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.

 

On March 6th, legendary jazz pianist McCoy Tyner transitioned. To commemorate Tyner’s life and work, we’re temporarily granting free access to our 1970 interview with him. Readers can download the PDF here.

 

Going Imperial inaugurates the fiftieth volume of The Black Scholar. The issue serves as both a testament to the journal’s longevity and a meditation on the Black intellectual tradition that serves as its raison d’être. At the center of this volume is Jeffrey C. Stewart’s The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, winner of the 2018 National Book Award and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Both Stewart and Locke’s work mark monumental contributions to the Black Studies project(s), serving as embodiments of where the field has been—even before its institutionalization in the late 1960s—and where it stands to go.

After Editor-in-Chief Louis Chude-Sokei starts the conversation with a provocative question of whether or not Black Studies has “gone imperial,” Stephanie Leigh Batiste opens up the forum on The New Negro by chatting with the book’s author. Over the course of the conversation Batiste and Stewart touch on wide-range of topics, including the book itself, long-form modes of study and research, and questions of Black masculinity, Black Studies, and Black sexualities.

Contributors Cheryl Wall, Gilbert NMO Morris, and Terrance Wooten each put Stewart’s The New Negro under critical scrutiny. Wall—a first rate scholar of the Harlem Renaissance in her own right—raises questions about Locke’s troubling relationship with several notable women of the movement, while also taking stock of the “extraordinary achievement” of Stewart’s biography.

Morris pushes us to map the terrain of Locke’s foreign policy influence, reminding us that Locke was both the product of and advocate for a broader Black World. According to Morris, such advocacy “rooted his [Locke’s] foreign policy concepts in the experience of displacement, subjugation and marginalization of the negro.” In this respect, Locke fits in a longer genealogy of Blacks in American foreign policy who attempted to center “human value as a recognition and commitment to the acclaimed values of the West.”

Wooten draws on Black queer Studies and “queer of color” critique to interrogate Locke’s complicated queer life. He encourages us to reckon with the troubling relationship between value and geography, while also coming to terms with “the limitations of any Black sexual politics that relies on class ascension/mobility as its primary way of conceptualizing freedom or belonging.”

Finally, Mathew Omelsky steps away from Stewart’s book and instead draws our attention to Zimbabwean novelist NoViolet Buluwayo’s novel, We Need New Names. Omelsky’s work is motivated by a desire to both think through and expand the limitations of Black Studies’ recent discourse on “fugitivity.” He asks, what do notions of fugitivity—raised by scholars like Fred Moten, Jared Sexton, and Saidiya Hartman—have to say about Black folk beyond the boundaries of the United States. And, more importantly, how can African literary studies expand and trouble prevailing theorizations of fugitivity in Black Studies.

Not to be overlooked, South African artist, Pola Maneli’s Slumflower serves as the cover art for the issue. Like Locke, Stewart, Omelsky, and the rest of the contributors to this volume, Maneli’s work is animated by the ever-vexing questions of Black racial identity—how it’s constructed, (mis)understood, disseminated, and essentialized. Maneli’s work reminds us that even the best, and most well-meaning, attempts at defining and representing  “the race” seem to fall short, revealing instead the limitations of our own observations.

 

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For a limited time, access the introduction and “Intellect, Art, Culture: Legacies of The New Negro; A Forum on Jeffrey C. Stewart’s Biography of Alain Locke.”

Subscribe to our 50th anniversary volume here. Personal subscriptions are $41 USD. Volume 51 includes the above issue, plus At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure, part one of 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, look for Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, Other Black Independent Cinema, and more . . .

 

Please read the attached letter to Harvard’s president in opposition to the recent denial of tenure to Dr. Lorgia García Peña. This letter specifically outlines the relevance of Dr García Peña’s work to the study of global Black literatures and cultures. Many of you will recall her brilliant article in the TBS special issue on “Dominican Black Studies” (2015), which the editorial board recognized as one of its top five articles from that year.

If you would like to add your signature, please email Raj Chetty at rchetty@sdsu.edu and include your full name, job title(s), and institutional affiliation. Please also feel free to pass this letter along to others you think would be amenable to adding their names.

