“Hell You Talmbout?” Sighting confusion in the performance of Black Revolt | Ra Malika Imhotep, SJ Zhang and C. Riley Snorton (30.3)

New Orleans artists and oral historians have long thought about the 1811 revolt that began on the plantations along the Mississippi River. The swamps around the port of New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain were always a place of (precarious) refuge for individuals and families who escaped enslavement on the plantation. Before 1811, small maroon communities long sustained themselves in the cypress swamps and bayous just on the outskirts of the city and river plantations. There they subsistence farmed, crafted wares and participated in illicit trade economies that tied their survival to the growing city of New Orleans. They also maintained relations with family and collaborators enslaved along the lake and the river. Periodic campaigns to solve “the maroon problem” by both French and Spanish colonial authorities could not change the environment around them or the landscape that facilitated this particular form of “getting out.” While maroons in Louisiana never rose up en masse to overthrow the system, they were armed and engaged in conflict, collaboration and conspiracy with a variety of groups. All those who strategically used the swamp to resist enslavement understood the landscape’s ability to promote new forms of conflict and recognition. Whether they were deemed rebels or maroons, their actions parallel the Black radical strategic uses of mountains and forests and rivers by maroon communities in Jamaica and Suriname, Brazil and the Great Dismal Swamp. Perhaps they served as a model for (and possibly conspired with) those who took up arms in 1811.

The 1811 revolt was also the inspiration of a large-scale production called the Slave Rebellion Reenactment that took place in Kenner, Laplace and New Orleans, LA on 8–9 November 2019. Initially, recruitment was designed to be spread secretively by word-of-mouth. Participants were asked not to prematurely share information about the performance on social media and a series of “Hush Harbor” gatherings and public talks were held throughout New Orleans and LaPlace, Louisiana to more deeply gauge interest, recruit participants and build comradery amongst those who would “enlist” as reenactors of the 1811 Revolt. This practice of discretion created some confusion amongst local artists and cultural workers who were on the periphery of the project. Conceptualized by the artist Dread Scott and produced by Antenna Gallery, the Slave Rebellion Reenactment (SRR) had already attracted high levels of press attention and funding in the years leading up to its execution. Still, in September of 2019, not many people on the ground knew exactly what was going on with the project. For some, this confusion bred skepticism and critique.

Confusion is often understood as indicative of failure, but in this essay we are interested in confusion as it emerged from SRR; what we, the authors, experienced as an ethos that erodes binaries between accuracy and mythos, success and failure. Here, confusion skirts capture and the documentary closures of surveillance by providing cover for queer intimacy, wake work, and care. Confusion, as we use it, rejoins an abolitionist imaginary with the experiences of participant-observers of the SRR and the rebels of 1811. Before proceeding, a note on “we.” Because we are interested in the kinds of sense that come from confusion, we use we here, not only to mark the constitution of several “I”s (and eyes) narrating this analysis, but also to generate a practice in language that draws on some of the potential we see in thinking about confusion as it relates to the reenactment, the reenactors, and the practice and politics of abolitionist imagination.

Dress rehearsals began in the second week of October. According to email communications sent out by the production team, these practical performance rehearsals were designed to “help you prepare to embody the rebels on our march, including: how to move and hold your body through walking and rhythm-based exercises, how to move together as an army, and how to hold and use the props during the performance.” We were instructed to walk in three columns and to automatically fill in gaps in the formation with swift, precise movements. The reenactors positioned in the front left columns were designated “team leaders” responsible for giving commands. Our instructions were a series of directional “call and response” commands paired with more performative chants designated by Scott: “On to New Orleans!” “We are going to end slavery!” “Join Us!” Deviations from this sparse script that referenced other protest traditions, like “Power to The People” and “We Shall Overcome,” were explicitly discouraged. The tight formation and repetitive commands were designed to perform a dual function: ensure the safety of the participants and shore up the “realism” of the performance. We, the reenactors, reported to our meeting site under the Claiborne Bridge early in the morning of Friday November 8th costumed and full of possibility. But once on-site in LaPlace, LA and herded into the gym of a Catholic school the occasion began to feel more like a film production. Our discomfort stemmed from the shock and confusion of being left to figure out for ourselves how we were going to transition from feeling like a group of extras in nineteenth-century costumes to a group of reenactors empowered by the spirits of those who walked before us; we gathered in small informal groups where some vented and strategized and others discussed payment discrepancies. Eventually, crew members asked small groups of reenactors to gather behind flags and follow their leaders outside.

