Cover art by Diedrick Brackens

 

From the introduction, “Going Electric” by Paul J. Edwards:

“Dylan is not alone in producing speculative knowledge of Black trauma within circuits of white American poetics. Ezra Pound provided the only first-person account of the death of Louis Till, Emmett Till’s father. Executed by the US Army at a detention center near Pisa, Louis’ only chronicler was his fellow prisoner, Pound, who recorded only fleeting mentions of the man in The Pisan Cantos, noting Till’s nickname by his fellow prisoners and a slightly longer passage that functions as a eulogistic note. Again, this moment is marked by its apparent ambiguity. It only becomes legible to scholars after Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam murdered Emmett Till a decade later. Maddeningly, Louis’ death was kept from his family until it was used to smear him and his dead son, suggesting that the Tills shared a genetic predisposition—like all Black men—to assault white women. Such a sardonic line retrospectively seems oddly Dylanesque with its inclusion of Louis’ death with a sense of a feast being prepared. In either case, in Pound and Dylan, the Black body can only be speculated on, never quite in focus but instead more citational than critically engaged with. Although Pound and Dylan do not feature in this issue, each of our contributors counter the obscurations of Dylan and Pound’s white poetics.”

Issue also includes the following:

• Violent Illumination: Street Lamps as Sites of Lynching and Black Resistance, by Leah S. Yared
• When Militancy Was in Vogue: Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes, and the Precarious Desires of White Audiences, by Zachary Manditch-Prottas
• Sex and the Future of History: Black Politics at the Limit in Sutton E. Griggs’ Imperium in Imperio, by Melissa A. Wright
• Book Reviews: Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America by E. James West / Sid Ahmed Ziane; Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick / Cera Smith; Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature: Memories and Futures Past by Christopher E.W. Ouma / Daniel Chukwuemeka; Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights by Samantha Pinto / Margarita Lila Rosa; Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital edited by Adrienne D. Davis and the BSE Collective / Kirin Wachter-Grene

For a limited time, read the introduction and “Violent Illumination” for free.

 

Personal subscriptions are $44 USD and include 4 issues. Until the end of 2021, you can subscribe to our 51st volume here.

In our 2022 volume, keep an eye out for Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, Black Archival Practice (two issues), and Black Religions in the Digital Age. Our 2023 volume will include issues on Afrofuturism, and more…

 

Aerial image in the University of Ibadan. Image from Wikimedia.

 

The city of Ibadan in south-western Nigeria is historic for many reasons. In this case, it was once the intellectual hub of the country and arguably, the Anglophone sector of West Africa. The seminal quartet of modern Nigerian letters comprising Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka and J.P. Clark Bekeredemo all studied at the University College Ibadan (now University of Ibadan) in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. The same is true of the first major generation of literary critics and theorists.

And so, it isn’t surprising that another significant figure-Harry Garuba- of the Nigerian literary scene emerged from the Ibadan school of poets and literary artists. Garuba, sadly passed in 2020 and Sanya Osha in this essay, explores what the culturally rich city might have meant to him and what he in turn personified for the sprawling metropolis.

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The historic city of Ibadan in South-western Nigeria is home to the University of Ibadan, the country’s first university. But it is also a city of startling contrasts, mystique, and secrecy. Capital of the Western region for a time, it has never completely shed its aura of deep mystery, even as an endless influx of cosmopolitan denizens flooded its world-renowned university and urban conurbations in search of refined company, rustic serenity, knowledge, and off-beat experiences.

Harry Garuba was a distinguished professor of literature and African studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa before he passed in 2020 due to leukemia. He had been a brilliant student at the Ibadan university which was established by British colonial authorities in 1948. More importantly, Garuba was an influential poet whose groundbreaking first collection of verse, Shadow and Dream and Other Poems (1982) inspired an entire generation of poets, writers and academics most notably, Remi Raji based at the University of Ibadan, Onookome Okome at Alberta University, Canada, Nduka Otiono at Carleton University, Canada, Afam Akeh, a London- based poet, and many others who made their mark in the worlds of academia and creative writing. Indeed, for a significant length of time, he was a fulcrum around which all major literary figures, initiatives, and activities on campus converged. Arguably, this attraction was not due to an inordinate exercise of power or undue force of character. Rather, it stemmed from the lambency of an ineluctable Warholian disposition.

At Ibadan, Harry also commenced his career as a young academic when he was still in his early twenties. The main campus was virtually ‘everything’ with its own vast residential quarters, not excluding rows of rickety stalls and kiosks that served as eateries and tuck shops at what is called the Black Market. Other similar arrangements can be found at Abadina, the quarter meant for non-academic staff and low-end workers. At the Black Market, apart from eating and drinking, theatre students and lovers held drama rehearsals. There were stores everywhere. You didn’t have to leave the campus for much and there was a shop that was once well stocked with the written works of the brightest minds the world had to offer.

And so the campus became a city-within-a-city. As a result, this curious relationship led to a dichotomy between city and varsity.

Virtually all of Nigeria’s major literary icons and intellectuals—Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, John Bekeredemo Clark, Abiola Irele, Michael Echeruo,  Ben Obumselu, Isidore Okpewho,  Ken Saro-Wiwa, Femi Osofisan and so many others—passed through the city and varsity at significant stages of their lives and careers.

Expatriates such as the late Ulli Beier, the irrepressible cultural catalyst, worked at Ibadan along with his then wife, Suzanne Wenger, who had facilitated the famous Oshogbo school of art that promoted the talents of Twins Seven Seven, Jimoh Braimoh, Rufus Ogundele and other notable artistic luminaries. They were also pivotal in establishing the Mbari artistic collective that offered a platform for the likes of Duro Ladipo, Kole Ogunmola, and a young Orlando Owoh, a great exponent of highlife music. Wenger would later become a well-respected high priestess of traditional spirituality, the river goddess Osun specifically, in Osogbo, calmly receiving and nurturing acolytes from all over the world until her final days.

The city of Ibadan and its illustrious varsity loomed under this formidable pedigree. As we walked as students through the hallowed corridors of the Faculty of Arts, we were never allowed to forget this lofty history nor the colorful personalities who inscribed their kaleidoscopic narratives drawing richly from their transformational personal experiences and inimitable perspectives on life and art. Bekeredemo Clark immortalized the city in a poem in which he remarked that it was a place browned with dust and rust glittering underneath the sun like fragments of broken china. Such a metaphor captured both the brokenness and inexplicable allure of the city. In a way, Clark (who passed in October 2020) was a poet who captured and represented the city’s vernacular cosmopolitanism.

Wole Soyinka, Nigeria’s Noble laureate, has a long and intimate relationship with both the city and varsity where he once studied and worked. There, he plotted his numerous artistic adventures and staged his first major act of political rebellion by holding up a regional radio station to protest an election widely believed to have been rigged in 1965.

One eerily bright and sunny afternoon in the early nineteen nineties, whilst walking along the narrow road that ran in front of the central administrative block, Soyinka spritely hopped out of a barely stationary vehicle, sighted Harry and greeted him warmly like a long lost friend. Having been entertained by a plethora of tales pertaining to Soyinka’s legendary self-regard, I was quite amazed at the depth and sincerity of the warmth he demonstrated towards Harry who was much younger than he.

Harry, being the consummate raconteur, always had delectable anecdotes to share about our numerous literary heroes. This was not out of place having been taught by the likes of Biodun Jeyifo, a Harvard emeritus professor, and the ever so proper Dan Izebavye, who managed to uphold an ethic of fair play, propriety, and humane considerateness even whilst scrupulously adhering to varsity rules. Undoubtedly, much of Harry’s social and cultural grooming also came from mavericks and perennial barroom fixtures such as the late Joe Emordi (fondly called Oga Joe), a formidable thespian in his own right and Sam Loco Efe, the also deceased great Nollywood actor who was already an established Ibadan legend long before he found renewed fame and controversy in the frenetic film industry cities of Lagos and Onitsha.

Life swirled drunkenly in cloudy beer mugs and sometimes became crossed-eyed with blind rage and bitter regret. Dreams flitted away in columns of cigarette smoke until the first glow of dawn wiped afresh the misty bar louvres. How could one ever forget the transitional impact of the irascible theatre director and professor, Dapo Adelugba, who held court in his cluttered and dusty office on the last floor of the faculty building?

The countless attractions and distractions of the varsity often kept us from exploring the hidden delights of the city, which were generally considered to be less cosmopolitan and therefore probably less valued. In my opinion, this was a huge mistake.  Harry, for instance, never learnt to speak Yoruba properly even though he had a Yoruba middle name, Oludare. The varsity was obviously viewed with awe and slight perplexity by the indigenous dwellers of the city’s inner precincts. The varsity had been constructed according to the vision and expectations of white colonial masters with considerable care and precision that is lacking in many areas around the city. It was believed that only favored initiates were cherry picked to experience the guarded delights of the varsity.

In his remarkable memoir, A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, the extraordinary Ibadan historian Toyin Falola irreverently captures the hidden mysteries of Ibadan in a manner that those of us locked within the innards of the varsity, unfortunately, did not really care to explore. When we ventured into the labyrinthine precincts of the city, we often did so as slightly snobbish and absent-minded tourists, carelessly going through the motions.

In varsity poetry circles, perhaps the most influential artistic figure with an Ibadan background was Christopher Okigbo, who is firmly etched within the pantheon of poets that mysteriously legislated over what was acceptable and possible from an artistic point of view. Although he was sadly killed during the Nigerian Civil War fighting for the Biafran side in 1967, his presence was felt in every poetry reading we held in both formal and informal settings, including our interminable after-hours drinking sessions.

Okigbo’s accomplishment confirmed the belief that we could be cosmopolitan artists even when our geographical circumstances were fairly circumscribed. Also, it was indeed possible to discover submerged postcolonial resources within the English language from which we could forge a new poetic vision and sensibility quite distinct from the Eurocentric paradigm. Perhaps this was the most powerful allure Okigbo held for us, including Harry, of course.

