Revenant Motion

Abstract

Abstract Through sensitive engagement with the experimental films of Arthur Jafa, the flex choreography of Storyboard P, and performance of #BlackLivesMatter protests, this essay submits revenant motion as a concept through which to think about black being and phenomenology in this era. The entwined reflections on black life, death, and aesthetics offered up by Jafa, Claudia Rankine, Hortense Spillers, Elizabeth Alexander, and Sylvia Wynter shape these speculations toward a black creative, curatorial, and cultural practice attentive to the other(wise) worlds opened by uncanny reanimation. The suggestion here is that revenant motion might name a genre (à la Wynter) of the perennial danse macabre, which often figures Death dancing among the living as a reminder to too-worldly humans of its ever-presence and equalizing power. The creative and critical practices considered here also persistently foreground the melancholy possibilities and pleasures that our collective entanglements with black after/other/lives affords. This study of the macabre aesthetic as it manifests in latter-day memento mori sharpens our awareness of the proximity of horror and romance. In doing so it provides us with an occasion to think about how the gothic character of black life emerges in the sensual and sensorial performance of mourning and artful response to grief.