The majority of us were left in the gym, sitting on bleachers and awaiting instructions. At a point of shared frustration some of us decided we would not just wait idly for direction. We looked into each other’s eyes, gathered our tools and weapons and walked outside to join a “regiment.” Before long there was prayer and song. Someone passed around a burning bundle of sage. The sun came out for a little while as we got into formation. Most of the day was uncomfortable. As we moved from point to point with little direction, often stopping so the film crew could get in place there was an air of confusion and discontent. Some of the crew, including assistant producer Shana M. griffin, social media coordinator Renee Royale and recruitment coordinator Ifátùmínínú Bamgbàlà Arẹ̀sà and others, went beyond their specific duties to make sure our needs were met. At our lunch stop, a dance circle erupted spontaneously amongst the reenactors without concern for the production team and the camera crew swiftly interjected itself as part of the circle.

Reenactments are typically understood to function as indexical modes of performance. In Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture (2008), Lisa Woolfork discusses three distinct categories of the reenactment of US slavery in contemporary cultural production: historical, ritual, and participatory. Each genre of reenactment explicitly utilizes the labor of Black people as reenactors, historical interpreters and/or facilitators but does so with different aims (2008, 133). Some ritual reenactments like the Maafa and African Holocaust ceremonies that happen throughout the United States to commemorate the Middle Passage are often linked to religious institutions and designed as an occasion of communal catharsis. Historical reenactments could be considered staged performances and participatory reenactments are often positioned as experiential learning programs (Woolfork 2008, 133). The SRR was initially articulated as a combination of these three genres, a “community engaged performance project” that reimagined the procession and conclusion of the 1811 Revolt and forced a living juxtaposition of the past (embodied by reenactors) against the present realities of the River Parishes. These municipalities lie just outside of New Orleans where several former plantations have been replaced by Petrochemical plants that put residents, many of whom were genealogically linked to the 1811 rebels, at high risk for cancer, asthma and other ailments. This intent raises questions similar to those pursued by Woolfork: What does it mean to play a rebellious slave at the site of such ongoing racialized inequity? Who is the performance for? “How does slavery reenacting become incorporated into this heady mix of corporate and public, education and entertainment, academic and vernacular?” (2008, 162). SRR was a highly aestheticized dramatization of a fugitive act for freedom. 1 Some reenactors were specifically enlisted by the production crew to wear harnesses affixed with body cameras designed to capture an on-the-ground perspective. Others simply pulled out their cell phones to record videos and post Instagram stories that conveyed their personal interpretations of different happenings. 2 We were posed and took opportunities to pose ourselves against various forested River Road backdrops, brandishing weapons and serious gazes—often explicitly instructed not to smile. In a self-published “loving critique,” reenactor Jihan McDonald described the urge to use her machete to strike down the drone that hovered above us gathering aerial footage (2019). This urge radiated through the body of reenactors as we used our own eyes, ears and cameras to witness and document the performance and our discontents. In the character of enslaved rebels, we shamelessly broke form, slowed down, sped up, paused for rest, politicized each other, laughed, and did whatever else we wanted to do as we marched. This moment and others, like the improvised songs of a group of open-mouthed reenactors armed with drums and tambourines who jokingly referred to themselves as the “Slave Rebellion Freedom Choir,” were necessary ruptures in the choreography of Dread Scott’s vision that confounded the procession’s aesthetic coherence to more radical ends (“We Gon’ Kill The Master / We Gon’ Free The Slaves”). That these moments were often rapidly intercepted by the camera crew’s gaze rehearses what we already know to be true of technologies of surveillance. 3