In solidarity,

Raj Chetty, PhD
Assistant Professor, Black Literature & Culture
English & Comparative Literature
San Diego State University
Co-editor (with Amaury Rodriguez), “Dominican Black Studies,” The Black Scholar (2015)

 

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December 10, 2019

President Lawrence S. Bacow
Office of the President
Harvard University
Massachusetts Hall
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: (617) 495-1502
Email: president@harvard.edu

Dear President Bacow,

We submit this letter in response to the decision to deny tenure to Dr. Lorgia García Peña. As scholars in Black Studies, we research and teach about the long histories of activist-intellectual work that undergirds all social change, including but not limited to changes in higher education. We understand the importance of linking national and international movements for social change to the development of social theories, histories, and art that respond to and build from these movements. We recognize that this work is part of Harvard’s own history, as the coming year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Department of African and African American Studies (AAAS) , emerging from Civil Rights struggle, Black struggle, and the momentous events of 1968, particularly on campuses across the United States, and globally.

It is clear to us that Dr. García Peña’s work is part of the long struggle against anti-blackness and for a more just world. While her scholarship has a clear relevance for Ethnic Studies, Latinx Studies, and Caribbean Studies, we see her work’s deep relevance for Black Studies, especially at this conjuncture in which Blackness and Latinidad rises to prominence at the intersecting interdisciplinary fields of Latinx Studies and Black Studies. As the work of Arturo Schomburg, Nicolás Guillén, and Ana Livia Cordero makes clear, international alliances between Blacks in the U.S. and in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean have a long and storied history. However, we see the current intellectual moment as one in which a global Black Studies is re-emergent, with particular attention to relations between and among Afro-Latinxs and Blacks in the U.S., Blacks in Latin America and the Caribbean, and Blacks in Europe. Dr. García Peña is at the forefront of scholarship attending to studies of the inter-cultural relations between Blacks in these different sites of the diaspora, and her work is of international renown. In denying her tenure, Harvard has failed to see the import of her rigorously comparative and globally attuned study of Black creative cultures.

Dr. García Peña’s work is generative not merely for attention to Black cultural relations, but also for the way it brings together landmark theories that often remain in the silos that narrow the scope of interdisciplinary Ethnic Studies scholarship. For instance, in her book, The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction, she bridges Gloria Anzaldúa’s theories of the border/lands with the particular configuration of the border as it developed over the 19th and 20th centuries in the island that is today Haiti and the Dominican Republic and the symbolic border established across imperial lines between the U.S. and the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic and Haiti, both of which were at the center of Black-led revolutionary and anti-colonial liberation movements in the Age of Revolutions, deserve more attention in Black Studies. Again, Dr. García Peña is at the cutting edge of this much-needed reorientation, intervening simultaneously in two fields: (1) reconceptualizing the concept of the border by extending from Chicano/a and Latinx Studies to the Caribbean and the cradle of enslavement, marronage, and Black revolution in Hispaniola, Santo Domingo, and Saint Domingue, and (2) re-orientating Black Studies toward the Dominican Republic and Haiti, in relation, and with attention to the way borders map onto Black lives.

In her forthcoming monograph, she brilliantly conceptualizes the vaivén (“coming and going”) of blackness that structures Black migrants’ lives today—from the Dominican Republic to the U.S., to Italy, and to Spain. This is a crucial and laudatory addition to global Black Studies and promises to transform the field. Her initial work for this book was published in The Black Scholar, one of the leading Black Studies journals, established in the late 1960s context of radical Black struggle. The Black Scholar’s editorial board named her 2015 essay one of its top five essays from among the four issues published that year, a remarkable achievement considering the caliber of the journal in the field of Black Studies.

