultural division of labor could be the condition for the realization of what (appropriating the language of Althusser) can be described as a revolutionary rupture produced by “an accumulation of ‘circumstances’ and ‘currents’ so that that whatever their origin and sense . . . they ‘fuse’ into a ruptural unity.”104 In his own words, Gonzalez-Torres insisted that by defying the cultural division of labor, a form of common and active, yet incommensurable, solidarity might come into existence, forming a “voice of opposition [and] infiltration that upsets the expected narrative.”105 Invoking Marx’s vision of communism in the Gotha Critique, Gonzalez-Torres argued that this voice would call for the redistributive justice of the commons: “Ultimately this will be a voice that truly attempts liberation through meaning and renaming, and reordering according to our own needs.”106 In an important revision of Marx, Gonzalez-Torres shifted the power of a communist vision of the world from an order that would meet the needs of the individual (“to each according to his needs”) to one of collective sustenance (“reordering according to our own needs”).

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It’s not merely that he theorized the possibility of such a practice. His work functions as a stage upon which the undoing of the division of labor is made manifest.

“Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) In the early days of January 2014, I worked my way through the Art Institute of Chicago’s contemporary galleries toward an encounter with one of Gonzalez-Torres’s candy spills. At the time, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) was manifest as a large pile of colored candies configured as a triangular mound flowing out from a corner. The piece has, as Gonzalez-Torres’ works often do, ideal specifications for materialization, including an ideal weight of 175 pounds. This weight may gesture to Ross’s body weight, though the same weight was used, for example, in “Untitled” (Portrait of Dad), 1991, allowing for a range of interpretations.107 The spectator can take candy from the spill, participating in the work’s production, consumption, and destruction. Each time we take and consume a piece of candy, we contribute to a process that mirrors the shrinking and decimation of Ross’s body by the plague. But viewers are not directly invited to take the work, and since the gallery is a space often marked by prohibition against physical interaction with the art, how is the spectator to know that she can take and eat it? With the exception of a small curatorial plaque that stands at a distance from the piece, the sculpture doesn’t announce its interactivity. Given the prominence of Gonzalez-Torres’s work, it’s not unlikely that a spectator who is in the know will reach down and take a few pieces of candy. Other spectators become the audience, locking eyes on what seems like a violation of museum etiquette, before deciding if they will perform the same actions in relation to the sculpture. But on that day it wasn’t a curator’s wall plaque that informed people about the sculpture’s interactive nature. Instead, as interested spectators approached the piece, the guard stationed in the room spoke with them, inviting them to take and eat the candies. He was a young black man. The guards at the Art Institute of Chicago are often black and brown, and it’s not uncommon, given Chicago’s ongoing, violent practices of racial segregation, for the guards to be the only other black people in a room when I visit the museum’s galleries. On that day spectators seemed genuinely surprised

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that the guard was not only speaking to them, but also educating them about the art in the room. Eventually I approached him to ask how often the candy is replenished. He explained that the work is usually restored on a daily basis, saying that “it would defeat the point” of the work if the pile of candy ever disappeared. Without prompting, he described the work as becoming itself not through disappearance but through renewal, teaching about the significance of the piece, the loss of queer life during the AIDS crisis, and an artist who was grieving the loss of his lover. In a 1995 ArtPress interview of Gonzalez-Torres, art critic and curator Robert Storr describes a similar encounter: When I was at the Hirshhorn and saw the show, there was one particular guard who was standing with the big candy floor piece “Untitled” (Placebo), and she was amazing. There was this suburban, white middleclass mother with two young sons who came in the room and in thirty seconds, this woman—who was a black, maybe church-going civil servant in Washington, in the middle of all this reactionary pressure about the arts—there she was explaining to this mother and kids about AIDS and what this piece represented, what a placebo was, and how there was no cure and so on. Then the boys started to fill their pockets with candies and she sort of looked at them like a school mistress and said, “You’re only supposed to take one.” Just as their faces fell and they tossed back all but a few she suddenly smiled again and said, “Well maybe two.” And she won them over completely! The whole thing worked because they got the piece, they got the interaction, they got the generosity and they got her. It was great.108

Storr’s recollection might remind us that, as a result of the division of labor, museum guards are usually limited to a form of (in Marx’s terms) “one-sided, machine-like labor” in which they function as an extension of the art institution’s security apparatus.109 This fact is overdetermined by the racialization of guard work. Security guards at art institutions in large US cities are commonly drawn from working class immigrant communities and communities of color. On the one hand, security guards are hypervisible. They are embodied nodes in the institution’s panopticon—the eyes and ears of a security apparatus that protects the

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institution’s investments by regulating and disciplining the spectator’s behavior. But they are not supposed to be its mouth or mind. Like most forms of racialized labor, the guard is supposed to be silent and invisible to the spectator—watching, but not seen or heard. In a chilling interrogation of the racialization and desubjectification of the art museum security guard, Fred Wilson’s Guarded View (1991) features four headless, brown, seemingly male mannequins. Each mannequin is dressed in a different uniform from one of New York City’s major cultural institutions: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney. Guarded View was developed from a 1992 performance titled My Life as A Dog. As curator Thelma Golden described the piece, Wilson moved through the Whitney’s galleries dressed as a museum guard and asked people, “What do you think of this work?”: “It was amazing because half the people ran down to the front desk and said, ‘There’s a guard going crazy.’ And he was only talking about work and any of you who know, Fred is very smart, so it was not like he was babbling. . . . Other people walked up to him and said, ‘Oh my God, you are so smart. You know you should not be a guard.’ Equally as problematic.”110 The “problematic” response of the Whitney’s patrons is unsurprising. Within majoritarian institutions the production of minoritarian knowledge is a project set up to fail.111 As Wilson’s intervention makes clear, the division of labor is also about the distribution of knowledge. Black security guards—if not black people in general—are not expected to possess knowledge about art in places like the Whitney. When we do, we are often either apprehended as disruptive, crazy, or made into targets for condescending praise. Museum guards spend an extraordinary amount of time with the art that they guard. They are afforded the time and opportunity to contemplate and learn about a particular piece with a depth and duration that may exceed the time given to the work by critics, curators, or scholars, whose critical utterances assume the authority of official expertise. The intellectual division of labor functions as an engine for the reproduction of class and racial hierarchy because the badge of expertise is primarily distributed on the basis of one’s perceived access to formal education and other luxuries of the ascendant classes. The critic’s or spectator’s active refusal to engage with museum guards as experts on the art they watch over

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must thus be understood as a commitment (however unwitting) to the maintenance of the cultural, racialized, and intellectual division of labor. An inadvertent example of this surfaces in Storr’s reading of the Hirshhorn guard’s performance. Storr characterizes the guard less as a source of knowledge production than as a translator for GonzalezTorres. He emphasizes her gender twice (“this woman,” “like a school mistress”), going out of his way to tell us that she is black, without explaining the significance of this detail. He curiously imagines her (with little discernible evidence) as “maybe church-going” and then, as if to contain this phantasmatically black church lady’s capacity to perform as a source of knowledge, he undercuts her defiance of the cultural division of labor by reducing her to the position of caretaker. In fact, she becomes a black woman taking care of a white woman’s children as he resituates her within one of the few (gendered) categories of labor in which black women are stereotypically allowed to function as limited sources of knowledge (teachers) by describing her as “a school mistress.” She “suddenly smile[s]” at the white children, allowing them their indulgence before offering free, affectively charged, maternal and pedagogical guidance to another woman’s kids. As a result, the piece is rendered ready for apprehension, consumption, and possession by the family as, “they got the piece, they got the interaction, [and] they got the generosity.”112 She, too, becomes an object for possession by this white family as “they got her. It was great.”113 In the same conversation, Gonzalez-Torres narrates this scenario in a different fashion: In my recent show at the Hirshhorn, which is one of the best experiences I have had in a long time, the guards were really into it. Because I talked to them, I dealt with them. They’re going to be here eight hours with this stuff. And I never see guards as guards, I see guards as the public. Since the other answer to this question “Who’s the public?” is, well, the people who are around you, which includes the guards. In Washington people asked me, “Did I train the guard, did I give them a lecture?” I said, “No, I just talk to them when I’m doing the work.” They said, “You know we have never been to an exhibit where the guards go up to the viewers and tell them what to do, and where to go, what to

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look at, what it means.” But again, that division of labor, that division of function is always there in place to serve someone’s agenda.114

Acknowledging that the division of labor is central to the reproduction of the social hierarchies sustained and necessitated by racial capitalism, Gonzalez-Torres echoed Marx’s complaint that capital strips the laborer to specialized functions as it “develops a hierarchy of labour-powers, to which there corresponds a scale of wages. The individual workers are appropriated and annexed for life by a limited function; while the various operations of the hierarchy of labour-powers are parceled out among the workers according to both their natural and their acquired capacities.”115 The division of labor thus validates the unjust distribution of resources and knowledge along lines of race, gender, and class, tautologically justifying the inequity of distribution as the product of the naturally developed social order. At the very least, Gonzalez-Torres’s work suggests that a better distribution of knowledge, resources, and labor is both possible and necessary. According to David Graeber, “Communism really just means any situation where people act according to the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’—which is the way pretty much everyone always acts if they are working together to get something done. . . . Communism, then, is already here. The question is how to further democratize it.”116 Gonzalez-Torres’s work opens a path toward an answer by transforming the scene of aesthetic encounter into a stage for the redistribution of resources, knowledge, and the sustenance of More Life. As the work performs for the spectator, that which is signified by the inadequate word “communism” comes just a little closer to us.

The Revolution Of course, to say that Gonzalez-Torres was advocating communist revolution, which I am not saying, would skip over one of the central contradictions in his relationship to revolution. Gonzalez-Torres was deeply suspicious of the very concept of revolution: I’ve been waiting for the revolution for a long time and it hasn’t come. The ones that have come have done very little to change our ways. Therefore

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I don’t want a revolution anymore, it’s too much energy for too little. So I want to work within the system. I want to work within the contradictions of the system and try to create a better place. I think revolutions were a really nice idea in the nineteenth century and in the early part of this century, but we must take into consideration the technological advances that are being made right now. These technological shifts are happening in a world that has become very fragile and also very small.117

The passage is rich with contradiction and generative ambivalence. If he doesn’t “want a revolution” anymore, he still speaks in the present perfect progressive: “I’ve been waiting for the revolution.” This could mean either that he doesn’t want the revolution he’s still waiting for or that he doesn’t want it anymore, though he still waits for it. After disavowing the revolution, he describes the very strategy (“working within the contradictions of the system”) espoused by revolutionaries from Marx and Luxemburg to Mao and Castro. Revolutionary theory has long struggled over the question of when “working within the contradictions of the system” passes over into insufficient reformism. This is perhaps most famously articulated in Rosa Luxemburg’s “Social Reform or Revolution.”118 But even Luxemburg insisted that (social and legal) reform was necessary to the revolutionary process, so long as it presupposed a revolutionary end. If Luxemburg might have chaffed at Gonzalez-Torres’s seeming embrace of “the system,” both of them, with Marx, shared the belief that revolution required the right set of conditions to be successful. Living and working in the United States at the height of the Reagan Revolution, Gonzalez-Torres must have understood that the conditions for actual revolution were nowhere remotely present. Beyond this, due in part to the accident of autobiography, he had serious reason to question a romantic (“nineteenth century”) idealization of revolution. In his (albeit broad) assessment that the “ones that have come have done very little to change our ways,” he was effectively in agreement with the Johnson-Forest Tendency’s mid-century conclusion that in spite of a half century of revolution, social and economic relations under both socialist and capitalist states remained exploitative, hierarchical, and destructive.119 Indeed, the Cuban Revolution, despite its many achievements, also reproduced and expanded many of the forms of violence,

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exploitation, and injustice it had been fought to abolish. GonzalezTorres’s skeptical approach to revolution, despite his at times explicitly revolutionary agenda, is itself a working through of the fundamental contradiction at the center of the question posed by Johnson-Forest. This was the contradiction that was playing itself out across Cuba when Gonzalez-Torres was a child. He was part of the first generation of children to be raised in the revolution. 1970 was the last full year that Felix lived in Cuba. That same year Ernesto Cardenal—a famed Nicaraguan poet, priest, liberation theologist, and future minister of culture for the Sandinista government— visited Cuba and then produced In Cuba, a book that offers a textured, admiring, but also critical account of the revolution. The book consists of a host of fragments, notes, and poems (by Cardenal and others) recounting Cardenal’s conversations and encounters with the people he met in Cuba. He marvels at the revolution’s progressive achievements: attempts to dismantle antiblack racism, care for the needs of the poor, education reforms aimed at eradicating illiteracy, national health care, the dismantling of capitalist ideology, and available labor for the working classes. But he also worries about the state’s discrimination against and suppression of Catholics (while being deeply critical of the reactionary tendencies of Cuban Catholicism), expresses anxiety regarding the revolution’s persecution of homosexuals, its practices of censorship, surveillance, and repression, and is concerned about the ideological consolidation of power into the extraordinary figure of Fidel. Indeed, by the end of the book, Fidel comes to accrue an increasingly (and ominously) godlike status in revolutionary Cuba. Cardenal’s criticism is framed early in the text by the caveat offered by two young poets who arrive at his hotel to speak candidly of the revolution’s failures. “We want you to know all the bad things about this Revolution,” they say to him, “because you must have been seeing the good things from the moment you arrived. And we don’t want the same thing to happen to you that has happened to others who have come to Cuba; they became disappointed.”120 Their criticism of the revolution is not mounted against it, but from inside of it. “I am not a revolutionary,” one says. “I am the Revolution. I and the others of my generation did not make the Revolution. We are its product, we were made by it. . . . We have never known anything but the Revolution.”121 In their criticism of

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the revolution, they aim not to topple it, but to transform it into what it ought to be, rather than what it was becoming. The young poets denounce the revolution’s treatment of homosexuals, in particular, as a “hateful and unnerving” component of a general campaign of “repression” carried out by the state in the name of the revolution.122 At various points throughout the text Cardenal expresses a similar anxiety, speaking with a man who had the chance to visit a “Social Disgrace Unit” where seminarists were held “with marijuana smokers and homosexuals and other delinquents, working in the marble quarries.”123 When he asks if there was “forced labor,” the man responds, “practically,” then underlines the social hierarchies of the labor camps in which homosexuals find themselves near the bottom, “under very harsh conditions. It’s very annoying for them [the seminarists] to be with homosexuals, sneak thieves, and other antisocial types.”124 Later, one of his interlocutors “admits that the repression in Cuba against homosexuals is very severe. They are not allowed to study, he notes, before musing, ‘It is terrible to think what would have happened to a Whitman or a Lorca in Cuba: they would not have been able to study.”125 But in a way, the revolution had already produced its own Whitman or Lorca. Reinaldo Arenas was born into poverty in Batista’s Cuba. Like the young poets, and Gonzalez-Torres, he was of the first generation raised under the revolution’s education reforms and literacy programs. Shortly before he died of AIDS complications, while living in exile in New York in 1990, Arenas told his own story in his memoir Antes que anochezca (Before Night Falls).126 But his first book, Celestino antes del alba (Singing from the Well), was published from Cuba in 1967, which established him as a prominent author nationally and globally. Arenas’s formally innovative, challenging novels boldly explored the limits of the revolution, as well as it successes, holding the spectral figure of homosexuality and the sensuous content of queer desire at the center of much of the work. This, and his withering criticisms of the state, drew him into increasing conflict with the Cuban government. He avoided the Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP) camps of the mid-1960s, concentration camps in which “anti-social” and “counter-revolutionary” figures, including large numbers of homosexuals, were forced to perform hard labor. But in the 1970s, after a sexual encounter with a group of young men on a beach, he became entangled in the state’s legal apparatus,

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eventually winding up in the notoriously bleak El Morro prison after a brief attempt to escape from earlier imprisonment. Like GonzalezTorres’s parents, Arenas migrated to Miami as part of the Mariel boatlift, before migrating to New York, where he lived until his death. Queer Cubans in exile, especially those self-identified on the Left (such as Gonzalez-Torres, Muñoz, or Cortiñas), occupy a nearly impossible position with relation to the revolution. In an essay describing his return to Cuba during 1977–1978 as a member of the Antonio Maceo Brigade (which consisted of young US residents and citizens of Cuban descent returning to Cuba to work in support of the revolution), José Quiroga names the problem of homosexuality as one of the revolution’s key internal contradictions. Furthermore, “Being homosexual and revolutionary entailed inhabiting a major contradiction, if not an impossibility.”127 Revolutionary queer figures like Lourdes Casal, one of the Maceo Brigade founders, had few good options for navigating these straights. Casal “never openly revealed her sexuality, nor did she criticize the state persecution of homosexuals and lesbians in Cuba.”128 Quiroga calls for an approach that works through these contradictions, rather than running from them: “But if we are going to inscribe the queer in the Revolution, let’s do so not solely from the point of victimhood but also from within the axis of agency. Problematic, disturbing, difficult agency—silencing itself at specific moments, gaining for itself spaces of freedom in the microcontext, appealing to the outside world when the inside universe is terribly unjust, and at times at the center of the national scenario.”129 In turning to this brief history of the revolution’s contradictory relationship to homosexuality, I aim to highlight the material and historical complexities that surely impacted Gonzalez-Torres’s ambivalent relationship to the concept of revolution. But in spite of the many ways the Cuban Revolution failed, it’s important to emphasize the fact that Gonzalez-Torres’s critique of it still manifested revolutionary and even communistic impulses. Indeed, until the point of their deaths, Arenas and Gonzalez-Torres were no less critical of capitalism or the United States (even if Arenas adopted a fervently anti-Castro, anti-communist position for the remainder of his life). As he was approaching death, this is how Arenas described his adopted home in New York City: “My new world was ruled not by political power but by another power, also

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sinister: the power of money. After having lived in this country for some years, I realize that it is a country without a soul: everything revolves around money.”130 There’s a painful irony to how things turned out. Like his contemporary Ana Mendieta, Felix was sent abroad as a child to what his family believed were safer shores in the north. Arenas fled to Miami as a marielito to escape political and sexual persecution. And still, by 1996, all three were dead, precipitously, in the United States. Arenas and Gonzalez-Torres were consumed by a disease that took on genocidal proportions as a result of the US government’s hostility toward queer, black, and brown life. Mendieta died under suspicious circumstances, falling to her death from the balcony of her thirty-fourth-floor apartment during a fight with her husband, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. (Andre was later acquitted for the murder in a controversial decision that remains maddening.) In keeping with the criticisms of the two young poets, we might read Gonzalez-Torres’s ambivalence toward revolution less as a dismissal of the revolutionary principle than as a response to an impossible position marked by the quite material knowledge of the ways in which the revolution betrayed (or was betraying) itself, in spite of the fact that we continue to wait for it.

“Untitled” (March 5th) #2. Rossmore. More Ross. More . . . But before the revolution there is still, and as yet, life. “When people ask me, ‘Who is your public? I say honestly, without skipping a beat, ‘Ross.’ The public was Ross.”131 The public was Ross. For five months in 1990, Ross and Felix lived together in Los Angeles at the Ravenswood building on Rossmore Avenue. Their world was full, but Ross was dying. Felix later drafted a list of his primary impressions of that time: “1990 moved to L.A. with Ross (already very sick), Harry the dog, Biko, and Pebbles, the Ravenswood, Rossmore, golden hours, Ann and Chris by the pool, magic hour, rented a red car, money for the first time, no more waiting on tables, Golden Girls, great students at CalArts.”132 Ann, his friend and curator Ann Goldstein, also lived at the Ravenswood. When Felix was looking for a place to live, she recalled that, he “immediately was drawn to the name of the street: ROSSmore.”133 Rossmore: More Ross.

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Describing their time in LA, Felix wrote: “L.A. 1990. Ross and I spent every Saturday afternoon visiting galleries, museums, thrift shops, and going on long, very long drives all around L.A., enjoying the ‘magic hour’ when the light makes everything gold and magical in that city.”134 But this world was falling apart: “Ross was dying right in front of my eyes. Leaving me.”135 During one trip to MOCA (the Museum of Contemporary Art) they encountered Roni Horn’s Gold Field (1982), a fourby-five-foot sheet of golden foil. It was, for them, “a new landscape, a possible horizon, a place of rest and absolute beauty.”136 As they faced one ending, Gold Field opened up a space to rest, take refuge, and keep breathing. It was a place where they could stay still, quiet, and alive together for just a minute longer. “In the midst of our private disaster of Ross’s imminent death,” he wrote, “and the darkness of that particular historical moment, we were given the chance to ponder on the opportunity to regain our breath, and breathe a romantic air only true lovers breathe.”137 Two light bulbs, sometimes wrapped tightly around each other, cast a soft light across the room. Eventually one flickers out, leaving the other alone. Felix made the first manifestation of this light strand, “Untitled” (March 5th) #2, in the wake of Ross’s death. March 5 was not the date of the work’s production. It was Ross’s birthday. After death, rebirth. “When I first made those two light bulbs,” he told Spector, “I was in a total state of fear about losing my dialogue with Ross.”138 But it was by continuing to make work that he kept some fragment of Ross, and their dialogue, alive and with him, with us. In the years that followed, he introduced pieces including “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), “Untitled” (Rossmore) (a strand of light bulbs), and “Untitled” (Rossmore II) (a spill of green candy). In works like these he sustained and made more Ross, to keeping alive the flickering gold vision of that better world they brushed up against in the Ravenswood on Rossmore.

Figure 3.4. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (March 5th) #2, 1991. Light bulbs, porcelain light sockets, and extension cords. Overall dimensions vary with installation. Two parts, approximately 113 inches in height each. Editions of 20, 2 AP. ARG# GF1991-012. (© The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, NY.)

4

Eiko’s Entanglements ( for Karen Shimakawa)

Come with me? There’s a performance that I want you to see. I’ll tell you all about it as we watch. You and I are in a cab riding through afternoon traffic in downtown Philadelphia. There’s a light drizzle outside; everything is gray. I press my forehead into the glass to watch the buildings through the window as we talk. We’re running fifteen to thirty minutes late, but we’re not hurried, because this is the kind of performance for which you can come and go. I admit to you that in spite of the fact that I profess to be a professor of performance studies, I don’t always sit all the way through durational performances. I mention this because we are going to watch Eiko dance, and she is known for work that moves slowly and lasts a long time. And this time we’re staying for the entire thing. As the cab makes it way toward the 30th Street Station, I tell you about the only other time I’ve seen Eiko dance. A few years ago, during the summer of 2011, Eiko & Koma performed Naked at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. (Koma is her husband and collaborator for the last half century; Eiko & Koma the name of their collective.) The set-up was similar to a materialization of the piece at the Walker in 2010. Joan Rothfuss, a former Walker curator, described the performance space as surrounded by a series of canvas screens “encrusted with a mixture of sweet rice paste, sea salt, feathers, and dried grasses and dotted with large burn holes through which viewers could see into the space. If they chose to enter, they were free to come and go.”1 Looking through the holes into the interior space, you see Eiko & Koma lying together and dancing naked in the center of a nest, a pile or crater of grass, feathers, and earth. There was a passage into the interior, where you could rest on a bench and watch them dance at a glacial pace to the 164

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Figure 4.1. Eiko & Koma, Naked. Walker Art Center. Minneapolis, Minnesota, November 2010. Photo: Anna Campbell. (Courtesy of Eiko & Koma and Anna Campbell.)

soundtrack of dripping water and the noises made by the people in the museum. When I say they were dancing, I mean that they were lying on the ground about a foot apart, slowly moving and only sometimes lightly touching each other. Skin sliding across a landscape of flesh, fingers shifting through the tangle of materials, bodies moving most because of breath slowly drawn. The dance, like much of Eiko & Koma’s work, is a study in slowness, where motion, movement, and change occur as the result of what Rosemary Candelario describes as their “persistent and insistent micromovements.”2 This choreography of slowness, for Candelario, is a practice of navigating and transforming the world: “Avant-garde art need not only cause radical breaks; it can also effectively engage in a slow, sustained process of change. Slowness as choreographic method provides the time to learn how to develop alternative ways of working in the world.”3 It also gives us time to pause and reflect on the complicated ways in which our worlds are tangled up together. In Naked Eiko & Koma are entangled with the space around them, their movements so subtle, their bodies so embedded in their surround

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that they sometimes fold into the black recesses of the space. As André Lepecki describes it, in Naked “each compositional element is always and constitutively linked to all others, and all constitutively linked to a fundamental, underlying movement, called vibration.”4 This vibration effects a relationship between and with the different elements of the performance: “The first condition for Eiko & Koma to scramble the organization of their audience’s sensorial apparatus: to establish fundamentally non-hierarchical relations between objects, images, sounds, bodies. All are made to resonate with one another, thanks to that imperceptible element that binds them together—micromovement.”5 But it’s not so much that the elements are “made” to do anything. If they vibrate amongst each other, this resonance is invitational, and it comes from within. It’s non-coercive and can be accessed from any vantage point and for however long you stay with it. You are free to come and go. In Eiko (& Koma’s) use of “slowness as choreographic method,” an encounter of three seconds may not be more nor less revelatory than one of three hours. It’s just differently so, and one can change significantly in the span of either. Indeed, as a result of performance’s ephemerality, any encounter with performance will be incomplete anyway, regardless of whether you stay for the duration. Following both Peggy Phelan and Fred Moten, performance’s withdrawal from presence, alongside its fugitivity from capture (“regulation and control”) is part of what gives it its “oppositional edge.”6 It absconds and escapes, and as Alexandra Vazquez writes, “performance is always far beyond the grasp of the critic’s intentions or organizing structure.”7 As a result, one has to come up with endlessly creative, often heretical means and antimethods for ethically engaging with an object of analysis that refuses and confounds the fixity of objecthood and/or the strictures of epistemological capture. Which is not to say that performance can’t be caught. (This is often what is referred to as “method.”) Nearly any fugitive can be tracked down. But live things are often killed in the catching (or in the having been caught). So I should modify my affirmation of performance’s “oppositional edge” to say that performance draws this restive power less from the rumored noncommodifiability of the live (which, in the wake of slavery, is and always has been commodifiable) than from the persistence of performance’s relentless fugitivity. Performance’s inexhaustible practice of fleeing capture, regardless of or perhaps because of all the ways we try to trap it, is the

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true source of its insurgent power. If performance wants to be free, at its best it tries to free you up as well. Maybe this is why, in the performance we are about to see, you are free to come and go. As a practice that evades capture, while inhabiting, moving through, across, and exceeding incommensurable temporal, spatial, and bodily coordinates, performance can be a particularly rich site for minoritarian subjects to experiment with and produce new ways of being in the world and new forms of collective vibration, or resonance—a communism of incommensurability. Eiko’s dance doesn’t tangle people together so much as it reveals a commons of the living and dead that is already deeply entangled, vibrating yet out of joint and incommensurate. This becomes the condition of possibility for the making of a world rich with possibilities for the minoritarian subject. Practicing an emancipatory choreography that offers alternatives to power’s hold over and claim to the racialized, gendered, and sexed body, Eiko’s dance still shows us that any route toward something like freedom from the forces that capture, control, dull, and diminish minoritarian life requires a working through and with incommensurability and difference. But if nothing else, Eiko’s dance is beautiful. And sometimes survival hinges on spending just a few minutes more together in the presence of beauty and possibility.

Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at MoMA During the run at the Walker, Naked was staged for nearly a month: six days a week, three hours per day. The performance that we are on our way to, A Body in a Station, is also extended across time, occurring progressively over four consecutive Fridays during October of 2014 at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station. Each performance of A Body in a Station lasts for three hours. The first began at noon, ending at three. The next began the following Friday at three, the third will last from six to nine, and the final performance ends on the twenty-fourth with the stroke of midnight. We’re going to the second Friday together. Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station comes into view through the taxi window. With grand porticos at its east and west exterior, its neoclassical architecture exudes power. Inside, a vast waiting area stretches between its main entrances, furnished with long wooden benches full with travelers waiting for trains that arrive and depart from tracks accessed through the

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Figure 4.2. Eiko, A Body in a Station, 30th Street Station, Philadelphia, October 3, 2014. Photographer: William Johnston. (Courtesy of Eiko and William Johnston.)

north and south sides of the building. The walls and floors are made of polished stone, which lends the room a warm, elegant, ochre glow. Time is out of joint. Arriving a few minutes late, we missed her entrance. If we had been there, this is what might have occurred. Unsure of where to go, we could have stood in the waiting area, looking around for Eiko. One of us might have caught sight of her and gestured to let the other know as she entered through the west doors or emerged from behind a traveler. She would have stood out. An elderly Japanese woman with face and arms dressed in white makeup, her body draped in a lightyellow kimono marked by a sparse pattern of bright red spots. She would look like a revenant, ghost, specter, or apparition. At one moment, her steps would have been quick and determined. Then she’d pause and slowly raise her arms above her head. Later, she’d curl her extremities in toward her torso while looking askew at a passer-by. Her entrance through the waiting room took some time. The station’s management agreed to allow her only a small space in the north atrium to perform in, but she later told me that no one had said how long it should take for her to get to and from it.8 Her progress through the

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station was an act of resistance too slow and subtle to be detected by the powers governing it, too quiet to be considered a disruption worthy of regulation, censure, or arrest. By the time you and I arrive, we’ve missed this miniature revolt, however. Eiko is already in the atrium dancing for a group of spectators who are seated and standing around her. She’s lying on the floor. Muscles tense, yet slack, her arms rise slightly from the ground as her gaze focuses on something to her side. Her deliberate, slow gestures lend a focused quiet to the echoing chamber. We try not to disturb the mood, settling into a gap against a wall, sinking down to the stone floor. The silence is punctuated, at times, by the noises travelers make as they move across the station. At other moments, it’s cut by the mournful sigh of a shakuhachi, a Japanese flute played by Ralph Samuelson, who is sometimes visible and sometimes not. Atop this unintrusive score, slowly and subtly, Eiko choreographs the mood, reorganizing the sense of time, place, and possibility in the station surrounding us. During a performance, attention waxes and wanes. Fixated on Eiko, we might break the concentration to lean over to point things out or ask each other questions in hushed voices. Perhaps one of us remarks that it’s odd to see Eiko performing without Koma. And then one of us notices that Koma is here, too, in the gathering crowd, watching her dance. The two have collaborated since they met in 1971, when both were studying with Hijikata Tatsumi, one of the legendary founders of the modernist dance form called Butoh, while living at Hijikata’s Tokyo studio, called Asbestos Hall.9 They left Hijikata’s studio three months after meeting. As Suzanne Carbonneau notes, “Steeped in the antiauthoritarianism of the [late 1960s Japanese] student movement, neither Eiko nor Koma was looking to be Hijikata’s disciple.”10 They worked in Japan and Europe for the next few years, continuing studies with Ohno Kazuo (Butoh’s other prime progenitor) and Manja Chmiel (a student of Mary Wigman) before settling in the early 1970s in New York, where they’ve lived and danced together ever since.11 The performance at the 30th Street Station wasn’t originally intended to be a solo. Eiko & Koma were wrapping up a three-year retrospective project—an intensive, forward-dawning interrogation of their work— when they reached out to Harry Philbrick, then the director of the Museum at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). “I had been involved, in a minor way, with that project,” Philbrick later recalled, “and

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it had set me thinking quite a bit about the relationship between art objects and performance, and even more fundamentally about how a museum could deal with an ephemeral performance.”12 They began conceiving a site-specific piece for the station. Koma was recovering from an ankle injury, however, so Eiko forged ahead with a rare solo performance. Rare, but not unprecedented. She began a solo dance a few months before. A Body in a Station is the second phase in Eiko’s ongoing solo series, A Body in Places. The first phase, A Body in Fukushima, was Eiko’s response to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku, Japan, which resulted in sixteen thousand deaths, a nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant, and the forced evacuation of over three hundred thousand people from Fukushima prefecture. Eiko traveled to Fukushima in January and in July of 2014 with her collaborator, William Johnston (a photographer and professor of Japanese history), who documented her dance through abandoned sites in Fukushima. The durational series of dances at the station were accompanied by PAFA’s exhibition of Johnston and Eiko’s A Body in Fukushima photographs. Part of the reason we were running late to the station is that we wanted to see the photographs first. When we entered the PAFA gallery, we were confronted with a purple and brown futon folded across itself. Just beyond this, and stretching along a tall, large, white wall was a series of photographs featuring Eiko, in her sixties, dancing through abandoned train stations and in the radioactive landscape of Fukushima. In some of the images she wears a white kimono, in others it is black, or the yellow one that she’s wearing in the Philadelphia station. Her raven-black hair, which is framed by wisps of gray, flies through the air around her, down her back, or into the folds of her garment as she moves through abandoned stations, lying across tracks grown over with lush green kudzu vines, or kneeling with a pile of red fabric atop the purple and brown futon in the middle of a barren field. Describing the Fukushima series, Philbrick emphasized the ephemerality of the performance, while suggesting that memory and documentation function as a limited means for its capture: “Although a solo performance, it is entirely dependent on the collaboration of Johnston. The photos are the only record beyond Eiko and Bill’s memory of what transpired there.”13 Philbrick’s interest in working with Eiko & Koma

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Figure 4.3. Eiko, A Body in Fukushima. (On the Tracks, Momouchi), Summer 2014. Photographer: William Johnston. (Courtesy of Eiko and William Johnston.)

was inspired by the challenge of curating performance for an institution whose primary objective is to own, have, or hold onto things. “Museums are owners and repositories of objects,” he writes, “and it is in their mission to care for those objects.”14 But, as it turns out, the challenges of owning and housing objects bears a familiar resemblance to the problems posed to the performance studies scholar because these objects are also always in flux, changing, and resisting capture and/or fixity: “All art objects, after all, change over time—they fade, crackle, dry, become brittle or soft; in short, they age. Museums try hard to hold that process in abeyance but we are ultimately left with objects that are icons of themselves; objects that hold the collective memories of those who saw them when they were new and fresh.”15 In a sense, whether they know it or not, museums have always been curating and caring for performances.16 Rather than commissioning an art object that the museum could hold in perpetuity, Philbrick worked with Eiko & Koma to conceive the dance we’re watching at the 30th Street Station. For Philbrick, the performance would “use the aura of the institution itself as a kind of cloak that Eiko & Koma might wear around Philadelphia, and thereby

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bring the museum out to a wider audience.”17 Here, performance is absorbed into and transformed into being an agent of the institution, so it can “bring the museum out to a wider audience.” But performance’s fugitivity and ephemerality pose significant challenges to the logic and mission of institutions (from universities to museums), which is often to own, have, hold—to capture. Performance’s anti-institutional edge is particularly prominent in the traditions of activism and body and performance art in which Eiko & Koma are situated and from which they emerged. That early performance artists, body artists, and conceptual artists had a critical, if not outright antagonistic relationship to the institutions of the art world (from the market to museums) was as much a phenomenon in the United States and Europe as it was for artists in postwar Japan. As Doryun Chong, Ming Tiampo, Alexandra Munroe, and Michio Hayashi have separately demonstrated, during the 1960s modern and postmodern Japanese artists (including Hijikata, Ohno, and the Gutai Group—pioneers in body art, performance, and action painting) developed work in the midst of social and political upheaval.18 After nearly two decades of US military occupation and forced economic development, and catalyzed by the renewal of the US-Japan Mutual Cooperation and Security Treaty, a coalition of students, artists, and Japan’s New Left aligned to forge a radical anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, and anti-war front that took the form of a massive protest movement. Both students at the time, Eiko and Koma joined the movement, leaving university because, in Carbonneau’s summary, “both felt keenly the hypocrisy of preparing to take part in the system they had committed to overturn.”19 The radical energy of the movement was reflected in the work of Tokyo’s avant-garde, including Nakahira Takuma and Taki Kōji, photographers associated with the short-lived but influential magazine Provoke. Describing the Provoke scene’s movement between photography, performance, and protest, Matthew S. Witkovsky notes that “the demonstrations, sit-ins, and street riots that mark the citizen protest movements of the 1960s can be understood as the flip-side of performance: also live, bodily, and unpredictable, but with an earnest desire to join audiences to actors and make all onlookers into sympathizers, if not participants.”20 Art collectives such as the Hi Red Center mobilized performance in the streets to create work outside (and relentlessly

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critical) of the institutions of the Japanese state and the dominant culture. As described by Chong, “Hi Red Center’s work could be read as a brilliant, absurdist parody of the control exerted by the state on the citizenry in an increasingly controlled society.”21 Disillusioned with the prognostications of political theory, Eiko and Koma also turned to the convergence of art and the body as a revolutionary praxis. The work of artists like these resonated with the two young activists, and it was in such work, they said, that “we sensed that the means and the end are inseparable, that being revolutionary means being radical, and that the body is our vessel and foundation for exploration, experimentation, and expression.”22 Eiko and Koma migrated to New York in the early 1970s, where they would have encountered artists and activists engaged with similar questions. As Rebecca Schneider describes the performance cultures of this period, “So much performance-based artwork in the 1960s and 1970s (influenced by a lengthy heritage of ‘anti-art’ avant-garde forms) was arguably more invested at that time in seceding from the exclusionary union of Great Masters than in joining it.”23 At the time, performance and body art, largely excluded from dominant art institutions, was a relatively inexpensive, flexible, critically effective, and accessible medium for minoritarian artists (women, people of color, and queers), who were similarly refused entry into the institutions of the art world. As Uri McMillan teaches us in his work on artists Howardena Pindell and Adrian Piper, the activist and often highly theatrical interventions of groups like the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (in the late 1960s, early 1970s) or the Guerrilla Girls (in and after the 1980s) mobilized protest and performance to indict the exclusive hierarchies of New York’s major exhibiting institutions and their near total exclusion of non-male, non-Western, non-white artists.24 By the time the pair arrived in New York, the art scene had already been greatly enriched by the innovations of a host of influential Japanese expat women artists working in performance, including Shigeko Kubota, Mieko Shiomi, Yayoi Kusama, and Yoko Ono—many explicitly mobilizing performance for institutional disruption and critique.25 In 1969, Kusama staged the Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at MoMA (Otherwise Known as the Museum of Modern Art), a happening in which Kusama infiltrated MoMA’s sculpture garden and directed a group of eight naked collaborators to reproduce (as body sculptures) the work of

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the museum’s Grand Masters.26 A few years later, in 1971, Ono took out an ad in the Village Voice announcing a “one woman show” at the Museum of Modern Art. The ad featured a photograph of the artist standing in front of the museum’s entrance while holding a shopping sack with the letter “F” printed across it. Posing just before and beneath the word “Art,” she mischievously renamed the institution “The Museum of Modern [F]Art.” During the show’s advertised dates, the museum box office famously taped her ad to their window, scrawling the words “THIS IS NOT HERE” across it.27 She got a camera person to document visitors’ reaction to the show (which was, in fact, not there), some saying they missed it, with others pretending to have enjoyed it. The camera person sometimes revealed that the show was conceptual, rather than physical, before asking the interlocutor for a response. One child perceptively replied with something like: I guess it means we don’t really need the museum for the show to exist.28 Institutional attempts to “deal with an ephemeral performance” can run the risk of diminishing or dulling performance’s oppositional edge through the act of capture, either absorbing performance’s resistancefunction into the institution, or transforming performance into a vessel that extends the institution’s reach out into the world. For example, decades after their interventions, when Kusama and Ono actually received one-woman shows at MoMA (in 1998 and 2015, respectively), MoMA highlighted both interventions in a fashion that awkwardly absorbed them into the museum’s institutional history, reproducing Daily News coverage of Kusama’s happening in her show’s exhibition catalogue and appropriating Ono’s title for Klaus Biesenbach and Christophe Cherix curated retrospective One Woman Show 1960–1971.29 Even when it is subject to institutional capture, however, performance may attempt emancipation from the hold of the institution. Dancing in the 30th Street Station, Eiko seems less to extend the art institution into the world, than to offer an encounter with a choreographic lesson in the emancipation and the de-institutionalization of the body’s movements. That is, the effect of her choreography is to loosen power’s hold over and control and choreography of the body. To explain what I mean by this, we have to go back to the station and watch her dance.

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Choreographing Freedom Every week the primary sequence for A Body in a Station is the same. Eiko enters the waiting area from the west entrance, moves to the north atrium, dances for hours, and then exits the way she came.30 Philbrick characterizes this as “the simplest of choreography carried out slowly and deliberately amidst the changing, charging swirl of commuters, travelers, lost souls, security personnel, and redcaps at the station.”31 But in what sense is it choreographic? Though the arc of each performance follows a similar sequence, Eiko’s movements through and in the station are not governed by choreography in the traditional sense. Her gestures are not predetermined but are singular unto each performance, improvised and particular to the here and now for which and in which she dances. Candelario describes this as a practice of “dancing-with,” wherein the dancer does not dance in a space, but with it. This theory (“dancingwith”) is developed via a reading of Eiko & Koma’s River, a site-specific performance danced in and “with the current” of a host of different waterways: “When they transpose their signature movement vocabulary into a fluid environment, the water becomes both floor and mirror for the dance, allowing the pair to choreograph quietude, stillness, and lingering alongside resistance and flow.”32 The effect in A Body in a Station is much the same, save that the station takes the role of the river, and the ebb and flow of water is replaced by the tides of travelers traveling. As we watch her dance, the bodies around her shift and swirl with patterns of movement choreographed and governed by the time-tables of the station. Eiko moves with them, dancing always in response to their presence, while generating movements and gestures that extend beyond the preformed movements set by the station’s dominant choreography. In Eiko’s dance at the station, a Japanese/American woman dances alone, guided by no one but herself. “I am in a station,” she says. “I have nothing, I don’t have those great choreographies, I don’t have big rehearsals. But I have intentions.”33 Indeed, she is suspicious of “choreography” as the term signifies in the modern tradition. She is apart from it: “I feel distant to the modern dance notion of choreography, which is to paint a white canvas with bodies. I just do not think that way.”34 This metaphor for choreography (“to paint a white canvas with bodies”) casts light on the feminist of color implications of Eiko’s solo dance.

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It brings to mind Yves Klein’s action paintings in Paris in 1960, in which the artist dressed in a suit and guided naked women dredged in blue paint across the canvas. As Amelia Jones describes it, Klein “used the female body (perhaps ironically but nonetheless blatantly) as a tool (a ‘living brush’) on behalf of male genius.”35 The woman’s body is to Klein what the ballerina, for Susan Leigh Foster, is to her male partner and/or choreographer: “She is, in a word, the phallus, and he embodies the forces that pursue, guide, and manipulate it.”36 Choreography, here, transforms the dancer’s/woman’s body into a social symbol, a tool for use by power and a subject for a masculine power’s domination and manipulation of the female body. As both a corporeal practice and an immaterial representation of larger symbolic power dynamics, choreography can grab, inscribe, and deposit power’s gendered and racialized imprint in the dancer’s body such that “like the unattainable love it typically portrayed, choreographic form left its only trace in the bodies that had performed it.”37 In both Jones’s and Foster’s examples, the choreographed woman is explicitly or implicitly white, yet her body is an overdetermined signifier of fleshy, even racial difference: In Klein’s case her epidermis is marked by the distinguishing difference of color (blue) as Foster’s ballerina shuttles through racialized roles (“Gypsies, Creoles, and other Orientalist characters”) that underline her “unequivocal Otherness.”38 That Eiko emphasizes the whiteness of the canvas might thus invite us to pause and think about the racialization of the bodies thrown against (or contained and held within) a white background. Within this framework, race is not a metaphor for the unequivocal Otherness of white women, but a lived reality through which women of color navigate the choreographic constraints of a white world. A practitioner of the choreography of corporeal emancipation, Eiko does not have choreography, and choreography does not have her. Eiko is choreography, centering the movements, choices, and body of a woman of color in a praxis of self-determination. Her distance from the “modern dance notion of choreography” resonates with what Lepecki describes as Jérôme Bel’s “interrogation of dance’s political ontology [which] takes the form of a systematic critique of choreography’s participation in the broader project of Western representation.”39 Bel’s work explores and reveals dominant forms of representation as they effect and reproduce “discursive and performative forms of domination.”40 In works like The Last Supper, Bel deploys

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gestural repetition to function as, in Lepecki’s term, “paranomasia”: “a composite word from the Greek para, both ‘alongside’ and ‘beyond,’ and onomos, ‘name,’ that indicates slight variations on meaning proper to the pun.”41 Bel’s paranomastic motion evidences choreography’s suspect claim to, and power over, the dancer’s body, revealing “that dance is something independent of the dancer. It reveals choreography as a haunting machine, a body snatcher.”42 But it also opens up new means through which the dancer can destabilize choreography’s hold on the body: “By peeling off dance from the dancer, the dancer can be inhabited by other nonpreformed steps; and choreography reveals itself as always diluted by each body’s tremors, involuntary acts, morphology, imbalances, and techniques.”43 When the dancer’s body moves beside and beyond choreography, the body realizes something akin to what Goldman theorizes as improvised dance as a practice of freedom, where freedom is not an endpoint or destination, but something that is instead generated by the body from within limited and constraining spaces. “Improvised dance literally involves giving shape to oneself and deciding how to move in relation to an unsteady landscape,” she writes. “In this sense, improvised dance offers a very real practice of freedom that can be carried into more ‘pedestrian’ spheres of movement, even though . . . there are no guarantees about the outcome.”44 Eiko’s emancipatory choreography is one such practice of freedom. While Eiko’s dance may not have the kind of “great choreography” that organizes the movements of large numbers of bodies, the station we are in certainly does. Though it’s held in the public trust, the 30th Street Station is managed by a private transportation company (Amtrak). Movement in the station is indicative of global life’s increased choreography by what Moten and Harney call logistics: the calculated forces and metrics of capital, which shape the movement of labor and goods across an increasingly interconnected world, organizing and governing both the consumers and the consumed.45 Logistics determine the flows of the modern world, moving great numbers of bodies and goods, but they govern this movement in the abstract. “Logistics wants to dispense with the subject altogether,” warn Moten and Harney.46 Achille Mbembe reaches a similar conclusion as he describes the rise of algorithmic knowledge over humanistic forms of knowing and being: “As markets themselves are increasingly turning into algorithmic

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structures and technologies, the only useful knowledge will be algorithmic. Instead of people with body, history and flesh, statistical inferences will be all that count.”47 Driven by probabilities, algorithms, and quantitative exigencies, logistics and algorithmic knowledge are primed toward the accumulation of capital, rather than the enrichment, protection, nourishment, and sustenance of planetary life. All too often realized through violence and coercion, logistics are one component of capital’s mass choreographic apparatus, which recruits and disciplines bodies into performing as productive sites for the generation and extraction of value. But Eiko’s gestures produce nothing but themselves: micromovements, a stumble through the atrium, the tremor of a muscle as she stands without waiting, the pressing of her body against the cool stone floor or wall. Not indifferent to the forces that govern the tides of bodies moving through the station, she moves in difference from them: slowly falling, stumbling, lying, and loitering. Her emancipatory choreography is less about taking hold of or dominating the body (compelling it to perform preformed movement) than a practice of opening the body up to new possibilities for movement. Noémi Solomon describes choreographer Xavier Le Roy’s work as an interrogation of the power dynamics of choreography, but also a means for “opening up new potentials for what a dancing body can do.”48 Unlike Le Roy (or Bel), Eiko in A Body in a Station seems less interested in a critical interrogation of choreography’s ontology than she is in embodying an alternative practice of it. If anything, she is not so much choreographing herself or us as she is the air around her. “I did choreograph,” she insists, “I choreographed the mood.”49 Ohno Kazuo, the only teacher Eiko ever called sensei, exemplified the pedagogy of the emancipated choreographer.50 After leaving Asbestos Hall, Eiko and Koma entered biweekly improvisation classes with Ohno. “Ohno would say a few things,” she recalls, “show us some pictures from time to time, then tell us to improvise for about two hours. No more instruction before, during, or after.”51 As with Nina Simone’s best teachers, Ohno pointed in various directions, but the students were doing the exploring on their own. At times, Eiko became overwhelmed by the “task of continuously facing my own mind in the unheated studio and feeling the limit of my own imagination.”52 Unable to force herself to open the door to Ohno’s studio, she “turned around to walk down the hill

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in darkness.”53 But in so doing, she learned something critical regarding an emancipated choreography: She, too, was free to come and go. If Ohno was teaching Eiko and Koma how to choreograph themselves, he was teaching them how to free themselves from his tutelage. But even when you want your students to be free, it’s hard to let go of the ones you love. When Eiko and Koma left Japan in the 1970s, their teacher objected: “Ohno sensei perhaps felt betrayed twice, when we left him first for Europe and then for the US. He never understood why we would leave him. What young people we were! Young people just leave.”54 Over the years, the students became teachers. Eiko & Koma run movement workshops together, and Eiko has offered courses at UCLA and, for some years, at Wesleyan University: “Now I teach and of course I want my students to leave me.”55 Though Ohno did not want them to leave him, he taught them how to do it. He never asked them to follow him, or to become his disciples, as had Hijikata. Instead, as Eiko does with those of us in the station, he invited them to follow him only insofar as they follow themselves, setting them free to become their own choreographers.

Entanglements We’re just over half way through. How are you doing? It’s possible you don’t like the performance. Maybe you’re sticking around because you don’t want to be rude. I appreciate that, but remember, you are free to come and go. But maybe you, too, feel caught in the mood that Eiko is choreographing? I should point out that this is the kind of feeling that can’t be produced through coercion. I hate audience participation, and wouldn’t bring you to a performance if I knew we were going to be compelled to do something or be touched without our consent. But notice that when she dances we’re not the only ones who gather together to watch her. Her dance is producing a public, and a commons is coming together. Sometimes this happens as travelers break free from the station’s preformed movements, pausing, stopping, and joining her for a minute, before slipping back into the dominant choreography. “People in the station are going somewhere, or waiting to go somewhere,” she wrote in an accompanying pamphlet. “Many are alone. Performing also alone, I want to breathe the vast space of the station and the movement within it. I want to exchange a gaze with every viewer and dance for those who

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came to see me as well as those who are indifferent.”56 A white woman with short, gray hair and a suitcase pauses opposite Eiko. She locks eyes on the dancer for a minute, before tightening her grip on her bag and continuing on her way. A middle-aged black woman walks across the atrium, catching sight of Eiko. She hesitates, slowing down, before settling into a place at the edge of the crowd where she watches with us a little longer. Certainly, Eiko is making a world with her dance: “Now I don’t want to dance in a space, I want to dance in a place.”57 But if she’s making a place, she’s producing it within and with the station and people surrounding her. It’s this collective vibration, the resonant dimension of her dancing-with that charges her choreography with transformative, creative, world-making powers. As Candelario writes, “Dancing-with acknowledges that not only will the dance change, but all partners in the dance will be altered by the process, forming something together that they could not possibly become on their own.”58 The woman of color feminist praxis of Eiko’s dance stages the undoing and unworking of the dominant choreography’s hold over the racialized, gendered, and sexed body within the station, and as it does so, she subtly begins to transform the place and time around her, including those of us who have gathered to watch. “All that you touch / You Change,” says the hero of Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, Lauren Oya Olamina, and “All that you Change / Changes you.”59 A collection of incommensurable elements are woven together through Eiko’s dance, changing it and changed by it. We become “we,” entangled with each other and opening up to someplace, sometime, somewhere, something else. But any kind of gathering or collective is complicated, risky, and requires elaboration and critique. Remember the futon lying at the entry of the PAFA galleries where the photographs were displayed? It looked lonely—its presence as much an ephemeral trace of Eiko’s dance in Fukushima, as it was a gesture to the fact that her dance could not be contained or held within the walls of any gallery. Somewhere, you might have thought to yourself, Eiko is out there dancing. And in having that thought, you became tethered to and tangled up with her and that other somewhere and sometime radiating out from her body. Maybe you’re just barely attached by the gossamer thread of a thought. But that’s still something. In Eiko’s dance, time is out of joint, space is overlapping, and bodies are tangled up together. Philbrick says that when the Fukushima photographs

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were displayed concurrently with Eiko’s dance in the 30th Street Station, “a triumvirate of locations were created; the stations in Fukushima and Philadelphia linked by the galleries at PAFA.”60 The folding, breaking, extension, weaving, and entanglement of time, space, and bodies are hallmarks of Eiko & Koma’s practice. As Eiko describes it, the “space and time, in which we move, is not a white canvas that stands alone and empty. Here and now are continuous parts of a larger geography (space) and history (time) and as such are dense with memories, shadows, and possibilities.”61 For Philbrick, time and space are gathered together by way of the institution presenting the work (“linked by the galleries at PAFA”). But it seems more apt to say that these different worlds become entangled by way of Eiko’s body as much as her body reveals our already entangled nature. Take Eiko’s anecdote about the following encounter: “When I walked into the museum after public hours to check the installation of our photo exhibition at PAFA, I found a cleaning lady who was looking at the photos alone. And then she noticed me. She could not speak English but she gave me a big hug and she had tears. That’s when I realized with these photos I might be able to create a new relationship with people.”62 It’s possible, given that the woman doesn’t speak English, that she, like Eiko, is an immigrant. As discussed in chapter 2, the kind of work the “cleaning lady” performs is often the province of women of color and immigrants. Certainly, the tears may have had nothing to do with her personal or historical experiences. Sometimes a photograph just makes you cry. But as a result of Eiko’s dance, the two women “noticed” each other, and for a moment they became entangled in each other’s arms. I want to resist the lure of romanticizing this embrace, while holding open the possibility that it might have greater significance. While there are the things they share (their labor is both, to some extent, absorbed by the institution), there are also a host of important differences. One woman enters the space as a MacArthur Grant recipient, a respected artist whose work is programmed and featured on the walls of the institution. The other cleans the space, her work made invisible to those who benefit from it, her labor taken from her and absorbed into the institution. One can’t reasonably say that their embrace makes a world in which the walls fall down and the wars are forgotten. But the embrace is a gesture to the fact that we still reach out to touch and hold and care for each other, in spite of the walls and wars that are meant to keep such acts of solidarity

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or empathy from happening. In the era of algorithmic knowledge and the choreography of logistics, the spontaneity of an embrace between two immigrant women (possibly two women of color) could be a seed or sign of deeper entanglements and richer commitments, latent and waiting to be activated. Here, Eiko’s dancing body serves less as a conduit connecting people and places across extended stretches of time and space, than as a beacon illuminating the already existing fact of our entanglement and radical interconnection. Entanglement and interconnection are, then, both a source of great possibility and mounting risk. Entanglement is another way of describing the communism of incommensurability. It can also describe the embrace between two women, a dancer and a cleaning woman; between a victim of nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima and a Japanese immigrant dancer in a Philadelphia train station; between a woman who stops to watch a performance and one who continues on her way; between Eiko, you, and me. Watching her dance in the station, you might be prompted to look around and ask: How did we all get here together? Staging the dance in a transportation hub, Eiko reminds us that the world is getting smaller, or at least more intimately entangled. This is a process that has been occurring for some time, the result of historical developments realized through the domination of the globe by the capitalist mode of production. In the Grundrisse, Marx argued that “by its very nature, capital strives to go beyond every spatial limitation. Hence the creation of the physical conditions of exchange—of the means of communication and transport—becomes a necessity for it to an incomparably greater degree: space must be annihilated by time.”63 Shipping routes, railways, interstate systems, phone lines, airspace, the internet, credit, debt, and the market all become means for the annihilation of space by time. As capital strives “on the one hand to tear down every local barrier to traffic, i.e., to exchange, and to conquer the whole world as its market, it strives, on the other hand, to annihilate space by means of time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum the time required for the movement [of products] from one place to another.”64 Doing so, it also exposes the world to the naked vulnerabilities of fungibility, equivalence, and commensurability. In response to the catastrophe in Fukushima, Jean-Luc Nancy describes the world as a system of general interconnection, interdependence, and impending catastrophe: “The complexity of interdependent