A few reenactors deliberately avoided the press, while others excitedly sought out opportunities for interviews and video portraits. Outside of the optic, some reenactors recorded audio of the songs, dances, and prayers that exceeded what was rehearsed. These varying orientations towards documentation make for an interesting application of “dark sousveillance.” 4 By resisting, ignoring and at turns complying with the command to perform for the camera, reenactors registered on and with our bodies “the co-presence of several historically contingent events” (Freeman 2010, 63). Elizabeth Freeman uses the term “temporal drag” to denote “retrogression, delay, and the pull of the past on the present” (2010, 63). Temporal drag is enacted in moments where the past is not just referenced by queer modes of cultural production, but reinhabited in ways that produce an uneasy reckoning with discontinuities between the “cultural corpse” of a bygone identity or political framework and the contemporary condition (Freeman 2010, 63). SRR mobilized the cultural corpses of the fallen 1811 rebels and relied on an extractive relationship between Black labor (embodied by reenactors) and white accounting (represented by the mechanisms of documentation) to tell the story. Despite the presence and intentions of Black cinematographers John Akomfrah and Bradford Young who were hired to document the procession, reenactors and Black observers still experienced the overwhelming presence of the film production crew as a technology of coercion, containment and capture. In this context, temporal drag denotes the work of Black reenactors willfully embodying a scene of failed revolt. This act simultaneously performs a contemporary rebellion against the trope of US History’s narratives of linear progression, but does so within the confines of an artistic exchange teetering between intervention and entertainment.

As variously sited participant-observers, we carried undersighted oppositional imaginaries explicitly related to Black queer modes of being and doing that can also be understood as acts of “reinhabitation” that perform temporal drag. SRR did not intentionally set out to queer the archive of slavery or slavery’s resonance in cultural memory. Nevertheless, many of the reenactors were queer. Our gestures of embodiment enlivened a Black queer aesthetic that may or may not be legible in the documentation of the performance. Women and queer-identified Black people led this 2019 ‘army of the enslaved. This configuration interrupts the standing historiography of 1811, which centers male leaders Charles Deslondes and Kwamena. In another series of queer gestures towards drag, reenactors’ costume choices transgressed the binary logics of SRR’s costume department. Without tangible evidence of each reenactors’ motivations, this may be interpreted as a combination of intentional engagements with queer drag performance aesthetics and expressions of non-binary and trans-identity. These aesthetic interruptions “challenged viewers’ trust in gender as a visually verifiable trait” (Ellison 2017). By rejecting binary conventions of adornment, Black queer embodiment asserts itself as a “taken-for-granted” presence within the performance of Black revolt. And then there is the matter of ritual. Rather than “sacralize black suffering,” SRR reenactors sought out opportunities to attend to and honor the vengeful dead with an array of Afro-diasporic traditional practices (Woolfork 2008, 135). We initiated our own interpretations of ceremonial acts at the start of each day’s procession and repeated them to different scales throughout our journey to performatively reclaim Orleans Territory. These modes of what M. Jacqui Alexander terms “spiritual labor” emerged as acts against both the historical alienation present in the conditions of revolt in 1811 and the varying levels of alienation felt by reenactors who were confronted with a “work place” that didn’t seem to account for the full spectrum of their needs (Alexander 2006, 326). Despite the dinner time dissemination of a half sheet of paper with debriefing questions on one side and mental health and community healing resources on the other, it did not appear that much attention was given to the psychological, emotional and spiritual impact reenacting slavery may have had on Black reenactors. Towards the end of that first day, while the majority of the production staff was focused on “the battle scene” and others passed out blankets, a group of us dragged our tired costumed bodies back and forth across the Bonnet Carré Spillway. An Indigenous reenactor called our attention to small paper signs that had been staked into the ground. This land where we hurriedly sought out refuge and warmth, where we moaned out our exhaustion and discontent, was formerly a “persons of color burial plot” holding the bodies of those enslaved in Norco, LA and their descendants. In overlooking or at best failing to communicate with reenactors the significance of the path we walked, the production missed an opportunity for a deeper reckoning with the material realities that the reenactment was staged against. But in that elision, we were free to act without the specter of mediation. All that we were compelled to do in response to this sudden confrontation with hallowed ground refused witness. Neither performance nor reenactment, this moment allowed a small group of us a space to feel deep into our own interior motivations for participating in such a contentious project. We were mostly Black women holding each other in quiet contemplation.

There were no cameras to catch us.

