Understanding Blackness through Performance: Contemporary Arts and the Representation of Identity

By Anne Cremieux

How does the performance of blackness reframe issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality? Here, the contributors look into representational practices in film, literature, fashion, and theatre and explore how they have fleshed out political struggles, while recognizing that they have sometimes maintained the mechanisms of violence against blacks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Oct 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781137313805

Book preview

Understanding Blackness through Performance

Contemporary Arts and the Representation of Identity

Edited by

Anne Crémieux, Xavier Lemoine, and Jean-Paul Rocchi

UNDERSTANDING BLACKNESS THROUGH PERFORMANCE

Copyright © Anne Crémieux, Xavier Lemoine, and Jean-Paul Rocchi, 2013.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2013 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®

in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN: 978–1–137–32507–5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Understanding blackness through performance : contemporary arts and the representation of identity / edited by Anne Crémieux, Xavier Lemoine, and Jean-Paul Rocchi.

   pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–1–137–32507–5 (alk. paper)

 1. Blacks in the performing arts. 2. Blacks—Race identity. 3. Race awareness. I. Crémieux, Anne editor of compilation. II. Lemoine, Xavier editor of compilation. III. Rocchi, Jean-Paul editor of compilation.

PN1590.B53U53 2013

792.089′96073—dc23                            2013019245

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

First edition: October 2013

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction   Black Beings, Black Embodyings: Notes on Contemporary Artistic Performances and Their Cultural Interpretations

Jean-Paul Rocchi with Anne Crémieux and Xavier Lemoine

Notes on Contributors

Index

Illustrations

Introduction

Black Beings, Black Embodyings: Notes on Contemporary Artistic Performances and Their Cultural Interpretations

Jean-Paul Rocchi with Anne Crémieux and Xavier Lemoine

In the aftermath of the Black States of Desire Conference,¹ Understanding Blackness through Performance: Contemporary Arts and the Representation of Identity explores how the representations of race, gender, and sexuality participate in a reconceptualization of identity through transdisciplinary practices. The performance of blackness remains a challenge as the arts evolve and raise new questions of representations. Resistance and redeployment strategies inform the world of black theater, performance, and theory, generating a multiplicity of positions from an intersectional perspective. Obviously, such a quest is not predicated on the fantasy that it is possible, or even desirable, to achieve a total representation of black identity. On the contrary, our goal is to look into representational practices that have fleshed out political struggles, while recognizing that they have sometimes maintained the mechanisms of violence against blacks (Bentson 2000: 4), be it symbolically, institutionally, historically, or socially (Johnson 2003: 4). These practices have opened up new territories that require scrutiny today.

If representation is always already a misrepresentation, it remains crucial to study how the performances of blackness are created by simultaneously taking apart the processes of figuration and the way they distort their subject. This raises not only questions about the conditions of representation, but also of its incalculable effects. In bringing down the barriers between disciplinary fields, it is necessary to question the very essence of the construction of knowledge through set categories. Artistic and critical discourses repeatedly attempt to deconstruct disciplinary approaches. In a sense, they are defined by this subversive gesture. Refusing the soothing illusion of closure and assuming the uneasy posture of instability generates new ways of understanding blackness and new analyses of performance within the cultural networks of representation. By exploring diverse cultural terrains, the performance of blackness reframes the issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality to forge new paradigms.

This collection of essays focuses on performances that explore the multiple facets of past and present blackness. It spans from historic black figures, including Josephine Baker, to contemporary anonymous queer performers in drag balls. This ample time frame is completed by a varied sample of media, involving literary works, films, visual arts, and numerous types of performances. Such practices are expanded in the theorizing of intersectional desires between race and sex, displayed in musical traditions (jazz and hip-hop) and corporeal representations (video and theater). From ancient rituals, black vaudeville, and dance, to the cyber circulation of black desire, the performance of history blurs chronological lines and opens up time and space. As a result, radical reconfigurations arise from embracing multiple positionalities, through cross-identifications such as queer black masculinities or womanist queer spiritualities.

