Scenes of Resurrection: Black Lives Matter, Die-ins, and the Here and Now of Queer Futurity | Jesse A. Goldberg (30.2)

“Thus the question remains as to what exercise of the will, forms of action, or enactment of
possibility is available to animate chattel or the socially dead or to the excluded ones that
provide the very ground of man’s liberty. The double bind, simply stated, is: How does
one account for the state of domination and the possibilities seized in practice? How does
one represent the various modes of practice without reducing them to conditions of domination
or romanticizing them as pure forces of resistance?”
— Saidiya Hartman 1
“The question here concerns the inevitability of such reproduction even in the denial of it. This
is the question of whether the performance of subjectivity […] always and everywhere reproduces
what lies before it; it is also the question of whether performance in general is ever
outside the economy of reproduction.”
— Fred Moten2

How can “playing dead” in the street effectively mobilize against state-sanctioned anti- Black killing? This question merges with Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten’s dialogue on the reproductive capacities of Black performance to haunt one’s participation in Black Lives Matter protest actions when called to participate in a die-in. This essay takes seriously Anusha Kedhar’s assertion that “Bodies matter—particularly when people are protesting the black body’s disposability at the hands of the state. Choreography, movement and gesture are not peripheral but central to the politics of protest,” to consider the overlapping potentials of “domination” and “resistance” in the very moment of embodied protest (Kedhar 2014a). While lying on the ground playing dead with dozens or even hundreds of other people—mostly Black people and other people of color—what does the simulation of death by living, breathing bodies say in protest of such excessive and unjust death?

Imagine the bystander or witness’s encounter with a die-in. 3 They are in their car, driving home from work after eight hours earning a paycheck to go home and strategize how to distribute the funds of said paycheck between rent, utilities, food, and medicine. They are tired. But they have made this drive a hundred times and have thus slipped into a kind of autopilot, thoughtlessly rolling from their place of work to their home, their body anticipating the physical rest on the other side of the threshold of the forthcoming doorframe. (Can you imagine this passerby, this unknowing would-be witness, without falling into empathetic identification? Without assuming their race, gender, sexuality, bodily capacities, or class positioning? These are genuine questions.) Then their autopilot is interrupted. Traffic has stopped at a stand-still. There are bodies lying in the street. And there are people walking amongst the bodies with chalk, outlining the bodies’ shapes on the concrete. And is that person holding a sign? Just before the driver can read the sign, perhaps for an explanation, the bodies sit up, stand up, walk. In their exhaustion, this bystander shakes their head—surely, they did not just see dead bodies come back to life? No. In their exhaustion they put together what they just saw. Protestors. These are people—mostly people of color, from the look of things—who are not dead, but rather decided to lay in the street and play dead. And their comrades with the chalk were making a political point. And now they are all simply getting up and walking away. What is it that this bystander, this witness, sees? Thinks? Perhaps they reflect on their own exhaustion and extrapolate from that to the exhaustion these protestors must feel at the imperative to again demonstrate to the world that Black Lives Matter—as that sign says. 4 Or perhaps they are frustrated with the protestors for simply reaffirming that society would rather see Black people just like that—lying dead in the street—rather than “meaningfully contributing to society,” as they think these protestors should be doing. Or perhaps they fantasize about running over the protestors as they lay in the street. Or perhaps they wonder about their first delusion—about the image of dead bodies coming back to life. If we take seriously not only the embodied choreography of the protestors, but at the same time the embodied witnessing of bystanders, and the stakes of the unpredictability of bystanders’ responses, how can we return to an evaluation of the protests as performance?

I believe these questions raised by the performance and witnessing of Black protest call for a pessimism without a paralysis and an optimism against hope. Thinking with Christina Sharpe’s notion of “the wake,” which I interpret as eschewing an either/or binary between optimism for the future and pessimism for the now, we can encounter embodied Black protest as both unable to escape the continuously unfolding afterlife of slavery and as able to practice a kind of fugitivity eschewing complete capture. That is, thinking Black Lives Matter protests as happening in what I call the “excessive present” of slavery— the notion that our current now is not merely influenced by, but excessively coeval with the time of slavery—reveals the simultaneity of pessimism and optimism such that the former is not resigned to the permanence of the violence of domination and the latter is not seduced into reliance on a future solution that may be beyond contemporary conceptualization (Goldberg 2017). Such a simultaneity may capture something of the “militant mourning” articulated by ACT UP’s use of the die-in as political protest against the government’s inaction during the AIDS crisis in the late twentieth century. Through the synthesis of the accumulating historical citations of political protest and the ephemeral temporality of performance, Black Lives Matter protests in general and die-ins in particular kinetically synthesize Christina Sharpe’s notion of “wake work”:

