Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics

Black Movements

Black Movements

Performance and Cultural Politics

Soyica Diggs Colbert

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Colbert, Soyica Diggs, 1979– author.

Title: Black movements : performance and cultural politics / Soyica Diggs Colbert.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016033726| ISBN 9780813588520 (hardback) | ISBN 9780813588513 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780813588537 (e-book (epub))

Subjects: LCSH: African American theater—History. | Performing arts—United States—History. | African Americans—Civil rights—History. | Civil rights movements—United States—History. | African Americans in the performing arts. | Civil rights movements—History. | BISAC: PERFORMING ARTS / Theater / History & Criticism. | ART / Performance. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies. | ART / Art & Politics. | ART / American / African American. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Black Studies (Global).

Classification: LCC PN2270.A35 C65 2017 | DDC 792.089/96073—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016033726

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2017 by Soyica Diggs Colbert

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

For Rodger

Contents

Introduction: Webs of Affiliation

Chapter 1. Flying Africans in Spaceships

Chapter 2. Trapping Entanglements

Chapter 3. Prophesying in Octavia Butler’s Parable Series

Chapter 4. Marching

Chapter 5. Why do you look for the living among the dead?: Locating the Future of Black Studies

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Introduction

Webs of Affiliation

Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down.

—Robin D. G. Kelley

What histories and ideologies must be affirmed and what other ones denied for a slave to become a superhero?¹ The filmmaker Quentin Tarantino’s slavery revenge fantasy Django Unchained (2012) offers a response to this question. It features a fearless black outlaw who has earned his freedom from slavery by accumulating value working as a bounty hunter.² Set in the antebellum period, the film depicts the eponymous protagonist, Django (Jamie Foxx), as he learns the rules of bounty hunting from his mentor, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz). Schultz explains that bounty hunting, like slavery, is another flesh economy.³ The comment predicates Django’s freedom on his participation in activities that perpetuate the power dynamic of slavery. Instead of dismantling a system of domination, Schultz gives Django the opportunity to shift from being dominated to dominating others. His apprenticeship prepares him for his final mission to rescue his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), from her cruel slaver, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). But accomplishing his quest to save the damsel in distress does not distinguish his journey. Rather, all the choices he makes to position himself as the hero enable the final fantastic scene of triumph, in which he rides off on a horse with Broomhilda.⁴

Tarantino’s superhero figure demonstrates a swagger born out of the character’s separation from and participation in the dehumanization of the enslaved.⁵ Although he plays the role of a black slaver only to enact a stunning ruse on Candie, Django, well armed and trained to defeat an army of men, looks on as dogs eat black men alive, slaves beat each other to death in hand-to-hand combat, and house slaves enforce brutal punishments on their fellows. By the film’s end, Django kills Candie, enacts revenge on the servile head house Negro (Samuel L. Jackson), shoots and kills the mistress, dynamites and burns down the big house, and frees himself and his wife. Through his transformation, he embodies not only the fantasy of black revenge but also the liberal ideal of unfettered agency.⁶

As a prototypical black superhero, Django’s masculine authority delimits the regulatory force of his status as chattel.⁷ Throughout the film he shocks many onlookers as a black man riding a horse and brandishing a gun, but their surprise often gives way to disdain when he exercises the relative authority of a free black man over his enslaved counterparts, admonishing them and directing their actions. His ability to secure his freedom through his exceptional performance as a bounty hunter and his deadly reconciliation of his and his wife’s suffering satisfies investments in a particular brand of American masculinity—part savior, part hero—that, I argue, is available to black men in greater abundance in the post–civil rights era.⁸ This era has emerged alongside theories of poststructuralism, which render race a non-material construction in which new architectures of blackness emerge, making it multiple and sometimes unlinking it from the past. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., said in a Time magazine interview about the film 12 Years a Slave (2013), we have the best of times, and we have the worst of times. We have the largest black upper-middle-class in history, but we have the largest black male prison population. . . . So it’s like we have two nations within the black community. So how did we get here?⁹ Tarantino’s film suggests that we got here through the cruel embrace of liberal ideals of individualism that predicate black liberation on the replication of racial dominance and heteronormative performances of gender.¹⁰ Although set in the antebellum period, Django Unchained offers unfettered individualism to its male protagonist as a remedy for the burdensome legacy of slavery—at once a comforting and a deceptive remedy.

