Performing Blackness

Seventeen years ago, a woman died on the floor of The Brooklyn Hospital Centre. Her body was found thirty minutes later as security guards walked past her corpse (Dwyer). Esmin Elizabeth Green, having waited twenty-four hours to see a doctor, died after blood clots moved from her legs to her lungs. Multimedia artist Simone Leigh, known for her work in African diasporic object cultures and her exploration of Black women’s subjectivities, paid tribute to Green in a 2014 exhibition, titled The Waiting Room, at New York’s New Museum. Commenting on the death of Esmin Elizabeth Green and the motivations behind her exhibition, Leigh remarked, “What happened to Green is an example of the lack of empathy people have towards the pain of Black women” (Sayej). From the nineteenth-century plantation to the concrete boundaries of modernity, Black pain and death are too often routinised. The routinisation of Black pain and death certainly provokes questions about empathy and what is often required to elicit it. Perhaps retelling, restoring, or re-staging the original scene of suffering or death might help cultivate empathy. Fredrick Douglass’s account of his aunt Hester’s agonising screams in response to a brutal plantation beating became one of the most vivid examples of the brutal routinisation of Black subjection. Both in Douglass’s narrative and Leigh’s account of the death of Esmin Green, Black pain is reconstructed in ways that might elicit empathy. Yet, as a conduit of empathy, performance must contend with how to reiterate scenes of pain without reducing them to spectacles.

When Saidiya Hartman asks, “Why is pain the conduit of identification?” she exposes how scenes of subjection do not merely display violence but organise spectatorship, inviting the substitution of self for the suffering other (read Black) in ways that stabilise racial hierarchy even under the guise of empathy (20). Such scenes have never been extraneous to material life since under slavery and in its afterlives, the staging and circulation of Black pain have been entangled with the logics of capital, converting sufferinginto value, legibility, and affective currency. How? By operating through the commodification of Black bodies as property, the monetisation of their labour and reproductive capacity, and the public staging of punishment and terror as spectacles that protect economic investment while generating forms of exchange, circulation, and profit. The most infamous repeated/reiterative performances of scenes of subjection, lynchings were staged as public spectacles and representations were materially circulated through photographs, postcards, and newspapers—images bought, sold, exchanged, and archived in ways that folded racial terror into systems of publicity and profit. The visual culture of lynching did not merely record violence but helped reproduce it by transforming Black death into a consumable spectacle within a broader racial economy of value.^[1]

In fact, knowing how the spectacularisation of Black suffering is so readily commodified and converted to capitalist and affective profit, Hartman famously refused to reproduce “the terrible spectacle” that is Frederick Douglass’s account of the brutal beating and subsequent screaming of his aunt, Hester, on a plantation (3). Like Hartman, Leigh also makes a conscious attempt to refuse the rendering of Black sufferingas spectacle for profit. Given that her artistic ethos is one of care for the community, there appeared to be an inevitable mismatch between her aims and the capitalist model of The New Museum, where her installation was staged, which requires a fee for entry. To circumvent capitalistic demands, she created an extension of the original installation called The Waiting Room Underground. This alternative occurred during the museum’s off-hours and included workshops available to a smaller and private audience free of charge. Simone Leigh’s The Waiting Room Underground can therefore be read as an attempt to interrupt the spectacle of a re-enacted scene/performance hijacked by capital-mobilised spectatorship by withholding both ticketed access and the ‘public’ gaze.

Examining the nature and implications of performance, Richard Schechner argues that “restored behavior is the main characteristic of performance” (35). When we perform, we call into being a scene which existed before, an original moment that was either an actual event or something first seen in the imagination. The act of recalling and reconstituting such original moments or scenes, rearranging and reconstructing them so they are reflective yet “independent of the causal systems […] that brought them into existence” is what Schechner defines as “restored behavior” (35). This means that every performance, with its innate repetition, is “twice-behaved behavior” in whose symbolism “the self can act in/as another” (Schechner 36). Framed this way, Leigh’s work can be read as restored behavior as the artist reconstructs the scene of Elizabeth Green’s subjection, her suffering and eventual demise. Yet, as editors of the edited collection, Race and Performance After Repetition, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., and Shane Vogel argue that, unlike American Civil War re-enactments, the recuperative nature of Leigh’s work is animated by a reparative impulse as it is “governed less by repetition than it is organized by attention and care” (4). Instead of the cut-up, mechanically temporal reconstructions of restored behavior, they posit a counter framework in which performance is framed as “a modality of time that directs our attention to those things that matter most to care” (5). For Colbert, Jones, and Vogel, performance, when viewed this way, is “not only […] restored behavior but also a behaved restoration” (5; my emphasis). They add that “This understanding of behaved restoration decenters the emphasis on repetition in a way that is particularly (but not exclusively) attuned to race and/as performance” (5).