In short, I mean wake work to be a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives. With that analytic we might imagine otherwise from what we know now in the wake of slavery. (2016, 18)

That is, thinking with these scenes of Black performance follows Susan Leigh Foster’s insistence on understanding “the body as an articulate signifying agent” (2003, 396) and attunes us to the sense articulated by Stephanie L. Batiste that “the body makes theory” (2014, 216)—particularly, in my own view, in the moment when the bodies playing dead end their performance, open their closed eyes, and stand back up, ascending from the blood-soaked earth back towards the air so often denied to Black subjects.5 We can imagine in that moment of standing back up, of moving from earth to air, the apostrophe in “I can’t breathe”—another in a repertoire of what Kedhar (2014b) elsewhere calls “a choreopolitics of freedom” evident in Black Lives Matter protests—becomes parenthetical: “I can(‘t) breathe.” The body standing back up at the “end” of the performance of dead-stillness enacts Black life lived in that parenthetical, of Black life sustained by unbreathable air. In this ephemeral moment of the parentheses that marks the ephemerality of the protest performance, I argue, we catch a glimpse of a scene of resurrection within a scene of subjection.

Neither an optimistic account of how far we have come since the end of slavery, nor a defeatist account of how absolutely nothing has changed since 1865, Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America argues that slavery both ends and does not end, that historicity matters, but History with a capital H might just get it wrong.6 Living in the wake of this impossibility of periodization, as Sharpe recognizes in her ongoing project to think Blackness and Being “in the wake,” demands that Blackness (and Black performance) be theorized across, inside, and out of time. This is particularly true of the performances of Black Lives Matter, which seek to both historicize the particular deaths of particular people at the hands of the state and to resist the periodization which would separate these deaths from the material deaths of and the social death inaugurated by the Middle Passage and its afterlives. Die-ins or highway shutdowns seek to resist the violence of police brutality that has remained so unflinchingly consistent despite the illusion of newness to some observers engendered by augmented technologies of visibility such as cell phone, body, and dashboard cameras. It is common in social justice conversations today to hear some version of, it isn’t the killings that are new, it’s the cameras. These protests highlight the urgency of resistance against violence happening now against particular people, while tracking the movement from plantation police powers to post-emancipation police power.7 In a die-in, specifically, there is an embodied poetics of accumulation which refuses containment. While most protestors lie “dead” on the ground, there is often a small number of fellow protestors walking among them, outlining their bodies with chalk. This outlining reproduces the image of police tracing a body’s silhouette at a crime scene, invoking the presence of the state and state-sanctioned violence. This invocation, however, is not singular but through repetition— body after body is traced—actually refuses singularity. There is not one particular victim of police violence being hailed by the die-in, but an accumulating list of known and unknown names. Additionally, at most die-ins, there are too many “dead” protestors for their comrades to outline every single one of them, thus leaving a number of the bodies “unmarked” by the symbolism of the state. These bodies are excess to the symbolic order of modern policing and so-called criminal justice, and in their excess they index the temporal excess of state-sanctioned Black death. That is, the sheer accumulation of bodies, alongside the ultimately insufficient repetition of the chalk outline, rupture the framework of police violence to signal the present moment’s saturation with Black death as continuous with Black death under another regime of anti-Black control: slavery.

If slavery and freedom are always mutually imbricated and the violence of slavery was transfigured into the violence of police powers, then Black Lives Matter protests against police violence must reckon with the aftermath of slavery and its attendant doubling of resistance with domination as it manifests in scenes of Black performance. Die-ins, I believe, enact such reckoning through embodied theorizing. They demand historicization within the current moment, but in the very poetics of the choreography also demand attention be paid to what Jared Sexton refers to as anti-Blackness without break or punctuation. 8 The demand to historicize requires that we emphasize that Black Lives Matter was mobilized by Black queer women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, in response to the specific event of George Zimmerman’s acquittal in 2013 for killing Trayvon Martin.9 But the anti-Blackness without break or interval or punctuation that is before, during, and after this moment of origin explodes the time of Black Lives Matter beyond its ostensible beginning and expands its performative beyond the purview of Martin’s male, ostensibly10 gender-conforming body into the possibilities of becoming and enacting a queer performative, as Tavia Nyong’o (2015) has argued, that demands diachronic analysis in the very same moment it calls for synchronic attention. 11