Tarantino and others have crafted satirical and fantastical postmodern renderings of black history that, as forms of future-oriented remembering, contribute to imagining how freedom may coincide with blackness in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.¹¹ Providing another lens through which to see how we got here, Spike Lee uses the documentary form as a mechanism to awaken the past—to engage with it and breathe new life into histories that might serve as the fertile ground for black freedom dreams to develop. His 4 Little Girls (1997) offers an entry point into the civil rights movement by way of the Birmingham campaign and, in particular, the devastating violence enacted in the Sixteenth Street Church bombing.

Situating Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair as martyrs in a campaign for social equality, the film memorializes the movement as much as it mourns the victims of gratuitous violence. Lee’s documentary remembers four innocent girls with distinctive personalities, hobbies, and family relationships. It also demonstrates that black suffering pervaded the Birmingham campaign. As a result, 4 Little Girls suggests a way forward that requires living with the dead while not distinguishing oneself from them. To live with the dead, however, is not the same thing as to be bound by death. Living with the dead allows an individual to incorporate and move forward with those she has lost. Conversely, being bound by death inhibits the growth of the subject. Although a subtle distinction, the notion of living with death versus being bound by it serves as a tipping point for artists navigating black cultural politics in the post–civil rights era.

Lee’s act of memory humanizes individuals who participate in collective dissent and reminds the viewer that leadership appears in the form of female children and male adults. Beginning with a tribute to Collins, Wesley, Robertson, and McNair, the film intersperses descriptions of the four girls with recollections that chronicle the launch and development of the Birmingham civil rights campaign. The film first depicts male leadership and then disrupts the familiar rendering of patriarchy, revealing that children became the foot soldiers of the local movement. The juxtaposition of adult male leadership with female children heightens the sense of shock and terror that the bombing produces. The film mourns their lives and their potential—what they are and what they could be.¹²

Lee’s documentary leverages the innocence of the children to draw attention to the ethical demands of the civil rights struggle. Near the end of the film, he makes the bold decision to show the girls’ autopsy photos. Carol Denise McNair’s father tells viewers that he remembers seeing a piece of concrete lodged in his daughter’s head. Then the film cuts to an image of the young woman’s mutilated body, proof of the violation. McNair’s mother says that she remembers going to identify the body and demanding to see her daughter. After leaving the morgue she went to her mother’s house and when I got in there I couldn’t stop hollering; I couldn’t stop screaming. And I can just see myself sitting in the chair, being so upset in a place that I wanted to rub but couldn’t rub it.¹³ Cutting from reactions to the bombing and still photographs, the film riffs on what Fred Moten describes as the mo(ur)nin(g)—part moaning, part mourning, part morning—that the photograph of lynching victim Emmett Till produces.¹⁴ Heightened by the soundtrack, the dirge-like sequence produces sadness, sympathy, and outrage. Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman’s Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race forcefully argues that black girlhood often represents a cultural impossibility as blackness comes to stand in for an absence of innocence. In the documentary, the innocence of the girls transfers to the innocence of black people who are simply demanding equality. The expansion of freedom emerges by way of a collective composed of individuals who linger simultaneously with suffering and the possibility of a new day.

Tarantino’s film is an act of fantasy; Lee’s film is an act of memory. Both, however, circle around the historical (slavery and the civil rights movement) and theoretical (black performance theory in the context of poststructuralism) touchstones of this book. In the wake of the purported failures of race-based collective movements of the twentieth century (such as the civil rights movement and postcolonial movements in Africa and the Caribbean), I analyze how artists and activists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries use the freedom movements of earlier historical periods as ways to imagine a more democratic society now and in the future. Like Tarantino, some create fantastic reworkings of the past, while others, like Lee, seek to re-create the past as a site of instruction for the present. Black Movements explores how post–civil rights black performance and cultural production becomes legible, possible, and generative as a result of its relationship to prior moments and modes of cultural production. The return to slavery as a historical touchstone has little to do with recovering the slave’s past, as Toni Morrison describes in Sites of Memory.¹⁵ Yet even though Django Unchained tells us little about slavery, it offers great insight into early twenty-first-century cultural production. If Django Unchained qualifies as an act of memory, it does so as a deliberate act of counter-memory that situates identifying as a triumphant black subject in opposition to identifying with the conditions of the enslaved. In the hands of Tarantino, however, the imagination functions to make available certain forms of masculinity to black men that have remained limited to them due to the shadow of slavery.