Racialized, gendered, and sexualized bodies are central to this collection of essays, as they cut across discourses to reframe desire and identity. They embody the possibility of being intimately, socially, historically, and culturally transformed. The issue is not to assert the right black body or identity, but to create a space and time where the black body can appear, disappear, and mutate, echoing the performance’s own destiny, oscillating between the real and the phantasmatic (Phelan 1997: 3). Artistic performances question the category of blackness so as to locate silences, expound desire, and continuously reconfigure the way meanings are negotiated on the cultural stage. As such, performance is also defined by reception and interpretation, resulting from a power struggle that must ensure their viability as fractious identities.

This book intends to contribute to a further understanding of blackness as both the expressions of one’s being black and the racializing discourses that generate the otherwise nonexistent category of race. This contextualist position is the most appropriate to look at the cultural variations of racial beliefs and practices while acknowledging their contingency and uncertainty, as Linda Martín Alcoff claims in her book Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self, and more particularly in the chapter The Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment (2006: 182–183). At the same time, our approach is both objectivist, as it analyzes metanarratives of historical experiences and cultural traditions, and subjectivist, as it values microinteractions and individual microprocesses of subjectivization through which racialization occurs. This stand is reflected in four parts, which alternate between general and specific approaches, encouraging the cross-pollination between contextualist, objectivist, and subjectivist positions.

Black Being, Black Embodying: The Power of Auto-ethnography

E. Patrick Johnson’s exploration of blackness and authenticity helps frame contemporary reflections on auto-ethnography. Johnson explains how his book is based on personal experiences, thoughts and experiences (Johnson 11). The risks and effects of this methodology are pellucidly envisioned in his introduction: In the process I expose my vulnerability as ethnographer as well as my active participation in the making of the ethnographic text—indeed, how, I, too, produce, authorize, and even authenticate blackness (Johnson 11). This theoretical self-awareness is the result of a long-term form of resistance, which could hark back to Du Bois’s double consciousness and, more recently, was staged in the mid-1970s by Ntozake Shange’s choreopoetry—which constitutes the backdrop of Myron Beasley auto-ethnographical praxis. Shange’s play diffracted how black women’s lived experiences became visible through various spaces—from women’s studies departments to bars and cafés (Shange 1975: xiii). Fighting against invisibility still requires today a sense of public and private reflection on the embodiment of blackness. In this first section of the book, auto-ethnographic speculations and the epistemological consequences of observation and participation help address the contemporary challenges of African American scholarship and how it is enmeshed in the production of blackness. Auto-ethnography, performance ethnography, and narratives are deployed by Beasley, Taylor, and Baldwin, as they ground blackness in a practice that embraces lived experiences, hard-won truths, and redefining gestures.

Myron Beasley, in his chapter entitled Each Taking Risk, Performing Self: Theorizing (Dis)Narratives, takes up the latest criticism on auto-ethnography and expands it in order to transform blackness through what he calls (dis)narratives. This practice draws on the reassessment of ethnographic writing and the questions of positionality raised by anthropology. Consequently, Beasley addresses the generic relation between textual performance/performativeness and embodied phenomena to emphasize, along with contemporary theorists such as Dwight Conquergood or Paul Stoller, the dialogical performance of black cultures—that which transforms at once the object, the subject, and the discipline.

Beasley adds to the debate by unearthing early (dis)narratives by major female African American figures: Zora Neale Hurston and Ntozake Shange. Their subversion of white hegemonic narratives through interdisciplinary practices that blurred social sciences and art created a space for blackness to exist. Indeed, their performance of blackness was based on lived experiences theorized through writing and acting. Beasley measures up to this challenge by practicing what he preaches, so as to confront the tensions and dangers of lived knowledge played out in an academic essay. His own (dis)narrative expounds a lived experience of blackness that cuts across race, gender, and identity, but also that questions dichotomies such as local and global, past and present, public and private, education and introspection. Similarly, Taylor and Baldwin ground their work in daily experiences, as they both rely on Womanism to explore the practice and meaning of cross-dressing in African American communities. They each argue, in their own ways, for a queering of Womanism, religion, and blackness, to supplement human beings’ ability to welcome diversity.