However, one thing we couldn’t have anticipated, flush as we were with youth, was that Okigbo’s talent and unique vision were singularly his own and not to be shared with those  who stumbled through the maze surrounding the path he had so ingeniously discovered. Okigbo, in short, was not to be followed. We could only marvel and gaze forlornly from afar at the magnificent horizon unearthed in those astonishing cadences of his remarkable and ethereal poetry.

In his art and academic writings, Harry did not do much to interrogate the connections between city and varsity, except perhaps with a cursory reference to Sango (the Yoruba deity of thunder and lightning) in his most famous essay, “Explorations in Animist Realism: Notes on Reading/Writing, African literature, Culture, and Society” published in Public Culture in 2003. Rather than drawing its primary inspiration from Yoruba culture and mythology, this essay is, instead, a compelling feat of postcolonial theorizing.

While the varsity was a site of ever-encroaching cosmopolitanism, the city held onto foundations of culture and language that have so much to reveal to us. Ibadan was a settlement, stabilized at the end of the nineteenth century after a century of warfare with other towns that tore apart most of Yoruba land. Innumerable slaves were snatched away to the New World, social fragmentation ensued and old political alliances crumbled.

The British colonial authorities established a semblance of social order in 1893. In essence, Ibadan eventually settled to civil life after a protracted reign of guns and swords. Today, it is difficult to sense a history that is drenched in blood, upheaval, and wanton destruction. Instead, the refinements of language, civility, and culture are so much more valued.

Indigenes of Ibadan are known as Mesiogo, a very peculiar concept applied only to the true born. “Mesi” means to reply, “ogo” means fool. And so Mesiogo means to reply promptly to a fool who is subsequently kept in the dark about one’s true intentions.  This characteristic is associated with the real children of Ibadan. In addition, Mesiogo incorporates a shifting sense of ambiguity, not as a counterproductive imperative, but rather as an unmistakable quality of existential resilience, that is, the ability to extricate oneself from a quandary with grace, skill, and finesse. Falola adds his important insights, claiming “mesiogo is a strategy of knowing when to fight, when not to fight. It is about understanding codes of behaviour in a highly stratified society.” Bola Ige, the former governor of Oyo State and a serving minister of the federation before he was assassinated under mysterious circumstances in 2001, published an edited volume that attempts to explain the concept as an existential practice.  We, the admirers of Okigbo, missed the full import this vital skill, taught in the indigenous Ibadan way whilst we lived in the city.

The Okebadan Festival is one of the most important in Ibadan’s cultural calendar. During this period, indigenes flock to the streets singing songs of excess and vulgarity to mask rites of social renewal, re-invention and consolidation. To the casual observer, the festival at first glance, may appear to be a carnival of decadence and transgression but is instead a crucial exercise in social cohesion, rejuvenation, and goodwill. It also serves as a collective prayer of seasonal plenitude and agricultural abundance. Indeed, the Okebadan Festival is intimately associated with harvests and the promise that comes with them. This tradition was not often emphasized amongst those of us whose worlds revolved largely around the university where we received most of our cultural and intellectual nourishment.

The tension between city and varsity can be ascribed to the fact that the former favored neo-traditionalism and the latter pursued a slightly triumphal cosmopolitanism. These two tendencies do not readily mix well and the disjuncture may have prevented both city and varsity from attaining their full potentials in postmodern times. The late Garuba was an unabashed representative of cosmopolitan strain of the city, but he would have been an even greater raconteur if he had embraced the neo-traditionalist element most cosmopolitans would rather not entertain. Indeed, Ibadan gave us more abundance than we knew what to do with and remains a city to which you always have to return.

 

Sanya Osha is the author of several books including Postethnophilosophy (2011) and Dust, Spittle and Wind (2011), An Underground Colony of Summer Bees (2012) and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Shadow (Expanded Edition) (2021) among other publications. He works at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town, South Africa.

 

 

 

I write this appreciation as a teacher recognizing another. Mistress Velvet was a true educator in every sense of the word. They extended wisdom in so many realms of their life. Their influence and impact on others is hard to calculate in its radiant expansiveness. So many have come forward to celebrate them. They were deeply loved in Chicago—our adopted city—central to organizing circles and many other Black, queer communities. So many people have and will continue to speak to Velvet’s imprint and power from internal places and spaces far, far more intimate than I could ever hope to articulate. I met them only once and I was fortunate to receive their permission to record that evening in writing, to share with others. Our conversation was, in their own words, “important” to them. It was equally significant to me. I have shared it widely; I have taught it in my classes. Their knowledge requires deep listening.

It was 2019 over an opulent meal in a dark and handsome dining room. Nestled in our leather banquette I was instantaneously drawn to their energy and generosity as we discussed the shape and contours our conversation for The Black Scholar would and would not take before we began it. We spoke about all manner of things within that framework, some of which appear in the published interview; we took our time. At the end we hugged, “glowing” (in Velvet’s words) from the conversation and vowing to get together to celebrate the issue’s release. That was spring 2020; our reunion never happened. In the fall of 2020, I virtually introduced them to a collaborator—a photographer based in New York. Velvet’s participation in the still-developing project (one I hope will be made public in the near future) would be, both the photographer and I believed, integral. They embodied the project’s ethos through their coalescing practices of education, activism, caretaking, advocacy, sex work, and political organizing. Though they transitioned before they could take part, I trust their spirit and legacy will materialize emergent Black, queer, kinky futures that will bless and guide and shape us all. That is how they lived every moment on this plane. Let their words speak for themselves.

Forever Velvet.

Kirin Wachter-Grene
Assistant Professor of Literature
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Wachter-Grene’s interview with Mistress Velvet, “Caretaking in So Many Ways: A Conversation with Mistress Velvet,” is free to access and read until the end of June.

Cover art by Diana Ayala

The Black Scholar continues to celebrate the journal’s 50th Anniversary with the release of its latest issue, Black Girlhood, which highlights the significance, challenges and beauty of Black girls. There is a growing body of scholarship on the experiences of Black girls, from their representation in the past and present to their lived experiences today. The intersectionality of Black girls’ lives – race, gender, class, and age – is a rich opportunity for interdisciplinary scholarship, including Black studies, feminist studies, and childhood studies.

This seminal issue is global in focus. It includes work from scholars analyzing representations of Black girls in the protest movement, new media technologies, musical theatre, and popular culture, like the Marvel Universe. It also centers Black girls’ voices about their own girlhood experiences.

Noted scholar Nazera Sadiq Wright opens the “Black Girlhood” issue with the essay, “Black Girl Interiority in Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love.” She argues that Black girls’ points of view and interior thoughts illustrate their involvement in the protest movement, often overlooked by Black Nationalism.

Kiana T. Murphy contributes an essay on the first Black girl superheroine and genius in the Marvel Universe with “Ironheart and the Crisis of Black Girl Representation,” and Jordan Ealey explores representation of Black girlhood in a musical in her essay, “Young, Bubbly, and Black: The Affective Performance of Black Girlhood in Kristen Childs’ ‘The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin.’”

This issue intentionally looks at Black girlhood through a transnational lens since, in the aftermath of the racist murder of George Floyd, we are once again seeing the interconnectedness of the global struggle for Black liberation. Maria Ximena Abello-Hurtado-Mandinga takes us to Colombia in her essay, “Black Girls’ Body: Notes on the Legacy of Colonialism in South America and the Urgency of a Black Liberation Project for Black Girls.” Régine Michelle Jean-Charles’ essay, “Nou pa gen vizibilite: Haitian Girlhood Beyond the Logics of Visibility,” speaks from the perspective of Haiti, the site of “the revolution from below,” the Haitian Revolution, spearheaded by Black enslaved peoples in the Americas.

The issue concludes with an examination of the depiction of Black girlhood in new media technologies. In their essay, “Digital Communities of Black Girlhood: New Media Technologies and Online Discourses of Empowerment,” Maryann Erigha and Ashley Crooks-Allen examine three online discourses: Well-Read Black Girl, Black Girls Rock! and SayHerName.

Lending authenticity to these scholarly essays, this issue includes the voices of Black girls about their own girlhood experiences, including stories about living under COVID-19 and the heightened racism in the U.S. They share their experiences with parental job loss and use of the “n” word in the classroom. These remarkable girls receive support from SisterMentors, a nonprofit program that centers the needs and dreams of women and girls of color in the education system, in the face of deep-seated institutional inequities. With this important addition, the issue connects scholarship and the actual subject of that scholarly work – the Black girl.

* * *

For a limited time, access the introduction and “Ironheart, Marvel Comics, and The Crisis of Black Girl Representation” by Kiana T. Murphy for free.

Until the end of 2020, you can subscribe to our 50th anniversary volume here. Personal subscriptions are $44 USD. Volume 50 includes the above issue, plus Going Imperial, At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure, and What Was Black Studies?

In our 2021 volume, keep an eye out for Black Privacy, Caribbean Global Movements, continued response to “What was Black studies?” and more. . .

For our 2022 volume, we’re working on Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, Black Archives (CFP forthcoming), and more. . .

 

Mignonnes, a movie by Black French filmmaker, Maïmouna Doucouré, is one of the most-talked about films of this year. It initially premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in early 2020 and became controversial after its summer debut on Netflix under its English title, Cuties. The backlash against Cuties is partly related to anxieties around girls’ bodies—particularly in stories that engage with puberty and sexuality.  The spotlight is specifically on Black/African people: The main character is a young Senegalese girl, and the story relies on popular music and dance produced primarily by Black women. Thus, implicit in the film are the perception and representation of Africanness and Blackness through Black women’s bodies and Black popular culture.