Behaved restoration therefore sees performance as primarily undergirded by care and less by mechanical repetition of previous scenes. In the same way that this understanding of performance demonstrates a different kind of care and attentiveness to race as performance (or more specifically the performance of Black Being—amid its multiplicity of experiences), private/individual Black phenomenologies are also shaped by the temporal materiality of how Blackness has been sustained in the world. In other words, to the extent that all experiences of living are bound to previous moments of existence, that is, lineage, heritage, or ancestry, then, to live in the now while connecting to the past is to live a life repeated within a grand temporal arc. In the particular case of Blackness, to live now is to both exist as a repetition of yesterday’s scenes and to cultivate existence as an exercise in care, being conscious of the ways that one is because of what was. Indeed, to live a Black life is to perform Being in a manner that is always informed by the weight of history. Perhaps no group on the face of the earth is so bound to history, both forcefully and willingly, as Blackness. However Blackness is lived and received, performed and subjected to spectatorship, it is directly connected to previous scenes of subjection as well as liberation. In this way Black life emerges as performance, a restoration of what was. For some, this means that Blackness is doomed to a state of perpetual enslavement, merely repeating cycles of suffering (think restored behavior).That those Black people who are alive today are “coeval with the dead” (Hartman 759). For others, it means that Black life today is, or at least has the capacity to be, better than it was in the literal chains of yesterday. In this sense, Black life today becomes reparative of Black life yesterday (think behaved restoration). This sentiment is often articulated in the popular imagination with phrases like “I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams” or “I am not my ancestors” (Décoste).

The ways that Blackness generally is in the world amounts to some form of behaved restoration. There is a performance of the race-ness of Blackness that is significantly informed by an inter-generational diasporic knowledge and experience of what it means to be in a world hijacked by those logics of whiteness that unfold in step with Black suffering. Even without recourse to whiteness and even when indulging in the mundanity and joy of Black Being, Black people experience the world through a knowledge (whether directly aware or subliminally) of the limits imposed on them. That knowledge calls for ways of Being that cannot be wholly claimed as ‘original’—that is, strictly independent of previous experiences—but as constant reiterations of the past and imaginations of the future, yet in ways that necessarily require attentiveness to how one is. In this way, Black life proceeds as performance and witness while also having to contend with Being witnessed (whether as exoticized curiosities, empathy-stirring spectacles, or simply as worthy sites of study and archiving).

In engaging with Black experiences, whether as lived or scripted performances, there remains a compulsion to clarify what it means to be through witnessing. Here, witnessing as an empathetic and recuperative practice dredges up questions about the ethics of how one might situate iterability in relation to spectacle. In her explanation of the nature and function of The Waiting Room, Leigh remarks that “The project mines certain kinds of knowledge that are passed between Black women” (Sayej). Even as previous practices of survival and resilience serve as foundation for our own fugitive performances of being today, our attempts at witnessing often still fail at neat enactments of reparation and restoration. Even in the language of Colbert, Jones, and Vogel, what emerges is a logic of extraction and some version of the entanglement between empathy and spectacle. Highlighting Leigh’s dependence on past fugitive practices, they note that such examples of fugitivity “produced mechanisms of survival, if not resistance […] they installed material remains ripe for recuperation” (5; my emphasis). Even though the verb employed here is “recuperate,” the noun phrase “ripe material remains” still yields a troubling spectacle of harvest or bounty. How do we account for the labours of our performances (of Black life, scripted or otherwise) if their foundations remain ostensibly un-divorced from the logics of extraction, use value, and exploitation? Perhaps, this is not a fair question given the probable impossibility of recuperating time without the near-intrinsic exploitative nature of excavation. Certainly, the argument could also be made that where fugitivity is concerned, counter or parallel exploitative mechanisms (distinct from dominant modes of exploitation) are required. One cannot flee and be bogged down by the luxury of neatness, perhaps.