In Transformative Womanist Rhetorical Strategies: Contextualizing Discourse and the Performance of Black Bodies of Desire, Taylor adopts Womanist methodology to tackle transgender performances of black women. Through micronarratives, Taylor reflects on her gradual consciousness and understanding of drag queens. She offers a Womanist reading of what other famous feminist and queer scholars have discussed at length (Butler 1990, 1993; Tyler 1991) and generously revises fixity, which can be attached to essentialist positions, challenging not only her own perceptions, but also Womanism itself. Within that framework, in a subpart entitled ‘My Own Self On It’: Authentic Womanist Voice in Drag, she defends convincingly that the authentic voice is a process of self discovery and narrative construction whereby the author/speaker/performer authenticate their own narrative within their own bodies. In the end, her journey weaves theory and practice, self and community, with a view to retracing the steps that construct a certain awareness of the expansive nature of blackness. She aptly contributes, then, to the discussion aired by Patrick E. Johnson, where he problematized blackness and the politics of authenticity (Johnson 1–16). Baldwin joins in the conversation in the next chapter.

In ‘Is Anybody Walkin?’: The Black Body on the Runway as a Performance of the Politics of Desire, Gayle Baldwin combines Womanist reflections to detailed readings of public events featuring two central yet radically different performances of blackness: a mass and a drag ball. Baldwin’s careful analysis uncovers the implications of these performances and blurs disciplinary distinctions between artistic and spiritual works. She relies on a method based upon her subjectivity, pondering the implications of her white queer gaze in the critical examination of the performativeness of black queer bodies in the black Church and in Newark drag balls. Intersecting racial, sexual, and gender-related (dis)identifications, Baldwin’s reflections on positionality take on an auto-ethnographic coloration also found in Toniesha L. Taylor’s chapter, partly inspired by the critical insights of Bryant Keith Alexander. Baldwin suggests various ways in which the embodiment of blackness remains highly contentious in the United States and she wonders which community rituals best address lethal homophobic and racist violence (such as in the case of Sakia Gunn’s murder): the sermon or the runway. Characteristically, the author connects the Gospel house and the drag balls houses by drawing a comparison with house slaves and field slaves, suggesting that the slave run(a)ways find their contemporary versions in the bodies walking the runways of the drag balls. This analogy is supported by the fact that the drag ball walkers are rejected by society and driven to start new families as a form of survival and creative resistance. Ultimately, without rejecting the significance of the black Church, Baldwin wonders whether blackness—and its future—is not to be found more in the underground spaces of the queer black and Latino communities rather than in the sermonette of an A. M. E. Wednesday service.

The three chapters of this section raise numerous and stimulating questions about the meaning and efficiency of the performance of self-narratives and their role in defining contemporary blackness. Does Womanism transform itself into a more inclusive theory by including drag queens, thus illustrating a sense of blackness based on inclusion despite the limits already experienced by previous umbrella movements? Can cross-dressing be understood as a specific or generic mode of transformation? What does the drag queen transform into? Does a drag queen, by listening to her true voice, merely transform into her true self, as Taylor suggests, thus running the danger of being caught in a circular logic? The lack of a clear sense of direction (What does one transform into? To what purpose?) does not belittle the immense potential of transformative power and subversive narrations. The forms and goals of these transformations, as they extend to film and visual arts, remain to be seen and teased out. This is what the next section proposes to do by opening new lines of inquiry and by looking at the mirroring of blackness in the onlooker’s eye.

Shattered Frames and the Onlooker: Strategies and Significations

It is precisely through the perspective of the onlooker that the theoretical frame of the performance of blackness is being shattered. On the American side of the Atlantic, the emphasis is laid upon the dialogical dimension. Following, among others, Dwight Conquergood, Soyini D. Madison, and Paul Stoller, while influenced by the good fortune of key concepts such as performativity (Reinelt 2002: 207), contemporary scholarship has tended to focus on the performer and on the cultural and cross-cultural conditions of production (Conquergood 1985), establishing a dialogical performance between performer and cultural content, which the opening chapters exemplify. Meanwhile, on the European side of the Atlantic, the mirror image of this dialogical performance is theatricality, a concept inherited from the tradition of theater, and which rather centers on the viewer and on aesthetics.

Shattered Frames and the Onlooker: Strategies and Significations reunites the dialogical and theatricality in order to examine the intriguing and multifaceted question of perception in terms of performer and viewer, but also of message and medium. The point is therefore to analyze the ways these conceptual and artistic dyads framing the performance of blackness can be disturbed by such a critical enquiry.