Django Unchained does share with 4 Little Girls a depiction of disposability that relates to the treatment of the enslaved, and I mention both films here to highlight how artists imagine, use, and call forth performance practices to constitute racial identity and interrupt the dehumanization of black people. My book explores representations of blackness that disrupt equating blackness with objection, while examining the possibilities and dangers that representations of black suffering provide. Django Unchained demonstrates the risks of embracing the lure of a black superhero whose presence perpetuates the myth of individual exceptionalism and reinforces systems of domination. In contrast, 4 Little Girls offers the possibility of remembering forgotten histories. While the seductive lure of forgetting empowers individuals to a point, Lee’s film reveals that the choice to think through and with the past enables a more expansive rendering of freedom predicated on an active engagement with the regulatory forces that circumscribe agency.

All of the chapters in Black Movements consider how artists devise strategies, some more successful than others, to disrupt the equation of blackness with suffering. I use the word movement to mean a change in position, place, or posture.¹⁶ Political movement can be defined as a series of actions on the part of a group of people working toward a common goal.¹⁷ Black movements are embodied actions (a change in position, place, posture, or orientation) that draw from the imagination and the past to advance political projects. This last term encompasses the multiple meanings of movement while retaining the temporal qualities of blackness as performative.

The black movements that I explore occur within a social context in which the idea that the consolidation of repeated actions (performance) over time constitutes identity (racial and otherwise) is routinely accepted.¹⁸ Judith Butler argues in Performative Acts and Gender Constitution that history and temporality produce gender as a performative—the crystallized, hailing, regulatory power of identity categories and social positions. Performance constitutes the actor because it renders the individual answerable to the nature of the role he or she inhabits, which, as Butler explains, becomes sediment as performatives. Performatives, such as gender roles or other identitarian categories, and reiterations of stylized norms, and inherited gestural conventions from the way we sit, stand, speak, dress, dance, play, eat, hold a pencil and more, exert social force through the perception of their stability. But performatives accrue value in reiteration of performance.¹⁹ Butler’s formulation depends on temporal accumulation. Over time, the appearance of identity flattens the internally discontinuous aspects of gender in order to produce continuity.²⁰ Joseph Roach offers a similar rendering of the term performance, explaining that [it] offers a substitute for something else that preexists it. Performance, in other words, stands in for an elusive entity that it is not but that it must vainly aspire both to embody and to replace.²¹ The filling of the vacancies, as he explains, never amounts to a perfect replica.

Although it is easy to analogize Butler’s rendering of gender performance to race, the preface to the 1999 edition of her book Gender Trouble warns against such easy alignments. Her admonition gives us room to consider how the performances that constitute blackness disrupt the accumulative time associated with gender performance because theories of gender performativity do not account for the temporal incongruence of blackness. My book contends that performances, which constitute blackness, operate within contrapuntal time. Post–civil rights artists make use of the temporal specificity of performing blackness by crafting webs of affiliation, which offer contexts for rethinking blackness in the past, present, and future. If identity functions as an accumulation that desire ushers forth, then historical misreadings of blackness have grave implications for contemporary performances. Such a rethinking of the relationship between performance and blackness is particularly important in a historical context in which individual striving, particularly on the part of President Barack Obama, have been exploited to counterbalance histories of antiblack racism. Ruminating over how performance constitutes the affiliation formerly known as race is not simply a form of nostalgia; instead, it provides an opportunity for responding to racism because it acknowledges the sociality of racial identity.