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systems (ecological or economic, sociopolitico- ideologic, technoscientific, culture, logical, etc.) and the existing chains of constraint (electricity, gasoline, uranium, all the rare minerals, etc.)—and their implementation (their civilian and military, social and private uses, etc.)—depend on a general interconnection: that of the money by which all these systems function and to which, in the last analysis, they lead back, since any operation of fabrication, exchange, or distribution must lead to profit.”65 This unprecedented degree of entanglement has grave implications for human and planetary life. For Marx, during the process of circulation and exchange the market flattens incommensurable commodities and actions into a relation of general equivalence, or commensurability: “When a product (or an activity) becomes exchange value . . . it must at the same time be qualitatively transformed, converted into another element, so that both commodities become denominated quantities, in the same units, thus becoming commensurable.”66 The logical result of capital’s ceaseless drive for expansion will be the absorption of everything (all life, matter, time, and space) into what Nancy describes as “the regime of general equivalence [which] henceforth virtually absorbs, well beyond the monetary or financial sphere but thanks to it and with regard to it, all the spheres of existence of humans, and along with them all things that exist.”67 The result of this process, “created over several centuries—without conscious decision, without deliberation,” is that the world “is now headed toward a generalized catastrophe, or at least is now capable of one.”68 For both Eiko and Nancy, the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima is indicative of our tendency toward generalized catastrophe. But for many people of color, this catastrophe has already been happening for some time. Capital’s annihilation of space by time was achieved through logistics, and it was rationalized and justified through the political and economic ideology of the white supremacist European and American bourgeoisie—liberalism. Liberalism, as Lisa Lowe argues, was “commensurate with, and deeply implicated in, colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and empire.”69 Logistics were the praxis through which this theory became reality. As Moten and Harney write: Modern logistics is founded with the first great movement of commodities, the ones that could speak. It was founded in the Atlantic slave trade,

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founded against the Atlantic slave. Breaking from the plundering accumulation of armies to the primitive accumulation of capital, modern logistics was marked, branded, seared with the transportation of the commodity labor that was not, and ever after would not be, no matter who was in that hold or containerized in that ship. From the motley crew who followed in the red wakes of these slave ships, to the prisoners shipped to the settler colonies, to the mass migrations of industrialization in the Americas, to the indentured slaves from India, China, and Java, to the trucks and boats leading north across the Mediterranean or the Rio Grande, to one-way tickets from the Philippines to the Gulf States or Bangladesh to Singapore, logistics was always the transport of slavery, not “free” labor.70

For people of color, the regime of logistics did not recently bring us to the point of generalized catastrophe. Logistics is and gives rise to the catastrophes that made us us: the ongoing, erupting entanglements born from and between the Atlantic slave trade, indigenous dispossession, settler colonialism, imperialism, resource extraction, and labor exploitation throughout the Americas, Africa, Oceania, and Asia. Black, brown, Asian, and indigenous life routinely functions as a central contradiction within modern, global, racial capitalism. As logistics set into motion the movement of bodies around the world, it simultaneously brought about the conditions through which W. E. B. Du Bois’s revolutionary dark proletariat became possible. Lowe describes this process as an effect of “the intimacies of four continents,” or “the dynamic relationship among the always present but differently manifest and available histories and social forces [of colonialism and racial capitalism].”71 The potentially insurrectionary relationships forged between the children of “the intimacies of four continents,” Lowe insists, remain a latent, if unrealized power rooted in the “implied but less visible forms of alliance, affinity, and society among variously colonized peoples beyond [but also, now, embedded within] the metropolitan national center.”72 Historical experiments meant to transform entanglement into solidarity and insurgency—including the Non-Aligned Movement, PanAfricanism, and various decolonial struggles from the mid-twentieth to early twenty-first century—have modeled such practices. Woman of color feminisms and queer of color epistemologies stage another. And for all of these movements, the aesthetic and poetic function as vital

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means for imagining and enacting new entanglements, new forms of collective care, solidarity, and resistance, and new ways of living in and surviving the world. Though by no means the revolution, Eiko’s dance and her embrace with the woman working in the PAFA galleries underscore the capacity of performance to foster practices of alliance, affinity, society, and mutual care at the horizon of the communism of incommensurability. But is this communism? We’re merely a random gathering of different people surrounding a dancer. We don’t really have a responsibility to or relationship with each other. If anything, we’re just floating here. But the looseness of that metaphor might actually be a way to describe minoritarian affinity: we, who float together in the wake of any host of historical catastrophes, subject to the tides and forces of history and power. Not so much a blending or melting, we are strewn detritus hovering at the surface, trying not to be dragged under, while caught up in precarious, awkward, and queer entanglements, rich with friction as we bump up against and crush into each other. I use the word “entanglement” because it sounds like bodies looped together in an embrace, in sex, or dance, or some other form of corporeal enmeshment that has the potential to be violent and destructive, but also pleasurable, sensuous, loving, and creative. Recognizing both possibilities, I mean “entanglement” to signify in the sense of the word proposed by Rey Chow, to “suggest a topological looping together that is at the same time an enmeshment of topics.”73 This “looping together” is not a name for relations of equivalence or commensurability, however, since it also describes a “figure for meetings that are not necessarily defined by proximity or affinity. What kinds of entanglements might be conceivable through partition and particularity rather than conjunction and intersection, and through disparity rather than equivalence?”74 While not necessarily defined by proximity or affinity, entanglements that are rich with “partition and particularity” may yet produce new forms of proximity and affinity, giving way to diverse, collective practices of mutual care, survival, and world-creation for and amongst different minoritarian subjects whose hopes and freedoms are inextricably tangled up with each other. But such practices are sustainable and ethical only if they can acknowledge and work through and with the difficulty of incommensurability (“disparity and equivalence”) instead of trying to extinguish it.

Figure 4.4. New York Daily News, front page, August 25, 1969. (Courtesy of New York Daily News.)

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Think back to the Daily News coverage of Kusama’s intervention at MoMA. In a photograph of the action, Kusama’s back is to a shallow pool. On the opposite shore a crowd of (mostly if not exclusively) white spectators watches a group of naked people in the pool. At Kusama’s back, Roy Williams, a black security officer dressed in a dapper suit, stands between the artist and the pool while trying to convince Kusama’s nude revelers to leave. Though the action bore a ludic anti-institutional edge, it was hardly a revolution. At best it was an amusing nuisance for Williams, but given the brutality of the racialized and segregated hierarchy of New York’s labor market in 1969, I worry that it might also have been a professional nightmare for him. This is a scene of entanglement that is not marked with the power of insurgent interracial, gender-transitive solidarity. Rather, as a security officer, Williams functions as the arm of a white supremacist art institution, working to evict the work of a woman of color artist who is excluded from the institution. Her happening, in turn, may place him in a precarious position with his employer, and all for the benefit of a gathering crowd of white spectators who consume their dance as spectacle. They are out of joint: incommensurable. The discourse of entanglement allows us to see the incommensurable particularities of singular figures (Kusama, Williams, and so on) whose fates are nonetheless tangled up together. But it also allows us to imagine other possibilities in which the “looping together” of radically different subjects might give way to transformative practices of affiliation, sharing, and care. After all, what might have happened if Kusama, Williams, the performers, and their allies in the crowd began to work with each other and against the institution? Predicated on attention to “partition and particularity rather than conjunction and intersection, and through disparity rather than equivalence,” entanglement is a framework with which we can engage, work with, and work in relation to the incommensurabilities of race, gender, sex, and class that overdetermine Kusama’s exchange with Williams or Eiko’s embrace with the woman in PAFA. After all, incommensurability implies a relation of being with; something would not be incommensurable if it were not comparable with or existing alongside something else. The difficulty lies in working through the simultaneity of sharing or comparison and disjuncture and incommensurability.

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From Her Body Sprang Their Greatest Wealth This point requires elaboration, but we’ve been sitting and watching on the station floor for some time, so we stand up to wander and stretch our legs for a minute. Around now, Eiko is pressed against the south wall, the red fabric raised above her head like an offering to the sky, and as we pass through the temporal and spatial slipstream that unfolds in her wake, we’re picked up and carried through time and space to another manifestation of the dance, this time on Wall Street in 2016. Her hands are still raised above her head as her spectral figure makes its way through a crowd, moving in starts and stops, the red fabric replaced by a garden-hose inexplicably hoisted into the air. At one point, a man in an expensive suit passes through. He looks like a businessman or banker, and he avoids casting his eyes on Eiko’s nearly absurd presence. But for a second, he is folded into the dance, slowing his pace a moment to watch her. In the era of financialization, Wall Street is more than the capitol of capital; it’s an engine fueled by risk. As Randy Martin observes, “High risks fetch higher returns. . . . Properly ascertained risk, not growth per se, is what yields rewards. The trade in risk avoidance devolves into a profit on risk itself.”75 From the perspective of the market, the effects of such risk are abstract, having little to do with the flesh and blood consequences reaped in the result. As Eiko’s spectral presence tugs at the man’s attention, even if only for a moment, she confronts him as an embodiment of human risk. (After all, the Fukushima Daichii Nuclear plant was primarily owned by TEPCO, a publicly traded utility company.) She stands before him, like the ghostly apparition of someone caught in the wake of—and seething forth from—the proliferating catastrophes that flow through his risk-prone ledgers. In fact, Wall Street is densely populated with ghostly victims of any host of historical catastrophes from whom the wealth of the modern world has been extracted. One can easily imagine Eiko turning a corner and bumping into a 2013 performance by Nona Faustine, From Her Body Sprang Their Greatest Wealth. Faustine’s performance, too, stages an embodiment of racialized and gendered human risk, and a comparison between the two performances draws into relief the radical incommensurability distinguishing one catastrophe and another.

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Figure 4.5. Eiko, A Body in Places, Wall Street, June 20, 2016. Photographer William Johnston. (Courtesy of Eiko and William Johnston.)

In a photograph documenting Faustine’s performance, she stands at the intersection of Wall Street and Bank Street—the site of a former slave market. A black woman, flesh vulnerable and exposed, she poses naked on a wooden box with white shoes on her feet, facial expression opaque, and wearing nothing else save heavy metal shackles that wrap around her hands and meet at her torso. Like Eiko, Faustine is no ghost, but as she performs her body becomes a conduit through which slavery’s dead return to Wall Street. What’s significant here, however, are not just similarities between two performances staged by women of color and tangled up in the same geographic space, but also the points of “partition and particularity” that distinguish them. The distribution of death toward black life in slavery’s wake situates the living black body in close proximity to death and to the dead. As Sharon Holland writes, “If black subjects are held in such isolation—first by a system of slavery and second by its imaginative replacement—then is not their relationship to the dead, those lodged in terms like ancestor or heritage, more intimate than historians and critics have heretofore articulated?”76 Faustine’s performance materializes the notion that in both

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the time of slavery and the time of performance, “we are coeval with the dead.”77 But her reanimation of the auction block draws attention to the entanglements between performance, slavery, the bodies of black women, and capital accumulation, reminding us of the ways in which performance (for some gendered and racialized subjects) has been not only an instrument of emancipation, but also an agent of domination. The auction block was more than just a feature of slavery. It was, as Saidiya Hartman demonstrates, a central stage on which the system of slavery was performed into flesh. In the “theater of the marketplace,” Hartman argues, performance was used to justify and “incite the flow of capital” through (and from) the slave’s body: “For those forced to ‘step it up lively,’ the festivity of the trade and the pageantry of the coffle were intended to shroud the violence of the market and deny the sorrow of those sold.”78 Faustine’s performance might thus be received as a critical indictment of the sensational theatricality of the slave auction as well as its critical role in producing the wealth that makes possible the city towering behind her (a materialization of the wealth extracted from black women’s bodies). So whereas for Eiko performance is a means for emancipation, the chains around Faustine’s hands gesture to the fact that performance may still be a method for domination, depending on what kind of body you inhabit. This is not to say that Faustine can’t mobilize performance toward emancipatory ends, but to acknowledge that such a practice of freedom for a black woman will be marked by social and historical exigencies that must be distinguished from those embodied by Eiko. Faustine’s performance gives flesh to Katherine McKittrick’s dual theorization of the auction block as a site that “positions excessive dehumanization and observation and obscures black humanity by violently transforming human beings into commodity objects through the act of economic exchange,” while also being “a site through which conditions of captivity and sale can be contested.”79 Faustine’s performance gestures to the auction block as a site where the enslaved often mobilized performance to negotiate their debasements, creatively staging the ontological and historical priority of resistance in a fashion that is, for Hartman, “tantamount to insurgency.”80 Offering a paradigmatic example of black performance as insurgency, Hartman turns to the sale of Sukie, a slave who engenders her own sexuality from the auction block in order to threaten the masters

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and momentarily invert the relations of domination by “def[ying] the tricks of the trade and, by extension, the related practices that secure and reproduce the relations of mastery and servitude.”81 Sukie’s insurgency is staged “in the domain of sexuality,” delivering her to what Spillers describes as the “insurgent ground as [black] female social subject.”82 Faustine, too, mobilizes the domain of sexuality, staging her exposed flesh and exposing her naked body at the geographical site of slavery’s primal scene, employing performance to invert the shrouding of the market’s violence and denial of the slave’s sorrow. A yellow taxicab turning the corner behind Faustine is the only other sign of life in the photograph. Its headlights are on and we could assume that the image was produced at dusk or dawn. The lack of people on an otherwise relatively busy street suggests the latter. Either way, in order to produce the photograph, Faustine had to risk arrest. The title of the piece gestures to the ways in which black bodies, and black women in particular, have been transformed into what Paula Giddings describes as “a permanent labor force and metaphor that were perpetuated through the black woman’s womb.”83 For Christina Sharpe, the result is that by “reading together the Middle Passage, the coffle, and . . . the birth canal, we can see how each has functioned separately and collectively over time to . . . turn the womb into a factory producing blackness as abjection much like the slave ship’s hold and the prison.”84 Practicing a choreography of emancipation, Eiko moves freely. But the shackles around Faustine’s hand and the stillness of the photograph suggest that the historical objectification of black women continues to linger in the flesh via the ongoing criminalization of black women’s bodies. As Sharpe insists, “Living in/the wake of slavery is living ‘the afterlife of property’ and living the afterlife of partus sequitur ventrem (that which is brought forth follows the womb), in which the Black child inherits the non/status, the non/being of the mother. The inheritance of a non/status is everywhere apparent now in the ongoing criminalization of black women and their children.”85 Eiko’s loitering, when compared to Faustine’s appearance at the corner, reminds us that loitering is a privilege afforded to only some bodies. (Indeed, anti-loitering measures played a key role in maintaining the afterlife of slavery for black people after emancipation.86) For black bodies the law is often another form of shackle meant to keep blackness and black people, still, in the hold. This

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is a form of containment that Eiko need not contend with. The presence of an aging Japanese woman moving eccentrically through space may attract ridicule or be received with an orientalist gaze that fixes her in ways that her dancing body constantly pushes against. But when she performs in the station outside of the preformed areas granted by the station’s management, no one arrives to arrest her. In the era of Sandra Bland, one has a hard time imagining that Faustine could carry out her performance for long with the same, protective register of invisibility or permissiveness. To imagine an encounter between these different women, performing side by side, is to understand entanglement as an experience of being enmeshed, yet out of joint. “Time is out of joint,” which I’ve said often as we’ve watched Eiko dance together, are the famous words to which Derrida cathects in Specters of Marx. Appropriately enough, the words are drawn from a performance: Hamlet’s address to the ghost of his father. Like a performance (where behavior is “twice-behaved”) an address to a ghost is an experience and articulation of the fact that time is tangled up and time is out of joint. For Derrida, “a specter is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back.”87 Performance, as it is for Eiko and Faustine, is a powerful means for returning the revenant to the presence of the present. Something in the present grabs our attention and pulls us out of Wall Street, dragging us back to the Philadelphia train station. As we returned, you might have noticed a large, metal clock floating above us and embedded in the stone wall of the north atrium. During a rehearsal for the piece, Anna Campbell took a photograph in which Eiko stands before the clock wearing the yellow kimono as the blood red banner of fabric flows at an angle from her right hand to stream across the ground. The kimono and her white makeup nearly fade into the wall, but the garment’s red spots, the crimson ream of fabric, and her jet-black hair stand in relief against the station’s monochromatic surround. Her left hand reaches up to her right cheek, and her gaze seems to land on a door frame in front of her. But as if someone sealed the entryway with blocks of white stone, it is a doorframe without a door. Still, the dead come flooding into the room, if not through the door, then by way of her spectral presence. Hovering above the sealed entrance, the clock reads 8:26 p.m., drawing a comparison with a famous, anonymous photograph of a watch salvaged from the wreckage in Hiroshima. That watch stopped at precisely

Figure 4.6. Eiko, rehearsal for A Body in a Station, October 2014. Photographer Anna Campbell. (Courtesy of Eiko and Anna Campbell.)

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8:16 a.m. (the moment the atomic bomb detonated), and as Eiko dances, 8:16 a.m. and 8:26 p.m. vibrate with each other. Entanglement thus describes resonance and vibration that is out of joint, which is nonetheless a powerful means for finding place, finding each other, and making sense of an alienating, annihilating, catastrophic world. In a sense, A Body in Places began as Eiko turned to the legacy of nuclear holocaust in an attempt to make sense of another catastrophe unfolding before her. On September 11, 2001, she watched the twin towers fall from her living room window. “Horrified by the government and media talk of retaliation,” she recalls, “I decided to learn more about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I was trying to put September 11 into a larger perspective. In doing so, I stumbled across Hayashi’s work.”88 Hayashi Kyoko is hibakusha, a survivor of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Her work, largely unknown in the United States, explores the rupture and legacy of atomic catastrophe as it clings to the bodies of those who are caught in its wake. In 2010 Eiko published a translation of Hayashi’s Torinichi kara Torinichi e (From Trinity to Trinity), an impressionistic novella following a hibakusha narrator (resembling Hayashi) on her pilgrimage to New Mexico’s Trinity Site, the location of the world’s first atomic bomb test.89 The woman at the center of A Body in Places bears a familiar resemblance to Hayashi’s narrator. She, too, wanders in the wake of nuclear catastrophe, shuttling across space and time. As Eiko describes it, “time is at the heart of Hayashi’s work” and time, too, is out of joint: “Not only does Hayashi’s narration move freely among scenes in the distant past, recent past, and present, but her use of tense changes within the same scene. . . . Hayashi’s aging body holds the physical memory of atomic exposure and its aftermath, and thus embodies that time span.”90 Time comes undone at the point of Hayashi’s writing body, and as she writes, her utterances carry the reader through thick and incommensurable entanglements of time and space, staging both as fragmented and out of joint, rather than progressive and continuous. That Eiko “stumbled across Hayashi’s work” is a fortuitous description, since a stumble can be a sign of a lack of coordination or of being out of joint. The stumble, trip, and bodily stutter are trademarks of Eiko’s dance in the station. As if with every stumble, she again trips across Hayashi’s work, falling forward (and back) like hibakusha surviving in the wake of nuclear

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apocalypse. As if with every stumble, she bodies forth the demanding utterances of those who did not survive. A specter is an utterance from the past with a claim upon the present. As Holland describes it, in a discussion of the titular ghost in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, “Beloved appears as an utterance from the past.”91 Morrison’s narrator tells us that Beloved keeps returning because the others (her mother and sister) keep running away “and leaving Beloved behind.”92 She returns because she can’t free herself from the trauma of slavery’s violence, which took her life in infancy in the worst fashion imaginable. Ultimately, her demands prove incommensurable with the needs of the living, so they leave her behind for good: “Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name?”93 Beloved’s mother, Sethe, in letting her daughter go (again), looks forward to “some kind of tomorrow,” but the novel’s haunting conclusion suggests that no new tomorrow is possible without a reconciliation with Beloved’s utterance, still echoing through and across the present.94 In both Eiko and Faustine’s performances, the past is given flesh within the present. In this way, they function like Derrida’s specters: “The specter is a paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit. . . . For it is flesh and phenomenality that give to the spirit its spectral apparition, but which disappear right away in the apparition, in the very coming of the revenant or the return of the specter. There is something disappeared, departed in the apparition itself as reapparation of the departed.”95 In A Body in a Station, Beloved, or Hamlet—as it is for another text that begins with a specter (The Communist Manifesto)—the revenant’s return is not the end but a beginning. “Everything,” Derrida concludes, “begins by the reapparition of a specter.”96 A specter’s utterance aims not just to rectify the past, but most of all to transform the present. Like performance, the specter lingers in now because she knows that nothing exists beyond or outside of this moment. So Eiko’s dance is not just a trace of what-once-was, but also the promise for what might yet be (or be again): “The revenant is going to come.”97 Both performance and specters defy the law that divides the living from dead, making the first a useful means and the latter an excellent teacher when pursuing the work of insurgency. For Holland, “the dead and their relations are perhaps the most lawless, unruly, and potentially revolutionary

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inhabitants of any imagined territory, national or otherwise.”98 They do not submit to the choreographies governing the living; they refuse all interdiction to their movement. Indeed, the returning specter refuses the laws of space, time, equivalence, and commensurability, holding instead to the singular, particular, incommensurable nature of her grievance, born in the past, but given flesh in the present. And with a claim upon the future.

Dance Here Time is out of joint. Time is running out. The clock in the atrium is ticking toward six p.m., when the performance is to conclude, and we notice that Eiko’s body is gravitating toward the threshold that divides the station’s waiting area from the north atrium. It becomes clear that she’s not returning for us, and the seated crowd begins to stretch and dissipate, before coming back together. In the densely packed waiting room, an even larger crowd collects around her. Passing through the aisles where people sit waiting for trains, she continues to choreograph the mood, stumbling through the station, weaving people together, yet out of joint. And then we are at another threshold as Eiko approaches the doors through which she entered. “Although Eiko had intended to end the performance by simply walking out the door,” Philbrick recalls, “clearly the audience would have followed her wherever she went, so turning to face them, Eiko bowed, and by using the convention of the theater, broke the spell we had all created together.”99 Perhaps by bowing, she set us free once more. She did not ask us to follow her or to become her disciples. Her appropriation of this theatrical convention might remind us of Althusser’s insistence that “the play is really the production of a new spectator, an actor who starts, where the performance ends, who only starts so as to complete it, but in life.”100 But here, there is no singular actor, or not only. Entangled in the wake of Eiko’s dance, some kind of ‘we’ stand with each other for a moment, revealed as the many, the collective, a being-singular-plural: the grounds on which the communism of the incommensurable flickers in and out of flesh. She leaves us like that. Floats out into the evening but haunting us still. Where her trace lingers, if you listen closely, you might hear the echo of a sentence beloved by Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg: Hic Rhodus, hic salta (Here is Rhodes, dance here).101

5

Tseng Kwong Chi and the Party’s End

We need to talk about the end of the party. What party? All of them.

1968 What hope there was that white supremacy was dying in the United States in 1968 was short lived, and for many, hope itself died that year, along with Dr. King. Things started to take a paranoid turn. The FBI’s Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, was instituted in the mid-1950s to fight Klan-type organizations. But by the 1960s, under the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover, it was the primary state apparatus responsible for targeting and undermining the struggle for black freedom. COINTELPRO began monitoring Dr. King and Bayard Rustin as early as 1957, circulating an internal memo in 1968 elaborating a mandate to suppress “a COALITION of militant black nationalist groups” and the “RISE OF A ‘MESSIAH,’ ” naming Dr. King, Stokely Carmichael, and Malcolm el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz in particular.1 In a description of that time, Assata Shakur writes, “No one could have known that the FBI’s COINTELPRO was attempting to destroy the Black Panther Party in particular and the Black Liberation Movement in general, using divideand conquer tactics. The FBI’s COINTEL program consisted of turning members of organizations against each other, pitting one Black organization against another.”2 Pressured by a relentless state apparatus, some good people on the inside of the resistance started to turn, becoming informants or worse. Though it once served as a source of revolutionary hope, the party turned against itself. The combination of COINTELPRO’s infiltration and the BPP’s already existing internal power struggles changed the party. “This Party was a lot different from the Black Panther Party i had fallen in love with,” recalls Shakur. “Everything felt different. The easy, friendly openness had been replaced by fear and paranoia. The beautiful 197

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revolutionary creativity i had loved so much was gone. And replaced by dogmatic stagnation.”3 Attempting, constantly, to ward off the threat of surprise, the BPP became paranoid, inflexible, and incapable of adapting in its war of positions against a brutal white supremacist state apparatus. Whereas “unity implies the coming together of elements which are, to begin with, varied and diverse in their particular natures,” as Audre Lorde writes, demands for unity within the black liberation movements increasingly centralized and universalized the black heterosexual cismale subject.4 Women and sexual minorities found themselves silenced within or jettisoned from the movement. In 1960 Bayard Rustin was forced to resign from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference after Adam Clayton Powell Jr. threatened to out Rustin’s homosexuality on the floor of Congress. Within the Black Power movement, Eldridge Cleaver’s complicated repudiation of homosexuality (by way of his profoundly phobic critique of James Baldwin) exemplified “the process by which,” according to E. Patrick Johnson, “black masculinity secure[d] its power by repudiating the (homosexual) Other.”5 And as black feminists confronted black nationalism with its patriarchal character, rather than opening up to difference, the movement ossified. As described by Manning Marable, “The actual practice of the Black Power Movement was the perpetuation of the structures of patriarchy, under the guise of ‘Blackness.’ . . . In theory and practice, the Black protest movement was compromised and gutted by its inability to confront squarely the reality of patriarchy.”6 Made rigid for these and many other reasons, the party was that much less adaptable to change as the state moved to smash it. The movement’s collapse didn’t make things any easier for the people who left than for the people who stayed. “After i left the Party,” Shakur writes, “my life became more and more impossible. Everywhere i went it seemed like i would turn around to find two detectives following me.”7 She went underground, but to get there safely, she needed a disguise: It has been designed not to stand out, something that will help me blend in with the other people who will be on the subway early in the morning. I stare at myself in the mirror, debating whether to look like a secretary or a maid. It’s too early in the morning for secretaries. I decided to look like a poor Black woman. Thick, ugly stockings, run-over black oxfords, beat-up plastic pocketbook, hand-me-down-looking plaid jacket, and, of

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course, lord-have-mercy-looking wig. My puffy morning face, smudged with a dab of awkward-looking eyebrow pencil and lipstick are perfect for the look.8

Shakur was navigating dangerous straights. On the one hand, as C. Riley Snorton argues, the black body in the United States is constantly watched, surveilled, regulated, and overseen: “Looking suspect expresses the way panopticism has become a naturalized practice for figuring and making sense of black bodies in public space.”9 But on the other, nothing is less seen in this country than “a poor Black woman,” and Shakur’s mobilization of performance to remain fugitive from capture drew upon a long tradition of black people, and black women in particular, using performance to enact and embody the fugitivity of the freedom drive. In a discussion of nineteenth-century black performance, Daphne Brooks argues that “black cultural producers and black women in particular negotiated ways of manipulating the borders of the material and the epistemological in transatlantic performance culture . . . experiment[ing] with ways of ‘doing’ their bodies differently in public spaces.”10 Shakur’s performance is exemplary of this continued tradition, which Uri McMillan describes as “fugitive performance art,” illustrated by way of Ellen Craft’s costumed escape from slavery. For Craft and others, performance “was crucial to enacting the spatial imaginaries inherent to freedom and subjectivity, while—as fugitive performance art—[Craft] artfully displayed the clever configuration of the white chattel slave’s body into an endlessly pliable instrument of escape.”11 Black freedom struggles, McMillan concludes, have long exemplified the fact that performance can be “put in the service of mobility.”12 Importantly, the mobility and fugitivity of performance are achieved as a result of performance’s seeming weakness—its inability to last, which proves useful when you need to disappear or get away in a hurry. The collapse of the BPP is only a defeat if we understand it as a point of termination, rather than departure. Shakur, though she was dragged deep into the belly of the beast and made a subject of and for the carceral state, ultimately succeeded in her fugitive flight. Instead of running north, however, she ran south, escaping prison with a little help from her friends and making her way to Cuba, where she brushed up against that something that Simone could only wish she knew how to

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feel: “Freedom. I couldn’t believe that it had really happened, that the nightmare was over, that finally the dream had come true. I was elated. Ecstatic. But I was completely disoriented. Everything was the same, yet everything was different.”13 Still, if Shakur found freedom, she did so after the collapse of the BPP. As Shakur knows better than most of us, freedom is performative and it is performed, falling apart as quickly as it flickers into flesh. Every end is a beginning. This chapter offers a portrait of what happens when the performance concludes, the party falls apart, and the feeling of freedom slips from grasp. To do this, I turn to the fall of another party and the rise of our last practitioner of minoritarian performance: Tseng Kwong Chi.