In this way, Dr. García Peña is a national leader in addressing the intersections between blackness, migration, and immigration status in the United States and globally. In addition to a stellar and internationally resounding publication record, her work has included institution building for communities historically marginalized by white supremacy in and out of the university, the kind of work that promises to transform students’ experiences. We need not say too much about her efforts at Harvard, because you know this record. We want to stress, however, her work in co-founding Freedom University in Georgia in 2011, in the immediate wake of legislation there that restricted undocumented students’ access to university study. This work foregrounds her ability to create sustainable collaborations to address contemporary systems that create and maintain oppressive conditions for marginalized people, and at Harvard she has continued to combine research, pedagogy, and service work in liberatory institution building. Her work is part and parcel of what Harvard will celebrate next year in the 50th anniversary of AAAS. It is no small irony that Harvard has denied tenure to someone who has been actively involved in the kind of institution building that descends directly from Black struggle within higher education and against the white supremacy that plagues it.

We express solidarity with the disappointment about Dr. García Peña’s tenure denial expressed through letters and statements, direct action, and on news and social media. We add our voices to the thousands of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, Harvard alumni, activists, and others opposed to the denial of tenure to Dr. García Peña because her research and publication record, institutional and professional service, and teaching are exemplary. What is more, we are concerned about what this denial says about Harvard’s stated commitment to pursuing diversity, inclusivity, and social justice, through hiring in Ethnic Studies and corresponding curricular change. Finally, we see this decision as detrimental to the critical intellectual and social justice work that Ethnic Studies does and can do, at Harvard and more broadly.

Sincerely,

Leslie Alexander
Associate Professor, Department of History
University of Oregon
Immediate Past President, Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora
Executive Board, National Council for Black Studies

Beverly Araujo Johnson
Professor and Director of Online MSW program, Social Work
Adelphi University

Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez
Professor, Department of African and African American Studies
Chair, Department of Latin American and Caribbean Languages and Cultures
Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
University of Texas at Austin

Sophia Azeb
Provost Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English Language & Literature
University of Chicago

Davarian Baldwin
Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies
Trinity College

Keisha Blain
Associate Professor of History
University of Pittsburgh
2019-2020 W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow, Harvard University
President, African American Intellectual History Society

Melissa M. Blanco Borelli
Associate Professor, School of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies
Associated Director, International Program for Creative Collaboration and Research
University of Maryland
President, Dance Studies Association (2019-2021)

Kimberly Blockett
Associate Professor of English
Penn State University, Brandywine

Adrienne Brown
Associate Professor of English
University of Chicago

Charisse Burden-Stelly
Assistant Professor, Africana Studies and Political Science
Carleton College

Christopher Cameron
Associate Professor of History
University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Ginetta Candelario
Professor of Sociology and Latin American & Latina/o Studies
Smith College
Editor, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism

Ben Carrington
Associate Professor of Sociology and Journalism
University of Southern California

Claudia Castañeda
Senior Scholar-in-Residence, Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies
Emerson College

Manu Samriti Chander
Associate Professor of English
Rutgers University-Newark

Raj Chetty
Assistant Professor of Black Literature and Culture, Department of English & Comparative Literature
San Diego State University

Laura Chrisman
Professor, Nancy K. Ketcham Endowed Chair of English
University of Washington
Publisher of The Black Scholar Journal

Kwami Coleman
Assistant Professor, Gallatin School of Individualized Study
New York University

Deirdre Cooper Owens
The Charles and Linda Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine & Director of the Humanities in Medicine Program
Department of History
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Director, Program in African American History at The Library Company of Philadelphia

Kaysha Corinealdi
Assistant Professor of History, Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies
Emerson College

Aimee Meredith Cox
Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies
Yale University

Collin Craig
Associate Professor, English Department
Hunter College

Michaeline Crichlow
Professor of Caribbean and Global Studies, African and African American Studies, and Sociology
Senior Research Fellow, Kenan Institute for Ethics
Duke University

Christina Davidson
Postdoctoral Fellow, Charles Warren Center
Harvard University

Zaire Z. Dinzey-Flores
Associate Professor, Departments of Sociology and Latino & Caribbean Studies
Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Jessie D. Dixon-Montgomery
Associate Professor of Spanish, Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Illinois Wesleyan University

Erica R. Edwards
Associate Professor of English
Presidential Term Chair in African American Literature
Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Ashley D. Farmer
Assistant Professor, History and African & African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas at Austin