Dealing with 1930s black women vaudeville, Kara Walker’s cutouts, art-house, and commercial cinema, the four chapters gathered in this part investigate, often from a transatlantic perspective, the primary function of perception in the construction of performance. The relevance of the notion of theatricality is explained by Janelle Reinelt in her essay The Politics of Discourse: Performativity Meets Theatricality, where she pays tribute to theater scholar Josette Féral. Féral explains:

Theatricality is a condition in which a certain cleavage in space opens up where the spectator looks to engage and to create the theatrical. Outside of the everyday, or rather a breach in it (brisure, clivage), this space of theatricality requires both the gaze of the spectator and the act of the other, but the initiative lies with the spectator . . . Féral claims that theatricality is a dynamic of perception, creating between the spectator and the one looked at (the actor) the special condition of theatricality. (Reinelt 207)

Féral pursues her analysis by arguing that for the spectator, theatricality comes close to an experience of otherness, an otherness in which he/she exists only as an external gaze (ibid.).

But what happens when that gaze cannot be external, when the experience of otherness, the othering process, is hampered by the viewer’s (and/or the performer’s) inescapable sociocultural condition of already being seen as the other? What is then the purpose, if not the pertinence, of these brisure(s), clivage(s), and breaks? Can there be a dynamic of perception, transformative of space, without a cleansing of the onlooker’s eye/I and imagination? This is a crucial point that Alcoff strongly defends:

Unveiling the steps that are now attenuated and habitual will force a recognition of one’s agency in reconfiguring a postural body image or a habitual perception. Noticing the way in which meanings are located on the body has at least the potential to disrupt the current racializing processes.

If racism is manifest at the level of perception itself and in the very domain of visibility, then an amelioration of racism would be apparent in the world we perceive as visible. A reduction of racism will affect perception itself, as well as comportment, body image, and so on. Toward this, our first task, it seems to me, is to make visible the practices of visibility itself, to outline the background from which our knowledge of others and ourselves appears in relief. From there we may be able to alter the associated meanings ascribed to visible difference. (Alcoff 194)

Alcoff’s agenda to reorient the positionality of consciousness aims at changing the culture of perception and at dismantling the racializing perception that we inherit and perpetuate. The four chapters in part II indeed attempt to make the performance of perception visible.

In Transgressive (Re)presentations: Black Women, Vaudeville, and the Politics of Performance in Early Transatlantic Theater, Zakiya R. Adair argues that Baker’s and Hall’s vaudeville shows are ethnographic performances which, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, perpetuated racialized and gendered embodiments of modern industrial nationhood. She demonstrates how the theatrical performance of the exotic non-white by African American women reiterated colonial ideas of race, sexuality, and nation, while conveying an early twentieth-century Afro-centric feminism. Indeed, if the political and social realities of the United States denied black women full and equal citizenship, their Americanness granted them social and economic opportunities elsewhere, within the imaginary space of early twentieth century black musical theater.

Relying on archival historical research using national and international press as well as popular French and American theatrical iconography, Adair’s chapter highlights two landmark transatlantic black vaudeville productions, La Revue Nègre (Paris, 1925) and The Black Birds Revue (Paris, 1928). In Adair’s analysis, the transatlantic circulation is doubled by the contradictions between humanism and colonialism. Josephine Baker’s famous Danse Sauvage—whose very name echoes Féral Benga, her male counterpart, studied in this book by James Smalls—fed both French colonial and sexual fantasies, and the performers’ urge for artistic and political freedom unavailable in the United States. In her own reading of Baker’s distortions in La Revue Nègre (1925), Mae G. Henderson also foregrounds the ambivalence of these shows that preserve, at least in part, the performer’s agency and thus foster a certain form of creativity. Back in the United States, Lew Leslie’s The Black Birds Revue (1928), where Hall plays with nudity, is another case in point. The controversy around nudity on stage illustrates the moral panic of the black bourgeois society partly based on the migration of black women in that period. But when the show sailed to European shores, the nudity lost some of its shock factor. What black vaudeville women shows perform is the way colonial, racial, and sexual fantasies haunt perceptions while fashioning the French and American ethos in different ways.