As Nyong’o reminded those at the 2015 Futures of American Studies Institute, by riffing on Sharpe’s work, “Black Lives Matter is always uttered in the wake of Black death,” and yet as a queer performative it both refigures mourning and queers melancholia, thereby offering a “militant mourning” reminiscent of “Douglas Crimp’s 1989 call for both mourning and militancy.” That is, the very phrase “Black Lives Matter” is a call to mourn the repeated deaths of Black people and a call to mobilize in resistance against the forces conspiring to produce Black death even while mourning. This realization, Nyong’o argues, reveals the historical contingency of anti-Black violence in the very same moment it recognizes its consistent presence. This queering of temporality both refuses to periodize the violence of anti-Blackness into a memorialized past and historicizes this violence to show how it has always been anything but inevitable, even if it has remained structurally persistent. Ultimately for Nyong’o,

Queerness is everywhere in the vicinity of a slogan that rarely speaks its name, not because its sexuality is on the downlow, but because it realizes that queer performativity’s doing in the world can work intersectionally within word assemblages in which ‘queer’ is not always front and center. Queerness here becomes a periperformative, not because one needs to be queer to say Black lives matter, but because one can hardly claim to be queer if one does not say it.12 (2015)

While Nyong’o invites us to think of the speech act of saying “Black Lives Matter” as itself a queer performative, I am interested in different performatives employed by the doing of performing bodies under the sign of the movement—specifically the performatives of “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” and, as I’ve argued, especially the performances of “die-ins.” These embodied performances and speech acts have become common practices in rallies, marches, occupations, and other protests mobilized around the Black Lives Matter slogan and movement.

The first involves protestors holding up their hands, palms outward, in the position which is supposed to signal non-threatening submission to officers of the law. At times protestors will remain silent, while signs or designated speakers provide commentary on their actions. Further versions see protestors participating in a call-and-response wherein callers shout, “Hands Up” and responders finish the statement, “Don’t Shoot.” This scene demonstrates that, in Kedhar’s words,

Unlike other slogans, though, [such as “Black Lives Matter” itself, as Nyong’o discusses it in his talk as speech act,] “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” is not just voiced. It is also embodied. Contained within the phrase is both a plea not to shoot, as well as the bodily imperative to lift one’s hands up. (2014b)

We thus need to attend to gesture as well as voice, the doing as well as the saying.

The second bears traces of the iconic sit-ins of the 1950s and 60s and is an instantiation of a protest performative that has been used for different causes, including environmental protests and radical queer protest of the AIDS crisis. Dying-in involves protestors lying down motionless in public spaces to represent dead bodies en masse and bring attention to a cause by interrupting people’s daily lives with simulated death. This strategy has a long history of use in radical queer politics, being employed to make vivid the mass death from the AIDS epidemic under the Regan administration, and to mourn lives designated as unmournable, as Dagmawi Woubshet recounts (2015). In Black Lives Matter protest performances, as I’ve recounted and analyzed above, there are often activists who walk among the symbolically dead protestors and outline their bodies with chalk as they lie on the ground. In some iterations, the names of victims of police murder are read aloud by one voice as a mass of protestors continues to “play dead.”

Both of these performances have proven effective in garnering attention for the Black Lives Matter movement—a success which I do not wish to dispute. Rather, I want to keep in mind the “ambivalence” of Black performance, the fact that, as Douglas A. Jones writes in his account of Black theatrical performance under the regime of slavery, “since performance sustained slavery and freedom it could not be trusted nor neglected” (2012, 21). In other words, performance exceeds the intention of performers such that even when framed as protest in explicit opposition to dominant powers, the structures of domination which necessitate protest in the first place are reproduced. Again, because Hartman’s question bears repeating, “How does one represent the various modes of practice without reducing them to conditions of domination or romanticizing them as pure forces of resistance? (1997, 55)”