Denise Ferreira da Silva
Professor & Director, Social Justice Institute-GRSJ
University of British Columbia

Yomaira Figueroa
Assistant Professor, Departments of English and African American & African Studies
Michigan State University

P. Gabrielle Foreman
Founding Director, the Colored Conventions Program
Paterno Chair of Liberal Arts, Professor of English, African American Studies, and History
Penn State University

Marisa J. Fuentes
Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and History
Presidential Term Chair in African American History
Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Colette Gaiter
Professor, Department of Art & Design and Africana Studies (Joint Faculty)
University of Delaware

Mneesha Gellman
Associate Professor of Political Science
Director, Emerson Prison Initiative
Emerson College

Nigel Gibson
Associate Professor, Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies
Emerson College

Kaiama Glover
Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies
Director, Digital Humanities Center
Barnard College, Columbia University
Editor, sx archipelagos

Katerina González-Seligmann
Assistant Professor of Literature
Emerson College

Camilla A. Hawthorne
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
University of California, Santa Cruz

Laura E. Helton
Assistant Professor of English and History
University of Delaware
Scholar-in-Residence, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (2019/20)

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
Chair, Department of History
Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Roger House
Associate Professor in American Studies
Emerson College
Yasmiyn Irizarry, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas at Austin

Régine Michelle Jean-Charles
Associate Professor of French, Department of Romance Languages & Literatures
African & African Diaspora Studies Program
Boston College

Mónica Jiménez
Assistant Professor, Department of African and African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas at Austin

Miriam Jiménez-Román
Executive Director, Afrolatin@ Forum
Black Latinas Know Collective

Jessica Marie Johnson
Assistant Professor, Department of History
Johns Hopkins University

Sarah Jessica Johnson
Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English
University of Chicago

Gaye Theresa Johnson
Associate Professor, Departments of Chicana and Chicano Studies and African American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

Tiffany Joseph
Associate Professor of Sociology and International Affairs
Northeastern University
Ford Foundation Senior Fellow

Helen Heran Jun
Associate Professor, Departments of English and African American Studies
University of Illinois, Chicago

Aaron Kamugisha
Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies
University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus

Robin D. G. Kelley
Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History
University of California, Los Angeles

Natalie Marie Léger
Assistant Professor of English
Chair of the English Honors Program
Queens College, CUNY

George Lipsitz
Professor of Black Studies and Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Hilda Lloréns
Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Rhode Island

Nancy López
Professor of Sociology
Director & Co-founder, Institute for the Study of “Race” & Social Justice
University of New Mexico
Coordinator, NM Statement Race, Gender, Class Data Policy Consortium

Kelly Lytle Hernandez
Professor of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning
The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair of History
Director, Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA
University of California, Los Angeles
Director, Million Dollar Hoods

Rosario M. de Swanson
Professor of Spanish, Latin American Literature & Gender Studies
Marlboro College

Nelson Maldonado-Torres
Professor, Latino and Caribbean Studies and Comparative Literature
Director, Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies
Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Yolanda Martínez San-Miguel
Professor and Chair, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
Marta S. Weeks Chair in Latin American Studies
University of Miami

Brian Meeks
Professor and Chair, Africana Studies / Rites and Reason Theatre
Brown University

Shirley Moody-Turner
Associate Professor of English and African American Studies
Co-Director, Center for Black Digital Research
Founding Director, Cooper-Du Bois Mentoring Program
Penn State University

Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Professor of History, Race and Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University

Yasser Munif
Assistant Professor, Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies
Emerson College

Pedro Noguera
Distinguished Professor of Education
Faculty Director, Center for the Transformation of Schools
UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

Tavia Nyong’o
Professor, African American Studies; American Studies; Theater and Performance Studies
Yale University

Imani Owens
Assistant Professor of English
Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard
Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English Language and Literature
University of Chicago

Tina Post
Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English Language and Literature
University of Chicago

Rachel Afi Quinn
Assistant Professor, Comparative Cultural Studies and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies
University of Houston

R. Radhakrishnan
Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literature and African American Studies
University of California, Irvine