Cuties falls within a genre of films about preteen and young teenage girls that have evoked controversy. For example, the U.S. film, Thirteen, which was released in 2003 and co-written by a then thirteen-year-old Nikki Reed, was very controversial.^[1] Unlike Cuties, which does not involve any sexual activity, Thirteen featured White girls having sex, taking drugs and self-cutting as a response to their unstable home environments. Major differences lie in the races of the protagonists, as well as Thirteen’s release long before the rise of social media. Perhaps the film that most closely resembles Cuties is another French film, Girlhood, directed in 2014 by White filmmaker Céline Sciamma.[2] Girlhood tells the story of a Black teenage girl in France who begins to come out of her shell after joining a lively group of other girls. Where Cuties is based on ethnography and draws on the experiences of Black French preteens, Girlhood evolved from the writer-director’s observations of Black teenagers in France. Though Sciamma received some criticism for being a White woman portraying a Black story, the film was widely praised.

Most reviewers have written positively about Cuties, which won a World Cinema Dramatic Directing award at the Sundance film festival, and many journalists have supported the film and been critical of the outrage that followed its Netflix release. This outrage became political and was mainly driven by White and other non-Black Americans. Republican Congressman Ted Cruz called for a federal investigation of the film as did the Concerned Women for America. Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard similarly referred to the film on Twitter as child porn without viewing it. In addition, the writer-director, Maïmouna Doucouré received death threats, and many verbal assaults on social media. This led her to pen an op-ed in the Washington Post, explaining why she made the film, her reliance on ethnographic research with girls in the making of the film, and the importance of adults understanding modern girlhood.

We want to engage with how Cuties represents biculturality as well as puberty from the perspective of a young African/Black girl. The film is part of an ongoing project by artists and academics to increase the visibility of Black French people, and conversations about race and gender in France.[3] Notwithstanding its national specificities, there is much in Cuties that speaks to wider concerns in the African Diaspora, particularly with respect to invisibility and hypervisibility of Black women and girls, as well as migration and its effects on children. This context is critical for viewing the film and for understanding the protagonist’s journey.

Cuties: The Story

The main character is Aminata or Amy for short, played by Fathia Youssouf. Amy is an 11-year old girl from a poor Muslim Senegalese family that just migrated to France. The family abides by the principle that women are first and foremost modest caretakers. Thus, Amy has to help take care of her younger siblings, clean the house, do laundry, go to school and never question authority. The transformative moment in the story happens when the family learns that her father back in Senegal decided to marry another woman and move to France with her. Amy’s mother, Mariam (played by Maïmouna Gueye) becomes depressed and inadvertently neglects her. Eventually, she forms a friendship with another girl, Angelica, who lives in her building. Angelica’s life is also defined by poverty and a troublesome relationship with her immigrant parents, but Amy is attracted to her sense of freedom and her trendy outfits. She meets Angelica’s friends and finds out they have formed a dance group called Mignonnes (Cuties) and are preparing for a competition in which their major rival is a group of much-older girls.

Through her association with the members of Cuties, Amy stops being a bullied outsider. She learns the latest Afrobeat and hip-hop dances, including twerking, which she teaches the other girls. Amy joins the group after one of the members is kicked out, and her behavior quickly changes. She steals money from her mother to purchase new outfits, gets into a fight, steals her cousin’s phone, and becomes obsessed with social media. Eventually, Amy’s reliance on attention leads to her posting a revealing photo of herself on Instagram. Afterwards, the other girls reject her out of fear that they too will be seen as indecent. She becomes a pariah, the very thing that she had been trying to avoid, and the girl she replaced is invited back to the group. In the penultimate scene, on the day of her father’s wedding, Amy runs away to dance at the final competition. Most of the audience at the event rightly disapprove of the girls’ dancing and outfits. They boo them, and while a few people watch intently, others are visibly disturbed. Then, in the midst of the dance, Amy freezes onstage as the implications of everything she has done dawns on her (including throwing one of the group members into a pond so that she would not show up at the competition). She runs back home in tears, where Mariam, who had previously reacted violently to her daughter’s behavior, tells her she does not have to go to her father’s wedding and embraces her as she cries. The film ends with Amy skipping rope with other girls outside her building and the closing shot is of her smiling face against the blue sky.

One of Amy’s defining characteristics is that she barely speaks, though she is the protagonist. In almost every scene, she has the least dialogue— a trait that underscores how marginalized she is within her family, her peer group, and her environment. When adults speak to her she is more accurately spoken at, than with, including in one scene in which her great-aunt discovers that she started menstruating and declares to her jovially that she is now a woman. In some ways, Amy is a filmic successor to Diouana, the young Senegalese protagonist in Ousmane Sembene’s 1966 classic, Black Girl.[4] The two films are also connected through casting as Diouana was played by Mbissine Thérèse Diop who also stars in Cuties as La Tante, Amy’s great-aunt. In Black Girl, Diouana moves to France to work as a nanny to a White French couple who mistreat her. Diouana never speaks to the White people in the film, partly because she is not fluent in French, but also because she has been forced into a position of submission. Eventually, the alienation she experiences from her family in Senegal, her employers, and France is so intense that she commits suicide. Black Girl has been analyzed as an allegory on the postcolonial condition, particularly the continued exploitation of African nations by Europe after colonialism and the implicit violence of Western assimilation.[5] Cuties appears to continue the commentary on Western assimilation and biculturalism begun by Black Girl, including its effects on the psyche of African people through a young girl’s experience in a more modern and nuanced exploration of the socio-cultural effects of migration. These overlap with the psychological adjustments Amy has to undergo as she comes into puberty.

The Convergence of Biculturality and Coming into Puberty

Setting the film at the onset of Amy’s puberty provides a backdrop for understanding her uneasy journey from shy wallflower to dancing provocatively on the internet and in front of crowds. Research in developmental psychology points to the timing of the onset of puberty as a particularly vulnerable stage in a girl’s life. Rona Carter, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, has found that Black girls who begin their period before their friends (or even think they have before their friends) are more likely to show defiant behaviors.[6] This held true for girls who, like Amy, had immigration in their recent family history. We see some of these behaviors in the girls in Cuties: their argumentativeness with authority figures and their defiance of rules and laws, like their breaking into an arcade and buying clothes with stolen money.

During a time that is emotionally and physically tumultuous for any young girl, Amy is also battling with disruption in her family, specifically as it relates to female gender roles. She watches as her mother, Mariam, prepares for her father to bring his new wife into their household. To the outside world, Mariam puts on a happy face, seeming to welcome the new bride, but at home, Amy witnesses the toll the upcoming nuptials takes on her. As Amy is coming into her own womanhood, at least physically, she is surrounded by examples of emotional and physical suffering from Mariam and subservience and manual labor by her great aunt. The representations of womanhood in her home are in stark contrast to the models in the music videos who seem to own their bodies, and by extension, their futures. Even her young girlfriends embody an empowerment that Amy does not see represented at home. Her budding gender identity is influenced by competing models of femininity.

The intersection of gender and culture is particularly poignant for Amy at this juncture in her life. Like many immigrant children, she is “caught” between two cultural worlds: that of her hyper-conservative Muslim Senegalese family, and the relatively unrestrained French pop culture her friends open up for her. Through this mainstream culture, she is able to try on different forms of girlhood that are at odds with the expectations of her home life. At Mosque, her head is covered as she listens to messages of female subordination and damnation (“there are more women in hell than men”). With her friends, she shows more skin than would ever be allowed in her religious community. Instead of hellfire, she is met with what these girls consider to be liberation and fun. At home, as the oldest child and the only girl, she must care for her younger siblings and complete household chores. In her small dance troupe, she choreographs newer and more suggestive dance moves. At home, she is quiet, a background player to the drama unfolding in her parents’ marriage. Outside, she makes noise—through her choreography and her increasing delinquency.

For many young people who straddle two cultural worlds, the journey to reconciling them is often fraught with missteps and stress. The drama that unfolds in Amy’s life represents so many youth who attempt to navigate such disparate cultural frames of reference. As she runs away from the perceived limitations of one culture, she appears to lose herself in the extremes of the other. The end of the film quietly shows Amy’s resolution of the tension between these two cultural poles. On her bed lies her competition uniform (a pair of short shorts and a tank top). Next to it, we see the dress she was to wear to her father’s wedding: formal, sequined, almost overpowering next to the dance outfit. A gentle breeze lifts the fabric of both garments, as if to suggest that there is life in both options. The camera then follows Amy as she walks outside of her building, dressed as a typical (Western) pre-teen, in jeans and a t-shirt. As she skips rope with other girls, she smiles in such a youthful, genuine way that the viewer is led to conclude that she is embarking on a journey that will bring her to merge both worlds in a way that is truly agentic.

The film tracks with ongoing critiques of Islam in France and elsewhere. However, Doucouré seems to challenge a White, non-Muslim audience to think more profoundly about these critiques. For example, the healer, El Hadj, when summoned to “cure” Amy of her rebelliousness, tells Mariam that there is no “evil spirit” in her daughter. He also sympathetically acknowledges Mariam’s struggles with her husband’s new marriage and tells her she does not have to stay with him. In her Washington Post op-ed Doucouré states, “All my life, I have juggled two cultures: Senegalese and French. As a result, people often ask me about the oppression of women in more traditional societies. And I always ask: But isn’t the objectification of women’s bodies in Western Europe and the United States another kind of oppression?” This commonality of Amy’s experiences, and those of the other girls in the movie, is no doubt responsible for how much of the movie is translatable across cultures and nationalities. In particular, the film speaks transnationally to the experiences of Black girls and women throughout the African Diaspora^[7], particularly regarding body agency.

Hypervisibility and the Problem of Representation

In her desperation to be accepted, Amy becomes hypervisible through engaging in explicit modes of popular culture primarily practiced by adults; and ultimately, both invisibility and hypervisibility prove alienating. Amy’s hypervisibility in the story is mirrored in how Cuties was initially advertised by Netflix. The original poster showed an airbrushed image of the girls dancing on stage, very different from the film’s French poster. Netflix apologized and withdrew the poster but kept the trailer. Marketing the film as a feel-good, girls movie, the trailer focuses on the scenes in which the girls dance and Amy rebels to the sound of Afrobeat artist, Yemi Alade’s Bum Bum and other popular songs. Considering that the film is a drama, and at times very painful, this trailer seems to emerge from an association of Black popular culture and girls’ stories with comedy and sensationalism. The first poster and trailer may have garnered Cuties more attention than it would have gotten with a more subdued approach. However, this marketing format also repelled many potential viewers and influenced the controversy around it.