On the one hand, witnessing the call and response of the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” chant can seduce one into romanticizing the protest as a sine qua non of resistance to state violence. A large group of protestors literally face-to-face with armed police put up their empty hands and assert the antithesis of police brutality by reciting a script taken directly from orders given by officers of the law. “The bodily act of the hands up don’t shoot protests takes those same bodies that are surveilled, disciplined, controlled, and killed and infuses them with power and a voice,” writes Kedhar. “It resurrects those dead bodies left lying in the street, and asks us, compels us to confront the alive-ness of the black body as a force of power and resistance.” It is even a deconstructive performative in this way, beginning the call and response with a police officer’s hail—“Hands up!”—and responding with what is implied by the social contract underpinned by the terms in which that hail is ostensibly uttered—“Don’t shoot!”13 In the words of Hershini Bhana Young, whose book Illegible Will: Coercive Spectacles of Labor in South Africa and the Diaspora interrogates “the body as gestural archive and inventor” through which “gestures migrate, repeat, and acquire (new) meanings” (2017, 12) in these “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” performances,

approaching a police officer (who may or may not have his gun drawn) with arms up is not so much a gesture of supplication as a threat, a parody of subservience. Instead of enacting my normative gestural role of freezing or supplicating, my gestures turn vulnerability into aggression. (2017, 11)

Yet, the embodied performance which accompanies the performative speech act in this call and response reproduces the scene of subjection as the scene of protest, if we recall the image of Michael Brown holding up his hands before being shot in the head by Darren Wilson. The performance of raising open hands to the police to signify one’s non-threatening status is undercut by the racist imagination which necessitates so many unarmed and non-threatening Black people to be killed by police. Thus, the conveyance of submission to the rule of law—one is legally not allowed to meet non-violence with lethal force, even if one is an officer of the law—is both a resistance to the abuses of law and a reproduction of the domination of “the force of law” and its repetition of its “founding violence.”14 In other words, while “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” demonstrations signify on the scene of police violence and thus conjure the black subject as what Abdul JanMohamed calls “the deathbound- subject,” they also reveal and revel in Mumia Abu-Jamal’s insight regarding “The Law Against The Law.” 15 Following the premise that “the theory of law is vastly different from its practice,” Abu-Jamal argues that a state law passed in Pennsylvania disallowing certain death penalty appeals is able to exist as law despite contradicting the spirit of a 1986 U.S. Supreme Court case (Baston v. Kentucky). The Pennsylvania law, he argues, “is a proclamation of the supremacy of the political over the legal. It is a statute that explicitly enforces the value that white life matters and Black life does not.” In enacting a scene of the law’s violence as political protest, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” performatives follow the premise of “the supremacy of the political over the legal” not as the given of defeat, but as an opportunity for intervention. This “opportunity” is of course not purely emancipatory, since it is the very condition of anti-Black violence.

In the case of Black Lives Matter’s use of die-ins, the ambivalence of Black performance is perhaps even more starkly felt. On one hand, the arresting power of a die-in goes without saying, and the solemn occupation of public space as an interruption of not only business as usual but life itself with the image of mass death literally resists the machinations of the state by blocking the physical and affective flow of bodies in space. This is an important, effective form of protest, as Kedhar notes after comparing die-ins to tactics employed by Occupy Wall Street, “Protesters have used ‘die-ins’ to stop the everyday flow of movement, and force onlookers to confront the fatal outcome of police brutality and racial profiling” (Kedhar 2014a). I would add that, since the die-in employs a poetics of accumulation which exceeds police brutality as the domain of anti-Black violence, protestors force onlookers to confront the very transhistorical legacy of a ground saturated by Black death. Thus, through interrupting the flow of capital, these die-ins enact what those three words would insist by demanding, through the very presence of bodies interrupting public space, a space for the mourning of Black death(s).

Yet on the other hand, the very image upon which this performance draws its power is the lifeless Black body. The fact that protesters register their resistance to murderous state violence by assuming the position of dead bodies invokes Moten’s questions to Hartman in the second epigraph to this essay. It seems that “performance in general is [n]ever outside the economy of reproduction.” One could question whether a die-in is the appropriate genre of protest when the stated goal is the realization that Black Lives Matter. While protestors certainly intend for their verisimilitude of mortality to register as an invitation to critique the forces of violence which produce so much death and necessitate protest in the first place, it is also possible that some observers may witness the die-in as spectacle, or as a putting on display of exactly what the white supremacist imagination desires for Black people. In other words, if anti-Blackness is indeed the norm in this world of white supremacist capitalism—or “the weather” as Sharpe puts it—then putting on display a simulacrum of Black death invites the desire for wish fulfillment and provides the reproducible image for those who would peddle such desire.