In 1811, Louisiana Governor, William C. C. Claiborne, raised and armed a militia to track and capture those who rose up. Members of the American army and navy were also armed and deployed. Sixty-six people from at least twenty-four plantations were executed (Paquette 2009, 77). Other enslaved men and women were interrogated and thrown in prison as conspirators. Some, especially those understood to be leaders, were tortured then beheaded. Their heads were spiked on poles, paraded into New Orleans and posted at the city gate. Parish authorities staked additional heads at “regular intervals on the levee down the east bank of the Mississippi River” (Paquette 2009, 78). The slow decay of the heads was meant as a warning but must have also marked the passage of time from the climax of the revolt. The events of 1811 laid bare the mechanisms of the “perpe- tual ‘state of war’” that is chattel slavery (Brown 2020, 4). 5 A large organized “slave army” commanded a spectacularly violent military response. Trauma was meant to function as a warning and discourage future resistance. Those whose heads remained on poles would have, in death, witnessed this aftermath. SRR rerouted the 1811 ending, a path lined with dismembered ancestors, and instead, wound its way inside Louis Armstrong Park to Congo Square. Historically, the most visible site of Black arts, ceremony and exchange before emancipation, Congo Square is today host to art festivals, concerts, weddings, weekly drum circles and Martin Luther King Day celebrations (Congo Square n.d.). At the end of the SRR procession, the event flyer read, “Historical reenactors and local performers will gather in a vibrant celebration of freedom from 4 to 6 pm.” Freedom from 4 to 6 pm. The reenactors and those who followed on foot were led to a stage in the square and met by drunken tourists and white revelers excited by the show of costumes and a lone Mardi Gras Indian somewhat suddenly in the mix. TV cameras, local celebrities, the attempted two-stepping of those who thought this was a tourist attraction (was it?) all produced for us the form of confusion found in the word’s secondary definition of “to rout”—or “the disorderly retreat of defeated troops.” Ending SRR in Congo Square felt at first like a failed tactical maneuver—one produced by the assumption that a historical site could produce enough symbolism to obscure the lack of chairs for tired reenactors or the poor communication with the local Black arts scene.

Despite the SRR’s refusal to represent the historical suppression of the rebellion’s participants and the terrorizing of its witnesses, the rerouted ending was still unable to resist thinking about the rebellion in terms of violent punishment. At the end, the ancestors were invoked through a live cover of Janelle Monáe’s anthemic protest song “Hell You Talmbout” led by Grace Gibson. Though it was difficult to hear, an announcement was made that the names to be said in the call and response—“say her name/say his name”—were those of the slain 1811 rebels. One by one many of the reenactors passed by the microphone next to Gibson on the stage and sang or shouted a name they held written on a piece of paper. Eventually the names of members of the community murdered by police were added to the list and also sung.

“Hell You Talmbout” is a song whose “defiant ac[t] of mourning” demands partici- pation from the listener (Quan 2017, 190). The choral call and response demands that we repeat the names of those killed by the police and through other forms of state-sanctioned violence, that we say, nay scream their names. However, in Congo Square that day the spectacle of the song was used to side-step the ending, to only obliquely acknowledge the past violence. We wonder if this is enough. Does the invocation of those killed require a sacred space? Or can the belligerent white tourist laugh and say their names as well? SRR’s ending asked Monáe’s song to do a lot of wake work in the context of a two-day long performance piece before an atypical audience. 6 But perhaps our experience of the ending underscores the antinomy between the song’s lyrics and title. As it was written, “Hell You Talmbout” is an emphatic call to speech and a demand for naming and recognition, but in the context of a reenactment that changed the ending, the sense of what happened to those embodied by the reenactors remained fuzzy. Were they victorious? How did they die? What respect can be paid without acknowledging the bloody end? Confusion and complicated feelings attend the endless list—&and, &and, and ... of Black death. The interrogative of the song’s title might be read as an expression of confusion in the syntax of rage.

However, just as SRR was not the first organized retracing of the 1811 path, it was not the first artistic attempt to reckon with the impressive scale of the 1811 revolt and its brutal ending in the decapitation of Black rebels. In the examples that follow, from nineteenth-century songs, to twentieth-century poetry, to twenty-first-century assemblage work, artists not only dare to “look” at the mounted heads of revolt leaders, they also draw connections between the numerous local flashpoints of collective resistance, weaving together the events of 1724, 1731, 1784, 1795, 1811, 1834. Often intentionally confusing the viewer or reader, these works consider the repetition of torture and execution in response to organized resistance as it came alternately at the hands of colonial officials, white planters, and extralegal groups. Their work reflects the ongoing difficulty of respectfully asking those mutilated for their resistance along the Mississippi River to speak literally and figuratively to each other over time.