Certainly, the film itself is a work of art and deserving of critique like any other. Aspects of it are disjointed. For example, it needed more minutes to intuitively arrive at the ending, especially given how painful previous scenes were. Doucouré’s directorial choices are mostly very nuanced and empathetic, particularly in how she depicts Amy’s emotions through close up shots of her facial reactions to the suppressive circumstances beyond her control. There are other moments, though short, that focus considerably on the girls’ bodies (i.e., the close-ups of them dancing). Nathalie Etoke, whose research focuses on the African Diaspora in France, asserted that she thinks much of the film was lost in translation, because its story and aesthetic are “very French.” As examples, Etoke singled out scenes depicting the girls dancing in slow motion and close-up shots of their bodies—indicative of a more “laissez-faire” attitude towards bodily representation in France and a current tendency in mainstream French feminism to be explicit in female bodily representation.[8] These more explicit scenes have spurred both critique and undeserved outrage. Much of the outrage reveals a generally more critical attitude towards Black popular culture and bodies.^[9]

In a Washington Post review, Karen Attiah pointed out the racial hypocrisy in the outrage towards Cuties. She argues that in America there is a simultaneous castigation of Black women and girls who display erotic agency, or break the rules of decorum, while lauding images of Black women’s victimization, including in movies about slavery and racism. The Black people who were uncomfortable with the film struggled with these complex implications given histories and presents in which Black girls’ and women’s bodies have been exploited for other people’s financial gain.^[10] While some thought the controversy was overblown, others thought the dance sequences and sections in which Amy was in her underwear, veered too close to commercialized images of girls’ and women’s bodies in popular culture. There are also gender double-standards at play in how we think about bodily agency, illustrated by a tendency to be more carefree with boys but less concerned about their exploitation, and hypervigilant and suppressive towards girls.

In “Black Girlhood Interrupted,” from Thick, her collection of essays, Tressie McMillan Cottom describes the simultaneous victimhood and dispensability of young Black girls.[11] In her writing, she grapples with the paradox of being hypervisible when attempting to gain body autonomy but invisible when actually the victims of assault (as was the case with the girls abused by R. Kelly, who was convicted for his long-time predation of young Black girls). But what happens in the Black community, no matter how painful for the girls among us, must stay in the Black community. McMillan Cottom writes, “People of color are similarly hypervigilant when we navigate a white social world. We screen our jokes, our laughter, our emotions, and our baggage. We constantly manage complex social interactions so we are not fired, isolated, misunderstood, miscast, or murdered.”[12] Perhaps many Black people who were opposed to watching the film wished for a better management of Amy’s messy, and yes, uncomfortable life. Certainly, many of the White viewers who resisted the film misunderstood its aim. But by putting an all-too-familiar journey through biculturalism, autonomy, and self-acceptance in a social media age, Cuties might go far in eliminating much of that opposition. As Maïmouna Doucouré wrote, “Some people have found certain scenes in my film uncomfortable to watch. But if one really listens to 11-year-old girls, their lives are uncomfortable.” This is multiply so at the intersections of race, gender, age, and culture.

 

Notes

^[1] Catherine Hardwicke, Thirteen (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2003). The screenplay for Thirteen was written by Reed and Catherine Hardwicke and directed by Hardwicke. The film garnered both criticism as well as praise, which included several awards and an Academy Award nomination.

[2] Céline Sciamma, Girlhood (Pyramide Distribution, 2014).

[3] See Nathalie Etoke, Afro Diasporic French Identities (Nathalie Etoke, 2013); Félix Germain, Silyane Larcher, and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, eds., Black French Women and the Struggle for Equality, 1848-2016 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018).

[4] Ousmane Sembene, Black Girl (Filmi Domirev and Les Actualités Françaises, 1966). Black Girl is one of the first films by an African creator to be widely distributed in Europe and North America.

[5] For a discussion on how Sembene and other authors and filmmakers have commented on the postcolonial African state through stories about women, see Susan Z. Andrade, The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958-1988 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

[6] Rona Carter et al., “Ethnicity, Perceived Pubertal Timing, Externalizing Behaviors, and Depressive Symptoms among Black Adolescent Girls,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 40, no. 10 (October 2011): 1394–1406.

^[7] See Aria Halliday, “‘Twerk Sumn!:’ Theorizing Black Girl Epistemology in the Body,” Cultural Studies 34, no. 6 (2020): 874–91. In “Twerk Sumn!” Halliday writes about the ways Black girls across the Diaspora gain knowledge of and pleasure in their bodies through dance, including twerking. Further, Halliday highlights the communal nature of this corporeal journey–for Black girls, dancing in community is liberating. Although Amy’s story is situated in a specific context, her story reflects the lives of many Black girls and women.

[8] Etoke, personal communication with Nicosia Shakes.

^[9] Some have contrasted the continued airing of Toddlers & Tiaras on U.S. television with the rush to “cancel” Netflix and launch a criminal investigation into Cuties. Toddlers & Tiaras was canceled due to controversy, but TLC continues to air reruns and spinoffs. The reality show glamorizes the adultification of toddlers in beauty pageants, while Cuties critiques the effects of social media hypervisibility and beauty standards on preteen girls.

^[10] We had conversations with several Black people of different ages who we asked to provide their thoughts on the film. Some of their names are Niga Jacques, Ryan McLeish, Agostinho Pinnock and Maziki Thame. Their opinions varied. We also thank Kabria Baumgartner for her feedback on this essay.

[11] Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (The New Press, 2018).

[12] Cottom, Thick, 193.

 

Nicosia Shakes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. Her book, Gender, Race and Performance Space: Women’s Activism in Jamaican and South African Theatre, is under contract with University of Illinois Press.

 

 

Barbara Thelamour is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. She runs the Identity, Culture, and Immigration Lab where she primarily investigates the cultural adjustment and identity development of Black immigrants in the United States. She is on Twitter at @B_Thelove.

 

 

 

This is part three of a three part series. Read the introduction to the series and the first post here and the second post here. All articles linked to in this series are free to read through 2020. To access, click on the green PDF button above the article. Publisher platform may require registration (free).

 

The suppression of Black gathering and protest is a mode of social control that developed during enslavement and shapes modern policing systems. These structures protect white property at the expense of human life. From gang injunctions to the abduction and arrest of protesters, Black collectivity continues to be criminalized in the United States. As the authors in this mini-issue show, the shared survival, consciousness, and presence of Black Americans is a form of protest that does indeed threaten to dismantle the very structures of racial capitalism, white supremacy, and policing. The articles locate acts of gathering in response to deliberately delineated spatial patterns of racial domination in the U.S., recognizing a spectrum of protest forms that range from acts of subterfuge to marching in the streets. The visceral poetics of Hortense Spillers and Assata Shakur, socio-psychological renderings by Edward Palmer, and lyrical prose by Edna Edet, together, theorize how to collectively build a radicalized consciousness out of embodied experience—one that can create worlds outside of past and current spatial demarcations and affirm Black life.

With “A Day in the Life of Civil Rights” (1978), Hortense Spillers offers a creative piece on memory and reckoning in which multiple characters, literary forms, and experiences layer to capture Black voices and personalities, the harrowing impacts of the day, and a broader historical context. Narratives of protest, violence, and the destructive aftermath of resistance, provide a variegated image of gathering and embodiment under the threat of an increasingly militarized police force in 1968 Memphis, Tennessee. An April 4th letter, written by one “Vivian Henderson” on the day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, chronicles the events of the previous day, when she was part of a group of young Black protestors who faced martial police violence on the city’s streets. Dr. King’s final speech at Mason Temple, a space of spiritual and political assemblage, is woven into the piece as the foundational refrain, touching the lives of different generations of Black Americans. Spillers’ framing of the letter’s narrative signals the painful outcome of the protest. The speaker “Betty Trammel,” is an on-duty hospital nurse who finds Vivian’s letter. Betty channels Dr. King’s words, her own wartime and activist past, and that days’ on-going protests while tending to a young Black man injured in the previous evening’s events. This article, like Shakur’s essay introduced below, centers the experiences of Black women, not only as they care for their community, but also as they explore and reflect on how to respond to the oppression surrounding them. With various depictions of embodied resistance in the face of hawkish white claims for power and property, as well as the resounding impact of Dr. King’s speech at Mason Temple, Spillers’ work emphasizes the perils and weariness of staying “strong” amid a seemingly endless struggle for racial justice. The protagonist imagines with hope and doubt “That it was always possible tomorrow, or was it right now, to be released from the awful onus of nightmare and locate one’s own stage of action, even beyond sorrow and self-pity, even beyond the edicts of the willful and the thrusts of assassins.”[1] In a final note of ambiguity, the narrative concludes with the nurse considering the fortifying process of building “a private myth from the tattered fragments of loss and disappointment” in order to bring a new world into view.