Ana Ramos-Zayas
Professor, Departments of American Studies and Anthropology, and Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration
Yale University

Barbara Ransby
Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Departments of African American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies and History
University of Illinois at Chicago

Petra Rivera-Rideau
Assistant Professor, American Studies Program
Wellesley College

Cindy Rodriguez
Senior Journalist-in-Residence
Emerson College

Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva
Giovanni and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor in History
Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean History, Department of History
University of Washington

Alaí Santos-Reyes
Associate Professor, Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies
University of Oregon

Evie Shockley
Professor, Department of English
Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Kimberly Eison Simmons
Associate Professor, Anthropology and African American Studies
Interim Director, Institute for African American Research
University of South Carolina, Columbia

Christen A. Smith
Director, Center for Women’s & Gender Studies
Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and of Anthropology
University of Texas at Austin

Maya Angela Smith
Associate Professor of French
University of Washington

Faith Smith
Associate Professor, African and African American Studies; English; Latin American and Latino Studies; Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies
Brandeis University

Chris Taylor
Associate Professor, Department of English
University of Chicago

Silvio Torres-Saillant
Professor of English & Dean’s Professor of the Humanities
Syracuse University

Anwar Uhuru
Assistant Professor of English, African American Literature
Monmouth University

Gina Athena Ulysse
Professor of Anthropology
Wesleyan University
2020 Biennale of Sydney Artist

Melissa M. Valle
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Department of African American and African Studies
Rutgers University, Newark

Wendy W. Walters
Professor, African American Literature & Culture, Writing, Literature, & Publishing Department
Emerson College

Calvin Warren
Assistant Professor, African American Studies
Emory University

Cornel West
Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy
Department of Philosophy
Harvard Divinity School
Department of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Omaris Z. Zamora
Assistant Professor of AfroLatinx Studies, Department of Latino & Caribbean Studies and Department of Africana Studies
Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Cc:
Provost Alan M. Garber, Harvard University, alan_garber@harvard.edu
Dean Claudine Gay, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, fasdean@fas.harvard.edu
Dean Robin Kelsey, Arts & Humanities Division, Harvard University, kelsey@fas.harvard.edu
Professor Mariano Siskind, Chair, Romance Languages and Literatures, siskind@fas.harvard.edu

 

Cover art by Delita Martin

Black Performance I: Subject and Method collects research that shows how performance can act as an optic and object of study. The authors’ diverse subjects reveal resonances of the past in performance in music and movement, poetry, media, art, museums, memory, and thought. The research in Black Performance II: Knowing and Being further demonstrates the ways performances in various genres contemplate and structure ways of knowing and ways of being as systems entangled in embodiments and critical interactivity. In this, women scholars identify performers’ diverse strategies for making meaning and remaking inherited knowledge. These scholars discover performance structures of Black feminist love in the work of various artists.

The performances reflect on new ways of being as much as the scholars who analyze them. Each performance also forges new ways of being that address how we understand, and perhaps feel, blackness, gender, transnational womanhood, community, sexuality, and history. The communities invoked develop common language and sensibility through aesthetics, speech, and writing. Several articles foreground the ways in which people work through ideas together in an enactment of community recognition. This occurs through relationships to form, through conversation, choreography, and writing. Melissa Blanco Borelli reveals Black transnational artists structure as radical presence through musical performance practices. Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson reveals dancers’ choreographic collaborative work founded on sharing spoken memories and stories as a process of “tenderness.” Shana L. Redmond experiments with collaborative and contrapuntal writing practices between Hansberry and Baldwin as negotiating a terrain of sound. Redmond explores the quotidian elements of sound as form—sound from the neighborhood as much as from music.

At times, the performers shape ideas with their audiences as interlocutor. In Aleksandra Szaniawska’s essay, Janelle Monae narrates queer possibilities via performances that find greater resonance before live and constructed audiences. In Rashida Braggs’s piece, our author as performer, addresses the nature of audiences’ hearing of history. Braggs brings performative ontology to the page to play with text as a conduit between thought, knowledge-making, performance, blackness, the body, music, and history. She recounts a performance she created as an investigation of Sidney Bechet’s performance of Gershwin’s “Summertime,” itself a layered enactment of historical consciousness. Braggs’s endeavor reflects the investigative and pedagogical directions of research as embodied practice.