In her 1997 poem, “The Head of Luis Congo Speaks,” New Orleanian poet, Brenda Marie Osbey, imagines how the severed head of Luís Congo, the Black executioner of early eighteenth-century New Orleans, might have addressed those he killed: “If you cannot lift up my eyes from where they droop along my cheeks ... so that I can see the great god ... I beg of you / a bit of your cool / fair / water” (1997, 103). In each section of the poem, the severed head interpolates the living and reflects on Congo’s participation in the violence of the colonial regimes along the Mississippi River. Osbey’s work embraces the difficult temporalities of racialized violence in Louisiana and a history of conflicts that are not always Black against White (a binary with uneven traction in the city, even today). The story, her poetry reminds us, even includes a Black man who traded freedom for “bloodstained hands” and “traitor’s heart” (1997, 112, 111). 7 More recently, in 2017, the Whitney Plantation Museum (WPM), the self-described “only plantation museum in the region with an exclusive focus on slavery” decided to rep- resent the violent ending of the 1811 revolt by adding an optional “memorial” section for visitors featuring a number of sculpted heads on stakes that are realistic in size and feature, made of a dark somber metal (About Whitney Planatation n.d.). The sculpted heads are located on the side of the plantation house, set apart from the official tour and its emphasis on the children who lived on the plantation, children who are represented inside various buildings by unsettling life-size statues. The impaled heads by contrast remain outside and are reflected sometimes in the water that pools on the grass into which they are staked. Perhaps there was some difficulty in producing a narrative that could meaningfully relate the figure of the enslaved child alongside the (equally?) disturbing scene of the dismembered fugitive adult. The heads are arranged “in a formation resembling a military bat- talion” (Johnson 2019, 105). What does it mean to enshrine the rebels through severed heads, in military formation, as if they are still fighting?

Dread Scott dismissed the WPM’s choice to represent the heads: They’re saying, White people are brutal. That’s true, but that’s not the story here. The story is the enslaved Africans who were fighting to not only emancipate themselves personally, but to end the system that enslaved them and people like them. That should be memorialized, not the brutality that was handed down to the people who dared to rise up. (Johnson 2019, 105; emphasis in original) Putting aside the neatness of Scott’s narration of the motives of those who resisted, what are the implications of excising the racialized colonial violence—the response to the armed uprising of participants? New Orleanian artist, Kristina Kay Robinson, learned about the revolt growing up and put the question another way: “I wondered, as I followed the cover- age of the reenactment, for whose benefit and comfort had the violence visited upon us actually been omitted?” (n.d.). Robinson’s performance artwork thinks with the history of 1729 and 1811. Though it is not invested in reenactment, her piece called Republica: Temple of Color and Sound is “a mobile shrine, learning, gathering and performance space dedicated to the memory and principles embodied by the rebellion.” 8

In the months before the reenactment, in another material meditation on the lived experience of the women who rebelled, New Orleans-based artist and organizer kai lumumba barrow constructed an installation titled “Raising Cain” in the front windows of The Community Book Center, a Black-owned bookstore and social hub in New Orleans’ Seventh Ward. Composed of organic materials—rope, cotton, sugar cane, palm tree sheddings—the assemblage work indexed the labor of those enslaved on Louisiana plantations. Dedicated to “Victoria, Peggy, Lucy, Suzette, Francoise, Marie Rose and the other unnamed women of the 1811 ‘rising.’” This installation represents another mode of reckoning with this historical occurrence. barrow prepared and compiled the materials by hand, wrestling with sugar cane outside during some of the hottest days of the summer. In line with her queer Black feminist art practice and investments in interrogating the conditions of Black women’s labor, barrows’ installation, housed in Black communal space, performed a deliberately “hushed” critique of Dread Scott’s Avant Garde spectacle.

Osbey was not the first nor barrow the last to, in the former’s words, “inven[t] a mythical relationship” between those who resisted at different times along the river (Osbey 1997, 126). One of the earliest recorded examples is a song for San Malo, a man executed by the state in 1784 for living as a maroon. “The Dirge of St. Malo” was written down in the 1880s, suggesting a long oral repertoire. 9 But that song’s description of San Malo’s execution on the levee has been dismissed as inaccurate, its “authors’” accused of having “confused events” of the 1795 Point Coupée Revolt with San Malo’s last stand in 1784 (Din 1999). 10 The form of confusion with which this song has been accused will help us return to the confusion that arose in us during SRR’s rendition of “Hell You Talmbout.” The song for San Malo as it was written down lingers on the details of San Malo’s death by watching the watchers. It performs an early aesthetics of cop-watching that alerts all those who hear it to the violent tactics particular to the levee. Twelve out of twenty-lines begin with “they,” indexing the mob and legal violence against San Malo: “They hauled him from the cypress swamp...They drew the horse—the cart moved off.” His body, in contrast with his name, is able to mark the passage of time and the terror of an unburied ancestor: “They left his body swinging there./For carrion crows to feed upon.” His body is like the heads left on poles along the river, left to leave an impression.