In relation to the threats against Black gathering, Assata Shakur’s visionary essay “Women in Prison: How We Are” (1978) explicates how different spatial and social oppressions restrict Black gathering and imaginaries. The architecture of the city, with its tenements and “transient neighborhoods” fostering “no sense of community,”[2] is reminiscent of her experience of incarceration at Rikers Island where “women prisoners rarely refer to each other as sisters.”[3] Shakur states that Rikers Island reflects the city where “poverty is the same. The alienation is the same.”[4] Shakur writes the city as a site of intense coming together—in forced poverty and in common experience—as well as intense fracturing, a feature necessarily and brutally repeated at Rikers Island. Shakur states that the city “removed us from our strengths, from our roots, from our traditions.”[5] She desires a consciousness that returns Black women to embodied cultural memory, memories of women who “carry on the tradition of fierce determination to move on closer to freedom.”[6] Shakur describes the lives of the mostly Black and Puerto-Rican women in prison that reflect the violent institutions, social pressures, and distorting cultural values that led to their incarceration. The article explores the tension between the racist and sexist structures that the women at Rikers come up against, and the type of community and consciousness Shakur wants to cultivate. Shakur’s narrative brings us back not only to the question of crafting consciousness, but also to an awareness of how space can dictate what sorts of worlds people feel that they can imagine. When physical and psychic gatherings are threatened by enclosure and containment, Shakur hopes that we can conjure empowering connections to the past and future to form community in the present.  “Women in Prison: How we are” is a presentist insurgency, a detailed description of racist, sexist, heterosexist, and classist structural abuse, and the despair and hopelessness generated by these structures, boiled down into a cell. Released from prison, women feel like they have nowhere to go, nothing towards which to move. As such, it is also a declaration of desire for a collective method of activist-being for Black women, for a futurist plan that begins with a recollection of a rich past and a conscious analysis of political aggressions.

An activist for Black freedom, Shakur was a member of the Black Liberation Army and Black Panther Party. She participated in the Black liberation movement through broader freedom struggles including the student rights movement and the movement to end the war in Vietnam. She was incarcerated for the outcome of a 1973 shoot-out with New Jersey State police officers who pulled her over allegedly driving with a faulty taillight. Shot twice herself, the exchange of fire killed one of the officers. Two people were killed, Black Liberation Army activist Zayd Malik Shakur who was in the vehicle with Shakur, and Trooper Werner Foerster, who arrived in a second police car.[7] Calling herself a “20^th century escaped slave,” Shakur escaped the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey in 1979 to haunt the FBI most wanted list into the 21^st Century.[8] Several aspects of Shakur’s biography figure the structural war on Black life, thought, and freedom that manifest in continued fatal police aggression, hypercriminalization of Black citizens convinced of their own freedom, judicial bias, and miscarriage of justice.

Edward Palmer’s vision for an alternate world addresses the character of Black policing. His essay changes in tone from pessimism to pragmatic hope in a revolutionary consciousness among Black police officers essential for Black liberation. Palmer’s “Black Police in America” (1973) saliently conveys white threats to Black gathering, not only in so-called white spaces but also in Blacks’ own neighborhoods. Palmer was a Black policeman for the city of Chicago and was exposed to the oppressive power structures in place that target Black sites—both spatial and psychological. He follows the metonymic figure of the Black police candidate from his childhood in the “lower-middle class ghetto”[9] to his metamorphosis into “super-citizenry.”[10] In the midst of this transformation, Palmer notes, the candidate is armed with a uniform and a gun that separates him from his community and, subsequently, his identity. This follows a similar thread from articles by Robert L. Allen and Terry Jones,[11] published earlier in the Social Justice Handbook, that take internal neo-colonialism and epidemic police violence as theoretical lenses from which to view anti-Blackness. What distinguishes Palmer is his thought-provoking, if controversial, statement on the potential for Black police officers to radically transform the police structure from within by “protect[ing] Black people from white oppressors and from themselves.”[12]

Arguing that the act of protest is fundamentally human, Edet’s historical survey “One Hundred Years of Black Protest Music” (1976) attests to how Black musical forms emerge from and respond to their social, spatial, and material conditions. During enslavement, Black people consciously found ways to express their grievances surreptitiously through spirituals that “referred to the conditions of slavery obliquely” and, thus, went unnoticed and unrestricted.[13] Work songs and convict songs—developed from the experiences of individuals brought together under conditions of captivity—illustrate how protest music houses and manifests the embodied cultural memory that Shakur conjures as possibility on Riker’s Island. The song leader, who Edet calls “a psychologist, able to select the exact song for a particular situation,” would attune the melody and accompaniment to the physical movement the labor demanded.[14] Protest music vocalizes resistance within and against disciplinary spaces. Through these songs, which erupt forth from Edet’s pages, Black people express collective visions of Black liberation and “Say ‘em loud, say ‘em clear, for the whole round world to hear.”[15]

Police brutality, incarceration, deprivational segregations, and work gangs bind and quarter. Violent incursions on Black struggles for freedom take endless state-sanctioned forms as Black insistence on freedom persists. These authors provide a specific vision of persistent structures and deployments of racism that transmit structures of slavery into new generations through white civilian aggression, racist policing, the court system, and incarceration. Systems of quartering are upheld by violence. There is no romance to such forms of abuse or their calling out. In these articles, authors identify avenues for activism as thought practice and labor that remain pertinent in 2020, a watershed year in its undeniable display of the immediate deadly consequences of identifiable racist structural violence. They animate the necessity of fundamental shift in structures of thought around Blackness towards anti-racist conceptions of Black life and Black citizenship that support freedom and also legal protection for all. The systems that condition and precede the body, that condition white supremacist racialized citizenship require dismantling in order to begin to disrupt the vile loop of the state’s structural disposition against Black liberty.

The instrumentalization of diverse comings together and recognitions of chosen and forced collectivities distinguish this mini-issue. Alongside the violence they call out, these pieces identify the power of insistent collectivity, creativity, self-definition, and mutual recognition as mundane conditions and tools of Black life. By illustrating Black critical and creative practices within, on the margins of, and boldly beyond racist geographic and structural boundaries, these articles speak to how violent policing of Black spaces and people both impedes and catalyzes the body’s ability to shift, develop, and regenerate itself. It is in these transformative processes, sometimes as tenuous as they are hopeful, that Black Americans have led, and continue to lead, coalitions of people from around the world in the collective fight against global injustice.

Stephanie Leigh Batiste

Associate Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara, Departments of Black Studies and English

Nadia Ahmed, Anita Raychawdhuri, Erick John Rodriguez, and Maite Urcaregui

Graduate students, University of California, Santa Barbara, Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative

 

*The Social Justice Handbook Series authors would like to thank Louis Chude-Sokei for his co-curation and support of this archival project.

 

[1] Hortense Spillers, “A Day in the Live of Civil Rights,” The Black Scholar, vol. 9, no.8/9 (1978): 20-27,.

[2] Ibid., 13.

[3] Ibid., 12.

[4] Assata Shakur, “Women in Prison: How We Are,” The Black Scholar, vol. 9, no. 7 (1978): 8-15, 13.

[5] Ibid., 13.

[6] Ibid., 15.

[7] Bim Adewunmi, “Assata Shakur: from civil rights activist to FBI’s most wanted,” The Guardian, Sun 13 Jul 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/13/assata-shakur-civil-rights-activist-fbi-most-wanted. Accessed by authors Nov 2, 2020

[8] http://www.assatashakur.org/ Accessed by the authors, Aug 15, 2020.

[9] Edward Palmer, “Black Police in America,” The Black Scholar, vol. 5, no. 2 (1973): 19-27, 19.

[10] Ibid., 23.

[11] Robert L. Allen, “Reassessing the Internal (Neo) Colonialism Theory,” The Black Scholar, vol. 35, no. 1 (2005): 2-11; Terry Jones, “The Police in America: A Black Viewpoint,” The Black Scholar, vol. 9, no. 2 (1977): 22-31, 36-39.

[12] Edward Palmer, “Black Police in America,” The Black Scholar, vol. 5, no. 2 (1973): 19-27, 27.

[13] Edna Edet, “One Hundred Years of Black Protest Music,” The Black Scholar, vol. 7, no. 10 (1976): 38-48, 38.

[14] Ibid., 39.

[15] Ibid., 48.

 

Black lives matter. Black thought matters. Black writing matters. Black writing about Black lives matters. Black scholarship, criticism, and research matter. Black memory matters, Black history perhaps most of all.

These words have been the credo of The Black Scholar from the apocalyptic year of 1969 to the, well, apocalyptic year of 2020. And so, situated once again “after the end of the world,” as Sun Ra would have it, it is incumbent on us to make sense of origins, presence, and futures.

What Was Black Studies?—an intentionally provocative title—commemorates 50 years in print, which also means 50 years of our entanglement with the ongoing project, commitment, inter-discipline, and reason for the argument called Black Studies. And in the spirit of political apocalypse and the dramas of memory, we’ve assembled a remarkable set of reflections and arguments, frustrated longings and critical conversations, visionary statements and declarations of failure by a range of significant figures in and around (and under?) Black Studies. The goal here is less to argue about origins, but instead to make sense of what it—we, us—have become in its wake, while continuing to engage the multiple, intersecting crises of the present.

Calling these scholars remarkable is no hyperbole: our contributors include Robin D.G. Kelley, Molefi K. Asante, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Siobhan Brooks, Frank Wilderson, Michelle M. Wright, Lewis Gordon, and Kehinde Andrews. Indeed, the response and support for this issue particularly due to the framing question “What Was Black Studies?” generated so much material that we’ll be featuring longer pieces in imminent issues. All of these scholars were asked to honestly respond to the provocation in any way they felt appropriate. What does Black Studies look like now vs. when they began their engagement with it? What did they think it was vs. what it turned out to be? What can it be? Must it continue being? Is it an ongoing concern or an institutional habit?

We’d like to thank these scholars for their time and patience and their acknowledgement of the historical and current impact of the journal.

 

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For a limited time, access the introduction and Afropessimism and Futures of … : A Conversation with Frank Wilderson
by Linette Park for free.

Subscribe to our 50th anniversary volume here. Personal subscriptions are $41 USD. Volume 50 includes the above issue, plus Going Imperial, At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure, and the forthcoming Black Girlhood.

In our 2021 volume, keep an eye out for Black Privacy, Caribbean Global Movements, and more content responding to “What was Black studies?”

For our 2022 volume, we’re working on Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, Other Black Independent Cinema, and more. . .