Such a desire for Black death is certainly external to the protesters themselves, who are making public their internal, otherwise private desires for not only a world with less death, but a world not structured by death and the threat of death in the first instance. One way of reading the mass of bodies participating in a die-in is as a refutation of the public/private split which renders public action political and private action apolitical—the kind of divide eschewed by Johanna Hedva when she raised her fist from her bed upon hearing a Black Lives Matter protest out her window, and the kind of divide against which she therefore positions her “sick woman theory” (2016). Hedva reminds her readers that “we must contend with the fact that many whom these protests are for, are not able to participate in them—which means they are not able to be visible as political activists.” Indeed, following the release of the policy platform of The Movement for Black Lives in summer 2016, a group of Black disabled and deaf activists writing as The Harriet Tubman Collective critiqued the platform for neglecting disabled Black people in its vision. Such erasure, they argue, “is disingenuous, at best, and violently irresponsible at worst.” (Harriet Tubman Collective 2016) The particular points levied by the Harriet Tubman Collective are substantive critiques of the political vision of The Movement for Black Lives and cannot be swept aside. I want to suggest, however, that in the specific moment of a die-in, protesters are potentially radically fracturing the divide between the public and the private, thus rendering politically present those private desires for a different world which may otherwise go unaccounted for in public. This is not to say a die-in is a utopian, universally inclusive form of protest that mitigates the issues raised by Hedva and the Harriet Tubman Collective, but it is just to say that the die-in imagines a different kind of politics that could begin to enact in the here and now an intersectional praxis of protesting anti- Blackness, queer antagonism, misogynoir, and ableism through the utter refusal of distinctions between public and private, mobile and static, loud and silent forms of resistance.

At the same time, however, the risk in collapsing the distinction between the internal or private and the external or public is the fact that performance exceeds the intentions of the performer. Attending to the ways in which the die-in enacts a space of radical mourning for those involved in the protest both in its immediate spatial configuration and in its larger psychic space which stretches to the bedrooms of those too sick to make it out to the street or the park does not negate the possibility of making a spectacle of Black death in service of the libidinal economy of white supremacist capitalism. Kashif Powell persuasively argued in a presentation at the 2015 annual meeting of the American Studies Association that by reproducing the scene of the obliteration of Black life, die-ins “fail to imagine life somewhere else” and therefore cannot escape reproducing the scene of subjection within the scene of protest. 16 Along this line of thinking, the die-in remains over-determined by the state’s desire for and enactment of Black death, and thus as a performance the die-in is a political failure because it capitulates to state power, even if against the best intentions of the performers. Without dismissing this view, I believe that while it is true it is incomplete. Without dismissing this critical evaluation of the die-in, I encourage us to see die-ins as not only responding to and thus reproducing state-sanctioned scenes of subjection forged through excessive violence, but as also scenes of resurrection which exceed the state’s violence, imagining beyond the boundaries of a state/resistance binary. 17

While conceding that a die-in does indeed reproduce the scripts of state-sanctioned Black death and insisting that we ought not theorize ourselves completely away from or outside of this proximity to (material and social) death, I would also insist that a die-in does imagine Black life, if not elsewhere, then in excess of the apparent terms of the here and now. The protestors who are able to, eventually stand up and walk away from the scene of death. That is, right at that liminal moment between the ephemeral ontology and the hauntological afterlife of performance, when the die-in is declared “over” just as its political power resonates beyond its ending, the bodies of the performers, which have never ceased drawing breath, cease enacting breathlessness and ascend, like revenants refusing their gravesites, into the air denied by the state for Black people like Eric Garner, a particular victim of police violence who is transformed through Black protest performance into an avatar for multitudes of victims of anti-Blackness who can’t breathe. I am following Sharpe here, who writes,

I’ve been thinking about what it takes, in the midst of the singularity, the virulent antiBlackness everywhere and always remotivated, to keep breath in the Black body. […] In the weather of the wake, one cannot trust, support, or condone the state’s application of something called justice, but one can only hold one’s breath for so long. (2016, 109–11)

In the moment when protestors rise from the ground, the site/cite of death becomes a site/ cite of life lived beyond death. Or, to use C. Riley Snorton’s words as he writes about Phillip DeVine’s life and death and afterlife, the ephemeral moment of rising points to “life that exceed[s] life” (2017, 193). This life lived beyond death happens not someplace else, but right here and right now, in this world, a world which does not negate the anti- Black world made possible by slavery, as Frank Wilderson and Calvin Warren contend, but which exists within such a world. 18 The rising bodies thus do not merely transform the scene of subjection into a scene of resurrection, but rather they reveal that the scene of subjection contains within it already the scene of resurrection. Because that whole time those protestors are performing breathlessness, they are in fact breathing.