The song’s trajectory from the swamp to the levee, not always a great distance, paired with repetition of the way San Malo is tied (arms in front, in back, to a horse) and the hanging referenced twice, all suggest a well-worn path. The song’s own formal in perpe- tuity (ending with, “they left his body swinging there”) critiques the reality that the song need be sung one hundred, two hundred years later. Similarly, a second ritual poem by Osbey, called “The Business of Pursuit: San Malo’s Prayer,” opens up space for a “mythical relationship” between San Malo and Luís Congo and intentionally confuses the reader about when and where events occurred. San Malo mocks Luis Congo for his vision of “heads [that] are bloodless on their poles” and links Congo, who lived fifty years earlier, to his execution saying, “my head goes up on the pole just as you decreed” (Osbey 1997, 108, 113). We who read and recite are asked to picture bloodstains across time, to embrace a capacious critique of the systems that produce them.

By contrast, SRR performs a very different aestheticizing of the revolt in its rendition of “Hell You Talmbout.” Though the song uses repetition to radically mourn those murdered by the systems descended from slave patrols and the convict lease system, the effect of the repetition in Congo Square that day was to decontextualize and thus anonymize the individuals whose names were said. Little context other than the label “rebel” was given to explain or describe the dead evoked in the Square. And while the juxtaposition of the present day was essential to the project’s artistic vision, in Congo Square, the present offered the happily dancing tourist spilling drinks on the tired feet of those who had marched 26 miles to venerate the past. One hundred and fifty years from now, will someone accuse the SRR’s rendition of “Hell You Talmbout” of the kind of “confusion,” as in “mistake,” that the song for San Malo is accused of? Did the spectacle obscure the ancestors? With this greater attention, did they also feel attended to? The cameras rolled, did the dead as well?

Turning to their time, we wonder what theories of surveillance the 1811 rebels developed as they moved through the swampy parishes in and around New Orleans. Robert Paquette explains how the bend in the river shaped the geography of their resistance, wherein “the walking distance between slave quarters [was] much shorter than the walking distance between [their dwellings and] manor house” allowing for greater ease for gathering and communication (2009, 80). As he notes, the enslaved at Fortier plantation eluded capture by retreating “downriver through the woods in a disciplined silence that astonished [General] Hampton and others with him” (2009, 76). The swamps are an anti-surveillance environment. There in the swamps the ambiguity of shadows and shallow ground must have produced or confirmed an ethos that privileged uncertainty over state recognition. As a place that is neither land nor water but both, the swamps like the “shoal, like Black thought, is a place where momentum and velocity as normal vectors are impeded” (King 2019, 4).

The confounding environment of the swamp carries the “potential to be something else that cannot be known in advance” (King 2019, 8). There are places you are willing to go because you cannot afford for your plans to be seen. Harriet Jacobs described her time in the swamps in terms of a willingness to endure the unpredictable danger of potentially predatory wildlife than the predictable terror of enslavement. 11 As C. Riley Snorton notes, “Its perception as uninhabitable is what also constitutes the swamp as a ‘loophole of retreat’” (2017, 72). The impeding of physics—momentum and velocity—crosses into the visual. Confusion becomes a tactic to evade oversight, a stowing away that carries the potential for reemergence. As such, the swamp is a nonbinary place. It is a both-and and neither-nor place. It is a space that encourages acts of refusal. As Julia Chinyere Oparah defines in her use of “maroon abolitionism”: “As maroon abolitionists, Black gender-oppressed activists know that the consequences of failing to achieve abolition are that they themselves, their family members, and their loved ones will continue to be disappeared” (2011, 303).

The swamps allegorize the paradox of abolition, as the threshold and horizon of Black worldmaking.

