Neon paratexts: reading M. NourbeSe Philip reading

Abstract

This essay reads poet M. NourbeSe Philip reading. I consider how her book She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, its problematizations of a gendered reading practice, extends into the collective and durational performances of Zong!. Ultimately I broaden the literary idea of paratextuality, those metalanguages, framings, and surroundings of a published book, those thresholds around texts in order to engage a reading of Philip's readings, those performances where she asks audience-participants to gather around the printed object. In Philip's work, the book is a springboard for socially reiterative performances, for inviting intentional relations with other people, new conditions, new events with which to be reckoned. Process as slow passage, improvisation as drift, and audience participation as pliant, unpredictable, unreliable, and betrayable by invitation and accident. Philip's paratextual performance practice is particularly pressing as banal and spectacular racial violences are at the core of everyday life in the Americas.