This is an imagination of something similar to what José Esteban Muñoz would call a utopian futurity. If the first half of my essay’s title is a riff on Hartman’s work, the second half of the title is a riff on Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Throughout this essay I am thinking with, against, and alongside Muñoz’s theorizing of queer futurity as I take seriously the critical power of hope alongside the intellectual force of pessimism. I share Muñoz’s sense that “[The present] is impoverished and toxic for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging, normative tastes, and ‘rational’ expectations,” but I disagree with his conclusion that “The present is not enough” (2009, 27). For me, the historically contingent, immediate moment in which we find ourselves is indeed toxic for queers, people of color, Black people, disabled people, and many other people “who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging,” but the present exceeds these unarguably unacceptable material conditions and structures of domination. Drawing on Diana Taylor’s observation that “bearers of performance […] are also bearers of history who link the layers past-present-future through practice,” along with the temporality of “the excessive present,” I view the die-in’s scene of resurrection as a potentiality for futurity within the unbearableness of the here and now (2006, 83).

This gesture towards futurity is part of what Nyong’o means by calling Black Lives Matter a “queer performative.” It is not only an appeal to identity politics or reference to the queerness of some of the movement’s founders, but a recognition that insofar as Black Lives Matter dares to imagine the world existing in a way that differs so fundamentally from the way it presently exists—in a “then and there” within the space of the “here and now”—it is fundamentally queering dominant modes and temporalities of being. In this way a die-in is fundamentally a performative that queers futurity not only because of its history as a strategy of queer identity politics, but also because of the way in which it imagines the world otherwise through the figure of the dead body, what should otherwise be a symbol of futurity denied. The die-in turns “no future” into a future of the now (Edelman 2004).

Die-ins incorporate resurrection in the scene of subjection, inscribing an impossible freedom in an embodied performance that reiterates the all too imminent and immanent death that marks Black life. This is a symbolic act of resistance as powerful as the material occupation of space, and at the same time its symbolic power is undercut by the fact that it depends upon resurrection’s material impossibility for its affective force. But again, that is exactly the power and the pitfall of the die-in. Rather than imagining life someplace else, someplace that is not the trenchantly anti-Black world that currently exists, the resurrection at the end of the die-in inscribes the possibility of freedom within its very impossibility, thus holding open a space for thinking the praxis of freedom within the discursive terms and material realities of the current world. In the same moment that inscribes the threat of violence in the act of resistance, that risk is weighed against the inscription of a world which might be different, thus inscribing the “not yet” within the right now. There is not a someplace else, and in that sense the die-in does fail to imagine escape or an alternative to the violence of the real, while at the same time the violence of the real remains unable to obliterate all possibilities for life that exceeds mere survival. The mutual imbrication of slavery and freedom, of domination and liberation, in the scene of subjection is also the mutual imbrication of the here and now of anti-Blackness and the then and there of a Blackened world.

Black performance is thus of course thoroughly more complex than pure resistance or pure reproduction of domination. The die-in is neither complete failure nor ultimate victory. Burdened by the history of slavery and the immeasurable tear in the fabric of the world rendered by the Middle Passage, the performing Black body reinscribes the scripts of the racist dominant world order within the very gestures which enact the possibility of overturning that order. As Hartman writes,

these acts of redress are undertaken with the acknowledgement that conditions will most likely remain the same. This acknowledgement implies neither resignation nor fatalism but a recognition of the enormity of the breach instituted by slavery and the magnitude of domination. (1997, 51)

Black Lives Matter protesters organizing in the streets and attracting the surveilling eyes of a state that is still fearful of the specters of slave rebellions are enacting a world that does not exist within existing scenes of subjection. This is synchrony meeting diachrony. This is optimism for a potentiality already existing in the world and a rejection of hope for an as yet nonexistent future. This is a queering and Blackening of an anti-Black world that offers no illusion that such anti-Blackness will disappear. This is a presentmoment that exceeds the limits of itself and spills intothe past and the future, queering temporality into aBlackened excessive present— in which themarkof slavery outlives legal abolition at the verysametimethat legal abolition still matters, and inwhich the freedom-to-come resides not in an unreachable “then and there,” but in the queer performatives enacted in the here and now of the present moment of corporeal presence. The scene of subjection is the scene of resurrection, and the scene of resurrection is the scene of subjection. That is both the challenge and the promise of Black protest performance.