1978 Tseng Kwong Chi is primarily thought of as a photographer, but he was also a pioneer in the realm of performance, describing himself as “a New York conceptual performance artist/photographer.”14 He was a central figure in, and photographer of, New York’s downtown scene during the 1980s, when he worked with and alongside friends like graffiti artist Keith Haring; painter Jean-Michel Basquiat; dance impresarios Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane; choreographer, dancer, and Kwong Chi’s sister, Muna Tseng; as well as a host of performance art luminaries including John Sex, Ann Magnuson, and Joey Arias. For a long time, as Muna and Ping Chong described it in their 1999 dance-theater collaboration, SlutforArt, his career was reduced to being “a footnote to Keith Haring.”15 But Kwong Chi did more than photograph the performance worlds swirling around him; he was a master performer in his own right. To conceive of Tseng as a performance artist requires a shift in dominant critical approaches to his work. Tseng placed a carefully cultivated persona at the center of much of his practice, including his best-known series, the East Meets West Series and the Expeditionary Series, both of which feature the artist posing in a Mao suit in iconic sites across the world. In one of the first essays on Tseng, Margo Machida wrote (in 1994) that his photographs “sought, albeit mischievously, to counter the long history of Orientalist painting and photography by explicitly re-presenting the West as if seen through a possessive ‘Occidentalist’

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Figure 5.1. Tseng Kwong Chi, The Gang’s All Here, New York, 1980. Gelatin silver print. (© Muna Tseng Dance Projects, New York. Courtesy of Muna Tseng Dance Projects.)

gaze.”16 In the intervening years, and as described by Warren Liu, “readings of Tseng’s work as a parody and critique of the ‘Oriental other’ have become somewhat de reiguer, even if that context has been engagingly framed under multiple rubrics, including postmodernism, queerness, transnationalism, postcolonialism, and settler colonialism.”17 Staging an alternative to the dominant critical tradition, Liu undertakes a formal analysis of photographs drawn from East Meets West and the Expeditionary Series to ask, “What if one opts not to enliven the photos with any autobiographical narrative . . . what might it mean to look at the photos as if one knew nothing about Tseng Kwong Chi—to look solely at what the camera authorizes (or forces) one to see?”18

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Figure 5.2. Tseng Kwong Chi, East Meets West Manifesto, 1983. (© Muna Tseng Dance Projects, New York. Courtesy of Muna Tseng Dance Projects.)

Liu’s approach amply evidences the fact that a formalist reading of Tseng’s work can reveal a great deal. After all, Tseng, like Gonzalez-Torres, was deeply interested in formal questions. But this approach also has the capacity to strip from Tseng’s practice his queer sensibilities, if not effacing (as occurs as an unintended side-effect in Liu’s reading) Tseng’s queerness and the queer content of much of his work.19 More than this, Liu’s approach rests on a fairly conservative notion of where Tseng’s work resides, fixing it in the final photographic form. A formalist proposition that removes that which cannot be seen (Tseng’s autobiography) ultimately dissolves against the larger body of Tseng’s work in which parts of Tseng’s personal life are at the center of the photographic frame. Surprisingly, the significant body of work beyond East Meets West and the Expeditionary Series has been largely ignored within the critical tradition, with the exception of recent, important essays by Amy Brandt and Alexandra Chang.20 While curating the first comprehensive

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retrospective of Tseng’s work in 2015, Brandt identified performance as a central component of his practice: “Although carefully composed, Tseng’s photographs are less about the final image as a work of art than the artist’s act of setting the stage for his own performances, which featured dynamic background, bold formal design, witty interactions with other subjects, and the use of costumes and props.”21 He transformed the world into his stage, and (like Shakur) he mobilized performance in the service of mobility, infiltrating places he wasn’t supposed to be. Performance was his medium as much as it was his means. As Dan Bacalzo writes, in his photographs “Tseng becomes an art object that is not himself, but neither is it completely an Other that can be exoticized and dismissed,” suggesting that his work should be situated as much within photography as it is within the traditions of performance and body art.22 This requires a broader set of analytical tools than Liu is willing to grant us. As Amelia Jones argues, “Body art is specifically antiformalist in impulse, opening up the circuits of desire informing artistic production and reception. Works that involve the artist’s enactment of her or his body in all of its sexual, racial, and other particularities and overtly solicit spectatorial desires unhinge the very deep structures and assumptions embedded in the formalist model of art evaluation.”23 In what follows, I attempt a narrative of Tseng Kwong Chi’s life, pursuing Liu’s call for alternative readings of his work, without abandoning the queer scene of performance (inextricably tied to Tseng’s body and autobiography), which was as much the work as the photographs he produced in the process.

1950 Art and performance came early to Tseng Kwong Chi. He was born Joseph Tseng in Hong Kong in 1950, after his parents fled Shanghai following Mao’s defeat of the Nationalist Army.24 By the mid-1960s, during the tumult of the Cultural Revolution, the Tseng family fled east once more, this time to the white suburbs of Vancouver. “We were the only Chinese students in my high school,” said his sister, Muna, “and it was a very unhappy time for Kwong Chi and me.”25 They spoke a colonial British English, and their classmates spared no mercy in torturing them for their difference. So Muna and Kwong Chi fled to art for refuge,

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Figure 5.3. Tseng Kwong Chi, Muna Tseng, Dance Theater Workshop, 1980. (© Muna Tseng Dance Projects, New York. Courtesy of Muna Tseng Dance Projects.)

retreating to forms in which they would not need to speak: dance for the sister and photography for the brother. For the rest of his life, as she danced, he was there to photograph her. Kwong Chi told his father that he was gay when he was a teenager. “I will never forget that scene,” Muna said, “because it took place in the wood panel basement of our suburban home in Vancouver. And it was a huge fight. I never heard my father so angry. He was 16 . . . Until the end my dad still thought it was a lifestyle choice.”26 Home can be a complicated space for queers of color, so Kwong Chi set out into the world, like many others before him, in order to make a queer kind of home elsewhere and otherwise. “For the embattled,” wrote Audre Lorde, “there

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is no place / that cannot be home / nor is.”27 After graduating from the University of British Columbia, and following a brief stint in Montréal (where he found the Mao suit in a thrift shop), “he reconciled with my dad enough to have him send him to Paris” to study at the École Supérieure d’Arts Graphiques.28 Muna moved to New York in 1978, and a few months later, unable to secure a visa to stay in Paris, her brother followed suit.29 They found an apartment on East Fifth Street in the East Village, where they began building a world. It should come as no surprise that this was a world full of parties. The Village was the place to be at the time, and soon, Muna said, they fell in with other “misfits who didn’t belong.”30 The East Village was hard. It was violent and broken, but rent was cheap, and for Kwong Chi’s world of misfits, it was a refuge. As performance artist and Kwong Chi’s friend Ann Magnuson later put it, “We were suburban refugees who had run away from home to find a new family.”31 Kwong Chi hit the streets, and one night, at about two in the morning, he met a cute white boy named Keith, an artist working in the growing graffiti culture of the downtown scene. They would be inseparable from that point on, and together they were the life of the party. Keith invited Kwong Chi to an underground bar at 57 St. Mark’s Place, and on any given night at Club 57, you could catch Kwong Chi and Keith hanging out with Kenny Scharf, Klaus Nomi, or Fab Five Freddy. “We had a juke box in the corner,” Magnuson recalled, “and Kwong was there, dancing away. . . . I seem to have an image of him with a joint in his hand, kind of swaying around and laughing and just being delighted by everybody.”32 They spent nights in the Pyramid Club, watching Magnuson perform with Joey Arias, or Danceteria, as Madonna sang “Like a Virgin” for the very first time. On the occasion of Princess Diana’s wedding or Reagan’s inauguration, they threw theme parties, where they drank, danced, and did drugs together in places like the Mudd Club, where Jean-Michel Basquiat held court. Guests arrived in theme dress, but Kwong Chi’s outfit was almost always the same: the Mao suit. And he rarely left the camera behind. To tell this story, I want to turn to a surprising and under-read text, Marx’s dissertation, which is a story about chance encounters. It is a text that emphasizes the creative power of deviance, which makes it an early, though unwitting, work of queer theory. Keith would have been about

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twenty-one or twenty-two when he met Kwong Chi, which is about the same age Marx would have been when he wrote his dissertation. The dissertation is a comparative analysis of the philosophers Epicurus and Democritus, in which Marx concludes that “Democritus makes use of necessity, Epicurus of chance.”33 Most of the time, friendships come into being through chance encounters, so it is unsurprising that Marx inscribed the text with the bonds of friendship, dedicating it to his fatherin-law, Ludwig Von Westphalen: “to his dear fatherly friend . . . the author dedicates these lines as a token of filial love.”34 New worlds are often born out of friendship, and friendship can play a major role in the course of the world historical process. Marx, for example, met his wife, Jenny, and her father, Ludwig, through his father when Marx was a child. Ludwig introduced him to Saint Simon, who affected the shape of Marx’s thought and, ultimately, world history. Kwong Chi, in turn, crashes into Keith outside of a bar late one night in the East Village, and their friendship transforms the course of art history. In his defense of Epicurean philosophy, the dissertation attends to the world-making nature of chance. But to get to Marx, we have to begin with Epicurus, for whom Being emerges in a great void as tiny particles fall in a straight line, “mov[ing] continuously for all time.”35 Suddenly, a chance occurrence occurs, and one of the atoms deviates from the straight line, colliding into the atoms beside it, with “some [atoms] recoiling far apart from one another [upon collision], and others, by contrast, maintaining a vibration” to form a world.36 For Marx, then, world-making is the effect of deviance’s creative capacities: “Epicurus assumes a threefold motion of the atoms in the void, one motion is the fall in a straight line, the second originates in the deviation of the atom from the straight line, and the third is established through the repulsion of the many atoms.”37 The swerve, it turns out, is the beginning of new and better worlds. In a much later essay on the Epicurean encounter, José Muñoz also recognized the creative power of the atom’s deviance, which he understood to be a form of queerness: “The swerve at the heart of the encounter . . . describes the cultural choreography of a potentially insurrectionist mode of being in the world. Thus, the swerve can describe the encounter as both queer sex and punk style (or, alternatively punk sex and queer style).”38 Marx, too, describes the atom’s swerve away from the straight line as an expression of insurrectionary consciousness: “It can

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be said of the atom that the declination [the swerve] is that something in its breast that can fight back and resist.”39 Thus, declination (the swerve) is nothing less than a precondition for the making of all new worlds: “If the atoms were not to decline, neither their repulsion nor their meeting would have taken place, and the world would never have been created.”40 The conclusion Epicurus, Marx, and Muñoz reach (and as described by Althusser) is that the swerve is the beginning of “the birth of a world”: “Swerve was originary; not derived.”41 For women, trans, and queer people of color, the need to “fight back and resist” (the ontological and historical priority of resistance) is born from conditions in which the swerve is not necessarily an act of revolutionary world-making (or not just), but is also a form of revolutionary survival. As Marx described it, the subtle movement of declination may occur because the deviant atom is “swerving away from pain and confusion, in ataraxy.”42 And as it falls into the swerve, the atom might find that its best chance for survival is to crash into another swishy atom falling beside it. I think about that night when Kwong Chi and Keith crashed into each other, and they became entangled with each other. As I look at their respective bodies of work, whose conditions of production were bound up in their friendship, I wonder about all the worlds that never would have come into being had that chance, queer encounter never happened. But it wasn’t just Keith and Kwong Chi. Their encounter was the result of a crashing together, and entanglements between, the host of singularities who made up their party. Their friends: Muna, Kenny, Bill, Arnie, Jean-Michel, Ann, John, Andy, and on and on. It was all the freaks who didn’t have a place in the world because they were too gay or too black or too brown or too Asian or too woman or too poor or not enough of and too much of all of those things. “Misfits in a way,” as Scharf described it, “and outcasts from our communities and families, for whatever reason . . . [w]e had adopted each other as family.”43 They ran away from homes that sometimes tried to destroy rather than sustain them, and in their swerve away from pain and confusion, they crashed into each other. They made a world. I don’t want to over-romanticize this world, nor paper over the inequities, injustices, and points of friction reproduced within its complicated, creative ecosystem. Even within the group there were lines of

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Figure 5.4. Tseng Kwong Chi, LA2 and Keith Haring, 1982. Gelatin silver print. (© Muna Tseng Dance Projects, New York. Courtesy of Muna Tseng Dance Projects.)

social, political, racial, sexual, gendered, and classed division. “Jean Michel [Basquiat] was not a frequent visitor to the club [57],” Magnuson recalled. “There was a rivalry between us goofballs at Club 57 and the cooler customers over at the Mudd Club. We were all about mushrooms and laughing like hyenas, while they were all about heroine and Nouvelle Vague Films.”44 Even given the prominence of the people of color like Basquiat and Tseng, this world remained predominantly white. And though relatively more diverse than the unapologetically white order of the governing classes of the time, it was still a space marked by the incommensurable internal striations of racial, sexual, gender, and economic disequilibrium.

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In 1982 Kwong Chi took a photograph of Keith with seventeen-yearold Angel Ortiz, also known as LA2, a black and Puerto Rican graffiti artist with whom Haring frequently collaborated. In the photo, Haring and Ortiz squat in front of a jointly produced image. Both sit at the center of the photograph as potential objects of desire. Haring wears a cut-off t-shirt that features his signature Radiant Baby image and exposes the flesh of his arms and the side of his torso. Haring’s legs, clad in blue-jeans, are spread open and face the camera. Ortiz, in turn, pivots his body away from the photographer’s gaze, but he is exposed in another way as he is shirtless and wearing athletic shorts. In a discussion of this photograph, Ricardo Montez offers a reading of Haring’s diary, in which the artist discusses the cross-race and cross-class intimacies he performed in his sexual and artistic life. “Haring engages sexually and artistically with people of color as a means of production and possibility,” writes Montez, while also flagging the inherent fetishization, racism, and exploitation within many of Haring’s queer, cross-race, cross-class collaborations.45 But even though Haring shared profits from his collaborations with LA2 during his lifetime, Montez underlines the fact that he did not “formalize his exchange within the legal system that currently protects his foundation and the capital controlled by his family members.”46 As a result, “in Haring’s death, the queerness of his relationship with LA2 is made even more evident in the ways that the legal, normative, and bourgeois structures that promote protection of property and continued access to capital fail to support [or recognize] LA2’s collaborative role.”47 As Montez’s reading makes clear, though they were building new worlds in which they might sustain each other in the face of a phobic dominant order, the possibilities contained within these worlds were ephemeral and often tainted by the worlds that came before. This played out in complicated ways across Kwong Chi’s own body. After two years in the East Village, the Tseng siblings moved to a loft at 162 West Twenty-First Street, where they lived together until Muna got married and Kwong Chi’s partner, Kristoffer Haynes, moved in.48 Kristoffer and Kwong Chi lived together until the latter’s death, years later. “I don’t think that he really enjoyed being Asian so much,” recalled Kristoffer; “he didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”49 Indeed, Kwong Chi resisted readings of his work that reduced it to politics or identity, which was a point of rich debate with his friend, Bill T. Jones. “I would say to

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Kwong that you don’t fool me I, I know, I can sense protest when I see it,” Jones recounted. “This is a rough conversation we were having, that this blankness was the way in which this culture at large expected him, as an Asian man, to—to exist. So he became a kind of cipher, a smooth surface that because it was so impenetrable, this persona, it reflected everything!”50 Blankness was the cost Kwong Chi was willing to pay to live in and gain access to a white world, but his friend still seemed to sense that his appropriation of it was an inherently disidentificatory act, transforming blankness into the grounds of insurgent critique. In spite of Kwong Chi’s complicated relationship to race and racism, and his protestation of an apolitical aesthetic, the inherent insurgency Jones recognized within his work makes perfect sense given the time of its production. Kwong Chi and his friends were the children of an era of revolutions. The black freedom struggles of the 1960s, combined with the anti–Vietnam War movement, unleashed a proliferation of emancipatory struggles across the United States. As Lorde described it, “The raw energy of Black determination released in the 60s . . . is still being felt in movements for change among women, other peoples of Color, gays, the handicapped—among all the disenfranchised people of this society. That is the legacy of the 60s to ourselves and others.”51 But what progress these struggles for freedom achieved were met with a powerful backlash. “We must recognize,” she continued, “that many of our high expectations of radical revolutionary change did not in fact occur. And many of the gains that did are even now being dismantled.”52 As she delivered those remarks to an audience in 1982—the same year Kwong Chi took the photo of Keith and LA2—the counter-insurgency was already striking back.

1980 Shortly after Muna and Kwong Chi moved to New York, Ronald Reagan swept into the White House. For minoritarian subjects the future looked grim. “Back then,” Magnuson recalled, “we didn’t know about AIDS. The specter of death hovering over us was Reagan and nuclear annihilation.”53 Queers, feminists, people of color, and artists were cast as the internal enemies of Reagan’s shining city on a hill, and the fact of his ascent to the throne sent a chill through the undercommons. “It really made us feel like we were freaks,” Muna said, “so we had to make our

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own village.”54 They needed each other to stay alive, but many of them would not survive anyway. The Reagan Revolution was the result of and inheritor to the white supremacist counter-insurgency of the 1960s, and, indeed, Reagan was one of that counter-insurgency’s greatest generals. In May of 1969, when Kwong Chi was a college student in Canada, Ronald Reagan was governor of California, where he deployed the California Highway Patrol, and later the State National Guard, to crush student protests at UC Berkley. A decade later, Reagan was the natural choice to be crowned king when the counter-insurgency declared victory and swept back into a power that it had (in fact) never lost control of. Ready to make America great again, Reagan populated his court with people like Senator Alfonse D’Amato, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, professional asshole William F. Buckley, and Daniel Fore, leader of the New York branch of the conservative lobby group named the Moral Majority. One of the ways Kwong Chi paid the rent in those days was as a photo journalist for the now defunct SoHo Weekly News—an artsy, leftist downtown rag. On a night out, he made friends with Buckley’s son, and with the help of his new friend, in 1981 he successfully pitched a photo essay featuring the power brokers of Reagan’s America.55 These photographs would become his Moral Majority Series, portraits featuring the same format: a conservative leader posed at the center of the frame in front of a crumpled US flag. As with the East Meets West and the Expeditionary Series, Tseng followed a similar format for these images. “Tseng’s images,” Alexandra Chang writes, “with their square format and familiar subjects, take on a vintage snapshot feel, yet they are unsettling as they expose the political resonances of encounters in which American pop mythology is interrupted by another narrative, that of an ethnic Other.”56 Even without Tseng’s presence, as is the case in most of Moral Majority, there is no question that the images “expose” the dark underside of the United States of America. While most of the images are solo portraits, Kwong Chi still appears in a number of the contact sheets, as is the case in the session with Daniel Fore. Here, we encounter a staircase in the background suggesting a domestic setting (likely Fore’s home). A number of the contact sheet images feature three children posed in front of the staircase. In one, Fore stands beside Kwong Chi’s friend Bruno Schmidt, who assisted in the series’

Figure 5.5. Tseng Kwong Chi, Moral Majority, Washington, DC, 1981. Moral Majority Series. Twenty vintage silver gelatin prints, signed, mounted on board, 51 x 41 in. (© Muna Tseng Dance Projects, New York. Courtesy of Muna Tseng Dance Projects.)

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Figure 5.6. Tseng Kwong Chi, Moral Majority Series contact sheet, 1981. Unidentified children; Tseng Kwong Chi and Daniel Fore; Bruno Schmidt and Daniel Fore. (© Muna Tseng Dance Projects, New York. Courtesy of Muna Tseng Dance Projects.)

production. In another, Kwong Chi stands grinning, wearing a seersucker suit, shoulder-to-shoulder with Fore, their arms just barely touching at the center of the frame. The crumpled flag floats pathetically behind them. Here, as elsewhere, costume is a central component of Tseng’s practice. For Sean Metzger, Tseng’s mobilizations of costumes “visualize and expose a particular type of garment as it creates meanings in place.”57 In much of his work he mobilizes the surface of his own body in concert with the costume to focus his spectator on the punctum of his racial difference. But in this image, costume was deployed to blend in rather than stand out. To produce this series, Brandt writes, he wore the seersucker

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suit, which “conveyed the white, upper-class purity promoted by the Republican Party [and] when the sitters asked him about the flag, he replied that it was meant to look as if it were blowing in the wind.”58 Noting seersucker’s colonial provenance, Brandt invites us to consider Tseng’s performance during the production of the series as a mode of disruptive, colonial mimicry. Indeed, and in excess of this, there is something guerilla about the scene. One wonders how many other times Daniel Fore invited people of color into his home as guests? How many times he let a homosexual take pictures of his children? How many times he let his arm brush up against the arm of a gay Asian man? Fore’s record on social difference wasn’t stellar. Around the time Tseng took the photograph, Fore declared that “Jews have . . . almost a supernatural ability to make money. They control the media, they control this city [New York].”59 While he argued that the Moral Majority was “not expecting to stop all the crime, all the homosexuality, all the lessbianism [sic], all the harlotry,” he would, as an evangelical minister, certainly try: “We are simply here as a savoring influence, preaching what we believe is the truth.”60 The men of Moral Majority, who in fact controlled the media and controlled Reagan’s shining city on a hill, were anointed the architects of a new United States. They were proclaimed the prophets of a brave new world that was, in fact, the eternal return of that same old world whose imposing white edifice had finally begun to crumble under the weight of its own crimes after four hundred years. Kwong Chi was as happy to turn his camera to the cultural, social, and financial elite as he was to the governing class of Moral Majority. Mobilizing the disidentificatory persona of (what he called) the “ambiguous ambassador,” Tseng donned the Mao suit, knowing that people would often mistake him for a diplomat or someone of importance. In Muna’s words, the suit allowed him to gain “access to those various worlds of white power” before he turned his camera against them.61 In 1980, he undertook a Lorraine O’Grady-esque infiltration of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual Costume Gala, using the Mao suit to crash a party for which he could not afford a ticket and to which he was not invited. The theme of the gala was “The Manchu Dragon: Costumes from the Qing Dynasty,” and in most of the photographs he looks genuinely thrilled to be at the party. The night was a veritable who’s who: Halston,

Figure 5.7. Tseng Kwong Chi, Costumes at the Met (Celebrity Panel), 1983. Costumes at the Met Series. Twenty vintage silver gelatin prints stapled on board, 50 x 40 in. (© Muna Tseng Dance Projects, New York. Courtesy of Muna Tseng Dance Projects.)

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Countess Jacqueline de Ribes, Jerome Robbins, Fran Liebowitz, Claudette Colbert, Buckley, and Tseng’s friend Andy Warhol (who would later pose for a formal portrait by Tseng). There was Nancy Kissinger, who made the egregious faux pas of showing up to the fashion party of the year in the same Adolfo dress as socialites Gladys Solomon and Jean Tailer.62 Tseng made sure to publicize her misstep, featuring Kissinger’s photo at the front of his spread and embedding the companion portrait of the socialites within it. Of the many photographs of the party, Tseng captures only three (invited) guests of color: restaurateur Michael Chow, model (and Chow’s wife) Tina, and the sculptor Louise Nevelson. And then there is a photograph of one of the museum’s guards, a black man, who, like Tseng, is present at the gala not because he was invited, but because he was doing his job. Tseng’s portraits of the Moral Majority and the ruling elite at the Costume Gala offers visual proof that white supremacy is at the center of (not anathema to) the structure and ideology of these United States. Where the Moral Majority and Costumes at the Met series offer documents of the whiteness of the ruling class, in 1980 Tseng collaborated with Magnuson to paint an expressly parodic portrait of the Moral Majority’s ideal body politic. The spread, describing itself with accompanying copy as a “Desperate Journey,” featured mostly white, all light skinned friends and comrades, including Magnuson, Sharf, Haring, Dany Johnson, Stace Elkin, and Jack Smith. This portrait of “Reagan’s World,” stages a send-up of the suburban (white) worlds that many of Kwong Chi’s friends ran to the Village to get away from. It features six tableaus in which a “heterosexual” couple (with names like “The Bothroids” and “The Glicks”) stand in front of suburban homes, basking in the nostalgic trappings of straight, white, middle-class normalcy. Poking fun at Reagan’s acting career, the spread mimics a promotional poster for a Hollywood movie, announcing “A Stirring New Success from the REPUBLICANS!”: “Having left a decaying urban setting, our youthful couples, exponents of the New Heterosexuality, move into the exciting new world of split-level living.” The campy, ludic, insurgently queer tableaus combine to make a radical antidote to the suspect nostalgia of the Reagan era. In one of the first, and best, theorizations of Tseng’s work, Donald M. Lowe argues that “with the deteritorialization and detemporalization

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of late capital . . . ‘nostalgia’ has become the longing for a non-spatial, nontemporal imaginary, something that never was—for example, the lifestyles of Ralph Lauren, the political values of Ronald Reagan.”63 For Lowe, Kwong Chi’s “antinostalgia” resisted this lure as his work “accepts the deteritorialization and despatialization of the world we live in it as it forces us to confront the new and the different on its own terms.”64 This “antinostalgia” is evident in “Desperate Journey,” and, indeed, throughout Tseng’s body of work. It is especially acute in a 1979 photograph from East Meets West. Taken in a Tennessee cotton field, the image shows Tseng just barely leaning over, hand outstretched as if inspecting his crop. He dominates the left third of the image, the vertical column of his body standing against the field’s horizon, drawing the grey sky into sharp relief behind him. The cotton field consumes the vast majority of space in the photograph, which amplifies the divergent presence of a rooftop at the horizon, flanked on the right by two barren trees. It looks like a barn, but might also suggest a slave barrack. The image is a departure from more widely circulated images from the series, which often frame the out-ofplace presence of Tseng’s body against the postmodern architecture of an iconic Western landscape. But in keeping with the other images, the cotton field photograph still cites Tseng’s appropriation of the formal registers of landscape photography. Iyko Day theorizes Tseng’s landscapes photographs as parodic interventions into the tradition of naturalist portraiture (such as that of Ansel Adams or the Canadian Group of Seven). For Day, the “American environmentalist movement regained momentum after World War I and bore the imprint of escalating eugenicist thought.” Inspired by this movement, “the grandeur of Adams’s landscapes, analogous to the Group of Seven’s, could provide spiritual reassurance of the durability of the white race, its ability to persevere in the face of lower castes.”65 As Tseng draws the racialized body into relief against the eugenicist and genocidal aesthetic of naturalist landscape, his images “prompt a recognition of landscape as both a biopolitical expression of white supremacy and a personification of white male domination.”66 It is difficult if not impossible not to conjure the image of slavery when looking at the cotton field photograph. If Tseng’s body stands as a faint index of the invisible presence of the United States’ racialized labor

Figures 5.8a and 5.8b. “It’s a Reagan World!” Soho Weekly News, December 10, 1980. Concept and text by Ann Magnuson; photo montage by Tseng Kwong Chi; stylist Patricia Cresswell. (Courtesy of Muna Tseng Dance Projects.)

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force, the empty cotton field obliquely gestures to the black workers who were forced to work fields like this. W. E. B. Du Bois described black labor (enslaved and otherwise) as the “founding stone of a new economic system in the nineteenth century and for the modern world.”67 The black worker was thus central to Du Bois’s theorization of the dark proletariat, “that great majority of mankind, on whose bent and broken backs rest today the founding stones of modern industry.”68 Tseng’s back

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Figure 5.9. Tseng Kwong Chi, Cotton Field, Tennessee, 1979. East Meets West Series. Gelatin silver print. (© Muna Tseng Dance Projects, New York. Courtesy of Muna Tseng Dance Projects.)

is bent here, as well, as if he indexes the ghostly specter of “coolie” laborers, Chinese workers who were imported in large numbers to work alongside newly emancipated, but still unfree black workers on southern and Caribbean plantations in the late nineteenth century.69 The image is haunted by the fact that both black and Chinese laborers worked together in conditions akin to slavery, despite its formal abolition, and as Lisa Lowe concludes, “While Black laborers are the narrative protagonists of Black Reconstruction, Asian labor appears as a figure whose addition would be necessary for the creation of an international working class of color: the ‘dark proletariat.’ ”70 No such alliance comes into being in the photograph, however. Here, Tseng plays less the insurgent role of the dark proletariat, than the part of the privileged inspector, or overseer. It is as if he images white supremacy’s interpellation of the Asian American subject into a role that critical race theorist Mari Matsuda describes as the “racial bourgeoisie,”

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a managerial middle class brokering the relationship between the white ruling class and a black, brown, and indigenous underclass.71 Refusing both catharsis and nostalgia, the image might suggest that the revolutionary class of the “dark proletariat” remains present only by way of its absence. We can certainly imagine the black and Asian body in shared, emancipatory struggle in this field, but we still do not see it. For, as Lowe observes, “The elaboration of a revolutionary ‘dark proletariat’ is invoked [by Du Bois] in a future conditional frame, as a ‘coming change,’ still yet to come.”72 Still. Yet still to come. We catch a glimpse of this potential alliance in Tseng’s photograph with the guard at the Met Costume Gala. In almost all of the photographs from the Met, Tseng is smiling. But here, standing to the right of the guard, his body is erect, head raised with an air of passive, but still guarded, self-possessed composure. His expression isn’t blank so much

Figure 5.10. Tseng Kwong Chi, Costumes at the Met, 1980. Unidentified Metropolitan Museum of Art guard and Tseng Kwong Chi. Gelatin silver print. (© Muna Tseng Dance Projects, New York. Courtesy of Muna Tseng Dance Projects.)