Artists and activists have explicitly and implicitly linked their actions to prior enactments to create what I call webs of affiliation to combat and, in certain cases, foster antiblack racism. Black movements function through webs of affiliation. I use the word web to draw attention to a form of temporality that is not linear and therefore does not follow a progressive narrative or understand the past as before the present. Webs of affiliation connect performances in the present to those enacted in the past but not through a direct line. Black movements occur in time but also shape our relationship to time, and temporal play distinguishes the cultural production I explore in this book. Temporal multiplicity—that is, time working in counterpoint rather than linearly—gives artists and activists in the post–civil rights era greater flexibility in shaping their relationship to blackness and how it functions and relates to the categories of the human and the citizen. Black Movements explores how artists actively engage with certain pasts and jettison others to remember, revive, and reimagine political movements that seem to have stalled. These moments of engagement create webs of affiliation, and in this book I show that they occur through speech acts, mimicry, oral expression, and acts of disruption.

Blackness in the Post–Civil Rights Era

The work of black cultural producers as historical agents in the post–civil rights era confronts the troubling dichotomy of the hero and the slave that the social, cultural, and political shifts of the late twentieth century have installed. Like the black superhero at the center of Tarantino’s film, President Obama (standing alongside other black superstars such as Oprah Winfrey, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Robert Johnson, Tyler Perry, Jay-Z, and Beyoncé Knowles) personifies the possibility that an exceptional individual can move beyond the equation of blackness with slavery, a burdensome inheritance that limits personal striving. Obama’s presidency calls attention to how black excellence functions as a twenty-first-century aspiration that is supposed to unlink the individual from his or her limiting past. Yet as my parenthetical list suggests, a number of late-twentieth-century figures held similar positions of achievement that distanced them from the burdens of blackness. The pull of liberal individualism on black people intensified after Jim Crow, and the victories of the civil rights movement enabled them to occupy social, educational, and professional spaces that had been less available to them during Jim Crow. While scientific advancements also contributed to the transformation of racial categories in the late twentieth century, my focus in this book is on how social and cultural practices inform, intersect, and reflect political imaginaries and practices. By the end of the twentieth century, as a result of shifting understandings of blackness and changes in the apparatus that regulate black people, blackness began to appear to be a chosen affiliation rather than a biological inheritance.²²

As Jacquelyn Dowd Hall expertly argues in The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past, predominant narratives of the civil rights movement marked a political decline after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

After a season of moral clarity, the country is beset by the Vietnam War, urban riots, and reaction against the excesses of the late 1960s and the 1970s, understood variously as student rebellion, black militancy, feminism, busing, affirmative action, or an overweening welfare state. A so-called white backlash sets the stage for the conservative interregnum that, for good or ill, depending on one’s ideological persuasion, marks the beginning of another story, the story that surrounds us now.²³

In Black Movements, I take up the story that surrounds us now, considering the multiple ways that artists working after the classical phase of the civil rights movement (beginning with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and ending with the passing of the Voting Rights Act) have taken up the unfinished business of advocating for uniform protection of civil rights, not just singular, individualized cases of redress. Of course, this analytical move does not mark the end or completion of civil rights movement strivings or suggest that the fifty years under consideration reflects a singular political, social, or cultural project. The civil rights movement emerged out of political exigencies that informed the shape of a diverse set of practices that emerged according to Hall, in the 1930s and continued for decades. While some of the desired outcomes of the civil rights movement still remain unaccomplished, the aesthetic and political imaginary (a binary I trouble throughout) of black movements has produced shifts following the classical phase.

The artists I explore in this book range from Octavia Butler to Kanye West and from Toni Morrison to Beyoncé Knowles. Although they have flawed, limited, and incomplete visions of how to further the political projects of the mid-twentieth century, their choice to align with various and distinct black freedom dreams marks a resistance to blackness as a deathbound position to be overcome through the acquisition of wealth and power or as a position of ontological impossibility under any circumstance. According to Abdul R. JanMohamed, the death-bound-subject’s ‘life’ is thus defined by the need to avoid the possibilities of life as well as the possibility of death. This is the aporetic zone occupied by bare life, a zone between the status of ‘flesh’ and that of ‘meat,’ neither quite alive nor quite dead.²⁴ Black movements prove that, although black subjects live under the threat of death, they do not necessarily avoid the possibilities of life.

