Repose: Black Nightmares, Black Dreams

Abstract

In the key chapter of his seminal text, Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon articulates the critical relationship between anti-blackness—which is to say the fact of blackness—and the black body’s orientation to both trauma and and the possibilities of pleasure. Each time he is confronted by his blackness made abject,—“Look a Negro!” “Mama, a Negro!”—he stumbles and is fractured, the pieces falling to the floor; he finds himself “sprawled out, distorted;” or crawling on all fours. Through his descriptions of the physical outcomes of black abjection, Fanon demonstrates the manner in which racialized trauma reorients the black body to the world. It is rendered prostrate. He also intimates resilience strategies for a new humanism. Using this as the departure point, this paper examines how racialized trauma is metabolized, to use a term first deployed by Resmaa Menakem, through the performance of death and sleep, both requiring the body to repose. Understanding that the necropolitical conditions under which black people live frequently exposes them to death and routinely deprives them of high quality sleep, I look at the die-in and what I am calling the nap-in. These are two forms of performance art that are used in this context to explore how, on one hand, the black body is forced into prostration through ultraviolence, and on the other hand, it is coaxed into recumbency through the lures of rest and relaxation. I particularly examine the aesthetics and politics of staging the black body, already the site of social death, as the site and sight of actual death during the die-in as it has been deployed in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement. Likewise I investigate artists niv Acosta’s and Fannie Sosa’s project Black Power Naps through which they propose the black body can be the site of the pleasures and joys that are experienced by way of the quotidian. Ultimately, this paper argues that each of these performances—and between their two poles—points to Fanon’s “zone of nonbeing,” which affirms black life’s staking a claim on the world.