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as it projects detachment, still rich with a surplus of meaning. Suffice it to say that it is beautiful. He is beautiful. His arms are at his side, right fist gripped around the shudder release, and his feet close together. The unidentified guard, in turn, stands with legs spread a few feet apart, hands clasped in front of him. This man, too, is beautiful. He cocks his head just slightly toward Tseng. There’s a hint of a smile. Though the picture with the guard is the only photograph in the SoHo Weekly spread to feature a uniform, Tseng titled the spread “Uniforms at the Met,” before titling the series Costumes at the Met. The slippage from “uniform” to “costume” underscores the way in which performance (including the performance of everyday life) can be a form of labor or work, especially for people of color. Tseng and the guard are the only subjects in the spread wearing actual uniforms, reminding us that bodies of color often enter elite white spaces (like the party at the Met) as workers (guards, domestics, performers, teachers). Throughout the night, Tseng interviewed his subjects. “What do you think of your uniform in relation to all this high fashion tonight?” he asked the guard. “Well, what can I tell you . . . um . . . I really like my uniform,” the guard replied.

1969 The promise of a revolutionary alliance of people of color sharing the struggle for emancipation, while powerfully invoked in the domain of the aesthetic, is most often realized in the aesthetics of everyday life. A few years ago, I stumbled across a photograph in my aunt’s closet which bears an uncanny resemblance to the photograph of Tseng and the guard. It’s a snapshot of my grandmother, Tatsuko, and my mom’s identical twin sister, Sharon. The picture is square and imprinted with the date along the bottom (“Jan 1969”). On the right Tatsuko stands in a shimmering white, handmade evening gown. Her pose bears the same erect composure as Tseng’s, though her arms and shoulders (covered by a fur stole, likely faux) do not fall to her side, but instead curve to where the hands meet, clasping a silver purse at her midsection. On the left, Sharon is wearing a similar make of dress, but with green fabric. Tatsuko wears arm-length white gloves, but her daughter has white hand gloves, clasped at her midsection around a matching green purse and affecting a

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Figure 5.11. Sharon Chambers-Corkrum and Tatsuko Chambers, January 1969. (Photograph courtesy of the Chambers family.)

pose that closely matches the guard’s. She wears cat-eye glasses, and, like the guard, her brown skin teases out the light, effecting a play of saturation, tone, shade, and color across her body. In both photographs, the subjects look dignified and rich, though they were poor. Both Tseng’s photograph of the guard and the snapshot of Tatsuko and Sharon might be situated within a long tradition of people of color picturing and performing new ways of being in the world on the stages of everyday life. Building on the work of Evelyn Higginbotham, Jasmine Cobb writes of nineteenth-century free black women who mobilized the optics of respectability, in league with the middle-class pursuits of domestic parlor culture and portraiture to offer a picture of (and stage a rehearsal for) black freedom and autonomy: “In the process of experimenting with mainstream ideas about womanhood, Black women used sentimental discourse to create personal spaces that conformed to their own unique needs and revealed their familiarity with relevant ideas of home.”73 Against forces that dull and diminish the luster of minoritarian life, photographic documents such as these remind us of the ways

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Figure 5.12. The author’s grandparents, Cleo and Tatsuko Chambers, with unknown child. (Photograph courtesy of the Chambers family.)

in which people of color have long mobilized the staging of self to bring about new possibilities for being in the world and being with each other. The photograph of Tatsuko and Sharon was taken in the United States, during a period of revolutionary upheaval and just before the family relocated to Okinawa. For a brief period in the 1960s, Tatsuko and her husband (my grandfather), Cleo Mack Chambers, moved their family to Denver, Colorado, to be close to Emma, his mother. He worked in an iron mill, which paid black workers like Cleo substantively less than their white counterparts. It wasn’t enough to live on, which drove him to re-enlist in the marines. A few months after the photograph was taken, he was stationed in Okinawa and relocated the entire family to a colonized island at the southernmost tip of Japan. They moved to a house in Kadena, near Koza. Today, Koza is known as Okinawa City, but in the 1960s and 1970s it was the segregated neighborhood that housed the

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black servicemen of the US occupation. This raises the question of how a population of black soldiers ended up in Koza to begin with. The islands comprising Okinawa were the sovereign Kingdom of the Ryukyu until colonial annexation by the Japanese government during the Meiji Restoration in 1868.74 Since then, indigenous Okinawans have endured a long, violent process of occupation, colonization, and forced assimilation that continues into the present. During World War II, the Japanese military brutalized the indigenous population, and in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa, between one fourth and one third of the Okinawan population died at the combined hands of US and Japanese forces. After the war, as the US military asserted its dominance over the Pacific theater, the US and Japanese governments took full advantage of Okinawa’s strategic position. As Wesley Iwao Ueunten observes, “Okinawa became the ‘keystone’ in [an] unholy alliance by allowing Japan to contain the most blatant aspects of U.S. domination in a place far enough away to remain out of the consciousness of the general American and Japanese populations but near enough to offer the benefits of U.S. military presence.”75 Okinawans shouldered (and continue to bear) the cost of the occupation as entire villages and sacred grave sites were razed to make way for US military bases. Okinawans became vulnerable to the violence of US servicemen as the US military transformed the archipelago into a major staging ground for its imperialist wars in Korea and Vietnam. The Vietnam/American War dragged disproportionate numbers of young black and brown men (like my grandfather) into the military in order to serve its machinery of death. Black Americans, brutalized and colonized in their own right, became the face of deadly military occupation for people in places like Vietnam, Korea, and Okinawa. So, in Koza, a tense friction characterized the coexistence between occupied Okinawans and the black soldiers of the occupation. In the late 1960s, local Okinawans joined resistance movements flourishing across the colonized world. On December 20, 1970, shortly after Cleo and Tatsuko settled their family in Okinawa, the people of Koza rose up in a violent rebellion against US occupying forces. They stormed Kadena Air Force base, burning cars and buildings in their path. As Christopher Nelson describes, “Okinawans learned about peace, freedom, and democracy from the Americans. However, these lessons were learned in their negation. . . . Freedom was illustrated by the confiscation

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of [Okinawans’] land, the restriction of their liberty, and the destruction of their customary way of life. . . . Democracy meant repression, lack of representation, and a political environment dominated by decisions made in Washington and Tokyo.”76 But if the uprising was, in Nelson’s words, “their appropriation of democracy,” it was also the opportunity for Okinawans to express a growing, international decolonial consciousness.77 In Uenten’s account of the uprising, he notes a surprising detail: “In the midst of the uprising, Okinawans consciously refrained from harming African American soldiers and their property.”78 Then, in the wake of the uprising, a group of black soldiers distributed a decolonial expression of solidarity with the Okinawan people: So you see we both are in the same situation. With this you see that we have a problem. With every problem there is a solution. Black GI’s are trying to become a part of the solution, not the problem. The Black GI’s are willing to help and talk to the Okinawans in order to form much better relations between the oppressed groups, because we have so much in common. So why not get our heads together and come up with a solution to destroy the problem. The Black GI’s are aware of the situation that brought about the riot, and this was truly a RIGHT-ON-MOVE. That’s the only way they’ll bend.79

Although this flier issues a call for a new (minoritarian) international, one has to resist the pull to romanticize this call as the arrival of revolution as such. No such decolonial unity emerged as a result of these efforts, and the US military occupation in Okinawa continues to this day. My own family’s biography bears this out. My grandfather was not among the soldiers who distributed the flier, and my mother suspects he played a role in quelling the Koza Rebellion. It was not until the years just before he was forced into forgetting by Alzheimer’s that he expressed a thick regret for his involvement in the war. Not in spite of, but because of this, and without underplaying the violence that continues to define (and thwart) relationships between occupied Okinawans and black and brown soldiers serving the occupation, nor dismissing the crimes that have occurred within the context of the US military occupation, the Okinawans’ conscious refrain from harming black soldiers, and the black soldiers’ expression of solidarity with the uprising, still shimmer

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with the promise of a different possible world built on different sets of alliance and affiliation. This is a world that seems impossible in the New York Daily News photograph of Yayoi Kusama and MoMA guard Ray Williams (discussed in the previous chapter), but it’s latent potentiality flickers faintly into being in the photographs of Tseng and the guard or Tatsuko and her daughter. To suggest this is to think within a reparative temporal register that Lowe describes as “a past conditional temporality [that] suggests that there were other conditions of possibility that were vanquished by liberal political reason and its promises of freedom, [and] suggests means to open those conditions to pursue what might have been.”80 These photographs are marked by the insurgent, world-making power that comes into being when people of color stand beside each other, performing to make what might have been into what is and yet can be, producing what Beyoncé and Frank Ocean describe as a “a subtle power. A tough love.”81 Looking at these photographs, we might remind ourselves that there is still time to get our heads together and come up with a solution to destroy the problem.

1981 From the beginning of their friendship, Kwong Chi followed Keith into the subways. Keith would hop on the line and make his way through the city’s underground stations, drawing in whatever vacant wall spaces he could find. In Muna’s recollection, “Kwong Chi decided that this was such historical, monumental work that Keith was giving to the people of NY, and so KC started to document and photograph this body of work.”82 At the end of the line (somewhere in Queens, Brooklyn, or the Bronx), Keith would seek out a payphone to call Kwong Chi and tell him the route. Kwong Chi would then grab his camera to take it underground, following the trail of Keith’s drawings in order to make a record of Keith’s constantly vanishing body of work. These photographic ephemera are most of what we have remaining of Keith’s practice from those days. Things were starting to happen for them. Though paydays were still few and far between, Kwong Chi was getting solo shows at Sempaphore East, exhibiting in group shows with up-and-comers like Cindy Sherman and soon exhibiting in places that include the Whitney Museum, P.S. 1,

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and Gracie Mansion Gallery.83 Haring, Scharf, and Basquiat’s careers soared into the upper stratosphere of art celebrity. But as Scharf would later note of Kwong Chi, “I think it was very frustrating for him—I know it was, especially because everyone was focusing on, you know, Keith, Jean-Michel, and me. He really wasn’t getting the respect he deserved.”84 Still, as Keith got rich, he shared his resources with his friends. He could finally pay Kwong Chi for documenting his otherwise ephemeral practice, while others (including Scharf, Basquiat, and Warhol) hired him as a photographer for publications or documentary purposes.85 It was largely on Keith’s dime that Kwong Chi was able to produce East Meets West and the Expeditionary Series, while he traveled the world taking pictures of his friend at work. Art became a space where Tseng and his friends could build a world together in order to survive a life in grayscale. But the Moral Majority was about to turn its sights toward this refuge. They started, as they often do, with an attack on black life. Even if the ascendant class pictured the world as a world without people of color, as Hortense Spillers might say, they still needed us. By deploying the racially coded narrative of the parasitical “welfare queen” or the urban drug addict, the counter-insurgency swept into office as Reagan campaigned as a tough-on-crime, no-tolerance hero who would solve the problem of black unrest by dismantling welfare, expanding the prison system, and militarizing the police. Black bodies, in Reagan’s America, were once more cast as a threat to the health of the body politic, and as Marable argues, “White supremacist organizations felt that they had a friend in the White House and that a fundamental corner in the history of U.S. race relations had been turned with Reagan’s election.”86 As if things couldn’t get worse, a new contagion was emerging at the horizon. On July 3, 1981, a (now famous) article in the New York Times announced a “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.”87 “The cause of the outbreak is unknown,” wrote journalist Lawrence K. Altman, “and there is as yet no evidence of contagion. But the doctors who have made the diagnoses, mostly in New York City and the San Francisco Bay area, are alerting other physicians who treat large numbers of homosexual men to the problem in an effort to help identify more cases and to reduce the delay in offering chemotherapy treatment.”88 The treatment proved ineffective; the disease was not cancer. But the preponderance of gay men and people of color who contracted it would find themselves treated as if they were.

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Reagan played the role of the president as an action hero, protecting the country from the enemies without (the Soviets) but also the enemies within. AIDS offered the Moral Majority a new plotline. When held in relief against the homosexual dead and dying from AIDS, Reagan could play the part of a real man, a healthy husband and a father to the nation. Around the time that doctors in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles were encountering what they first described as Gay Related Immune Deficiency (or GRID, later AIDS), Reagan took a bullet outside of a DC hotel. Four weeks later, he addressed a joint session of Congress. “Thanks to some very fine people,” he declared from the pulpit, “my health is much improved. I’d like to be able to say that with regard to the economy.”89 As Michael Rogan described the speech, “The president was identifying the recovery of his mortal body with the health of the body politic, his own convalescence with his program to restore health to the nation.”90 His performance was a success, and soon enough his economic reform package was passed to the sound of thunderous, bipartisan applause. Through tax cuts, program reductions, deregulation, assaults on labor unions, and the privatization of public assets, the Moral Majority’s reforms, in Lisa Duggan’s words, “shaped a culture supportive of strategies of upward redistribution of wealth,” while increasing the income gap and reifying racial, sexual, gender, and class hierarchies.91 Already vulnerable populations (especially the working class, women, queers, trans people, the disabled, and people of color), were driven deeper into social and economic precarity.92 The specter of HIV/AIDS would become a powerful technology in the Moral Majority’s war against black, brown, and queer life. The writing was on the wall, and Kwong Chi’s party was on the verge of coming undone.

1985 Reagan didn’t publicly acknowledge the AIDS crisis until 1985, when seven thousand people were already dead, with many more infected. Importantly, rates of HIV transmission were disproportionately skewed toward people of color. In 1986, white people made up 80 percent of the population, but the Centers for Disease Control reported that of 24,576 patients believed to be living with HIV, 39 percent were black

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or Latinx.93 Asian Americans were a very small part of the overall population (largely as the result of a century-long era of Asian exclusion legislation), but they were still becoming infected at disproportionately higher rate than whites.94 Furthermore, the distribution of the disease was devastating for women of color. In 1986, 70 percent of women living with HIV or AIDS were black or Latina. The Reagan administration managed a public health crisis through moral and financial metrics, allowing the death of a large block of socially undesirable subjects through a combination of moral opprobrium and financial policy. As AIDS advanced, the administration and Congress declined to appropriate and allocate the necessary funds for research and prevention programs, while undertaking economic reforms that were in fact cutting vital public services that might have otherwise sustained the afflicted. As the Moral Majority used financial policy to allow (even encourage) an unbelievable number of quite preventable deaths, it launched a simultaneous campaign that linked the threat of AIDS with queer and black bodies in the popular imaginary, killing three birds with one stone by framing it as an assault on public arts funding. The Right’s assault on the arts wasn’t tactically misguided. Cultural workers were keenly aware of the insurgent role that aesthetics could play in combatting the present threat, as expressed by Douglas Crimp in his galvanizing 1987 call for cultural practices that would directly combat the AIDS epidemic (and the social and political conditions fostering it): “We don’t need a cultural renaissance; we need cultural practices actively participating in the struggle against AIDS. We don’t need to transcend the epidemic; we need to end it.”95 Unsurprisingly, the National Endowment for the Arts was moved to the center of the battlefield, but as Gonzalez-Torres put it, the NEA debate was not actually a debate: “We should call it what it is, which is, a smoke screen.”96 Through a series of spectacular oratorical performances enacted on the Senate floor, the Moral Majority focused the nation’s attention on the threat of degenerate art (that is, queer art, black art, feminist art), which served as an effective distraction from the effects of deregulation and privatization. “Why worry about the fact that we have the lowest child immunization rate of all industrialized nations?” Gonzalez-Torres mused. “Why worry about $500 billion losses in the savings and loans industry when $10,0000 was given to Mapplethorpe?”97 While the battle

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Figure 5.13. Tseng Kwong Chi, Moral Majority Series, 1981. Alfonse D’Amato. Gelatin Silver Print. (© Muna Tseng Dance Projects, New York. Courtesy of Muna Tseng Dance Projects.)

over the NEA would not reach a fever pitch until the end of the decade, it officially began when Republican Representative Steve Bartlett of Texas proposed an amendment to a 1986 appropriations bill to ban NEA funding for material that was “patently offensive to the average person.”98 The amendment died in committee, but it offered a glimpse of the shape of things to come. Senator Alfonse D’Amato of New York, one of Tseng’s subjects for Moral Majority, emerged as a champion in the battle to defund the NEA. Tseng’s portrait of D’Amato captures the senator in a three-piece suit, smiling, flag crumpled behind him, and large glasses wrapping his face as he plays the role of the patriotic wonk. He played a different part in 1989, when he took to the floor of the Senate to denounce Andres Serrano’s now iconic 1987 photograph “Piss Christ,” a stunning study in gold, amber, and orange, in which light seems to emanate from a dying messiah submerged in urine. Though the title announces the image’s profane intention, the work itself is a portrait of Christ that is both

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fearlessly iconoclastic and a gentle, moving study of a revered religious symbol. This was not how D’Amato saw it. Glancing nervously at the catalogue, the senator began his address, his voice shaking slightly as he ventriloquized a constituent’s fearful complaints about the use of NEA funds to support Serrano’s blasphemy. Then, looking down at the photograph, he described “Piss Christ” (for which he was “somewhat reluctant to utter its title”) as “a deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity.”99 Soon, trepidation gave way to rage as he began tearing pages from the catalogue. He insisted that his efforts were not censorious, however. They were simply a question of economic policy: “If people want to be perverse in terms of what they recognize as art and culture, so be it. But not with my money. Not with taxpayer dollars. And certainly not under the mantle of this great nation of ours. This is a desecration.”100 In the years that followed, attacks on art from the Senate floor became routine and reportorial. As critics including Jennifer Doyle, Alisa Solomon, Theodore Shank, and Michelle Wallace have separately observed, the artists under assault were often queers, women, and people of color (a shocking detail given the radical underrepresentation of minoritarian artists within the mainstream art world).101 Alongside the forms of art most commonly attacked by Congress (photography, film, performance art, and theater) were those that involved the representation of or encounter with the body in performance. Vilified artists included photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, playwright Mac Wellman, performance artists and experimental theater makers Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller, film makers Marlon Riggs and Cheryl Dunye, and performance artists Ron Athey and Divinity Fudge. In a 1992 article in American Theatre magazine, Solomon argued that the Moral Majority’s mobilization of performance from the Senate floor ironically aimed to reify an association between AIDS, theater, performance, art, and the threat of the queer body.102 Players like D’Amato and Jesse Helms pursued the resurrection of early modern denunciations of the contagious nature of performance and theater as inherently queer and hence degenerate art forms. Theatrically denouncing this work ensured that, as Solomon elsewhere testified (citing seventeenth-century Puritan reformer William Prynne), “theater by queers—and by syllogistic extension, theater in general—was officially branded, once again,

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as ‘sinfull, heathenish, lewde, ungodly Spectacles and most pernicious Corruptions.’ ”103 Black artists, queer artists, and feminist artists working in performance became synonymous with D’Amato’s “deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity.” The effects were devastating. As Michelle Wallace argued, artists of color were “especially dependent upon public funding such as that provided by the NEA” while at the same time facing exclusion and censorship from within a white supremacist art world: “black artists rarely (actually, never) occupied the hallowed berths reserved for art world stars like Robert Mapplethorpe.”104 At the time, both Gonzalez-Torres and David Wojnarowicz noted that the white supremacist and homophobic tendencies of the art world were often no less fundamentally homophobic or racist than the agents of the Moral Majority.105 “I scratch my head at the hysteria surrounding the actions of the repulsive senator from zombieland,” wrote Wojnarowicz in 1991, “who has been trying to dismantle the NEA for supporting the work of Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe. Although the anger sparked within the art community is certainly justified and will hopefully grow stronger, the actions by Helms and D’Amato only follow standards that have been formed and implemented by the ‘arts’ community itself.”106 Wojnarowicz thus condemned the senators attacking the NEA, but he was no less critical of the prevailing homophobic and racist tendencies of the “arts community” at large.

1990 Just as the Moral Majority launched its attack on art, the party was weathering a deadlier assault. New York was the epicenter of the first wave of the AIDS crisis, and by 1986 Kwong Chi’s world (which Muna described as “a world that seemed for years to be a world without end”) began to come undone. For a minoritarian subject like Tseng the AIDS crisis was compounded with a history that hurts. As Robb Hernández and Joey Terrill observe, “AIDS marked a major historical trauma in the 1980s, but the aftereffects of civil wars, displacement, and immigration happened concurrently, instilling these landscapes with shared memories of death, dying, and disappearance across triangulated junctures.”107 The richness of Tseng’s work is that it traverses a host of social

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Figure 5.14. Tseng Kwong Chi, Lightning Field, North Dakota, 1986. East Meets West Series. Gelatin silver print. (© Muna Tseng Dance Projects, New York. Courtesy of Muna Tseng Dance Projects.)

geographies traversed by people of color, without being reducible to any single one of them. That same year Tseng produced an image in which he stands in the National Grasslands of South Dakota. The sky reflects off of his glasses, giving him a radioactive effect: glowing eyes as the currents in the air make his hair stand straight up. In the background, lightning snakes its way down from an expanse of angry, saturated clouds. If you were a sexually active gay man living in New York at the time, life was sort of like standing in an open field during a freak lighting storm and waiting

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for the bolt to hit. More and more people were starting to die, from drug overdoses or from the plague. Around 1987, Kwong Chi, too, was diagnosed with the disease.108 The galleries and clubs that sustained Kwong Chi’s world started to close. Club 57 closed in 1983, and Sempaphore East closed a few years later. Soon, as Muna recalled, “We were going to more memorials than we were going to openings.”109 Tseng took volumes of photographs of the many parties thrown by his village. Once documents of a thriving, queer lifeworld, today they look like books of the dead. Worn down by the brutality of the art world and a life in crushed black, Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose in 1988. Arnie Zane died that same year of AIDS, followed by Jack Smith in 1989. That same year Tina Chow was diagnosed with HIV. Five months later she and her husband, Michael, were divorced. She spent the next three years working tirelessly as an AIDS activist until her death in 1992. But before this came 1990. John Sex died in October of 1990. Six months before this, on February 16, Keith also succumbed to the plague. Kwong Chi could not be at his best friend’s side because he, too, was sick. “When he got sick,” Magnuson recalled, “like when everybody got sick, it was traumatic. We saw a lot of our friends die.”110 Their world began to come undone, torn apart at the seams. “We didn’t have healthcare,” Muna said, “so in the end he was in a hospital in Toronto.” He told his sister that he wanted to make a body of work about the hospital but he lost his eyesight before he could make it. She took care of him during the last six months. But she was in New York when Keith died so she booked a flight to tell him in person. By the time she arrived in his hospital room, “he had already heard on the news. I think it was at that point that he really gave up the fight. At the end it was so traumatic. You cannot imagine. It was really like a war.” Twenty-two days later, on March 10, 1990, Tseng Kwong Chi died. He was just one of a lost generation of queer of color artists whom we needed. And still need. Now more than ever with the counterinsurgency back in control of a power it never lost control of.

The End So the party fell apart. But there is something to be said about a party that doesn’t last. Like a performance, a party can appear in the blink

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of an eye. It’s a way of bringing people together and mobilizing them. Both performance and parties can be pleasurable, and they can produce worlds that sustain people as they survive hostile living conditions. But a party’s ability to fall apart in an instant also gives its revelers a chance to escape when the police show up. To remain fugitive from capture, survive the night, adapting and learning for another night when we can perform the party back into being. A major part of Muna’s world fell apart when her brother died. “He was my idol,” she wrote, years after his death. “He was my guru.”111 But in the shattering wake of his death, she pulled the pieces together, repaired herself to the extent that she could, and kept him alive, carrying him within her. This is to take a reparative orientation toward the fact that the party is imperiled, that the police are at the door, and that things are about to come undone. “To read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new,” writes Eve Sedgwick. “To a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. Because there can be terrible surprises, however there can also be good ones. Hope, often fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates.”112 Gathering the ephemera and fragments left in the wake of her brother’s life and death, Muna put the pieces together to keep him alive and take him with her to the various battles that she would wage in his name—and in her own. “In my care taking at the end,” she recalled, “he had the foresight to make a will about his estate. He said to me, ‘You have to take care of it.’ He knew he had basically ten, eleven years of work. That was all, really. And that it was cut short. He knew it was important work. He knew it.” While undertaking the hard work of building her own career, she preserved his records—becoming both repertoire and archive—in her West Village home, opening it up and making it available to anyone interested in Tseng Kwong Chi. These two worlds converged in 1999, when Muna collaborated with director Ping Chong to create a performance about her brother’s life, SlutforArt. SlutforArt was the first in a trilogy of works exploring three generations of Muna’s family, including Stella at Dancespace, a 2011 study of her late mother’s life, and It’s All True:

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Grandfather, a work about a grandfather that she never knew, developed during an April 2017 residency at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC) in New York. As with many in the diaspora, most of what Muna knows of her grandfather are the absences that lie in the spaces between the scraps and fragments of shadowy stories our parents and grandparents tell us, in the un-narrated photographs they keep on shelves or in drawers, and in the quiet moments of sadness that they bear in silence (or rage) in our presence. On a rainy gray evening on April 21, I sat with an audience of about fifteen people in BAC’s Cage/Cunningham Studio as Muna and her collaborators (Chanterelle Menashe Ribes and Perry Yung) staged a workshop production of a fabulated biomythography of her grandfather’s life and legacy. In the final moments, Muna traces her grandfather’s bloodline to her brother. A solo image from the Expeditionary Series washes across the back wall. In the image, Kwong Chi, photographed from behind, is seated at the edge of cliff, looking out over the Grand Canyon. The image is a citation of Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 oil painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, in which a well-appointed gentleman observes a mountainous landscape, ripe for domination. Inverting Friedrich’s exploration of “Man’s” mastery over nature, or his humbled place within it, Tseng’s image emphasizes the role of an out-of-place migrant in a landscape that might swallow him whole. Muna turns away from the audience, still talking, and she becomes an inverted mirror image of her brother. As she stands inside the projection, he is just a little bit taller than she is. But for a brief second one can imagine them standing next to each other again. Still together. Still here. Still. The projection transitions to video footage featuring the studio that we are in. In the center of the film, shot by Tatyana Tenenbaum, a projected double of Muna now stands in front of the curtains. Dressed in black, she is frozen in place with arms raised into the air. We hear the jarring, opening chords of the Beatle’s last recorded song (“The End”) blasting through the space, and Muna’s visage in the film dances around as if there were a force inside of her fighting to get free. Her core remains loose but steady as she contracts at the middle and limbs lash out all akimbo. She whirls around the room, and the camera pans to reveal the towering skyline outside the windows. As we watched the film in the studio, the blackout blinds began to withdraw and cool, silver light

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Figure 5.15. Muna Tseng in It’s All True: Grandfather, Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York City, April 2017. Screen capture from film directed by Tatyana Tenenbaum. (Courtesy of Barykshnikov Art Center.)

crawled into the room, exposing the towers of midtown Manhattan. Muna dances, in double, with her projected self. At the center of It’s All True is a simple question that many in the diaspora, torn from homelands and histories under erasure, have to ask of the faces staring from our parents’ pictures: Who are you and where are you in me? But there is also the question she seems to be asking her brother: Where are you and why won’t you come back? Watching her dance, my mind wandered to a tenth-century Japanese poem by Izumi Shikibu: Why haven’t I thought of it before? This body, remembering yours, Is the keepsake that you left.113

It occurred to me that what’s left of Muna’s grandfather and Tseng Kwong Chi still live in Muna’s body when she dances. To perform reparation, as did Muna in that studio, the minoritarian subject collects the scattered fragments and part objects of herself and the world around her in order to make a functional self. She doesn’t perform reparation to become whole; she does it because it makes her

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good enough to get through the day. As Sedgwick writes, “Because the [reparative] reader has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did.”114 That the party falls apart, then, is not its negation, but its condition of possibility. It is, paradoxically, its principle of hope. Ernst Bloch taught us that the disappointment of hope is hope’s condition of existence: “It too can be, and will be, disappointed; indeed, it must be so, as a matter of honor, or else it would not be hope.”115 Hope— like performance, a party, or freedom—falls apart only to come back together again. Which is the surprising proof, for Bloch, that “humans on earth can alter course toward a destination that has not yet been decided—toward redemption or perdition. The world remains, in its entirety, very much a working laboratory possibilis salutis.”116 The disappointment of hope is not the end, but a beginning, as the encounter with disappointment and incompletion confirms that something is missing and that something must be done. Following C. L. R. James, “We were not able to choose the mess we have to live in—this collapse of a whole society—but we can choose our way out.”117 As it was in a rehearsal studio on the sixth floor of the Baryshnikov Arts Center on a rainy April night, as it was for Bustamante’s audience at (Le) Poisson Rouge, Simone in Jericho, New York, Vō in the house that Martin and Florence Wong built, Felix and Ross at the Ravenswood, or for Eiko in the 30th Street Station, minoritarian performance is more than a rehearsal for the example of a better world. It is a reparative practice through which we keep our dead alive and through which we pull ourselves together enough to weather the storm another night so we can sustain the fight the morning after. It doesn’t always succeed. Most of the time it will not. But when you haven’t got anything else, it’s the most that you can do to stay alive. *** And we need More Life.