Note on contributor

Jesse A. Goldberg is currently a Lecturer at Auburn University where he teaches courses in American and African American literature as well as composition. Prior to Auburn, he taught at Longwood University and Cornell University, where he was an instructor with the Cornell Prison Education Program. His writing appears in Public Culture, Callaloo, MELUS, CLA Journal, ASAP/J, The Feminist Wire, and the edited volumes The Routledge Guide to Alternative Futurisms, Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print, Teaching Literature and Writing in Prisons, and Toni Morrison on Mothers and Motherhood. He is also currently co-editing a special issue of GLQ on prison abolition and queer liberation and working on a book manuscript titled Abolition Time: Slavery’s Afterlife, Queer Temporality, and Reading Literature Against the Law.

Notes

  1. Hartman (1997, 55). ↩

  2. Moten (2003, 4). ↩

  3. Hartman’s work of course puts pressure on the “or” between bystander and witness. ↩

  4. See Moten on “ontological exhaustion” (2013, 738). ↩

  5. In addition to the work of Batiste and Foster, dance studies scholarship by Danielle Goldman and Barbara Browning takes up the centrality of the body as site of intentional political action in ways relevant to the Black Lives Matter Movement (Browning 2003; Goldman 2007). I stay most closely with Tavia Nyong’o’s work, however, because of his direct engagement with the contemporary moment while hailing Douglas Crimp and the choreography of ACT UP’s performative protests in relation to the Movement for Black Lives. ↩

  6. “Lacking the certitude of a definitive partition between slavery and freedom, and in the absence of a consummate breach through which freedom might unambiguously announce itself, there is at best a transient and fleeting expression of possibility that cannot ensconce itself as a durable temporal marker. If periodization is a barrier imposed from above that obscures the involuntary servitude and legal subjection that followed in the wake of slavery, then attempts to assert absolutist distinctions between slavery and freedom are untenable” (Hartman 1997, 12–13). ↩

  7. For more on this lineage, see Chapters 5 and 6 of Scenes of Subjection, as well as the scholarship of Alex Vitale, Bryan Wagner, Angela Davis, Jared Sexton, and others. ↩

  8. Sexton asks, “But how, then, does one mark time and think historicity, how does one engage the iterability of the performative, if nothing ends? How to orient or make sense of lived experience, the lived experience of the Black no less, without break or interval or punctuation in the fact of (anti)Blackness?” (2011, 6). Sexton is asking how it can be possible to say that performative actions and/or speech acts are new iterations of those which have come before when it seems impossible, when looking at anti-Black violence, to identify a point where one “iteration” might be said to end. For Sexton and for Hartman, there is a profound difficulty in thinking the performative in the face of an event (slavery) that exceeds its own supposed ending. ↩

  9. Barbara Ransby’s Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century (2018) is an excellent historical account of the Black feminist political foundations of the Movement for Black Lives which further expands on this story. Additionally, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016) offers a powerful materialist account of the conditions under which such a politics mobilized a mass movement. Readers interested in further contextualizing their understandings of the Black Lives Matter Movement would do well to begin their reading with this pair of texts. ↩

  10. I refer to Martin’s “ostensibly gender-conforming body” to take seriously the different material experiences of cisgender and transgender Black people while also recognizing insights by scholars of black queer theory which identify ways in which blackness may remain always already outside of (hetero)normative gender. On the latter point, I am thinking especially of C. Riley Snorton’s most recent book, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017), in which he “eschew[s] binaristic logic that might reify a distinction between transgender and cisgender, black and white, disabled and abled, and so on, in an effort to think expansively about how blackness and black studies, and transness and trans studies, yield insights that surpass an additive logic” (7). ↩

  11. While thinking through Nyong’o’s meditations on Black Lives Matter and queer performativity certainly makes clear that aligning the movement with queerness is not merely an essentialist nod to the identities of its founders, it is also worth quoting Alicia Garza herself, from her essay, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement”: “Black Lives Matter is a unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of Black people by police and vigilantes. It goes beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within some Black communities, which merely call on Black people to love Black, live Black and buy Black, keeping straight cis Black men in the front of the movement while our sisters, queer and trans and disabled folk take up roles in the background or not at all. Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements. It is a tactic to (re)build the Black liberation movement” (2014). ↩

  12. Written text provided by author for direct quotation. ↩

  13. This is similar to Foster’s observation of the lunch counter sit-ins of the Black Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s: “Unlike a general sit-in, used to block access or to insistently remind those in power of protestors’ demands, the lunch counter sit-ins performed the function of the very action they were protesting, and this reflexive status of their actions must have contributed to their appeal” (“Choreographies of Protest,” 399). ↩