Such a hauntology, also evoked by Rinaldo Walcott about the present-day resurgences of transatlantic slavery, characterizes as well Vanina Géré’s chapter Kara Walker’s War on Racism: Mining (Mis)Representations of Blackness, which examines Kara Walker’s drawings and cutout silhouettes exhibitions. Echoing Mae G. Henderson’s use of misperformance, Géré sees in these (mis)representations of blackness, the historically charged scopic drives of viewers, torn between pain and pleasure, that Kara Walker’s prettifying craft, playing on curvaceous lines and delightful detail, awakens in gallery viewers. Walker’s work strongly evokes how black people have been deprived of positive representations throughout history. While stating that the Black subject in the present tense is a container for specific pathologies from the past and is continually growing and feeding off those maladies, she (Walker) responds to the forms of racism and sexism rampant in contemporary media with abstracted bodies abstracting blackness. In the meantime, she scrutinizes the white racist desire to consume and/or eradicate black bodies in order to confront viewers’ relationships to racism and the spectacle of violence. While bringing the viewer into a zone of discomfort, Walker’s pictures, Géré argues, are the site of unbearable violence not only in terms of contents, but also inasmuch as [they lay] the responsibility of such contents onto the viewer, arousing feelings of unease, guilt, and shame within us. Ultimately, Walker’s art makes visible the question of responsibility.

Such is also the concern of the two following chapters, both dedicated to cinema. Filmmaking here is envisaged as a medium that fashions perception and possibly racializes the performance it displays. If the racism is in the onlooker’s eye, it is also his/her response-ability that is at stake.

In Between Mumblecore and Post-Black Aesthetics: Barry Jenkins’s Medicine for Melancholy, Simon Dickel explores the permeability of racial lines by looking at black filmmaker Jenkins’s debut feature film Medicine for Melancholy (2008), which has been classified as mumblecore, a traditionally white genre. The term mumblecore was first coined to point out the similarities between films that came out in 2005 and all involved blasé, young white men and women caught in unsatisfying, unstable relationships. Mumblecore is characterized by soundtracks largely made up of independent rock, also a white-dominated genre. It was soon received as an all too-white, too-straight genre, as noted by J. Hoberman in a 2007 article in the Village Voice: Mumblecore is demographically self-contained. Straight, white, middle class. With its indie-rock soundtrack and its mini-plot, Medicine for Melancholy fits the mumblecore genre. Yet, Dickel analyzes how Jenkins addresses black issues both diegetically and through intertextual, diasporic references. Dickel shows how the film directly references a sequence in Menelik Shabazz’s 1981 black British film Burning an Illusion, as well as Lorna Simpson’s 2008 work Please Remind Me of Who I Am. As the characters roam the city, they make an important stop at the MoAD, the Museum of the African Diaspora, so that the diasporic dimension of the Shabazz reference is confirmed by the diegesis. Because of its kinship to white independent filmmaking, with protagonists who act as cultural mulattoes, the author suggests that Medicine for Melancholy adopts a post-soul as opposed to post-black position—a distinction also used by Moriah in her study of Everett’s work. Jenkins, in fact, imports the aesthetics of black photographic artists into his film, categorized as mumblecore for separate reasons. Much like Spike Lee was first labeled a black Woody Allen (Mieher 1987), the adaptation process into a medium that remains culturally white questions the performance of blackness and its reception.