Epilogue 6E

I like to think about the first time you turned the key to apartment 6E. You would have been in your mid-twenties. Your living room was flanked by a wall of windows, sills eventually populated with books, photos, burned-out candles, and stacks of manuscripts. A glass door on the left led out onto a balcony, and I wonder how long it took before you noticed the endlessly renewable parade of shirtless men running on the gym’s rooftop track across from your building. Did you know then that this apartment would become the center of a world and the headquarters for our party? Did you know how many nights you would spend on that balcony with the people you loved, feeling too much (or not enough)? And did you know that we would be left standing on that balcony less than nineteen years later mourning the loss of you? You took a part of us with you when you left. Some of us could not enter the apartment after you died because you would never come back to it again and that was too much to bear. Some of us couldn’t because it reminded us of the messier parts of the story—the things that still hurt and didn’t die with you. In our quieter moments we could admit that the party was part of what took you away from us: a paradox, since you needed it to survive. The last time I saw your home, it was emptied out. Almost everything had been packed up, given away, or thrown away. Without your art, books, effects, and photographs, it was a skeleton. I looked across the room and out the window one last time before closing the door, imagining that that must have been what it looked like the first time you turned the key, opened the door, and walked inside. *** It wouldn’t be long before you threw the first of many parties.

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Acknowledgments

acknowledgments for a being singular plural: Jeff Andrews, Katie Brewer Ball, Robin Ballard, Miriam Bethman, Daphne Brooks, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Ivan Bujan, Caitlin Burkhart, Jodi Byrd, Anna Campbell, Beth Capper, andre carrington, Sonali Chakravarty, Ping Chong, AJ Christian, Kandice Chuh, Kelly Chung, Jasmine Cobb, Bob Corkrum, Soyica Colbert, Frances Cowhig, Colleen Daniher, Misty De Berry, Janet Dees, Billy Dwyer, Paul Edwards, Sally Ewing, Martha Feldman, Dan Foley, Marcela Fuentes, Chris Gallahan, Malik Gaines, Jonathan Gelb, Danielle Goldman, Roy Gomez-Cruz, Chris Gray, Blake Hamilton, Adrian Heathfield, Trish Henley, Leon Hilton, Chad Hinkley, Jeff Hinkley, Christian Hodge, Dan Hoernschemeyer, Judy Hoernschemeyer, Sharon Holland, E. Patrick Johnson, William Johnston, Kehaulani Kauanui, Joan Kee, Suk-Young Kim, Kareem Kubchandani, Thomas Lax, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Summer Kim Lee, Katherine Lemons, Andrew Leong, Betty Letson, Scott Leydon, Eng-beng Lim, Lisa Lowe, Joshua Lubin-Levy, Marta Lucena, Heather Lukes, D. Soyini Madison, Jonathan Magat, Jasmine Mahmoud, Martin Manalansan, Molly McGarry, Uri McMillan, Sean Metzger, Andreea Micu, Anders Milton, Christine Mok, Jeanne Moody, Fred Moten, Amber Musser, Lisha Nadkarni, Patricia Nguyen, Jeanie O’Brien, Barbara O’Keefe, James Oliphint, Danny Orendorff, Monica Park, Saul Petty, Steve Petty, Ethan Philbrick, Kenneth Pietrobono, Rajiv Pinto, Dassia Posner, Brittnay Proctor, Jasbir Puar, Randy Rains, Riley Rains, Tracey Rains, Elliot Ramos, Iván Ramos, Chanterelle Menashe Ribes, Ramón Rivera-Servera, Shoniqua Roach, Ricky Rodríguez, Bartholomew Ryan, Michelle Salerno, Ashlie Sandoval, Rebecca Schneider, Shalini Shankar, Nitasha Sharma, Aliza Shvarts, David Simon, Clayton Shuttleworth, Shayna Silverstein, Shante Smalls, Freda Love Smith, Noémie Solomon, Liz Son, Gus Stadler, Julia Steinmetz, Carol Simpson Stern, Amy Tang, Tatyana Tenenbaum, Kyla Thompkins, Daniel Tsai, Hella Tsaconas, 243

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Alexia Traganas, Elias Velasco, Hypatia Volourmis, Dina Walters, Michael Wang, John-Paul Ward, Robert Warrior, Carrie Mae Weems, Jessica Winegar, Yves Winter, Ji-Yeon Yuh, Perry Yung, Soo-Ryon Yoon, Takao Yoshikawa, Harvey Young, Mary Zimmerman, Eric Zinner, John Andrews, Christine Bacareza Balance, Jeanie Ballard, Lauren Berlant, Nao Bustamante, Tatsuko Chambers, Cleo Chambers, Sharon Corkrum, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Jennifer Doyle, Joshua Javier Guzmán, Sonia Hinkley, Shadi Letson, Bill Letson, Ricardo Montez, Albert Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o, Eiko Otake, Miriam Petty, Ann Pellegrini, Roy Pérez, Sandra Ruiz, Karen Shimakawa, Riley Snorton, Karen Tongson, Alina Troyano, Ela Troyano, Guinevere Turner, Muna Tseng, Jeanne Vacarro, Alex Vazquez, Danh Vō, Shane Vogel, Izumi, Momo, Rocco, Victor Gonzalez, Joshua Rains, Ryan Rivera, Sam Pedraza, José Muñoz

Notes

Preface 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Moten, Stolen Life, ms. 257. Ibid., ms. 258. Muñoz, “Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate,” 112. Stevens, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.” Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 3. This is a revision of a lyric from the Frank Ocean song, “Close to You,” in Ocean, Blonde. Muñoz, “‘Gimme Gimme This . . . Gimme Gimme That,’ ” 99. Nyong’o, “Punk’d Theory,” 23. Savage, “Siouxsie Sioux,” 341. Moten, Stolen Life, ms. 258–59. See Lee, “‘I’ll Be over Here.’ ” “Party’s Fall,” on Siouxsie and the Banshees, Tinderbox. Moten, Stolen Life, ms. 257. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 100. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 66-67. Walcott, “Black Queer Studies, Freedom, and Other Human Possibilities,” 144. Sharpe, In the Wake, 22. Walcott, “Black Queer Studies,” 143. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 74. Interview with Nao Bustamante, Sunday, June 25, 2017. Ibid. Ibid. Muñoz, “The Vulnerability Artist,” 193. He drew his theorization of “ugly feelings” from Ngai, Ugly Feelings. Muñoz, “The Vulnerability Artist,” 198. Bustamante interview. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” 531. Marx, Grundrisse, 78, 80, and see also 81. Muñoz, “Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate,” 112.

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33 Muñoz, “‘Gimme Gimme This,’ ” 96; Muñoz, “Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate,” 112. 34 Nancy, After Fukushima, 37. 35 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 113.

Introduction

1 All Simone quotations in this section come from documentation of the concert on Simone, Nina Simone: Live at Montreux 1976. 2 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. 3 Hensley, “Woman in Stunning, Viral Baton Rouge Protest Photo.” 4 Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 19. 5 Vazquez, Listening in Detail, 270. 6 Just a few of the books we could gather in the library of minoritarian performance theory include: Brody, Impossible Purities; Muñoz, Disidentifications; Shimakawa, National Abjection; Johnson, Appropriating Blackness; Moten, In the Break; Brooks, Bodies in Dissent; Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret; Muñoz, Cruising Utopia; Mitchell, Living with Lynching; Fleetwood, Troubling Vision; Burns, Puro Arte; Rivera-Servera, Performing Queer Latinidad; Preciado, Testo Junkie; Lim, Brown Boys and Rice Queens; DeFrantz and Gonzalez, Black Performance Theory; Vazquez, Listening in Detail; Carpenter, Coloring Whiteness; Balance, Tropical Renditions; McMillan, Embodied Avatars; Colbert, Black Movements. 7 Rodis, Nina Simone. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 6. 11 Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom. 12 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2. 13 Rolando, The Eyes of the Rainbow. 14 Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 95. 15 Ibid. 16 James, Dunayevskaya, and Boggs, State Capitalism and World Revolution, 64. 17 James, Modern Politics, 154. 18 Karatani, The Structure of World History. 19 Bloch and Adorno, “Something’s Missing,” 15. 20 Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 299. 21 Robinson, Black Marxism, 317. 22 Sidahmed, “‘She Was Making Her Stand.’ ” 23 Moten, In the Break, 12, emphasis added. 24 Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter, 169. For a discussion of this passage, see chapter 5. 25 James, The Black Jacobins, 8. 26 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 206. 27 Musser, Sensational Flesh, 20.

Notes

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

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Delmez, “Sea Islands Series,” 106. Morrison, Song of Solomon; Ovid, Metamorphoses. See Schneider, Performing Remains. Ibid. Hartman, “The Time of Slavery,” 759. Ibid., 772. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 207. Ibid. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 1–52. Roach, Cities of the Dead. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 7. Vazquez, Listening in Detail, 270. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 16, 15. James, Modern Politics, 127–29. Robinson, Black Marxism, 2. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 13. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 16. Nina Simone, “Backlash Blues,” on Simone, Nina Simone Sings the Blues. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 105. Ibid. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 26. Berlant, “’68, or Something,” 133. Vazquez, Listening in Detail, 175. Ibid., 189. Ibid. Nancy, “Communism,” 148. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 195. Ibid., 5. Phelan, Unmarked, 146–66. Marx, Grundrisse, 231. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 254. Ibid., 231. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 29. Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 44, 139; Marx, Grundrisse, 30. Cited in Redmond, Anthem, 200. Ibid. Robinson, Black Marxism, preface. Keeling, The Witch’s Flight, 15. Ibid., 14.

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71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

90 91 92 93 94 95

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Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro,’ ” 151. Ibid. Bloch and Adorno, “Something’s Missing,” 15. Piper, “Talking to Myself,” 32. Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, 8, ix. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 32–33. Marx conceded that art has some kind of relationship to the base (“the material basis” of society), but also insisted that it remains autonomous from it and is thus imbued with the capacity to extend beyond it. He reflected on art’s seeming autonomy in the Grundrisse when he wrote: “It is known that certain periods of [art’s] florescence by no means correspond to the general development of society, or, therefore, to the material basis, the skeleton as it were of its organization” (46). This partially explains why people of different epochs may still be moved and shaped by the aesthetic encounter with a work of art from a different era (or under different conditions of production). As Marx observed, “The difficulty lies not in understanding that Greek art and epic poetry are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still give us aesthetic pleasure and are in certain respects regarded as a standard and unattainable model” (47). James, Modern Politics, 139. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 198. Nina Simone, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” on Simone, Silk & Soul. Goldman, I Want to Be Ready. James, Modern Politics, 119. James, Dunayevskaya, and Boggs, State Capitalism and World Revolution, 99. Marx, 1844 Manuscripts, 138–39. Karatani, The Structure of World History, 7. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 35. Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” 531. Marx, 1844 Manuscripts, 139. On capital’s division of the common into the singular “individual,” see Marx, “On the Jewish Question.” Hartman, Scenes of Subjection. The masters ripped black flesh apart in order to foreclose even the pleasures of sense. As James writes, the regularity of mutilation was meant “to deprive them of the pleasures which they could indulge in without expense” (The Black Jacobins, 12). Ibid. Marx, 1844 Manuscripts, 139. See McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 121–46. See James, Dunayevskaya, and Boggs, State Capitalism and World Revolution, 27–88. Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 74–75. Ibid.

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96 Citations from Cortiñas’s performance are drawn from three sources: the event itself, the notes from which Cortiñas was reading, and the text in Apogee (which is identical to Cortiñas’s notes) published as Cortiñas, “Notes on Returning to San Francisco Twenty-Five Years Later.” I will cite Apogee pages only when citing text that Cortiñas did not read at the Bureau. 97 Bowers v. Hardwick, 191. 98 Cortiñas, “Notes on Returning to San Francisco,” 11; emphasis added. 99 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 73–74. 100 Cortiñas, “Notes on Returning to San Francisco,” 10. 101 The benediction “More Life,” appears throughout this text and is drawn from the climax of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (280): Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work begins. But also, Drake. 102 Cortiñas, “It’s Kinda Cold out Here,” 185. 103 Ibid. 104 Cortiñas, “Notes on Returning to San Francisco.” 105 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 68. 106 Cortiñas, “Notes,” 11, emphasis added. 107 Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 185. 108 Ibid., 197–98. 109 Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s name appears without diacritical remarks in deference to the artist’s stated wishes at the time of his death. 110 Tseng Kwong Chi’s name is presented (surname followed by first name) as styled by the artist in his life. Elsewhere, names follow Western format, save Japanese names discussed within a Japanese context, in which case the surname is followed by the first name. 111 Gonzalez-Torres and Nickas, “All the Time in the World” (1991), 89. 112 Gaines, Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left, 21. 113 On the ideological disruptions emerging from the popular culture of the Tokugawa era, including ukiyo-e prints, see Hirano, The Politics of Dialogic Imagination.

Chapter 1. Nina Simone and the Work of Minoritarian Performance

1 Lyrics and banter in this section are transcribed from Nina Simone, “Sunday in Savannah,” on Simone, ’Nuff Said! 2 Brooks, “Nina Simone’s Triple Play”; Brooks, “Afro-Sonic Feminist Praxis”; Redmond, Anthem, 179–219; Tillet, “Nina Simone’s Time Is Now, Again”; Tillet, “Strange Samplings”; Gaines, Black Performance, 21–54. 3 Rodis, Nina Simone. 4 Moten, In the Break, 41.

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32

33 34 35

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Ibid., 52. Bloch and Adorno, “Something’s Missing,” 15. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1:76. King Jr., “Eulogy for the Martyred Children,” 221. Cited in Berlant, “’68, or Something,” 138. Ibid., 139. Ibid., 140. Bloch and Adorno, “Something’s Missing,” 9. Ibid. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1:76. Bloch still admits that the “feeling of freedom” has a proximity to the “dreams of a better life” that animate utopian longing (Bloch and Adorno, “Something’s Missing,” 9). Bloch and Adorno, “Something’s Missing,” 3. Simone, Little Girl Blue. Simone, Nina Simone: Live at Montreux 1976. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 19. Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 60; Cohodas, Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone, 77. Brooks, “Nina Simone’s Triple Play,” 176. On the event, see Badiou, Being and Event. See also Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis. Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 51. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 189. Marx, Capital, 1:784–849; Federici, Caliban and the Witch. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 189. Ibid. Weeks, The Problem with Work, 36. Auslander, Liveness; Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 60. Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 32. My reconstruction of Simone’s biography throughout this chapter is largely indebted to Nadine Cohodas’s exemplary biography of Simone, Princess Noire, 27–38, and Simone’s own autobiography in Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 14–27. Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 19. As she describes it: “The wonderful thing about this type of discrimination is that you can never know for sure if it is true, because no one is going to turn around and admit to being a racist. . . . So you feel the shame, humiliation and anger at being just another victim of prejudice and at the same time there’s the nagging worry that . . . maybe it’s because you’re just no good” (ibid., 42–43). Ibid., 45. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 25.

Notes

36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66

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Ibid., 50. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 50. Lotringer and Marazzi, “The Return of Politics,” 15–16. As Lotringer and Marazzi write, “Refusal of work, demand for more money and less work, struggles against harmful work (which, after all, characterizes work in all its capitalist form), has always meant forcing capital to develop to the maximum its productive forces” (ibid., 16). Ibid. Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 50. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 51, emphasis added. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 3. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 20. Ibid., 21. Ibid. Cohodas, Princess Noire, 35; Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 34. Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 4–8. Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 33–34. Ibid., 23. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 153–81. Ibid., 170. Vasili Byros describes them as “materials for free composition that are subject to substantial development, involving processes of elaboration, variation, extension, and expansion” (“Prelude on a Partimento”). Spitta, Johann Sebastian Bach, 55. Ibid. Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 66. Byros, “Prelude on a Partimento,” 4.6. Cited in ibid., 4.7, emphasis added. Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 23. Spitta, Johann Sebastian Bach. In The Principle of Hope, Bloch takes a swipe at Spitta, complaining about a dominant characterization of Bach “as ‘absolute music’, and always with a polemical antithesis to the merely Romantic espressivo which is quite unimportant for the nature of Bach’s work and it specific espressivo. The same antithesis had already filled and misguided Spitta’s Bach monograph in the eighteen seventies, the same unfruitful denial of all affective lines, expressive lines, although almost all Bach’s music consists of these” (3:1065). Spitta, Johann Sebastian Bach, 47. Ibid., 31.

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67 Ibid. 68 My thinking here is indebted to Misty DeBerry, who is working on a dissertation that expands upon the power and effects of dehabituation in black feminist performance. 69 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 31. See also Agamben, Profanations, 85–86. 70 Take Agamben’s example of a cat playing with a ball of yarn where a mouse used to be: “The game with the yarn liberates the mouse from being prey and the predatory activity from being necessarily directed towards the capture and death of the mouse” (Profanations, 85–86). 71 Agamben, Nudities, 102. 72 Ibid. 73 Spitta, Johann Sebastian Bach, 48. 74 Ibid., 36. 75 See Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure. 76 Simone, Let It All Out. 77 Agamben, Profanations, 85–86. 78 Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 51. 79 Ibid., 52. 80 Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster. 81 Vazquez, “Parts of a World,” 42. 82 Muñoz, “Teaching Minoritarian Knowledge, and Love,” 119. 83 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 28. 84 Johnson, “Poison or Remedy?,” 369. 85 As Simone would reflect of her time at Julliard, “I learned too that, even at the highest level, lessons that Miz Mazzy had taught me when I was seven years old still had a place” (Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 40). 86 Hall, “Marx’s Notes on Method,” 147. 87 Althusser, For Marx. 88 Hall, “Marx’s Notes on Method,” 147. 89 Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 52. 90 Ibid., emphasis added. 91 This interview is featured in Garbus, What Happened, Miss Simone? 92 Lyrics and description are reconstructed from a reissued DVD of the program included on Simone, Nina Simone Live in ’65 & ’68. 93 Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 82. 94 Ibid., 78. This resonates with Marx’s description of the industrial worker as a being who “adapts his own movements to the uniform and unceasing motion of an automaton” (Capital, 1: 546). 95 Redmond, Anthem, 180. 96 Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 67. 97 Gaines, Black Performance, 24. 98 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons.

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99 “My teachers from Lorraine onwards were the cream of the movement: Stokely Carmichael, Godfrey Cambridge and many, many others” (Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 87). 100 Redmond, Anthem, 193. 101 Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 91. 102 “Now by a twist of fate I had a big hit with a cover version and the aim of our tour was to exploit it”(ibid., 116). The London gig may well have been just a job, but Nadine Cohodas suggests that that there was something different about this performance. Citing an interview with Henry Young, Simone’s guitarist at the time, Cohodas writes: “‘She was almost quite lovable,’ Henry recalled, the most relaxed he had seen her” (Princess Noire, 217–18). 103 Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 93. 104 Gaines, Black Performance, 46. 105 For more on the history of Hair, see Wollman, The Theater Will Rock. 106 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 203. 107 Redmond, Anthem, 199. 108 Marx, Capital, 1: 344–45, 924–25. 109 Robinson, Black Marxism, 4, 116. 110 Marx, Grundrisse, 441. 111 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 212. 112 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 25–26. 113 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 216. 114 See ibid., 215–16. 115 Ibid., 207. 116 Ibid., 215. 117 Davis, Women, Race & Class; White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?. On the association between proper bourgeois subject composition, gender, and colonial practice, see Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire. 118 Davis, Women, Race & Class, 5. 119 Again, Spillers: “The offspring of the female does not ‘belong’ to the mother, nor is s/he ‘related’ to the ‘owner,’ though the owner ‘possesses’ it, and in the AfricanAmerican instance, often fathered it, and, as often, without whatever benefit of patrimony” (“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 217). 120 Musser, Sensational Flesh, 159. 121 Morgan, Laboring Women, 1. 122 Federici, Revolution at Point Zero. 123 Agamben, Homo Sacer. 124 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 131. 125 Musser, Sensational Flesh, 183. 126 Redmond, Anthem, 198. See also Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black. 127 Chow, The Protestant Ethnic; Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet. 128 Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet, 5. 129 Tadiar, Things Fall Away.

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130 131 132 133 134

Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet, 6. Davis, Women, Race, and Class, 17. Ibid., 15. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 22. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom; Mbembe, “Necropolitics.” See Taylor, “Sanctuary Activists Aid Latin Refugees”; Golden and McConnell, Sanctuary; Crittenden, Sanctuary; Davidson, Convictions of the Heart; Tomsho, The American Sanctuary Movement; Lorentzen, Women in the Sanctuary Movement. Taylor, “Sanctuary Activists Aid Latin Refugees.” Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 228–29. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 45. Hughes, “Backlash Blues.” “Backlash Blues,” on Simone, Nina Simone Live in ’65 & ’68. Brooks, “Afro-Sonic Feminist Praxis,” 219. Cortiñas, “It’s Kinda Cold out Here,” 185. Ibid. Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide, 4. Kennedy, Funnyhouse of a Negro, 25. Brooks, “Afro-Sonic Feminist Praxis,” 219. Ibid., 220. Ibid., 220–21. Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide, 4. Ibid., 5. Kennedy, Funnyhouse of a Negro, 24. Citations and reconstruction of this performance drawn from Nina Simone, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” on Simone, Black Gold. Redmond, Anthem, 211. Citations and reconstructions of this performance drawn from Nina Simone,“Why? (The King of Love Is Dead),” on Simone, ’Nuff Said! Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 146. Cohodas, Princess Noire, 214. The song was later included on the album Emergency Ward!, which stands as a nuanced and devastating response to the despair and violence of the Vietnam War (see Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 125). See also Cohodas, Princess Noire, 262–63, 71–72. Citations and reconstructions of this performance drawn from Nina Simone, “Let it Be Me,” on Simone, Emergency Ward!. Bloch, “The Stage Regarded as a Paradigmatic Institution,” 227.

135

136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157

158 159

Chapter 2. Searching for Danh Vō’s Mother 1 Ruiz, “Waiting in the Seat of Sensation,” 342. 2 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia. Ruiz, 341.

Notes

3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35

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255

Ibid., 342. Johnson, Appropriating Blackness, 77. On “quare,” see Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies.” Muñoz, “Queer Theater, Queer Theory,” 240. Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” 119. Phelan, Unmarked; Roach, Cities of the Dead; Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence”; Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire; Schneider, Performing Remains; Vazquez, Listening in Detail; Fuentes, “Performance Constellations.” Schneider, Performing Remains, 7. Shvarts, “Troubled Air,” 205. Taylor describes the reproduction of performance through the metaphor of DNA in her work on the HIJOS (an organization comprised of children of the disappeared from Argentina’s Dirty War) and their progenitors, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (The Archive and the Repertoire, 161–89). See also Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 183–222. Loraux, The Children of Athena, 132. Muñoz, Disidentifications. Federici, Revolution at Point Zero, 2. Ibid., 117. Morgan, Laboring Women; Tadiar, Things Fall Away. Johnson, Appropriating Blackness, 104–59. Ibid., 114. Text communication with Shadi Letson, September 22, 2016. Spillers, “Interstices,” 155. Morgan, Laboring Women. Spillers, “Interstices,” 228. A reproduction of Adolph Menzel’s Eisenwalzwerk can be located at commons. wikimedia.org. “Danh Vō and Xiu Xiu: ‘Metal.’ ” Marx, Capital, 1:188. Ibid., 1:1038–39. Marx, 1844 Manuscripts, 108, emphasis added. Marx, Capital, 1:187. Phelan, Unmarked, 146. Ibid., 148, 52. See Schneider, Performing Remains, 1–31. See Federici, Caliban and the Witch. Schneider, Performing Remains, 1–31. Spillers, “An Order of Constancy,” 151. There is some resonance here between this and the way Taylor describes “the way performances tap into public fantasies and leave a trace, reproducing and at times altering cultural repertoires”(The Archive and the Repertoire, 143). Auslander, Liveness.

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36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

| Notes

Phelan, Unmarked, 146. Schneider, Performing Remains, 7. Moten, In the Break, 5. Marx, Grundrisse, 383. Ibid., 382. Tadiar, Things Fall Away, 133. Federici, Revolution at Point Zero and Caliban and the Witch. Spivak, “Feminism and Critical Theory,” 57. Ibid. Um, “Exiled Memory,” 833. Ryan, “Tombstone for Phùng Vo.” Patricia Nguyen, “Salt/Water,” 96. Ibid. Email correspondence with Marta Lusena, assistant to Danh Vō, September 5, 2016. Ibid. Um, “Exiled Memory,” 838. Nguyen, “Salt/Water,” 96. I was unable to secure reproduction rights for this image, which can be viewed in: Danh Vō, “Edition for Parkett 93.” Nguyen, “Salt/Water,” 99. Espiritu, “Toward a Critical Refugee Study,” 424. Nguyen, “Salt/Water,” 107. Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 7. Ibid. Ibid, 8. Ngô and Lam, Guest Editors’ Introduction, 681. Marx, Capital, 1:143. Marx, 1844 Manuscripts, 108, emphasis added. Marx, Capital, 1:163–77. Ahmed, “Orientations Matter.” Ibid., 243. 16:32, 26, 05, 2009, wall plaque at the Whitney Museum of American Art for the exhibition “Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner,” March 4, 2016. Nancy, Corpus, 139. Vogel, “Touching Ecstasy,” 50. Newman, “Intimate Bonds,” 169. Marx, Grundrisse, 290. Marx, Capital, 1:289–90, emphasis added. Ibid. Johnson, “Correctional Facilities,” 175. See Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Johnson, “Correctional Facilities,” 174.

Notes

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257

76 Even the “science” of historical materialism made little attempt to account for the vital contributions of (unwaged) labor performed by women within and beyond the domestic sphere, let alone the way women workers were differentially affected as women. In On the Reproduction of Capitalism, for example, Althusser repeatedly notes that the “family” and the “school” are primary Ideological State Apparatuses responsible for the reproduction of the conditions of production, and thus the reproduction of capitalism, without dedicating real time to the (stereo) typical work that is performed by women within the family or schools (whether as mothers or teachers). 77 Tadiar, Things Fall Away, 36. 78 Vō, “Mothertongue,” 232. 79 Ibid., 233. 80 Irigaray, “Women on the Market,” 172. 81 Ibid. 82 Spillers, “Interstices,” 158. 83 Tadiar, Things Fall Away, 133. 84 Phelan, Unmarked, 148. 85 Ibid. 86 Shvarts, “Troubled Air,” 217. 87 Phone conversation with Miriam Petty, April 18, 2016. 88 Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence,” 10. 89 Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom, 7. 90 Espiritu, “Toward a Critical Refugee Study,” 414. For more on the disciplinary technologies through which Southeast Asian refugees, and Cambodian refugees in particular, are interpellated into US subjectivity, see Ong, Buddha Is Hiding. 91 Johnson, Mother Tongues, 84. 92 Irigaray, “Women on the Market,” 185. 93 Federici, Revolution at Point Zero, 49. 94 Ibid., 91–111; Tadiar, Things Fall Away. 95 Spillers, “Black, White, and in Color,” 229. I am grateful to Rebecca Schneider and Beth Capper for this point. 96 Johnson, Mother Tongues, 66. 97 Ibid. 98 Vō, “Mothertongue,” 233. 99 Rafael, Motherless Tongues, 2. 100 Ibid., 12–13. 101 Ibid., 14. 102 Kwon, “The Hidden Injury of Class.” 103 Gumbs, Martins, and Williams, Revolutionary Mothering. 104 Oka, “Mothering as Revolutionary Praxis,” 51. 105 Ibid. 106 Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” 161. 107 Ibid., 160.