 

 

Introduction to Series*

As we have seen in the long history of the battle for racial equality and Civil Rights, state-sanctioned police violence is a strong arm of racist power. Exaltation of the police is too often a lesson in white entitlement that authorizes and inheres the brutalization of Black and Brown people. The following bundles of articles and essays from The Black Scholar archive consider policing and intersecting structures of injustice. They also explore the long history of criticism and insurgence practiced by communities and scholars passionate about anti-racism, equality, and freedom. The research and reflection drawn together here attest not only to the rigor of how these issues have been assailed over time, but also to the sensitivity of our redress in analyzing the character of consciousness. The collection signals racism, sexism, homophobia, incarceration, and militarism as interlocking systems of oppression. The first bundle, “Rehearse, Resist, Riot, Repeat: Policing Through Time,” hails our sense of déjà vu and repetition (with difference) in the incidence and impacts of anti-Black police violence. An epidemic in the United States, police violence and murder creates conditions of rage, riot, and mourning. The second bundle, “Imagining a Global Resistance,” acknowledges W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1903 observation that the color-line divides towns and cities, and also circles the globe.^[1] In the wake of centuries of European imperialist practice, racial hierarchy and structures of white-supremacy impact every nation. In fact, nationhood itself seems a symptom of race-based (as well as ethnic) oppressions, where policing reflects and inflicts broader systems of power. The third grouping marks a gathering of transformational awareness and consciousness over time in the process of diagnosing abusive policies, practices, and institutions. It is called “Creating another World: Gathering(s) Against Injustice.” In each grouping, analytical engagements identify structures and systems that reproduce racism and sexism. At the same time the insurgency of critical creative address testifies to the long history of brilliant struggle to provide all people with inalienable endowments of humanity, to forge systems of justice and just consciousness.

These words, oppression, injustice, protest, freedom, consciousness, resistance might seem overly familiar, perhaps overused or idealistic. This is only because racism, sexism — the inequities and entitlements of racial capital, as such — are also old and inert in self-perpetuation. It is old too to say that bigotry and race hatred, biases that foreclose possibility and cultivate suffering and death, are wrong. It means that these old hopes, these long struggles, persist still towards further fulfillment. It takes the knee of a white police officer blithely crushing the neck of a Black man into the concrete, suffocating him with confidence in his own blameless power, the “no-knock” police shooting of a Black woman safer-at-home in her bed while we reach a watershed viral death toll during a pandemic, to feel together the affront of homicidal collective consent to police brutality and public lynching. It takes, perhaps, the quiet of quarantine for some to realize or admit that racist ideology pervades social and political systems and the ways that they operate to impact human life. The struggle has been so long, so brutal. Fighting has been so long, so tiring, so demanding. This horror (as horror) is not new. There have been so many losses. Hopelessness, jadedness, and despair lurk just on the other side of assault, murder, and the next failure. We grieve together. For as long as racism and dispossession persist, so too does pride in the power of their dismantling. We take turns being energized by history and vision, helping and teaching each other through—and anew. This is the work. The work is hard. It demands insistence, great patience, great fury, and great love. These wearied, stalwart words–resistance, consciousness, freedom, oppression, injustice, protest–march on because their purveyors are relentless. Capacious local and transnational vision, a courageous letting go of what has been normalized, are demanded to address the enormous humanitarian and environmental challenges of our times. Practices of transformation, cultural shift, radical break, abolition, and even wokeness become fresh once again — different, renewed, and productive.

TBS presents these collections as provocation to anti-racist thought and activism, as reminder and inspiration, as context and guide for our 21st century aspirations towards justice and the dismantling of automatic and aggressive institutional, social, and interpersonal structures of violence. We present them in honor of those lost and in honor of the continuing struggle.

– Stephanie Leigh Batiste

 

^[1] Du Bois, W. E. B., and Brent Hayes. Edwards. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford University Press). New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

 

*All articles linked to (below in red) in this series are free to read through 2020. To access, click on the green PDF button above the article. Publisher platform may require registration (free).

 

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“Rehearse, Resist, Riot, Repeat: Policing through Time” offers a grouping of articles from The Black Scholar’s archives as brief but deep history, context, and sinew for the insurgent clarity and possibility of the movement for Black lives. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and too many other Black people at the hands of militarized police officers, while seeming to wake many to structural violence for the first time, continues the U.S.’s long history of militarized occupation and anti-Black violence. Police murder, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy are not new, and these acts of state-sanctioned violence are not discrete. Today there is “a nightmarish sense of déjà vu in the atmosphere,”^[1] akin to the one Maya Angelou powerfully evokes in her short narrative about Black Panther George Jackson’s funeral, “Rehearsal for a Funeral,” which opens this bundle.

In Angelou’s narrative of aggrieved rehearsal, the anti-Black oppression of the 1970s feels suspended in time. The grieving of George Jackson on a “solemn Saturday”^[2] mingles with the collective grief for the recent murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. We take our use of “rehearse” from Angelou’s description. Rehearsal is a form of performative repetition (with difference), and in Angelou’s rehearsal, there is an uncanny sense of repetition at play with the seemingly endless incidents of police violence that are directed toward Black people and the murders that are often a result of that violence. Angelou describes “[a] feeling that all the happenings . . . had been done on this very street since life began . . . A textured perception that all the mourners were bit players, in an eternally running drama.”^[3] Angelou’s narrative account of this “rehearsal for the next rehearsal”^[4] embodies and employs repetition as a literary form, from her accounts of the lack of disbelief registered in the faces of attendees, to the absence of amazement, surprise, and wonder, which “had been scraped away by the ceaseless repetitions of the scene down too many years.”^[5]  The experience of returning to Angelou as a reader in 2020—bringing the past several months of rebellion, police brutality, murder, and hope to her pages—changes what we notice and takeaway from her writing, embodying a repetitive practice of emotive readership that is responsive to the current moment and, as such, is different with each read. The repetition sustained throughout her work is ultimately broken at the end, creating a new order of repetition with a difference, as Angelou’s account imagines a break from the rehearsal. The potential for “newness” emerges in the piece’s culmination, at once mitigating the repetition of the narrative and portending a resistance to the monotonous rehearsal of Black death.

In the next piece included here, “The Police in America: A Black Viewpoint,” Terry Jones provides the sociohistorical context for these repetitive rehearsals, tracking, in particular, the relationship between American law enforcement and Black communities from the early 19th century to the 1970s. His historical analysis “demonstrates the major role played by the police in subordinating one race to another,” Black to White.^[6] Jones provides us with statistical evidence proving the large, unavoidable discrepancies between arrest rates of Black people and White people, which he attributes to the function of “police discretion,”^[7] and he provides us with data on the (dis)proportion of Black people on city police forces in relation to those cities’ Black populations. Jones also points us in the direction of the perspective of Black policemen, which serves as an effective preface and gesture to Edward Palmer’s “Black Police in America,” an article that will appear in the third bundle of this series, “Creating another World: Gathering(s) Against Injustice.” Jones asks his readers to resist systems of oppression, in thought, in action, and in behavior, and to ask whether “police efforts and their expenses [are] really the most efficient way of maintaining stability in society.”^[8] Jones postulates that anti-Black, discretionary police power serves the function of protecting the White power structure. Like Angelou’s portended “newness,” Jones suggests that “the real issue . . . may be in developing something entirely new,”^[9] calling to mind the current push among activists for the abolition of American police forces and the replacement of police power with community-driven solutions.

The anti-Black violence of the U.S. police system leads to the repetition of riots, which U.S. Representative John Conyers, Jr. expands upon in his 1989 article, “Police Violence and Riots,” the third and final selection of this grouping. John Conyers, Jr. was one of the founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus and served for more than 50 years as U.S. Congressman. His extensive career in Civil Rights governance and anti-racist policymaking, and his later departure from Congress, demonstrate the complexity of his contributions. In 2017, Conyers resigned as a result of multiple harassment allegations. His resignation displays the transformative power of Black woman-led organizing and the re-orientation of public consciousness about gender equity brought about by the “Me Too” movement. Conyers’s resignation illustrates the evolution of historical and contemporary struggles for structural transformation that do not take masculinity as an invisible norm, but instead work to address systemic violence at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality.

In “Police Violence and Riots,” Conyers examines why Black people riot. He asserts that riots are the culmination of the triplicate harms of an inequitable criminal justice system, economic inequalities, and a lack of political power. Conyers explains that the repetition of riots is indicative of an unchanging system of police violence perpetrated by White police against Black people: “The event that triggers the riot is frequently the same. A white policeman unmercifully and publicly beats a black person who is often innocent of any criminal act . . . The past pattern of violence is not easily forgotten.”^[10] To disrupt the repetitive patterns and constant rehearsals, we must abolish  the systems in place that foster and support such violent law enforcement, as well as systems that create “the idleness and bitterness caused by unemployment [that help] bring on the riots.”^[11] Like Angelou’s piece, Conyers’s feels eerily timeless, as his present so closely resembles our own. Like Jones’s, Conyers’s research reveals that Black people are over-policed in proportion to the crimes they commit. But unlike Angelou’s and Jones’s calls for newness, Conyers calls for police reform, reflecting a fissure in the current public discourse on policing. The second bundle of this series, “Imagining a Global Resistance,” tracks the “global paradigm of the colonial relationship,”^[12] emphasizing that reforming the police system and other superstructures of colonial violence that function to uphold an unjust social, political, and economic order is not enough.

As you read these selections in 2020, you may feel a dispiriting sense of being stuck in time. Angelou’s, Jones’s, and Conyers’s America, where police are free to use their “discretion” to control the fates of Black people, where the criminal justice system disproportionately targets Black people, and where economic inequality robs millions of their dignity, is our America. In light of this, we may be tempted to believe that the rehearsal for the funeral will never end. But each work here, and those from the generations before and since, are palimpsests, mapping the lived experience of Blackness, the feeling of being Black, and the stories of Black people in America. In each of these repetitions, in each of these rehearsals, there is a conspicuous fortification of activism, knowledge, and understanding. As you experience, or perhaps reexperience, the rehearsal, the resistance, and the riot through these thinkers, know that weariness is merely evidence of a repetitious and assiduous effort, and that “the struggle for freedom is a right and clear effort which concerns all the people, all the time.”^[13]

May all those whose lives have been taken by police violence and murder rest in power, and may we work to honor their lives through unyielding anti-racist thought and practice.