Artist Delita Martin’s cover to this issue, “If Spirits Danced” poses a possibility echoed by our authors. With a quotidian boldness, the direct gaze of a Black girl in blue calmly engages and challenges. She ventures a hypothesis of lively possibility in her provocative titular “if” alongside an embedded invitation to do so, to dance in spirit and gesture.

 

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For a limited time, read the introduction by guest editor Stephanie Batiste, and “Of Treads and Thunder: The Insurgent Listening of Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin” by Shana L. Redmond, for free.

Support The Black Scholar by subscribing to print and digital issues here.

Our 2020 volume, which is also our 50th anniversary volume, is slated to include…

• At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure
• Black Girls and Girlhood I
• What Was Black Studies?
• And more…

The following is the projected content for our 2021 and 2022 volumes…

• Black Privacy (read the CFP)
• Caribbean Global Movements
• Black Girls and Girlhood II
• Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades (read the CFP)
• And more…

Cover art by Delita Martin

This first of a two-part Special Issue on Black Performance samples diverse subjects and methodologies, ranging from theater and dance to art installation, music, literature, film, digital images, and social interaction. Edited by Stephanie Leigh Batiste, this issue positions Black performance as a site for solidifying the prescience and critical sharpness of Black creativity in shaping knowledge and sensibilities. In the ways that the contributors featured study performance, we see the past brought to bear to redefine what we know about history and Black histories in particular. In each essay, the author’s mode of analysis asks us to imagine how our present moment is or might be remade by the performances studied and by their performers’ exhortations towards proliferating ways of understanding blackness.

Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Francesca Negro introduce a lost archival folder that details a radical play written in Portuguese. This essay substantiates a hemispheric history of choreographic narrative in the lives of iconic dancers — Brazilian Solano Trinidade and American Alvin Ailey.

Sasha Ann Panaram analyzes poetry and post-modern performance in M. NourbeSe Philip’s textual and performative re-memory of the middle passage’s Zong massacre. The absented bodies of enslaved, murdered Africans become memorialized in writing, breath, and embodied art installation.

Christina Knight evaluates Black performances’ visual resonances in Arthur Jafa’s jazz-inflected film strategies in Love is the Message The Message is Death. She considers viewership, visual representation, and Black social performance in historically and digitally viral images.

Isaiah Matthew Wooden riffs on the historical sampling of memory in the performance practices of artist Derrick Adams’ ostensibly fine arts repertoire. Looping the terms repertoire, representing, representation, repetition (and, perhaps, reputation) in the hip hop idea of “reppin’,” Wooden’s deejay format spins beats of memory through Adams remixing of history.

DJ Lynée Denise presents a listener’s archeology of the song “Rock Steady” to sound our way through a musical legacy of soul. Denise moves in unruly genealogies against the grief of our loss of Aretha Franklin, a sonic shaper of Black feeling.

Redeployments of Black performances resound visually and sonically in these performers’ and scholars’ recombination of memory, feeling, and time. Artist Delita Martin’s cover “New Beginnings” places a mask, perhaps of ritual or theatrical mediation, in the company of a non-linear exchange of intergenerational looking and encounter. Our scholars follow suit. Their approaches mix a critical engagement with the past with systems of knowing and feeling blackness in creative critical conversations with the artists.

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For a limited time, the introduction and DJ Lynée Denise’s “The Afterlife of Aretha Franklin’s “Rock Steady:” A Case Study in DJ Scholarship” are free to download and read. Keep an eye out for our upcoming final issue for 2019, Black Performance 2.

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Our 2020 volume, which is also our 50th anniversary volume, is slated to include…

• At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure
• Black Girls and Girlhood I
• What Was Black Studies?
• And more…

The following is the projected content for our 2021 volume…

• Black Privacy (read the CFP here)
• Caribbean Global Movements
• Black Girls and Girlhood II
• And more…