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108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126

Gumbs, “Forget Hallmark,” 120. Spillers, “Black, White, and in Color”; Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 110–37. Lorde, “Man Child,” 73. Musser, “Re-Membering Audre,” 354. Ibid. Lorde, “Man Child,” 74. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 75. Ibid. Ibid., 76. Musser, “Re-Membering Audre,” 356. Tadiar, Things Fall Away, 9. Boucher, “Danh Vo Channels Martin Wong,” Accessed July 13, 2017. Petty, Stealing the Show, 38. Pérez, “The Glory that Was Wrong,” 282, 281. Federici, Revolution at Point Zero, 116. Ibid., 116. Ibid. This phenomenon is exemplified by the modern commodification and exportation of Filipina nurses and domestic workers; see Tadiar, Things Fall Away, 140. Strober and Strober, Reagan, 138, 40. See Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings. This letter was included in the exhibition Martin Wong: Human Instamatic, curated by Antonio Sergio Bessa and Yasmin Ramirez, Bronx Museum of the Arts, November 4, 2015–February 14, 2016. Examples of the women I am referring to include, but are by no means limited to: choreographer Muna Tseng (Tseng Kwong Chi’s sister), curator Andrea Rosen and artist Julie Ault (friends of Felix Gonzalez-Torres), Eve Sedgwick (queer theorist and teacher, editor of the work of Gary Fisher), Nicole Atkinson (Marlon Riggs’s colleague who contributed to the posthumous completion of his final film, Black Is, Black Ain’t). Ault, “Some Places It Will Always Be Eureka.” Ibid. Ibid. Spillers, “Black, White, and in Color,” 228. Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 186. Skype interview with Danh Vō, Tuesday, March 15, 2016.

127 128 129

130

131 132 133 134 135

Notes

Chapter 3. The Marxism of Felix Gonzalez- Torres

1 Ligon, “My Felix (2007),” 19. 2 Ibid., 21. 3 Kwon, “The Becoming of a Work of Art,” 282–3; Cruz, Ghez, and Goldstein, “Reflections on a Proposal for 1995,” 49.

Notes

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

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259

Ligon, “My Felix (2007),” 24. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 166. Ibid. Ibid. Ligon, “My Felix (2007),” 23. Muñoz, “Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate,” 104. Muñoz, “‘Gimme Gimme This,’ ” 96. Stevens, 524. Nancy Spector notes Gonzalez-Torres’s attachment to the poem in Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 183. Stevens, 524. Cardenal, In Cuba, 72. Vazquez, Listening in Detail, 204. Gonzalez-Torres commonly mobilized “Untitled” followed by a parenthetical reference to title his works. The works thus do not lack a title, even when only titled “Untitled” as a component of his conceptual practice. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 174. Ibid., 177. Ibid., 176. Muñoz, “Feeling Brown” and “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down.” This narrative is drawn from Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled Biographical Sketch,” 89. Julie Ault expanded upon this chronology, posthumously, in her “Chronology.” From February 24 to May 21, 2016, El Museo del Barrio featured an exhibition of Gonzalez-Torres’s early work. See Fuentes, Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Clark, “Ross Laycock,” 33. Ibid. Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled Biographical Sketch.” Ibid. On Gonzalez-Torres as tactician, see Muñoz, Disidentifications, 165–79. Gonzalez-Torres and Kosuth, “A Conversation,” 358. Gonzalez-Torres, “Interview by Tim Rollins,” 10, emphasis added. Gonzalez-Torres and Storr, “Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” 234. 234; originally published as “Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Être un espion (Interview),” Art Press, January 1995. Gonzalez-Torres and Nickas (1991), 86. Gonzalez-Torres, “Interview by Tim Rollins,” 22. Cited in Ligon, “My Felix (2007),” 22. Gonzalez-Torres and Nickas (1991), 89. Marx, Grundrisse, 32–33. Marx, Capital, 3:1017. Ibid., 3: 1018. James, Dunayevskaya, and Boggs, State Capitalism and World Revolution, 64. Ibid., 46. Marx, Grundrisse, 36. Ibid.

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41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 37. 43 Email correspondence with Caitlin Burkhart, Project Coordinator of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation on June 19, 2017; hereafter cited as “Burkhart email.” 44 Gonzalez-Torres and Storr, “Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” 233. 45 Gonzalez-Torres, “Letter from Felix Gonzalez-Torres to Ross Laycock, 1988.” 46 Ibid. 47 Marx, Capital, 1:256. 48 Gonzalez-Torres, “Interview by Tim Rollins,” 20. 49 Gonzalez-Torres and Joseph Kosuth, “A Conversation (Interview),” 76. 50 Gonzalez-Torres, “Interview by Tim Rollins,” 21. 51 Jameson, The Political Unconscious. 52 Berardi, The Uprising, 105–06. 53 Ibid, 105. 54 Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception; Tadiar, Things Fall Away. 55 Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 43. 56 Gonzalez-Torres and Kosuth, “A Conversation,” 349. 57 Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 26–27. 58 Gonzalez-Torres, “Interview by Tim Rollins,” 27. 59 Marx, Capital, 1:198. 60 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 164. 61 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 27–45. 62 Luxemburg, “Social Reform or Revolution,” 142. 63 Karatani, The Structure of World History, 291. See also Klein, The Shock Doctrine. 64 Karatani, The Structure of World History, 291. 65 Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 100. 66 On the certificates of authenticity see Deitcher, “Contradictions and Containment”; Kwon, “The Hidden Injury of Class.” 67 Gonzalez-Torres, “Interview by Tim Rollins,” 13. 68 Marx, Capital, 1:873–940; Federici, Caliban and the Witch and Revolution at Point Zero, 138–48. 69 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 11. 70 Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 14–15. 71 Gonzalez-Torres, “Interview by Tim Rollins,” 21. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid., 13. 75 For an overview of the relationship between the market and the rise of the painter, see Phillips, The American Century, 305–24; Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 9–10. 76 Felix Gonzalez-Torres et al., Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 12. 77 Harvey, A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism; Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?. 78 Bowley, “Art Collectors Find Safe Harbor.” 79 Gonzalez-Torres and Kosuth, “A Conversation,” 348.

Notes

80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118

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261

Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 18. Muñoz, “Teaching Minoritarian Knowledge, and Love,” 120. Cruz, “The Means of Pleasure,” 17. Marx, Capital, 1:177. Marx, Grundrisse, 81. Nyong’o, Afro-Fabulations, ms. 89. Ibid., ms. 102. Walcott, “Black Queer Studies,” 143. Gonzalez-Torres and Robert Nickas, “Felix Gonzalez-Torres: All the Time in the World (Interview)” (2006), 45. Gonzalez-Torres, “Interview by Tim Rollins,” 24. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue; Arenas, Before Night Falls, 154–58. Moten, In the Break, 14. Marx, Capital, 1:201. The “natural” development of the division of labor was also understood by Engels to be historical; see his The Origin of the Family. Marx, Grundrisse, 33-34. Ibid., 34. Gonzalez-Torres, “Practices.” See chapter 5 for more on the NEA debates and Gonzalez-Torres’s critique of it. Gonzalez-Torres, “1990: L.A., ‘The Gold Field,’ ” 148. See Gonzalez-Torres, “Practices,” 133. Ibid. Marx, “On the Jewish Question.” Gonzalez-Torres, “Practices,” 133. Doyle, Hold It against Me, 20. Gonzalez-Torres, “Practices,” 133. Ibid. Althusser, For Marx, 99; emphasis in original. Gonzalez-Torres, “Practices,” 133. Ibid., emphasis added. Burkhardt email. Gonzalez-Torres and Storr, “Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” 233. Marx, 1844 Manuscripts, 68. Cited in Cooks, Exhibiting Blackness, 117. See also Jones, South of Pico, 166–72. Muñoz, “Teaching Minoritarian Knowledge, and Love,” 120. Gonzalez-Torres and Storr, “Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” 233, emphasis added. Ibid. Ibid., 233. Marx, Capital, 1:469–70. This reproduction of class hierarchy becomes exacerbated by a “separation of the workers into skilled and unskilled” labor (ibid., 1:470). Graeber, Revolutions in Reverse, 35–36. Gonzalez-Torres, “Interview by Tim Rollins,” 27. Luxemburg, “Social Reform or Revolution.”

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119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138

James, Dunayevskaya, and Boggs, State Capitalism and World Revolution. Cardenal, In Cuba, 20. Ibid., 21. Ibid. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 85. Arenas, Before Night Falls, 310. Quiroga, “Unpacking My Files,” 155. Ibid. Ibid., 157. Arenas, Before Night Falls, 310. Gonzalez-Torres and Storr, “Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” 233. Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled Biographical Sketch.” Goldstein, “Untitled (Ravenswood),” 38. Gonzalez-Torres, “1990: L.A., ‘The Gold Field’,” 68. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 69. Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 183.

Chapter 4. Eiko’s Entanglements 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Rothfuss, “Naked (2010),” 254, emphasis added. Candelario, Flowers Cracking Concrete, 4. Ibid., 8. Lepecki, “Reciprocal Topographies,” 49. Ibid. Phelan, Unmarked, 148. Vazquez, Listening in Detail, 67. Eiko relayed this during a conversation at her Manhattan apartment with Karen Shimakawa and I on April 27, 2017. I began writing and thinking about Eiko with Karen and we presented a co-written paper about A Body in Places in Tohoku, Japan, at Performance Studies International in 2015 and in Miami for the Association for Asian American Studies in 2016. Many of the ideas in this chapter are indebted to my collaboration and thinking with Karen. I proceeded solo here (with her permission). She and I continue to think and write about Eiko together. Candelario, Flowers Cracking Concrete, 31. Carbonneau, “Naked,” 25. Candelario, Flowers Cracking Concrete, 37–42; Eiko Otake, “Nothing Is Ordinary.” Philbrick, “Eiko in Place,” 14. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 14. Ibid.

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263

16 See also Ippolito’s “Accommodating the Unpredictable” on the challenges of new media conservation faced by Guggenehim Museum curators and conservators in the early 2000s. 17 Philbrick, “Eiko in Place,” 15. 18 Munroe, “All the Landscapes”: Doryun Chong, “Tokyo 1955–1970”; Michio Hayashi, “Tracing the Graphic in Postwar Japanese Art”; Ming Tiampo, “Please Draw Freely.” 19 Carbonneau, “Naked,” 23; See also Candelario, Flowers Cracking Concrete, 24–27; Doryun Chong and Eiko Otake, “Even a Dog That Wanders Will Find a Bone (Interview),” 57–61. 20 Matthew S. Witkovsky, “Provoke,” 470. 21 Chong, “Tokyo 1955–1970,” 64. 22 Chong and Otake, “Even a Dog That Wanders Will Find a Bone (Interview),” 59. 23 Schneider, Performing Remains, 4. 24 McMillan, Embodied Avatars, 95–195. 25 Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance. 26 Zelevansky, “Driving Image.” 27 This, as Klaus Biesenbach and Christophe Cherix indicate in Yoko Ono, 208, may have been a gesture to Ono’s exhibition, “This Is Not Here,” at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, a few months earlier. 28 This response is paraphrased from a viewing of the film during a screening at MoMA as part of Ono’s 2016 solo retrospective. 29 Zelevansky et al., Love Forever, 27; Biesenbach and Cherix, Yoko Ono. 30 Philbrick, “Eiko in Place,” 18. 31 Ibid., 18; emphasis added. 32 Candelario, Flowers Cracking Concrete, 112. 33 Bell et al., “Conversation,” 25. 34 Ibid., 30–31. 35 Jones, Body Art, 99. 36 Foster, “The Ballerina’s Phallic Pointe,” 3. 37 Ibid., 8. 38 Ibid., 5. 39 Lepecki, Exhausting Dance, 45. 40 Ibid., 46. 41 Ibid., 62. 42 Ibid., 63. 43 Ibid. 44 Goldman, I Want to Be Ready, 146. 45 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 84–99. 46 Ibid., 87. 47 Mbembe, “The Age of Humanism Is Ending.” 48 Solomon, “Conducting Movement,” 66. 49 Bell et al., “Conversation,” 26.

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50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

Notes

Otake, “Nothing Is Ordinary,” 122–29. Ibid., 122–23. Ibid., 123. Ibid. Eiko Otake et al., “Conversation (October 2015),” 111. Ibid. “Eiko: A Body in Places.” Bell et al., “Conversation,” 31. Candelario, Flowers Cracking Concrete, 116. Butler, The Parable of the Sower, 11. Philbrick, “Eiko in Place,” 15. Cited in Candelario, Flowers Cracking Concrete, 136. Bell et al., “Conversation,” 23. Marx, Grundrisse, 448. Ibid., 463. Nancy, After Fukushima, 5. Marx, Grundrisse, 81. Nancy, After Fukushima, 5. Ibid., 7. Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 2. Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 92. Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 20. Ibid., 19. Chow, Entanglements, 1–2. Ibid. Martin, An Empire of Indifference, 32, 33. Holland, Raising the Dead, 15. Hartman, “The Time of Slavery,” 759. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 38, 37, 36. McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 73, 84. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 41–42. Ibid., 41. Ibid. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 229. Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 37. Sharpe, In the Wake, 74. Ibid., 15. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 174. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 11. Otake, “About the Translation,” xxxiii. Hayashi, From Trinity to Trinity. Otake, “Introduction,” xviii, and “About the Translation,” xxxvi. Though Eiko stylizes her name as “Eiko” only, in some publications she publishes under her full name.

Notes

91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101

Holland, Raising the Dead, 54. Morrison, Beloved, 262. Ibid., 274. Ibid., 273. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 6. Ibid., 4. The first line of the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” is “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.” Ibid. Holland, Raising the Dead, 23. Philbrick, “Eiko in Place,” 19. Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro,’ ” 151. This phrase appears throughout Marx’s work. Drawn from Aesop’s fables, and cited in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, it is most commonly deployed as a means of saying “now is the time to act.” See Marx, Capital, 1:269, and “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” 23. Luxemburg also appropriates it near the conclusion of “Social Reform and Revolution,” 166.

Chapter 5. Tseng Kwong Chi and the Party’s End 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

| 265

Hoover, “The FBI Sets Goals for COINTELPRO.” Shakur, Assata, 232. Ibid., 231. Lorde, Sister Outsider, 136. Johnson, Appropriating Blackness, 55. Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, 89, 87. Shakur, Assata, 232. Ibid., 238. Snorton, Nobody Is Supposed to Know, 133. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 8. McMillan, Embodied Avatars, 75. Ibid. Shakur, Assata, 266. Tseng, “Cities.” Muna Tseng and Ping Chong, “SlutForArt,” 116. Machida, “Out of Asia,” 96. Liu, “How Not to See,” 27. Ibid., 29–30. Ibid. 28–30 Brandt, “Tseng Kwong Chi and the Politics of Performance.” Chang, “Epic Journey.” Brandt, “Tseng Kwong Chi,” 26. Bacalzo, “Portraits of Self and Other,” 76. Jones, Body Art, 5. I interviewed Muna Tseng when she visited one of my undergraduate classes on October 26, 2016; she also gave a gallery tour of the exhibition Tseng Kwong

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25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

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Notes

Chi: Performing for the Camera at the Block Museum (cited here as “Muna Tseng interview”). I draw much of this narrative from those events. Another major resource for Tseng’s autobiography includes Muna’s collaboration with Ping Chong, SlutForArt, a dance-theater piece constructed through and featuring interview fragments with Tseng’s friends and contemporaries. I will also indicate corroborating sites throughout—in this case: Chang, “Epic Journey,” 119; Bacalzo, “Portraits of Self and Other,” 82. Muna Tseng interview. Ibid. Lorde, The Black Unicorn, 55. Muna Tseng interview. Brandt, “Tseng Kwong Chi,” 26–29. Chang, “Epic Journey,” 119. Muna Tseng interview. Magnuson, “Ann Magnuson on Club 57,” 121. Cited in Tseng and Chong, “SlutForArt,” 115. Marx, “Doctoral Dissertation,” 43. Ibid., 27. Epicurus, “The Extant Letters,” 7. Ibid. Marx, “Doctoral Dissertation,” 46. Muñoz, “‘Gimme Gimme This,’ ” 97. Marx, “Doctoral Dissertation,” 49. Ibid., 51–52. Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter, 169. Althusser wasn’t a fan of Marx’s dissertation, which he dismissed (in a footnote) as a “splendid piece of nonsense” (ibid., 206, fn 50). However, he agrees on this account: the world-making potential of the swerve, insofar as it induces the atom’s “encounter with the atom next to it, and, from encounter to encounter, a pile-up and the birth of a world” (ibid., 169). Marx, “Doctoral Dissertation,” 51. Tseng and Chong, “SlutForArt,” 122. Magnuson, “Ann Magnuson on Club 57,” 121. Montez, “‘Trade’ Marks,” 431. Ibid., 439. Ibid. Email correspondence with Muna Tseng, May 6, 2017. Tseng and Chong, “SlutForArt,” 119. Ibid. Lorde, Sister Outsider, 138. Ibid. Magnuson, “The Andy and Edie Show,” 63. Muna Tseng interview. Ibid.

Notes

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

94 95

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Chang, “Epic Journey,” 129. Metzger, Chinese Looks, 229. Brandt, “Tseng Kwong Chi,” 48. Purnick, “Moral Majority Establishes Beachhead in New York.” Ibid. Tseng and Chong, “SlutForArt,” 120. Brandt, “Tseng Kwong Chi,” 50–52. Lowe, “Against Nostalgia,” 414. Ibid. Iyko Day, Alien Capital, 91. Ibid., 79. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 15. Ibid. See also Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane. Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 172. Matsuda, Where Is Your Body?, 150. Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 172. Cobb, Picture Freedom, 102. See also Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent. For a history of Ryukyu Kingdom and Okinawa’s colonization, see Kerr, Okinawa. Uenten, “Rising up from a Sea of Discontent,” 92. Nelson, Dancing with the Dead, 119. Ibid. Cited in Uenten, “Rising up from a Sea of Discontent,” 92. Ibid., 115. Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 175. Their collaboration, “Superpower,” is featured on Beyoncé’s album, Beyoncé. Tseng and Chong, “SlutForArt,” 117. Muna Tseng interview, Chang; “Epic Journey,” 124. Tseng and Chong, “SlutForArt,” 122. Muna Tseng interview. Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, xxxv. Altman, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” Ibid. Reagan, “Address to Joint Session of U.S. Congress.” Rogin, Ronald Reagan, 4. Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?, 39. See also Harvey, A Brief History of NeoLiberalism. Center on Budget and Policity Priorities, “Falling Behind.” Center for Disease Control, “Epidemiologic Notes and Reports.” Gay black men accounted for 25 percent of AIDS cases but were only 6 percent of the population at the time. See also Johnson, 61. Center for Disease Control, “Epidemiologic Notes.” Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism, 33.

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102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117

| Notes

Gonzalez-Torres and Storr, “Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” 237. Ibid. Cited in Kurczynski, “Chronology,” 310. A broadcast of D’Amato’s speech is available on C-Span: “Alfonse D’amato on Serrano, NEA,” www.c-span.org. Ibid. Solomon and Minwalla, The Queerest Art; Shank, Beyond the Boundaries, 199–224; Wallace, “The Culture Wars within the Culture Wars: Race”; Doyle, Hold It Against Me. Solomon, “Art Attack.” Solomon, “Great Sparkles of Lust,” 18. Wallace, “The Culture Wars,” 168–69. Gonzalez-Torres, “Practices.” Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives, 119. Hernández and Terrill, “Coastal Traffic,” 111. Chang, “Epic Journey,” 131. Muna Tseng interview. Magnuson, “The Andy and Edie Show,” 63. Muna Tseng, “A Tale of Two Siblings,” 141. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 146. Izumi Shikibu, “Why Haven’t I,” 50. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 146. Bloch, “Can Hope Be Disappointed?,” 340. Ibid., 345. James, Modern Politics, 129–30.

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Index

Adorno, Theodore, 39 Agamben, Giorgio, 53, 56, 67 Ahmed, Sarah, 99 AIDS: Arenas, 159; Cortiñas, 30–32; culture wars, 232–233; distribution of disease, 229–230, 236n93; first wave of crisis, 30–32, 128, 210–211, 229–235; Gonzalez-Torres, 128–129, 153; GMHC, 81; Reagan, 229–230; Tseng, 233–235; Wong, 117–119, 128, 153, 159, 161, 210, 229–230, 232–235, 267n93 Althusser, Louis, 129, 151; the swerve, 11, 207; on Marx, 58; 266n41; performance, 22–23, 196 Anderson, Marian, 72 Andre, Carl, 141, 161 Apogee, 29, 249n96 Arenas, Reinaldo, 148, 159–161 Arias, Joey, 200–201, 205 Art Institute of Chicago, 152–153 Athey, Ron, 232 Atkinson, Nicole, 258n130 Ault, Julie, 119–120, 258n130, 259n20 Bacalzo, Dan, 203 Bach, Johan Sebastian: appropriation of, by Simone, 42–43, 45, 47, 63–64; pedagogy, 49–58 Bag, Alice, xviii Balance, Christine Bacareza, 246n6 Baldwin, James, 62, 198 Baraka, Amiri, 62 Bartlett, Steve, 231 Baryshnikov Arts Center, 237–239

Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 200, 205, 208, 228, 235 Batista, Fulgencia, 125–126, 159 Beatty, Warren, 145, 148 being with/being together, xi-xxii, 5, 18–19, 22, 25, 28, 78, 80, 125, 235–236 Bel, Jérôme, 176–178 Beloved, 195–196 Berardi, Franco, 136 Berlant, Lauren, 6, 18; “something,” 40–41 Bessa, Sergio, 119 Beyoncé, 227, 267n81 Biesenbach, Klaus, 174, 263n27 black feminism, 11, 73; insurgency, 39, 67, 70–72; mothering, 83–88, 87, 110–114; performance, 252n68 blackness, 82, 84, 141, 198; disobedience, 31; Bach’s blackness, 56; black performance, 11; death, xvi; punk’s debt, xiii-xiv; queerness, 113–114; slavery, 65, 67, 191 Black Panther Party, 197–200 black performance: insurgency, 190–191; freedom drive, 11, 41–42, 199; reconstruction of value, 148; relationship to minoritarian performance, 11, 27, 41–42 black women, 64–73, 190–191; death, xvi; knowledge production, 155; mothering, 72, 110–114; performance, 199, 223; reproductive labor, 85–87, 104; ungendering, 66, 71, 82–83 Bland, Sandra, 3, 14, 77, 192 Bloch, Ernst: Bach, 51, 55, 251n64; freedom, 39–42; hope, 239; incompletion, 23; Marxism 9, 25; performance, 80

287

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body: Bach’s disciplining, 53–55; black body, 16, 27, 64–70, 85, 87, 116, 147, 190–192, 199, 222, 228–230; body art, 90, 128, 150–151, 172–174, 176, 203, 232–233; choreography, 175–178; freedom, 4, 7, 25, 39, 42, 53, 69–71, 80, 176–178; ghosts as “becoming body,” 195–196; Laycock’s, 152; memory, 238; metaphor for Vietnam, 97–99; protest, 3–4, 8, 10–15, 39, 66–67, 172–173, 188–191; Reagan, 229; the soul, 100 Boggs, Grace Lee, 8, 132, 157–158 Boyd, Rekia, 3, 77 Brandt, Amy, 202–203, 213–214 Brecht, Bertolt, 23, 40 Brody, Jennifer Devere, 246n6 Bronx Museum of Art, 119, 258n129 Brooks, Daphne, 38, 43, 72–73, 199 brown, xix, 30–34; browness, 81–85; Gonzalez-Torres, 123–129, 135, 142–152; Wong, 117, 122; Buckley, William F., 211–210, 215–216 Bureau of General Services-Queer Division, 28–34, 249n96 Burns, Lucy Mae San Pablo, 246n6 Bustamante, Nao, xvii-xxi, 239 Butler, Octavia, 180 Byros, Vasili, 52, 251n57 Candelario, Rosemary, 165, 175, 180 capital: breakdown, 138–139, 142, 188; capital accumulation, xvii, 20–21, 142, 177–178, 182–184, 190; capitalist mode of production, xx, 6, 9, 27, 30, 88, 94–96, 103, 106–107, 114–115, 118, 126, 132, 134–135, 137–140, 148–149, 156–158; finance, 136–137; financialization, 136–137; freedom, 41; performance, 20–21, 89–93; primitive accumulation, 91, 140, 184; racial capitalism, 9, 16–17, 64–65, 85, 107, 113, 135, 156, 184; reproduction, 85, 89–93, 106–107, 111; risk, 188; space and time, 181–184; slavery, 16–17, 64–65; work, 48

Carbonneau, Suzanne, 169, 172 Cardenal, Ernesto, 158–150 Carmichael, Stokely, 1, 75, 197, 253n99 Carpenter, Faedra Chatard, 246n6 Casal, Lourdes, 160 Castile, Philando, 3, 77 Castro, Fidel, 126, 157, 160 Castro, Raúl, 126 catastrophe, 182–185, 188, 194 Chambers, Emma, 85–86, 224 Chambers, Tatsuko, 86, 222–227 Chambers-Corkrum, Sharon, 222–227 Chang, Alexandra, 202, 211 Cherix, Christophe, 174, 263n27 Chong, Doryun, 172–173 choreography: emancipation, 167, 169, 174–179, 180, 191; capital as choreographer, 177–178, 181–182, 196; Eiko, 174–179; inoperativity, 53; logistics, 177–178, 182–184; power, 175–177; slowness, 165–166 Chow, Rey, 68, 185 Chow, Tina, 216, 235 Cienfuegos, Camilo, 126 Cleaver, Eldgridge, 198 Club Mudd, 205, 208 Club 57, xvii, 205, 208, 235 Cobb, Jasmine, 223 The Cockettes, 117 Cohodas, Nadine, 79, 250n30 COINTELPRO, 197 Colbert, Soyica, 246n6 commodities, 20, 88–93, 115, 145, 149, 183; art object, 136–139, 142; blackness, 64–68, 87, 113–114, 190; commodity’s background, 99–100; gold, 89–90; the mother, 90, 103–107 communism, xi-xxii, xv, xvii, 129–132, 138–139, 156; Cuba, 125– 6, 156–161; definition, xx, 26, 156; Gonzalez-Torres, 125–6, 129, 151–152; historical communism, 8–9, 19, 29, 131–2; Southeast Asia/Vietnam,

Index

94–95. See also communism of incommensurability communism of incommensurability, xi-xii; defined, xx-xxi, 9; entanglement, 182–185; illustrated, 125–126, 129, 151–152; Muñoz, xxi, 15, 25–26; performance, 185, 196; contradiction: capital, 16, 132–139, 151, 184; performance’s ontology, 91–92; revolution, 156–161 Cortiñas, Jorge Ignacio, 28–34, 73, 160; “Notes on Returning to San Francisco Twenty-Five Years Later,” 29–34 Craft, Ellen, 199 Crash, Darby, xii-xiii, xv, xvii, xviii; the Germs, xii Crimp, Douglas, 230 crushed black, 146–147, 235 Cuba: Assata Shakur, 199–200; Cuban Revolution, 125–126, 128, 141, 157–160; exile, xv; 15, 18; homosexuality, 156–161 culture wars, 149–152, 229–233 D’Amato, Alfonse, 211, 231–233, 268n99 dance, xviii, 1, 3, 53, 164–196; as entanglement, 185; as freedom, 175–177, 180; minoritarian subjects, 44 dark proletariat, 16–17, 184, 219–221 Dash, Julie, 13 Davis, Angela, 66, 69 Day, Iyko, 217 death: AIDS, 117–119, 210–211, 30, 233–236; black and brown queer death, xvi–xvii, xxii, 3–4, 13–15, 17, 28–34, 62, 72–78, 105, 142–148, 189–190; Laycock, 128–129, 161–162; memorialization, 98–99, 104–105; Mendieta, 161; the party, xi–xii, xx; utopia, 40; Wong, 120–122; Vietnam War, 95, 225 De Berry, Misty, 252n68 DeFrantz, Thomas, 246n6 Delany, Samuel 148 Deleuze, Gilles, 17–18, 43

| 289

de Man, Paul, 57–58 Derrida, Jacques, 192–195 dialectic: life and death, 28, 101; Marxist, 58, 137–138; performance, 130 distribution, 183; death, xvii, 4, 28, 73, 146–148; means of distribution, 13, 135–140, 143; Gonzalez-Torres, 130–132, 135–140, 143, 146–149, 156; Marx, 131–132, 149 Divinity Fudge, 232 division of labor: Gonzalez-Torres, 139, 148–156; Marx, 148–149, 153, 261n92; racialized and gendered, 44, 84, 118 Doyle, Jennifer, 151, 232 Du Bois, W. E. B., 27; dark proletariat, 16–17, 184, 219–221 Duggan, Lisa, 229 Dunayevskaya, Raya, 8, 132, 157–158 Eiko: A Body in a Station, 164, 167–172, 174–175, 179–182, 188, 192–196, 329; choreography, 174–179; emancipation, 174–179, 190–192; Eiko & Koma, 164–166, 169–173, 175, 178–179, 181; Hayashi translator, 194–195; 169–173; Koma, 164–166, 169–173, 178–179; Naked, 164–167; Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, 164, 167–172, 174–175, 179–182, 188, 192–196, 329; River, 175; space and time, 181–182; September 11th, 194 Eisenwalzwerk, 88–89, 93, 102 emancipation, 27–28, 34, 37–59; black and brown emancipation, xvii, xxi, 1, 19, 197–200, 222–227; communism, xxi, 8, 25, 27–28; choreography, 175–179, 190–191; labor, 17, 27–28; the senses, 6, 21–22, 25–28 Engels, Friedrich, 16, 25, 102, 261n92 entanglement, 16, 34, 192; minoritarian, 181–187 equivalence, 148; capital, Marx on, 182–183; communism, xx, 9, 26, 125, 185–187; specters, 196; value, 145

