Introduction: On Black Performance

Abstract

Historically aligned with hypervisibility, blackness places the individual on display. Cultural workers have used the transformative power of performance-repeated actions presented before an audience that carry with them the history of their recurrence--to shape viewers' and listeners' perceptions of blackness. Working against the notion that categories of identity, including racial ones, are fixed, performance strategically uses improvisation to instate and destabilize subjectivity. While performance studies is a relatively new field of inquiry, performance has been fundamental to the revolutionary character of black culture from its beginnings. As Cedric Robinson theorizes in Black Marxism: the Making of the Black Radical Tradition, evidence of the tradition's persistence and ideological vitality among the Black slave masses was to be found not only in the rebellions and the underground but as well in the shouts, the spirituals, the sermons, and the very textual body of Black Christianity (311). Along a similar line, Saidiya Hartman's groundbreaking analysis in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America demonstrates the ubiquitous intersection of subjection, subject formation, and display in black people's earliest experiences in the United States. While Hartman and Robinson may not consider themselves black performance theorists, I include them here to demarcate a line of inquiry pervasive in black studies. Calling attention to performance as a theory that is multisensory, Fred Moten locates an a acoustic materiality that emanates from the scenes of subjection Hartman describes. The sounds that echo throughout In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition necessarily belong to a history of revolutionary action that emerges in relation to degrading and dehumanizing images of black people. As scripted forms of race continue to tear their ugly heads in Will.i.am's blackface performance at the MTV 2010 video music awards alongside a Venus Hottentot-esque Nictd Minaj, the time is ripe to investigate the past, present, and future of black performance and its relationship to the constitution of identity, aesthetic forms, and freedom movements. The articles in this special issue of African American Review demonstrate the centrality of performance to black cultural production from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. They show how artists have attenuated the hold on blackness on display atop the auction block, as animated in the soft-shoeing of the blackface minstrel stage, or personified in a grin plastered on a bottle of maple syrup. Instead, the authors reaffirm blackness as a process, following E. Patrick Johnson's Appropriating Blackness: Performance Politics and Authenticity (2003) and Daphne Brooks's Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (2006). Redefining, reshaping, and re-signifying blackness, the cultural workers examined in this special issue make use of the fluidity of identity categories in order to liberate subjectivities and collectivities. …