  14. This language in quotations is drawn from one of the central distinctions in Jacques Derrida’s essay “Force of Law” (1990). ↩

  15. See JanMohamed’s The Death-Bound-Subject (2005) and Abu-Jamal’s essay collection Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? (2017, 14–16). ↩

  16. See Powell’s published essay “Making #BlackLivesMatter: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the Specters of Black Life—Toward a Hauntology of Blackness” for more on this reading of the die-in. The end of the article condenses some of Powell’s remarks from his conference presentation and synthesizes it within a larger thinking towards the hauntology of the slave trade. I cite his conference presentation rather than the published article, though, because of the sustained focus in the presentation on die-ins, specifically, which gets cut and condensed in the published piece. ↩

  17. Here I follow Batiste, who in fleshing out a more nuanced articulation of the functions of the dance form krumping, argues that “fortunately, the dance form itself reveals a more complicated story, whereby performers critique and transform, rather than merely respond to their environment” (2014, 201–2). I take seriously that a die-in is, like dance, an embodied performance, and so as I read Batiste’s account of dancing’s potential to not only respond to but also critique and transform environments structured by deprivation and violence, I am convinced that, as protest, we may also see die-ins doing this not only X but also Y work. ↩

  18. See Wilderson’s Red, White, and Black (2010) and Warren’s Ontological Terror (2018) for accounts of how the entirety of the Western World is based on African slavery as its condition of possibility. ↩

References

Abu-Jamal, Mumia. 2017. Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? San Francisco, CA: City Light Books.

Batiste, Stephanie L. 2014. “Affect-ive Moves: Space, Violence, and the Body in RIZE’s Krump Dancing.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen, edited by Melissa Blanco Borelli, 199–224. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Browning, Barbara. 2003. “Choreographing Postcoloniality: Reflections on the Passing of Edward Said.” Dance Research Journal 35 (2) Winter 2003: 164–169.

Derrida, Jacques. 1990. “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority.” Cardozo Law Review 50 (5): 920–1045.

Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Foster, Susan Leigh. 2003. “Choreographies of Protest.” Theater Journal 55: 395–412.

Garza, Alicia. 2014. “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.” TheFeministWire.com, October, 7. https://thefeministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2/.

Goldberg, Jesse A. 2017. “The Restored Literary Behaviors of Neo-Slave Narratives: Troubling the Ethics of Witnessing in the Excessive Present.” Callaloo 40 (4): 57–77.

Goldman, Danielle. 2007. “Bodies on the Line: Contact Improvisation and Techniques of Nonviolent Protest.” Dance Research Journal 39 (1): 60–74.

Harriet Tubman Collective. 2016. “Disability Solidarity: Completing the Vision for Black Lives.” Tumblr.com, September, 7. http://harriettubmancollective.tumblr.com/post/150072319030/htcvision4blacklives.

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

Hedva, Johanna. 2016. “SickWoman Theory.” Mask Magazine, January. http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory.

JanMohamed, Abdul. 2005. The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archeology of Death. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Jones, Douglas A. 2012. “Slavery, Performance, and the Design of African American Theater.” In The Cambridge Companion to African American Theater, edited by Harvey Young, 15–33. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Kedhar, Anusha. 2014a. “Choreography and Gesture Play an Important Role in Protests.” New York Times. December.

Kedhar, Anusha. 2014b. “‘Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!’: Gesture, Choreography, and Protest in Ferguson.” The Feminist Wire. October.

Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Moten, Fred. 2013. “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh).” The South Atlantic Quarterly 112 (4): 737–780.

Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York, NY: NYU Press.

Nyong’o, Tavia. 2015. “#BlackLivesMatter and Queer Performativity.” Talk given at the 2015 Futures of American Studies Institute, June.

Powell, Kashif Jerome. 2016. “Making #BlackLivesMatter: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the Specters of Black Life—Toward a Hauntology of Blackness.” Cultural Studies →← Critical Methodologie 16 (3): 253–260.

Ransby, Barbara. 2018. Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Sexton, Jared. 2011. “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism.” Intensions 5: 1–47.

Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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

Taylor, Diana. 2006. “Performance and/as History.” TDR/The Drama Review 50 (1): 67–86.

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. 2016. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Warren, Calvin L. 2018. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Wilderson, Frank. 2010. Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Woubshet, Dagmawi. 2015. The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Young, Hershini Bhana. 2017. Illegible Will: Coercive Labor in South Africa and the Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Women & Performance