290

| Index

Espiritu, Yến Lê, 97, 106 Evans, Ieshia, 2–4, 10–11, 14–15, 33 Evers, Medgar, 77 Falwell, Jerry, 211–212 Fanon, Frantz, 33, 129 father: Funnyhouse of a Negro, 74; patriarchy, 11, 113; slavery, 64–65, 253n119; Vuong, 98–99 Faustine, Nona, 188–195 Federici, Sylvia, 67, 85, 107, 117 feminism: feminist theory, 5, 9, 11; Gonzalez-Torres, 129, 141, 143, 149; Eiko, 175–176, 180; entanglement, 184; Marxism, 93, 102–107, Reagan era, 210, 230, 233. See also black feminism Finley, Karen, 232 Fisher, Gary, xxi, 258n130 Fleck, John, 232 Fleetwood, Nicole, 246n6 flesh: defined, 11–12; gender, 120; ghosts, 195–196; performance, 11–14, 54–55, 65–72, 79–80; slavery, 11–14, 16, 27, 65–72, 87, 190–191 Fonda, Jane, 79 Fore, Daniel, 211–214 Foster, Susan Leigh, 176 freedom, 1–36, 38–45, 239; black freedom, 1, 8, 22, 25, 38–39, 61–64, 67–68, 199, 210, 223; choreographic freedom, 175–179; communism, xxi-xxii; critique of freedom, 6–7, 106, 227; feeling of freedom, 6, 21, 24, 39, 41–42, 77; freedom drive, 11, 49, 51–52, 56, 199; Marxism, 129–130; negation, 7–8, 225–226; performance, 25, 47, 49, 61–62, 70, 79–80, 190, 198–200 Friedrich, Caspar David, 237 Fukushima, 34, 170–171, 180–183, 188 Gaines, Malik, 34, 39, 62–63 Garner, Erik, 3 Gay Men’s Health Crisis, 82

ghosts: claims on the present, 192, 195–196; communism, 265n96; Eiko, 168, 188–189; slavery, 13 gold: Gonzalez-Torres, 161–162; Marx, 89–90; Metal, 89–91 The Golden Girls, 130, 161 Goldstein, Ann, 161–162 Gonzalez, Anita, 246n6 Gonzalez-Torres, Felix: billboards, 129–130, 142; biographical sketch, 125–129, 161–162; candy spills, 129, 152–153, 162; contradiction, 132–139, 141, 151, 156–161; critical approaches, 123–128; division of labor, 139, 148–156; Group Material, 128; infiltration, 134–139; Laycock, 128–129, 134, 152, 161–162; light strings, 129, 162–163; Marxism, 125–133, 137–139, 151–152, 156–158, 160–161; minimalism, 129, 135, 140–142; paper stacks, 129, 130, 134–135, 139–140, 143, 147–148; “Practices” lecture, 149–152; performance, 135, 138, 130, 134–141, 147–148; race, 123–125, 135, 141–148, 152–156; titles, 259n15; Ravenswood Apartment, 161–162, 239; “Untitled” (Death By Gun),” 142–148; “Untitled” (Madrid 1971), 126–127; “Untitled” (March 5th) #2, 161–162; “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 152–153, 162; “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), 133–134, 136–137 Graeber, David, 156 Guattari, Félix, 18, 43 Guevara, Che, 126, 139 Guggenheim Museum, 114–115 Gumbs, Alexis Pauline, 111 Hair (the musical), 61, 63, Hall, Stuart, 58 Halliday, Jason, 146 Hamlet, 192, 195 Hansberry, Lorraine: art, 22, 64; death, 1, 62–63, 74–77; black freedom, 8, 22;

Index

Marxism, 25, 62; To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, 68, 74–77 Haring, Keith, 200; death, 235; friendship and collaboration with Tseng, 205–210, 227–228; in “Desperate Journey,” 216; LA2, 208–209 Harney, Stefano, 29–30, 177, 183 Hartman, Saidiya, 14, 27, 65, 190 Hayashi, Kyoko, 194–195 Hayashi, Michio, 172 Hegel, G. W. F., 25, 58, 265n101 Helms, Jesse, 232–233 Hernández, Robb, 233 Hic Rhodus, hic salta, 196, 265n101 Higginbotham, Evelyn, 223 Hijikata, Tatsumi, 169, 172, 179 Hi Red Center, 172–173 Hiroshige, Utagawa, 35–36, 80 Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 153–155 Hoover, J. Edgar, 197 hope, 236–239 Hughes, Holly, 232 Hughes, Langston: “Backlash Blues,” 17, 61–63, 72; death, 1, 72, 74–76 immigrants; language, 109–110; museum workers, 153, 181–182; reproductive labor, 85–87, 102–104, 107, 118 improvisation, 45; practice of freedom, 25, 175, 177–178; minoritarian performance, 4, 18, 21, 39, 47–48, 56, 59, 70, 72; Bustamante, xix inoperativity, 54–56 110; minoritarian performance, 56; sex, 54 Irigaray, Luce, 103, 107 Jackson, Shirley, 146 James, C. L. R., 239; freedom, 25; future in the present 24; Marxism, 8–11, 27, 132 Jameson, Fredric, 10, 130, 135, 137 Japan: during the 1960s, 169–173; Japanese occupation of Vietnam, 94; Koza

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291

Rebellion, 224–227. See also Fukushima; Okinawa Johnson, Barbara: pedagogy, 57; Marx, 102; the mother, 106, 108, 110 Johnson, E. Patrick, 82, 86, 198, 246n6 Johnson-Forest Tendency, 8, 132, 157–158 Jones, Amelia, 176, 203 Jones, Bill T., 200, 209–210 Jones, LeRoi, 62 Jumex Foundation, 122 Karatani, Kojin, 26, 138 Kennedy, Adrienne, 73–74 King, Martin Luther, Jr.: death, 1, 37, 61, 76–78, 197; “something,” 40–42 Kissinger, Nancy, 216 The Kitchen, 88 Klein, Naomi, 138 Klein, Yves, 176 Koma: biographical sketch, 169–173; entanglement, 181; Naked, 164–166; River, 175; training, 178–179 Kosuth, Joseph, 129, 137 Koza Rebellion, 224–227 Kubota, Shigeko, 173 Kusama, Yayoi, 173–174, 186–187, 227 LA2 (Ortiz, Angel), 208–210 labor, 89–90, 92–93, 96, 102, 104, 217–220; appropriation of labor, 134; care work, 86, 103, 117–118, 155, 235; division of labor, 84, 118, 139, 148–156; emancipation of labor, 16–17; performance, 20–24; living labor, 99–101; movement, 177, 183–184; productive labor, 20–21, 69, 88–93, 103, 132, 134–139, 178, 251n42; reproductive labor, 20, 67, 85–88, 90, 92–93, 96, 102–108, 114, 116–119. See also slavery; work Lam, Mariam, 98 Laycock, Ross, 152; death, 161–162; relationship with Gonzalez-Torres, 128–129, 134

292

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Lenin, Vladimir, 10, 62 Lepecki, André, 166, 176–177 Ligon, Glenn, 123–124 Lim, Eng-Beng, 246n6 Liu, Warren, 200–203 logistics, 177–178, 182–184 Loraux, Nicole, 85 Lorde, Audre, 34; difference, 198, 210; mothering, 83, 110–114, 120; queerness and home, 204–205 Lotringer, Sylvère, 47 Lowe, Donald M., 216–217 Lowe, Lisa: liberalism, 6, 16, 183–184, 227; dark proletariat, 184, 220–221 Lukács, Georg, 139 Luxemburg, Rosa, 138, 157, 196 Machida, Margo, 200–201 Magnuson, Ann, 200; AIDS, 210, 235; “Desperate Journey,” 216–219; downtown scene, 205, 210, 216–219; Tseng’s death, 235 majoritarian, 15; Bach, 56–57; minoritarian and majoritarian, 17; majoritarian order, 15, 51, 59, 76, 110, 135, 139–140, 143, 154; nature of historical communism, 19; source material, 63, 110 Makeba, Miriam, 1, 71, 75 Malcolm X, 1, 77, 197 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 230, 232–233 Marazzi, Christian, 47 Marcuse, Herbert, 23–24 Marian Goodman Gallery, 107–108 Mariel Boat Lift, 128, 160–161 Martens, China, 111 Martin, Randy, 188 Martin, Trayvon, 14 Marx, Karl, 16, 25–27, 62, 64–65, 89–90, 92–93, 31–133, 134, 137–138, 145, 150–152, 157, 182–183, 196; 1844 Manuscripts, 25; abandoned mill, 101–102, 116; aesthetics/performance, 20–21; Capital, 88, 101, 131–132; Communist

Manifesto, 25, 195, 265n96 ; dancing table, 99–100; division of labor, 148–153, 156; Gotha Critique, xx, 26, 131, 151, 156; Grundrisse, 20, 36, 58, 92, 101, 131, 149, 182; “On the Jewish Question,” 150; piano-player, 20–21; reproduction, 99–105; underread dissertation of, 205–207 Marxism, 9–10; “Autonomia,” 47, 69; Cuba, 125–126; gender, 87–88, 92–93, 104 Matmos, xvii Mazzanovich, Muriel, 45–46, 49–51, 57–58 McKittrick, Katherine, 190 McMillan, Uri, 173, 199, 246n6 Menzel, Adolph Von, 88. See also Eisenwalzwerk Metropolitan Museum of Art, 154; costume gala, 214–216, 221–222 Metzger, Sean, 213 Miller, Tim, 232 Minh, Ho Chi, 94, 98 minoritarian (definition of), 15–19 minoritarian performance, 37–80; black performance, 11; commons, xvii, xxi, 135; death, xi-xxii, 75–78; definition of minoritarian performance, 4–5; deteritorialization, 43–44; freedom, 10, 39, 42–43, 51–52; improvisation, 4, 18, 21, 39, 47–48, 56, 59, 70, 72; infiltration, 134–139; Muñoz, 15, 19, 24, 33, 43–44, 106, 124–128, 140, 143; pedagogy, 55–59; performance theory, 9, 246n6; reparation, 236–239; survival, xvi, xvii, xxii, 4–5, 7, 9, 18–19, 28–31, 33–34, 40, 46, 59, 61–62, 83–85, 92, 95–96, 112–114, 148, 167, 185, 194–195, 228, 236; transmission of knowledge, 18, 48–50, 57, 130–131, 139–140, 143, 148, 154–156; world-making, xxii, 4–5, 8–9, 18–20, 34–36, 59, 80, 125, 128–129, 148, 165, 167, 180, 205–207, 224–225, 236; work, 5, 19, 29, 37–80, 222 Mitchell, Koritha, 246n6

Index

Moms Mabley, 72 money: AIDS, 118; Arenas, 160–171; capitalism, 89–91, 145–146, 182–183, 251n42; Gonzalez-Torres, 137; Marx, 89–90; Warhol, 144–145 Montez, Ricardo, 209 More Life, xxi, xxii, 4–5, 8, 10, 13, 25, 30–31, 33, 67, 70, 72, 77, 80, 85, 156, 239; source, 249n101 Morgan, Jennifer, 67, 87 Morrison, Toni, 13, 40, 195 Mosquera, Gerardo, 124 Moten, Fred, 8, 39; logistics, 177–178, 183–184; the party, xi, xiii, xiv, xvi; planning, 29, 30–31 183, performance, 11, 92, 148, 166 mother: the black mother, 64–66, 70–72, 83–88, 110–114, 116, 150, 191, 195, 253n119; Gonzalez-Torres’s, 128; Irigaray, 102–107; language, 107–110; Lorde, 110–114; Mammy, 116; Marxism, 87–88, 90–93, 102–107; motherchild relation, 117, 120–122; performance theory, 90–93; queer mothers, 82–84, 110–114; queer of color’s mother, 110–122; Rivera’s mother, 81–85, 88; Simone, 38, 59; Simone’s, 45–6; Tseng’s, 236; Vietnam, 97–99; women of color mothers, 85–88; Wong’s, 114–122 Muñoz, José Esteban, xi-xxii, 8, 57, 160; death, xi-xxii, 31–32, 78; communism, xii, xxi, 124–125; Gonzalez-Torres, 124–128, 138; minoritarian/minoritarian performance, 15, 19, 24, 33, 43–44, 106, 124–128, 140, 143, 246n6; punk, xii-xiii, xv; queerness, 81–82; the swerve, 206–207 El Museo del Barrio, 82 Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), 162 Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), 164

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293

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA): Kusama, 173–174, 186–187, 227; Ono, 173–174; Vō, 100; Wilson, 154 Musser, Amber: flesh, 11, 39, 66, 68; Lorde, 112, 114; Simone, 39, 68 Nakahira, Takuma, 172 Nancy, Jean-Luc: being-singular-plural, xii, 19; catastrophe, 182–183; communism, xvi, xxi, 19; death, xvi; everrenewed present, xxii; inoperativity, 53; sharing, 26, 100, 124–5 National Endowment for the Arts, 150, 230–233 Ndegeocello, Meshell, 72 Newman, Michael, 100 Ngô, Fiona I. B., 98 Nguyen, Mimi Thi, 6, 98, 106 Nguyen, Patricia, 95–97 Nguyen, Thi Ty, 93–99, 102, 104–107 Nyong’o, Tavia, xiii, 146 Ocean, Frank, 227, 245n6, O’Grady, Lorraine, 214 Ohno, Kazuo, 172; pedagogy, 169, 178–179 Oka, Cynthia Dewi, 111 Okinawa, 224–226, 267n74 Ono, Yoko, 173–174 Ortiz, Angel. See LA2 Otake, Eiko. See Eiko Panicharam, Nantapol and Pruan, performance of, 89–91 party, xi-xxii, 26, 30, 31; Black Panther Party, 197–200; Communist Party, 8–9, 26, 125, 132, 265n96; fall of Black Panther Party, xiv, 34, 62, 200, 197–200, 236–239; SNCC, 7–9, 29 pedagogy, 48–59; Bach’s, 53–55; emancipation, 57–59, 178–179; Ohno, Kazuo’s, 178–179; performance, 48–49; Simone, 49–50; student-teacher relation, 49–51, 57–58, 155, 179

294

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Index

Pedraza, Sam, 75–78 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), 169–170, 180–181, 185, 187 Pérez, Roy, 117 performance: body art, 90, 128, 150–151, 172–174, 176, 203, 232–233; Bustamante, xviii; commons, xx, xxii, 18–19, 28; consciousness, 22–23; domination, 44, 189–191; durational, xviii, 33, 82, 89, 164–166, 170; ephemerality, xxi-xxii, 6, 8, 19, 25, 38, 90–92, 105–106, 166, 169–174; freedom, 25, 47, 49, 61–62, 70, 79–80, 190, 198–200; fugitivity, 13, 91, 166–167, 171–172, 199, 236; GonzalezTorres, 135, 138, 130, 134–141, 147–148; Marx, 20–21; methods of study, 165–166, 203; museums and art institutions, 170–174, 263n16; pedagogy, 48–49; performance studies, 11, 14, 164, 171, 262; play, 51–53, 109–110; mode of reproduction, 34, 84–85, 89–93, 98–101, 104–107, 120–122, 147; ontology, 90–92, 104, 166; reparative performance, 236–239; resurrection, xvi-xvii; scenarios, 3, 14; slavery, 64–71, 189–191; time, 14–15, 30, 65–66, 105–106, 136, 165, 167–169, 171, 180–181, 189–191, 194–195; transmission and transfer, 14–15, 48–49, 66, 70, 255n34; work, 1, 43–48, 61–62, 222. See also minoritarian performance Petty, Miriam, 106, 116 Phelan, Peggy, 20; ontology of performance, 90–92, 104, 166 Philbrick, Harry: on A Body in a Station, 169–172, 175, 180–181, 196; performance curation, 170–171 Pindell, Howardena, 173 Piñero, Miguel, 115–117 Piper, Adrian, 23, 173 Piss Christ, 231–232 planning, xi, 29–31, 62 Portrait of Jason, 146 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 198

Preciado, B. Paul, 246n6 primitive accumulation, 91, 140, 184 Provoke (magazine), 172–173 Prynne, William, 232 punk, xvii, 43, 88; Muñoz, xii-xiii, xv, xvii-xviii, 206 private property, 21, 68; abolition, 27–28, 132 Quashie, Kevin, 68–69 Quiroga, José, 160 Reagan, Ronald: AIDS, 118, 228–230; inauguration, 205; neoliberal reforms, xiv, 142; Reagan Revolution, 157, 210–219, 228–230 Redding, Otis, 76 redistribution: communism, xx, 9, 34, 131–132, 156; resources/knowledge, 139–143, 148, 154 Redmond, Shana, 22, 38, 62, 64, 68, 75 refugees, 109; Cuban, 128, 160–161; El Salvadoran, 70–71; epistemological perspective, 97–98; the party as refuge, 1–2; Vietnamese refugees, 95–99, 106, 109 Regan, Donald T, 118 “rehearsal for the example,” 33, 80, 223, 239 reparation, 227, 236–239 reproduction, 81–122; Gonzalez-Torres, 139–140, 144; maternal reproduction, 84–93, 99, 102–122, 255n11; performance, 34, 84–85, 89–93, 98–101, 104–107, 120–122, 147; performance theory, 84–93, 255n11; planning, 29; reproduction of the relations of production, 131, 154, 157, 257n57; reproductive labor, 20, 34, 67, 85–93, 96, 102–108, 114, 116–119; the uterus, 96–97; the womb, 92–93, 191 revolution, 41, 94–95, 151, 197–198, 210,; anti-capitalist revolution, 138–139;

Index

Cuban, 125–127, 156–161; Cultural Revolution, 203; dark proletariat, 17, 72, 221–226; mothering, 111, 113; the party, xi, 8–9, 132; performance, 18–19, 22–23, 173, 184–185; survival, 33, 207; Reynolds, Diamond, 3 Ribes, Chaterelle Menashe, 237 Rice, Tamir, 3, 77 Riggs, Marlon, 232, 258n130 Rivera, Ryan, 34, 120; death, 84; sustain, 81–85, 88, 102 Rivera-Servera, Ramón, 246n6 Roach, Joseph, 14, 57 Rogan, Michael, 229 Rosen, Andrea, 258n130 Rothfuss, Joan, 164 Ruiz, Sandra, 81–82, 84 Rustin, Bayard, 197–198 Sanctuary Movement, 70–72 Scharf, Kenny, 205, 207, 228 Schiebe, Johann Adolf, 52 Schmidt, Bruno, 211–213 Schneider, Rebecca, 173; temporality, 14; reproduction, 84, 91–92, Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky: Gary Fisher, xxi, 258n130; mothers, 111; pedagogy, 50; reparation, 236, 239 sense: common sense, 19–22; communism, 124–125; freedom, 6–9, 14–15, 19–28, 36, 39, 42, 68, 80; Marx, 21, 25–27, 130; Simone, 52 Serrano, Andres, 231–232 Schackman, Al, 52 el-Shabazz, Malcolm el-Hajj Malik. See Malcolm X Shakur, Assata, 197–200, 203; freedom, 7, 200 Shange, Ntozake, 73–74 Sharpe, Christina, xvi, 191 Sherman, Cindy, 227 Shimakawa, Karen, 164, 246n6, 262n8 Shiomi, Mieko, 173

| 295

Simone, Nina, 1–10, 19, 24–29, 34–36, 37–80; “Ain’t Got NoLife/I Got Life,” 60–70, 72–73, 75, 79–80; Bach, 42–43, 45, 47, 49–58, 63–64; “Backlash Blues,” 17, 72; Beethoven, 45, 50; Carnegie Hall, 47–48; Carmichael, 1, 75, 253n99; Curtis Art Institute, 45–46; on discrimination, 250n30; Emergency Ward!, 254n157; “Four Women,” 64, 73–74; freedom, 6–7, 24–28, 39–42; “Go to Hell,” 63; Gospel, 8, 45, 48–49; Hansberry, 1, 8, 22, 25, 62–64, 68, 74–77; Hughes, 1, 17, 61–63, 72, 74–76; Julliard, 45, 57, 252n85; King Jr., 37, 61, 76–78; Makeba, 1, 71, 75; Marxism, 25, 62; Mazzanovich, 45–46, 49–51, 57–58, 252n85; “Let It Be Me,” 79–80; Little Girl Blue (album), 8, 42–49; “Love Me or Leave Me,” 45, 48–56; Midtown Bar, 44–59; “Mississippi Goddamn,” 58, 64; Montreaux Jazz Festival, 1–2; “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”, 1–2, 19, 24–28, 34–36, 39; Nuff Said!, 63, 76; “Pirate Jenny”, 64; Rachmaninoff, 45; Sound of Soul, 60–70, 72–78; “Sunday in Savannah,” 37–39; “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” 68, 70–71, 74–76; “Why: The King of Love is Dead,” 61, 76–78 Siouxsie Sioux, xii-xiv, xvi, xxi slavery: capital, 64–70, 166, 183–184, 217–220; legacy, xvi 7, 195; Middle Passage, xvi, 10, 65, 191; performance, 64–71, 189–191; resistance, 11–16, 199; sense, 27; reproductive labor, 85–87, 103–104; 195, 199 Snorton, C. Riley, 33, 120, 199 Solomon, Alisa, 232–233 Solomon, Noémi, 178 something, 20–24, 48; freedom, 6–7, 9; Marx’s “something,” 20–21; “something’s missing,”6, 147–148; “some kind of something,” 37–42, 69, 78, 80

296

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Index

Spector, Nancy, 140, 142, 162, 259n11 Spillers: Hortense, 120, 228; white feminism, 103; flesh, 11, 14, 64–66, 68, 71, 87; mothering, 64, 91; “insurgent ground,” 107, 111, 191 Spitta, Philipp, 52–54; Bloch, 251n64 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 93 Sterling, Alton, 3, 77 Stevens, Wallace, xii, 125 still life: defined, 33–34; illustrated, 2–4, 28, 134, 162, 237 Storr, Robert, 153–155 Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 7–9, 29 survival. See minoritarian performance Sutherland, Donald, 79 Tadiar, Neferti, 69, 114–115; reproductive labor, 92, 102, 104 Taki, Kōji, 172 Taylor, Billie, 19–21, 23–24 Taylor, Diana, 14, 48–49, 85, 255n8 Taylor, Gene, 76 Tenenbaum, Tatyana, 237–238 Terrill, Joey, 233 Tiampo, Ming, 172 Till, Emmett, 14, 77 time/temporality: capital, 181–183; ghosts, 195–196; Gonzalez-Torres, 134, 139; “out of joint,” 168, 180–181, 192; performance, 14–15, 30, 65–66, 105–106, 136, 165, 167–169, 171, 180–181, 189–191, 194–195; “time of slavery,” 14, 65, 189–191 Truth, Sojourner, 66, 70 Tropicana, Carmelita, xvii-xviii Tseng, Kwong Chi, 34, 110, 200–239, 258n130, 265–266n24; AIDS, 233–235; Club 57, 205, 208, 235; coming out, 204; costumes, 213–214; Costumes at the Met, 214–216, 221–222; critical approaches, 200–203, 216–217; death, 235; education, 205; early life, 203–5;

“Desperate Journey,” 216–219; East Meets West Series, 200–202, 211, 217, 219–221, 228, 234; Expeditionary Series, 200, 202, 211, 217, 219–220, 223, 228, 234–235, 237; friendships, 200, 205–207, 209–211, 227–228; Haring, 200, 205–210, 216, 227–228, 235; LA2, 208–209; Madonna, 205; Magnuson, 200, 205, 208, 210, 216, 218–219, 235; Moral Majority, 211–214, 216, 231–233; performance, 200–203, 205, 213–214; race, 209–210; Sempaphore East, 227, 235; SoHo Weekly News, 211–219; The Village, (New York) 205–206, 209, 216, 236 Tseng, Muna, 200–239; dance practice, 200, 204–205, 236–239; early life, 203–5; It’s All True: Grandfather, 236–239; life under Reagan, 210–211; Stella, 236; SlutForArt, 200, 236, 265–266n24; Kwong Chi’s death, 233, 235, 236; Kwong Chi’s legacy, 236–237 233–239 Tubman, Harriet, 70 Turner, Guinevere, xvii Um, Khatharya, 95–96 utopia, 40–42 value, 115, 145; devaluation/revaluation, 90–91, 103, 117–118, 148; performance, 20, 23, 43–44, 90–91, 135–137, 139–14, 1480; productive labor, 88–90, 131, 178, 183; slavery, 65–67, 88–91, 101–102; reproductive labor, 107, 117, 31, 136–137, 139–140, 148, 178, 183 Vazquez, Alexandra, 126; minoritarian, 4, 15, 166, 246n6; pedagogy, 57; “we,” 18–19 Vietnam: fall of Saigon, 93, 95; Gulf of Tonkin and Ha Long Bay, 95–99; language, 109–110; Vietnamese refugees, 95–99, 106, 109; Vietnam War, 34, 72, 93–100, 210, 225, 254n157

Index

Vō, Danh, 34, 88–110, 114–122, 239; collaboration with father, 96, 103–104, 108–110; exodus from Vietnam, 95–96; 8:03, 28.05 (chandelier), 93–95, 121–122; 16:32, 26.05 (chandelier), 95, 99–102; IMUUR2, 114–122; Metal, 88–91; Mother Tongue, 107–110; Oma Totem, 102–107; Tombstone for Nguyen Thi Ty, 93–94, 99, 102, 104, 106; Untitled (postcard), 96–99 Vō, Phùng, 96, 102–104, 108–110 Vogel, Shane, 100, 246n6 Vuong, Ocean, 98–99 Walcott, Rinaldo, xvi, 146 Walker Arts Center, 116, 154–167 Wallace, Michelle, 232–233 Warhol, Andy, 144–146; Tseng, 207, 216, 228; Wong, 119 Waymon, Eunice Kathleen. See Simone, Nina Waymon, Sam, 60, 79–80 Weems, Carrie Mae, 12–15 Weheliye, Alexander, 67, 71 Wellman, Mac, 232

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297

we/nosotros, 18–19, 180 Westphalen, Ludwig Von, 206 White, Deborah Gray, 66 Whitney Museum of American Art, 100, 144, 154, 227, 256n66 Williams, Cynthia Dewi, 111 Williams, Roy, 186–187, 227 Wilson, Fred, 154 Witkovsky, Matthew S., 172 Wojnarowicz, David, 233 Wong, Martin, 34, 114–122 Wong Fie, Florence, 114–122 work: minoritarian performance, 5, 19, 29, 37–80, 222; performance, 1, 43–48, 61–62, 222; refusal of work, 47–48, 251n42; unworking of work, xvi, 43–44, 53, 63, 72, 180; women’s work, 67, 69, 81–88, 93, 102–103, 106–107, 117–119, 257n76 Xiu Xiu, 88–91 Yung, Perry, 237 Zane, Arnie, 200, 235

About the Author

Joshua Chambers-Letson is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America.

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