There’s a riot goin’ on

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper we take up the concept of the ‘chorus’ as explored by Saidiya Hartman in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. In that book, Hartman imagines the chorus as a collective expression of resistance and survival – the sound of many voices speaking out and speaking up. We argue that the concept of the chorus can be understood in Marxist terms as an expression of surplus population, and as such, is always provoking crisis. We consider surplus populations in relation to three historic moments of upheaval and resistance, and the representation of these events (or lack thereof): the riot of Black girls at the Bedford Hills Reformatory in 1919; cafeteria riots led by trans, queer, and gender non-conforming people in the 1950s and 1960s in California; and the 2004 Palm Island riot that irrupted in the wake of the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee. In each case, the riots (and their expression in the form of a chorus) responded directly to aggressive policing and the violence of the state. These riots are not merely about responding to the violence of policing but also about defending that irreducible and generative excess that might variously be described as Blackness, queerness, and Indigeneity.