Editorial Comment: Directions

Abstract

Editorial Comment:Directions Jen Parker-Starbuck Two events frame this special issue's editorial for me. The first, occurring as I began writing, was going to see the remarkable Anna Deavere Smith piece Notes from the Field at the Royal Court in London. I was struck by her work's continued relevance (her footage of police violence in Baltimore in 2015 might just have easily been the same images from her Fires in the Mirror in 1991 or Twilight: Los Angeles in 1992) and the ricocheting back and forth between these ongoing acts of violence. Notes from the Field resonates with a question that Rebecca Schneider asks in her essay: Is there "a time-limit on response-ability?" Smith's work felt like an "extended hand" to the audience, a gesture that, like many of the essays in this issue, attempts to grapple with these troubled times, while also reminding us of the need to find a response, a way to look back and forward at the same time. The second event took place as I finished this editorial: my participation in the "Carnival of Resistance" protest in London, where an estimated 250,000 people came together peacefully on a beautiful sunny day to march along Regent Street to Trafalgar Square, waving placards and chanting to protest Donald Trump's UK visit. The experience was akin to what Elin Diamond describes in the special issue as Guy Debord's "constructed situation," but also felt a bit like a dérive as I saw the city anew. Along the way, my companions and I discussed whether or not this action would have political relevance or whether, as one cynical op-ed I read stated (following Pod Saves America's January 30, 2017 podcast, based on a sign at a protest), was "protesting … the new brunch"? In the end, walking with this critical mass toward a densely packed rally, swept up in an undeniably embodied charge, I felt hopeful for a sea-change, as if the spirit of protest was somehow contagious, moving from body to body to embody resistance and to harness opposition. It was a call to change the direction of politics, away from increasing conservativism and right-wing populism and toward a more just and inclusive world. These events took on particular resonance for me because I was immersed in the essays in this special issue. This issue's call was intentionally broad—"Directions"—and the response has yielded evocative essays that "hail" readers to think deeply about gestures moving from bodies to bodies, forward and back, caught in intervals of thought. It asks us to consider the notion of direction, from the performative and very real "hands up!," to spectatorial "feeling in counterpoint" to resist directional interpellation, to stage directions that empower actors' bodies to move with interpretive agency within the printed word. The issue begins and ends with protests and with striking gestures of hands and hands up!, a directional gesture as a response to our time. The special issue opens with Schneider's "That the Past May Yet Have Another Future: Gesture in the Times of Hands Up!" She begins by asking us to think of a gesture—a wave, for example—that "is at once an act composed in and capable of reiteration, but also an action extended, opening the possibility of future alteration." It is this possibility of an interval between past and future that resonates through all of the essays in this issue. Directions are not simply unidirectional. Transporting readers from Paleolithic cave hands found on rocks from 30,000 years ago to the "hands up!" [End Page xi] gesture of the Black Lives Matter movement, in this essay Schneider creates a kind of call and response to demonstrate the power of gesture to "turn time back, forward, to the side, or all the way around on itself," and to appeal for greater "response-ability" to help the past find "a different future." She writes alongside others calling for a relationality, however difficult, among "radically different … experiences." Schneider describes her own recognition of the Paleolithic hand "hailing" her, causing her to ask "in what direction do our calls reverberate—only forward in time...