– Sage Gerson, Taylor Holmes, Nirvana Shahriar
Graduate students
UCSB Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative

 

^[1] Maya Angelou, “Rehearsal for a Funeral,” The Black Scholar, 1975, p. 6.

^[2] Ibid., p. 3.

^[3] Ibid., p. 6.

^[4] Ibid., p. 6.

^[5] Ibid., p. 4.

^[6] Terry Jones, “The Police in America: A Black Viewpoint,” The Black Scholar, 1977, p. 24.

^[7] Ibid., p. 25.

^[8] Ibid., p. 37.

^[9] Ibid., p. 36.

^[10] John Conyers, Jr., “Police Violence and Riots,” The Black Scholar, 1981, p. 3.

^[11] Ibid., p. 5.

^[12] Robert L. Allen, “Reassessing the Internal (Neo)Colonialism Theory,” The Black Scholar, 2005, p. 10.

^[13] Maya Angelou, “Rehearsal for a Funeral,” p. 7.

At the Limits of Desire initiates The Black Scholar’s Fiftieth Anniversary celebration by engaging with Black sexuality studies in order to reimagine the field anew. Guest-editor Kirin Wachter-Grene and TBS Editor-in-Chief Louis Chude-Sokei, along with artists, scholars, pedagogues, kinksters, and sex workers alike both in and out of academia, continue the journal’s mission to cut at edges and push at envelopes.

The issue opens with Carmel Ohman’s, “Undisciplining the Black Pussy: Pleasure, Black Feminism, and Sexuality in Isa Rae’s insecure,” which argues that Rae’s HBO television series expands the possibilities for Black women’s sexual self-expression. Omari Weekes’ “Something in the Holy Water Ain’t Clean: Time and Religious Inversion in Hal Bennett’s Lord of Dark Places” is the first of two essays that look closely at the edges of desire in African American literature. Weekes reads Bennett’s notorious underground 1970 novel Lord of Dark Places, arguing for its satirical inversion of Christianity which makes space for new articulations of Black masculinity. Likewise, K. Thomas explores the impact her religious upbringing in the Haitian Baptist church (HBc) had on her sexual development as a young woman and later, initiate into the San Francisco and New York queer, Black BDSM scenes.

Amber Musser returns to TBS with “The Limits of Desire: Jacolby Satterwhite and the Maternal Elsewhere.” In her reading, Satterwhite’s use of BDSM imagery oscillates between transparency and opacity—what we think we know and what we have yet to begin to imagine. In keeping with the connection between pleasure and creativity is Mistress Velvet’s practice of making her white, male clients read Black feminist theory, a commitment that has garnered the Chicago-based Pro Domme national attention. In Kirin Wachter-Grene’s interview, Mistress Velvet discusses this practice with an emphasis on the Black feminist lineage. Ancestry and lineage return in multi-media artist, curator, and educator Heather Raquel Phillips’s, “Finding Family,” which limns family pain and the construction of alternative family structures in order to show how laborers in adult industries have been mentors and kinfolk.

Returning to literature, Anna Ziering takes up one of the most infamous novels about the complicated nexus of sexuality, pleasure, power and history in, “They Are Busy with This Woman:  The Abject Erotics of Gayl Jones’ Eva’s Man.” Ziering analyzes protagonist Eva’s finding of pleasure in extragenital sites, such as orality and anality, that serve as erotic practices to process her own relationship to violence. Following on the theme of finding and expressing pleasure through unexpected methods is Amaris Brown’s “Closing the Distance: The (Im)possible Politics of the Yield in Carrie Mae Weems’ Not Manet’s Type.”

A shout out must go to Chicago’s Leather Archives and Museum (LA&M), dedicated to preserving the histories of leather, fetish, and kink and the hidden histories of race in that cultural complex. The LA&M has provided generous funding for two contributors to this special issue, Kirin Wachter-Grene and Heather Raquel Phillips, to pursue their research and teaching of Black sexuality. With the increase in public acknowledgement of practices of Black radical pleasure, perhaps independent institutions such as the LA&M and artists such as our cover photographer, Efrain Gonzalez, a legend who has tirelessly provided visual testimony, will be increasingly acknowledged.

 

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For a limited time, access the intro and A Black Church, Black Woman, and the Lure of Black BDSM by K. Thomas for free. Individual copies for sale here.

Subscribe to our 50th anniversary volume here. Personal subscriptions are $41 USD. Volume 50 includes the above issue, plus Going Imperial, What Was Black Studies?, and Beyond Borders: Black Girls and Girlhood.

In our 2021 volume, keep an eye out for Black Privacy, Caribbean Global Movements, part two of What Was Black Studies?, and more . . .

For our 2022 volume, we’re working on Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, Other Black Independent Cinema, and more . . .

*This article was originally published on March 27, 2020 on Sixty Inches From Center.

Vaginal Davis (center) performing with Cholita!, one of her underground bands, as seen in video footage from the film Cholita! (1995, directed by Michele Mills). Photo courtesy of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Her blond hair perfectly flipped, a smile breaking across her warm and open face, Vaginal Davis takes the mic, satin blue nighty shimmying. Amidst a stage of fierce femmes of all shapes and sizes rocking back and forth in slumber party attire, Davis holds the center of our attention. Performing tonight as Graciela Grejalva—lead singer of Cholita!—she sings, she shouts, sweating, spitting rapid-fire lyrics, a pink swatch of fabric clutched in one hand. Her other hand gesticulates wildly, mirrored by the lingerie-clad woman to her left who cajoles in pantomime, pointing at, sometimes flipping off the audience, implicating and drawing them in. Black and brown women, including Alice Bag of Sad Girl and The Bags, play backup to our Blatino (half Black, half Mexican), intersexed, queer drag superstar, churning out a low-fi frenzied garage punk beat. “CHINGA TU, CHINGA TU, CHINGA TU MADRE!” they collectively sing in urgent, joyful unison. Go fuck yourself. Literally, go fuck your mother.

Vaginal Davis, who named herself after Black radical Angela Davis with a queer, humorous twist, is not here to entertain you. Her work, which includes writing, independent video, public access programming, bar drag, music, sculpture, theatre, performance art, and nightlife hosting,  has been lasting and life-sustaining. Her influence has spanned decades, inspiring countless cultural interventions in queer life and beyond.

The scene I open with appears in the 1995 video footage of Cholita!, one of Davis’s “multiracial, maxi-gendered” bands constructing and performing what is, to my mind, a “biomythography,” a term Black feminist lesbian poet Audre Lorde created in the early 1980s to describe a mix of biography, myth, and history. Davis is an invention of her own making, a bricoleur, an inimitable force of irreverent brilliance evident in all her performances and print media (primarily zines such as the infamous Fertile La Toyah Jackson (1982-1991)). She resides now in Berlin but came up in late 1970s Los Angeles, establishing herself quickly as a legendary punk fixture central to the performance, video art, and homocore/queercore scenes that merged punk aesthetics with queer content. In addition to Cholita! (“The Female Menudo”), her underground bands included Pedro, Muriel, and Esther (PME), Black Fag (a satirical send-up of famed California punk band Black Flag), and Afro Sisters consisting of Davis and two white women backup singers sporting Afros.

As this Cholita! performance establishes clearly, Vaginal Davis is here to enjoy herself, often at our expense, in the most generous and playful way imaginable. But when I say “play” I mean serious play or what Davis calls “crazy fun.” Blistering critique. Uncomfortable irony. Black humor. She pauses, cheekily, inviting the audience to a call and response. “Let me say it and then you say it!” “LISTEN!” she implores the audience giddily laughing over her. “CHINGA TU…” she enunciates slowly, followed by “GoooOOOD!”, a single syllable word stretched to five syllables with such sincere rising enthusiasm one cannot help but want to be caught up in anything, in everything Davis is doing. Young queers, femmes, PoC punks, she’s hailing us. “You can sing along with us” she promises, but “CHINGA ME?! NO. CHINGA TU” just in case you forget who created this scene, who invited you in. There is no mistaking who is fabulously in charge here. Davis demonstrates one can have power and authority in ways not structured in dominance.

On February 6^th The School of the Art Institute hosted “Conversations at the Edge: An Evening with Vaginal Davis” at the Gene Siskel Film Center. The program, in conjunction with Davis’s epic musical album/film The White to be Angry (1999) currently on view at the AIC**, celebrated Davis’s singular mix of “Hollywood glamour, campy punk raucousness, and pointedly subversive social critique.” We were treated to a screening of a selection of Davis’s films from 1982-2003 including Cholita! (1995, directed by Emmy-Award winner Michele Mills), Dot (1992, dir. Vaginal Davis); Davis’s homage to Dorothy Parker, That Fertile Feeling (1982, dir. John O’Shea and Keith Holland) featuring Davis’s bandmate and co-conspirator Fertile La Toyah Jackson; and One Man Ladies (1996 dir. Glenn Belverio and Vaginal Davis) co-starring independent filmmaker and performance artist Glenn Belverio (aka Glennda Orgasm), a drive-by drag candid intervention into the love lives of Manhattan’s well-heeled uptown women.

An in-person conversation between Davis and Solveig Nelson, Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow and co-curator of The White to Be Angry exhibit, accompanied the screenings. This was the first time in decades Davis had watched some of these films—many of which are collaborative, improvisational scenarios— and they prompted her intimate reminiscing about them, and the DIY spirit that stewarded them into being.