In a jointly written statement for The Marshall Project, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and James Kilgore affirm that “abolition is first and foremost philosophical,” and rooted in a desire for a “society that centers freedom and justice instead of profit and punishment.” 12 Yet as abolition has become more a part of public discourse, it is rejoined by a series of questions concerning its practicability: What would be the protocols for responding to violence and harm? Are there not forms of violence that require policing and prisons—even as policing and prisons are instruments of repression designed to hold abolition at bay? Audre Lorde reminds us that we need new tools. How might confusion act in the service of an abolitionist imaginary? The second definition of confusion as “to rout” seems to also express the 1811 retreat into the swamps, or the impetus to reenact a “failed” rebellion, or perhaps any attempt at revolt in the midst of its violent suppression. We are inclined to sit with the various places the ancestors ended up: in the swamp, in prison, back on the plantation, in the imaginations of costumed reenactors, in pieces on poles. We sit with the seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of names and the and of state authorized punishment that accompanies Black revolt. From this vantage point, we see confusion as the potential for cover and as a kind of speculation that subsumes spectacle. Confusion is a necessary uncertainty that attends radical imagination.

As Mariame Kaba writes, “When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without law enforcement—and they shudder” (2020). Abolitionists, she notes, “have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation” (2020). Getting to this other vision requires tarrying in the swamps, which is to say it demands that we embrace how “Black revolt as performance sits both within and outside the bounds of translatability” (King 2019, 42). Perhaps confusion is consternating for some because it feels too much like failure, but the swamps—as a space of living in the world, a space to commune, to collect ourselves and plot the next revolt—offer a different way to map our affective territory.

Perhaps the success of Black revolt is not marked by how accurately it is retold or the clarity of the demands attached to the act of gathering and moving together (or the rapidity of state response). Perhaps movement and imagination are the offering. As such we “must remember to reach only for the neither thing” “and stop eulogizing the project of living long enough to see/ that it has yet to come, and so can never die” (Smythe n.d..). And so we exist in the &and of the inevitability of Black living.

notes

  1. One of the most pressing questions for scholars of the Black radical tradition and Black per- formance is borne from a confusion about the prepositional distinction between performances of or for freedom. See e.g., Hartman (1997); Brooks (2006); Tavia N’yongo (2009); Moten (2018). ↩

  2. It is not lost on us that the use of “body cameras” and “cell phone footage” in and around the SRR procession mirrors or is haunted by the way these particular technologies show up in con- temporary discourses surrounding surveillance, police brutality and police reform. ↩

  3. Speaking of Steve McQueen’s film End Credits (2012), Sharpe describes how “so much of Black intramural life and social and political work is redacted, made invisible to the present and future, subtended by plantation logics, detached optics, and brutal architectures.” As we attend to in greater depth later in this essay, surveillance works through the logic of hypervi- sibility—a way of making invisible some things by spectacularizing others (2016, 114). ↩

  4. As Simone Browne writes, “I use the term ‘dark sousveillance’ as a way to situate the tactics employed to render one’s self out of sight, and strategies used in the flight to freedom from slavery as necessarily ones of undersight...I plot sousveillance as an imaginative plane from which to mobilize a critique of racializing surveillance, a critique that takes the form in antisurveillance, countersurveillance, and other freedom practices. Dark sousveillance, then, plots imaginaries that are oppositional and that are hopeful for another way of being” (2015, 21). ↩

  5. Brown refers here to the language of Olaudah Equiano. ↩

  6. As Sharpe argues, “to be in the wake is to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding” (2016, 14). ↩

  7. For an excellent discussion of Congo’s relationship to this longer history see, Dawdy (2006). ↩

  8. “Republica” is another example in this tradition that Robinson describes as “is a multi-modal arts project reimagining the past, present and future of the Gulf Coast region of North America. Inspired by early revolts in the Louisiana Colony such as the 1729 Natchez/Bambara revolt, the 1795 plot at Pointe Coupee and the 1811 German Coast Uprising.” Robinson, “Republica: Temple of Color and Sound,” n.d. ↩

  9. “The Dirge of St. Malo” was published in Cable (1959, 418–419). ↩

  10. Din seeks to deem the song inaccurate in his disagreement with another historian of the period, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. His analysis of the poem continues to make many presumptions about community memory: “The poem’s numerous errors convincingly suggest that it was not com- posed until after the execution of the Point Coupée conspirators—long after the details of San Malo’s capture and execution had become fuzzy in the minds of most people ... The poem’s many mistakes reveal that its author(s) neither witnessed the 1784 execution nor saw San Malo” (1999, 114–115). ↩