Although Black Movements situates its claims within the era after the classical phase of the civil rights movement, I resist arguing for a definitive break between the political aims of black freedom movements of the early and mid-twentieth century and those of the late twentieth century. Post, in my formulation, indicates coming after, but it does not deny how ongoing acts of memory inform the historiography—the process of shaping historical narrative over time—and feed into understanding what came before.²⁵ I am more invested in exploring how artists negotiate the shifting social landscape over the fifty-year period than in offering a uniform depiction of how black movements operate in the post–civil rights era. I use the term post–civil rights era to indicate a shift in political, discursive, and quotidian experiences of blackness that I link to the end of de jure segregation and the emergence of poststructuralism and multiculturalism. I do, however, aim to hold on to the ongoing salience and expansiveness and diversity of civil rights projects and resist reconciling them to a project to end segregation. The more expansive vision that I explore emphasizes the humanity of black people and realizes that black freedom movements encompass international and feminist projects. The practices call attention to visioning as a creative and critical practice that requires an understanding of the political as constituted in artistic work; such an understanding troubles the dichotomies of politics and aesthetics and of reason and unreason.²⁶

Conceptualizing black freedom as unfolding through repeated embodied movements also puts pressure on periodization; take, for example, the relationship of black internationalism to the classical phase of the civil rights movement. Hall explains the domestic as well as international aims of what she calls the long civil rights movement, spanning from the 1930s to the 1970s. She challenges nationalist historiographies that posit that the juridical victories of the civil rights movement resulted from international pressure on the United States to appear more democratic. The historiographies contend that the U.S. government conceded to some of the demands of civil rights activists because the nation saw equal rights as a weapon in its Cold War campaign against the Soviet Union.²⁷ Rather, she argues, "seen through the optic of the long civil rights movement, . . . civil rights look less like a product of the Cold War and more like a casualty. That is so because antifascism and anticolonialism had already internationalized the race issue and, by linking the fate of African Americans to that of oppressed people everywhere, had given their cause a transcendent meaning."²⁸ Black internationalism served as the context of the civil rights movement, placing the global experience of black people at its center. Understanding that the civil rights movement is constituted, in part, by a set of practices that result from a web of affiliations rather than from a national causal dynamic buttresses Hall’s claim for the mutuality of the civil rights movement and black internationalism.

The persistence of black internationalism during the classical phase of the civil rights movement highlights a longstanding antagonism between the aims of black freedom movements and the positions of the state expressed through the rhetoric of antiracism that emerged during the Cold War. Due to the civil rights movement, writes Roderick A. Ferguson, the U.S. nation-state would achieve new levels of freedom and secularity. Indeed the transformation that took place on campus yards would help to make the rearticulations of minority difference into the general presuppositions and elements of U.S. liberal capitalism.²⁹ As a result, antiracism became incorporated into the national logics of U.S. democracy and capitalism, producing successive official antiracist regimes particularly liberal multiculturalism (1980s to 1990s), and neoliberal multiculturalism (2000s).³⁰ The operation of these official antiracist regimes required incorporating individual people of color into existing institutions organized in opposition to their thriving.

Official antiracist regimes demanded that forms of blackness be untethered to the history of capital that distinguishes black life in the Americas. Jodi Melamed describes the incorporation of antiracist social movements into the state project of multiculturalism, beginning in the 1970s. Liberal multiculturalism would signal the moment in which state and capital would use antiracism to forestall the redistribution of resources to economically and racially disenfranchised communities, while neoliberal multiculturalism was a means of using difference to foster capitalist distribution while curtailing social redistribution for underrepresented folks.³¹ In order for the United States to incorporate the antiracism of the civil rights movement into a national project, the national rhetoric had to forget the critique of capitalism and the allegiances cultivated through black internationalism.³² The periods of multiculturalism that followed the classical phase of the civil rights movement have designated the geographical and ideological parameters of black freedom struggles, demarcating which issues, concerns, and ways of