While Dickel uncovers diasporic artistic references and suggests Medicine for Melancholy questions the very genre it espouses, as well as a black artist’s place within a white industry, Anne Crémieux tackles the question of adapting a black novel to film and how the movie remains true to its specifically literary agenda. Heated debates surrounded the reception of Precious, the adaptation of Sapphire’s controversial, highly successful 1995 novel Push. At the core of the novel is the acquisition of the means of personal expression to escape oppression. Claireece Precious Jones is an incest survivor growing up in a poor, abusive household. Feeling resented for her dark skin and excess weight, Precious desires what her condition excludes her from: wealth, stardom, a thin waist on a white body, as well as a cute, light-skinned boyfriend. Kept down by unsupportive parents, a dire economic situation, and low standards of education, Precious struggles out of old habits, into a new life, through the written word. Adapting such a harrowing story not only poses the question of how to render the painstaking and ultimately liberating path to literacy, but immediately creates discussions on whether it is desirable to offer the world such a negative image of black life. In "From Book to Film: Desire in Precious (Lee Daniels, 2009), adapted from Push by Sapphire (1995)," Crémieux looks in detail at how director Lee Daniels transposed the expression of desire from word to image, with traces of the acquisition of writing relegated to the opening credits, while moments of dramatic despair trigger fantasy sequences inspired by the novel, but also directly related to the change in medium. This was applauded by Sapphire as faithfully rendering the coping mechanisms of an intelligent child, and for giving her and the audience a necessary escape from the horror of her situation. Crémieux notes how respectable mediators were sought by the marketing campaign, as well as within the film itself. Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry became executive producers and vocally defended the film as incest and abuse survivors themselves, while Mo’Nique and Mariah Carey lent their stardom by playing Precious’s mother and her social worker, respectively. Significantly, the film introduces the character of the fairy godmother, played by Susan Taylor, former publications director of Essence, a position she held until 2008. Precious was therefore supported by a cast and crew of black stars, many of whom came out as survivors themselves to defend a film they believed was necessary. The author offers detailed scene analyses to map out the process of adaptation through the physical staging of the black body as a locus of desire, shifting the focus from learning how to write to learning how to see. Special attention is given to the mirror scenes and the use or absence of special effects, to show how Daniels visually inscribes the adaptation of Push within the narrative tradition of the talking book and speakerly writing, as defined by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., but in a decisively visual way (Gates 1988: 127–169 and 22, 181).

How can we understand and value black performances in a contemporary global polity of cultural and economic spaces where the desiring subject is still reified, commodified, and sent back to an age-old tradition of sub-personhood? This major concern running through the volume, from Vanina Géré’s study of Kara Walker’s cutouts, to Zakiya R. Adair’s scrutiny of black women vaudeville or Kristin Leigh Moriah’s exploration of literary and cinematic expressions of black masculinity, is also a central focus of the contributions gathered in Through Performance: Desire and the Black Subject, the third part of this collection.

Through Performance: Desire and the Black Subject

The nodal point of Henderson’s, Spaulding’s, and Walcott’s chapters is the body, and more particularly the desiring body—how it connects being and embodying and what it may perform. In 1993, Peggy Phelan had already problematized performance, being, and the desiring body while celebrating the singularity of live performance, its immediacy and its non-repeatibility (Reinelt 201–202):

Performance uses the performer’s body to pose a question about the inability to secure the relation between subjectivity and the body per se; performance uses the body to frame the lack of Being promised by and through the body, that which cannot appear without a supplement. (Phelan 150–151)

Some 40 years before, Frantz Fanon concluded Black Skin White Masks (1952) with a similar understanding of the body and of its performance—the lack of being that the embodied other transforms into desire. In his self-staging, the blackness that Fanon’s body performed was one akin to James Baldwin’s, one where race is an imagined desire, open to the world and others, in want of answers that the sole body cannot provide, but which only the body can call for (Rocchi 2012: 58–59).

Both a prison and a source of freedom, the performing body is a pharmakon, that is, a poison and a cure, whose duality applies particularly to marginalized cultural identities. It is in race, gender, and sexuality that the singularity and unrepeatability of performance meet most powerfully the iterative power and normativizing effect of performativity. What is at stake, for marginalized beings, is to channel the variations of their subjectivities through petrified and reductive cultural representations. This was bell hook’s agenda in her essay Feminism Inside: Toward a Black Body Politic (Golden 127–140), where she focused on the production and circulation of counter-performances that escape stereotyping and objectification. In the context of poststructural critiques of the subject, it highlights the central role not only of the performer and the spectator, but also of the scholar. Walcott, Henderson, and Spaulding play such a part and fulfill the ethical and political commitment of witnessing, without which the performance of blackness cannot be but a deadly spectacle of the desiring subject.

In Black Queer Studies, Freedom, and Other Human Possibilities, Rinaldo Walcott adopts the framework of diaspora homopoetics to look at black queer photographers and filmmakers and