  11. As Harriett Jacobs writes, “But even those large, venomous snakes were less dreadful to my imagination than the white men in that community called civilized” (1861, 171–172). ↩

  12. “The Case for Abolition” June 19, 2019, The Marshall Project: [https://www][0]. themarshallproject.org/2019/06/19/the-case-for-abolition. ↩

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Ra Malika Imhotep is a PhD candidate in African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

SJ Zhang is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Johnson is currently writing a book called Going Maroon and Other Forms of Freedom.

C. Riley Snorton is Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Chicago. Snorton is the author of Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017).

REFERENCES

“About Whitney Plantation”. n.d. Whitney Plantation. https://www.whitneyplantation.org/about/.

Alexander, M. Jacqui. 2006. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Brooks, Daphne A. 2006. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850– 1910. Durham: Duke University Press Books.

Brown, Vincent. 2020. Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press Books.

Cable, George W. 1959. Creoles and Cajuns: Stories of Old Louisiana. Edited by Arlin Turner. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. “The Case for Abolition”. 2019. The Marshall Project, June 19. https://www.themarshallproject.org/ 2019/06/19/the-case-for-abolition. “Congo Square/Louis Armstrong Park”. n.d. Nola.gov. https://www.nola.gov/parks-and-parkways/ parks-squares/congo-square-louis-armstrong-pfark/.

Dawdy, Shannon Lee. 2006. “The Burden of Louis Congo and the Evolution of Savagery in Colonial Louisiana.” In Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism, edited by Anupama Rao and Steven Pierce, 61–89. Durham: Duke University Press.

Din, Gilbert C. 1999. Spaniards, Planters and Slaves: The Spanish Regulation of Slavery in Louisiana, 1763–1803. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press.

Ellison, Treva. 2017. “The Labor of Werqing It: The Performance and Protest Strategies of Sir Lady Java.” In Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and The Politics of Visibility, edited by Johanna Burton, Eric A. Stanley, and Tourmaline, 1–22. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Freeman, Elizabeth. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham NC: Duke University Press Books.

Hartman, Saidiya V. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Jacobs, Harriet. 1861. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by L. Maria Child. Boston: Published for the Author.

Johnson, Erik. 2019. “Slavery, Tourism, and Memory in New Orleans’s ‘Plantation Country.” Africa Today 65 (4): 100–118. Kaba, Mariame. 2020. “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.” The New York Times, June 12, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html.

King, Tiffany L. 2019. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham: Duke University Press.

McDonald, Jihan. 2019. “A Loving Critique of the Slave Rebellion Reenactment,” December 27, 2019. Self-published.

Moten, Fred. 2018. Stolen Life. Durham: Duke University Press Books.

N’yongo, Tavia. 2009. The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Oparah, Julia C. (AKA Julia Sudbury). 2011. “Maroon Abolitionists: Black Gender-Oppressed Activists in the Anti-Prison Movement in the US and Canada.” In Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Eric Stanley and Nat Smith, 293– 322. Chico: AK Press.

Osbey, Brenda Marie. 1997. All Saints: New and Selected Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Paquette, Robert L. 2009. “‘A Horde of Brigands’? The Great Louisiana Slave Revolt of 1811 Reconsidered.” Historical Reflections 35 (1): 72–79.

Quan, H. L. T. 2017. “‘It’s Hard to Stop Rebels That Time Travel’ Democratic Living and the Radical Reimagining of Old Worlds.” In Futures of Black Radicalism, edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson, and Alex Lubin, 173–193. London: Verso.

Robinson, Kristina Kay. n.d. “Letter from New Orleans: Down River Road.” Burnaway, https:// burnaway.org/letter-from-new-orleans-down-river-road/.

Robinson, n.d. “Republica: Temple of Color and Sound.” Kristina Kay Robinson. https:// kristinakayrobinson.com/republica-temple-of-color-and-sound/.

Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press. Smythe, S. A. n.d. “An Offering.” https://tdor.co/art/an-offering/.

Snorton, C. Riley. 2017. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Woolfork, Lisa. 2008. Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture. 1st ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Women & Performance