The wildly gyrating camerawork that captured the Cholita! performance and most of Davis’s videos over those several decades is so low budget as to be no budget, but that is what I love about it. It captures perfectly what felt like a wildly free, give no fucks about the quality, care only about the guerilla gesture time to make DIY punk art. It was watching this shoddy camera work as much as it was enjoying what it captured that overwhelmed me with pleasure during that evening’s event. I remember exactly what it felt like, though it was lifetimes ago.

I am 18—a freshman in college. I am opening for Le Tigre—Kathleen Hanna’s early aughts feminist art band so full of joyous, raging fuck you energy that the air whips about me as I dance, smiling hard from our debut. I am a member of Las Sinfronteras—“Without Borders”—a queercore feminist performance art group. I am a Bikini Kill fanatic, a zine maker, a riot grrrl, a scrappy Tucson punk.

Vaginal Davis made all of this possible, birthing all that would coalesce to create the context for the emergence of the 1990s feminist punk riot grrrrl movement that I’ve inherited. Only then could Las Sinfronteras take shape.

This was the first time we would open for Le Tigre. There would be another time after that, and before that second time there would the time we opened for legendary DC band Fugazi. I look back now, twenty years later, and realize the magnitude of these teenage dreams. But at that time, in 2000, I was just trying to keep on, keep on livin’.

We radical cheerlead in our anarchist drag, sarcastically chanting (“eeny meeny miny mo/to the border here we go/will they let you cross? HELL NO!/why not?/cause you’re from MEXICO!”) then jump into the crowd as Kathleen, JD, and Johanna ascend the stage. I scream the lyrics to “Hot Topic,” bouncing up and down, jostling my neighbors:

So many rules and so much opinion
So much bullshit but we won’t give in

Stop, we won’t stop
Don’t you stop
I can’t live if you stop

Then we collectively shout the ancestral rollcall:

Gertrude Stein, Marlon Riggs, Billie Jean King, Ut, DJ Cuttin Candy, David Wojnarowicz, Melissa York, Nina Simone, Ann Peebles, Tammy Hart, The Slits, Hanin Elias, Hazel Dickens, Cathy Sissler, Shirley Muldowney, Urvashi Vaid, Valie Export, Cathy Opie, James Baldwin, Diane Dimassa, Aretha Franklin, Joan Jett, Mia X, Krystal Wakem, Kara Walker, Justin Bond, Bridget Irish, Juliana Lueking, Cecilia Dougherty, Ariel Skrag, The Need, Vaginal Creme Davis, Alice Gerard, Billy Tipton, Julie Doucet, Yayoi Kusama, Eileen Myles

Oh no no no don’t stop stop

Don’t you stop, Vaginal Davis. Don’t you ever stop. I hope you know what you do to the young people just finding out about you in 2020. The worlds you’ll open up. I heard them talking the night of your “Conversations at the Edge” event (“wow…we could never make those kinds of videos now, could we?”). I saw them flock to you after to ask how. I smiled as I walked out of the room because it is their time.

After this I can’t get Davis out of my head. Her energy draws me to another space two weeks later when the AIC hosted a performance in her honor. The BIPOC Punk Takeover show featured mostly Chicago-based Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) punk and hardcore bands including Mermaid N.V., The Breathing Light, and Blacker Face. Organized by Chicago-based collective Black, Brown, and Indigenous Crew, the show served as a contemporary accompaniment to The White to Be Angry. But the BIPOC show also referenced its own local history of Homocore Chicago, a collective founded in the early 1990s. Celebrated for organizing queer punk shows on the regular for about a decade, Homocore Chicago presented diverse artists, including Davis, and helped to make the punk scene less white, less male-dominated, less straight—a legacy that continues today through the Black, Brown, and Indigenous Crew.

Heeding the call, queer, trans and gender-nonconforming folx of all races and ages filled the beautiful Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room that late February night. A space perhaps a bit too grand (“how did we get in here!?” one of the members of Mermaid N.V. remarked, laughingly) and a bit too opulent for the occasion, particularly given recurrent critiques throughout the evening about the disenfranchisement of Black and brown people within capitalist labor. We nevertheless had been welcomed (for free! as many proper punk shows used to be) and had come correct, knowing what this evening meant. It was a meeting and melding of institutions (Homocore Chicago as QTPOC underground foundation represented within the venerable AIC) rife with complications and possibilities. What are the risks for marginalized subcultures and people to be granted visibility or “legitimacy” by renowned power structures? Why such inclusion now? Perhaps seeking communion in the face of such questions, we moved as a pack towards the front of the room. A collage of presumably Homocore Chicago-affiliated bands flickered across the backdrop as two MCs took the stage. The evening began with a land acknowledgement, as well as the requisite February shout-out that “every month is Black history month” before they offered a moving tribute to Davis, testifying to the fact that she created her own scene and in so doing, made space for others too often erased, ignored, and relegated to the margins even within so-called “alternative” culture. “BIPOC to the front!” came the rallying cry, and the show began in all its raucous glory.

I am not BIPOC so I stand back, forming the outer layer encircling the revelers in the pit, a kinship formation as familiar to me as my own body. I grew up in the late 1990s hardcore punk scene. On those velvet black desert nights I conceded to the music—violent in its joy, its fury, its knowledge that it was ours—that kept us coming back to the all-ages, community-owned and run club near nightly. I was always in the outer ring watching the boys colliding with abandon until I wasn’t. I was centered once—all the girls were—in pink hockey masks we danced at the core of the circle and they held us in space. Either position, both positions thrilled me. Vaginal Davis’s legacy holds this feeling eternal. Babyqueers, trans, nonbinary, and femme radicals are at the center with her. Irreverent jokester-artists are at the center with her. BIPOC Chicago, Los Angeles, New York is at the center with her. Enter the darkness of Gallery 186 at the AIC and you’re there.

Davis became a prolific independent filmmaker in the early 1980s. The White to be Angry is her touchstone work, a 19-minute visual album she both wrote and directed satirizing (toxic) masculinity, white supremacy, and the unspeakable desires, such as homosexual attraction, underlying and powering these oppressive ideologies. Although its roots lie in giddy 1990s public access excess (as I watch I can’t help but think of John Moritsugu’s 1993 cult film Terminal USA which satirizes some of the same cultural touchstones, particularly the “pervert in the back bedroom” of the American family), its themes remain as germane as ever. Each song is a chapter, and each chapter parodies a famous filmmaker (Woody Allen, Clive Barker, Bruce LaBruce). Interspersed between is collaged television footage. The title of the piece is taken from Davis’s live performances as well as a musical album her band PME recorded in the mid-1990s with legendary Chicago producer Steve Albini. Likewise, the film’s hardcore/speed metal soundtrack is provided by PME.

The White to Be Angry is Davis’s “definitive declaration on race and class in the US of A.” It is an orgy of gleeful depravity; equal parts disturbing, hilarious, and smart. I sat through it four times on a loop, struck each time by some new visual reference. I was particularly taken when, in the final chapter, one of the skinheads is reading Angela Davis. This reminded me of Chicago Pro-Domme Mistress Velvet who requires her white male clients to read Black feminist theory, a resituating of knowledge production that wrests it from the domain of white male privilege and situates it squarely in Black feminist epistemology. Davis herself stars in this chapter as the film director directing her actors in an illicit gay tryst. “You work with me not against me” she instructs one of the skinheads, zooming in closer, and coos in another scene “he looks so good like this! Oh my God he looks great!”, drawing attention to both the carefully constructed performativity of the skinhead’s look, as well as to the unspeakable erotic attraction to fascist aesthetics, the likes of which Susan Sontag wrote of in “Fascinating Fascism” (1974). So much of this film is uncomfortably ambiguous, inciting the viewer of the late 1990s to consider their repressed ideas and desires. Likewise, it presents a challenge to us watching in today’s era of peak wokeness to consider carefully our inclination to cancel anything vaguely offensive.

Vaginal Davis cares little now, as then, for respectability and propriety. She self-admittedly likes to make her audience uncomfortable and if we don’t get the razorsharp critique embedded in the campiness, it really is our loss. “Davis’s political drag”, wrote the late, great queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, “is about creating an uneasiness in desire, which works to confound and subvert the social fabric.” But as much as her decades of work form this archive of subversion, so too is it a reminder to forge the fabric of collaborative kinship. At the end of her “Conversations at the Edge” event, an audience member asked Davis “what advice would you give a young, queer video and performance artist starting out today? what do you think is necessary for young, queer artists working today to grow a liberated, queer future?” At first Davis replied that she was not sure she is the best person to offer advice because she has always done things in ways that buck tradition. But this is exactly why she is someone we look to.

Davis’s work imagines and enacts alternative ways of living. The night of her Siskel screening she reminded us, “I was very angry, just growing up poor in the inner city. But I was always optimistic, too. I didn’t want to just focus on the anger, although that is necessary.” She then shared with us the story of her mother who defied authority to plant community vegetable gardens in inner-city Los Angeles with which she fed all the neighbors. Her mother’s refusal to capitulate to structures of domination, her will to define the contours of her own life, is always with Davis. She has long led the way, showing us how to use biomythography and myriad processes of radical artmaking to propagate care and joie de vivre in an atmosphere of fear and rage and uncertainty. Urging us to “stay close to people who you find connection with, as lifelines, as mentors”, she ended the night offering to be one of those people, committing, in the most generous, genuine manner, to write handwritten letters to those of us who write to her. I just might send her this piece. We have no choice but to continue her legacy, to surprise and shock ourselves into such innovative thrival. We must find, in Davis’s words, “our own mode of production with collaborators and supporters and friends, with people who we trust, and who we love.”

**Editor’s note: Amidst the ongoing coronavirus epidemic, the Art Institute of Chicago is currently closed temporarily. Davis’s exhibition The White to be Angry was scheduled to be on view until April 26th; the museum has indicated that all exhibition dates are subject to change. In the meantime, you can find more information about the exhibition here, and learn more about Davis by visiting her website.

Featured Image: Photograph by Alice Bag distributed under a CC-BY 2.0 license.

 

Kirin Wachter-Grene is Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She teaches and writes about African American literature and gender and sexuality.