Relatedly, while the delineation between Leigh’s work and American Civil War enactments is clearly mapped through repetition and restoration, the distinction might not be as clear when comparison is between two or more modalities of Black performance. Are Black films (not just those depicting some aspect of slavery or civil rights), for instance, to be regarded in the same breath as Leigh’s The Waiting Room? Are they both not examples of behaved restoration? How do we assess what a successfully executed empathetic performance of Black life looks like? Is such a determination weighted in favour of affective transference or care? Is it a matter of technical skill and choice of technique? Of genre and format? In popular and academic discourses of dramatized accounts of Black life, the question of too much spectacularising of Black suffering and/or too little demonstration of the details of Black life remain an open, festering wound. Concerning the motivation behind his 2022 film, Nope, Jordan Peele, during a 2022 Writers Roundtable by the Hollywood Reporter, intimates:

When I was writing this in 2020…I was very distracted by this concept of spectacle… I’m seeing all these…people and these events and these ideas that are often so entertaining and so thrilling that we can be blinded to the danger of them…At the same time, the George Floyd protests are going on. And so, [keeping in mind] this idea of what…photography means to Black people and what a weapon for our civil rights it’s been…I wanted to create a film that indicted the process and the industry…and present the dangers of these [spectacles] and chasing them but also my give my characters their…agency to reclaim something (19:34-22:23).

What Peele speaks of here is the dangers of chasing spectacles even if originally intended as anti-oppressive witness, and even if the lens is managed by Blackness as a liberatory or fugitive tool, the originally reparative attempts resound amid a chorus of literature and scholarship on the fraught relationship between Blackness and spectacle.^[2] What is it about Blackness that makes it seem to be so readily yielded to spectacle?

Writing in response to performance studies scholar Vershawn Ashanti Young’s claim that “race is nothing but an identity, entirely a function of who we are rather than what we do,” Marquis Bey and Theodora Sakellarides argue that “race not only is but is done” (7, 39). They explain that,

race is not merely a static, entirely “known” identity, unmediated and extricated from actions, but a performative identity that always carries with it a set of behavioral practices that are cited and reiterated. One is a particular race because, at least in part, one does the “race-ness” of it. And this doing is necessitated by the instability of race (39).

Their arguments are filtered through the peculiarly racialised figure of Rachel Dolezal and how discourses surrounding her performed Blackness might be problematised beyond questions of whether she can be or ever was indeed Black, or for that matter, whether her racial masquerade might be accurately read as nothing more than a social, cultural, and political performance of blackface. Born to white parents in the US state of Montana, Rachel Dolezal grew up in a household where her parents had adopted and raised Black children. By her teenage years, she had made a conscious decision to associate more closely with Blackness, even attending Howard University, one of the most pre-eminent members of America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) on scholarship. After working briefly as a part-time professor of Africana studies at Eastern Washington University, Dolezal gained notoriety as the president of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the African American human rights organization National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), after she was exposed by her parents as a white woman with no biological ties to Black people.^[3]

Debates over Rachel Dolezal, a white woman masquerading, performing Blackness, have often revolved around questions of racial authenticity as well as the ethics of performed Being. “Who is Black, who gets to be Black, and how?” These are all questions emanating from concerns with the ethics of authentic representations of Black Being. Such questions of authenticity indeed function as a signal of the performance and iterability of the race-ness of Blackness. In other words, one can question whether something is authentic only if they have some benchmark, a pre-existing standard against which to measure the present version. Questions of authenticity, in this regard, are not limited to lived experiences but are similarly applied to artistic representations of Blackness. Like the staged representations of Blackness that Leigh’s The Waiting Room might typify, other visual representations of Blackness, particularly in motion picture, are often prone to this type of scrutiny as a result of the received expectation that art is true or real only up to the point and usefulness of its verisimilitude.

HBO’s hit television series, The Wire, which, on account of this metric of authenticity, is often touted as arguably “the greatest TV series of the 21st century” serves as a generative case in point here (Deggans). The network’s official website provides a synopsis which describes the show as a “highly realistic and totally unvarnished drama series[that] chronicles the vagaries of crime, law enforcement, [and] politics […] in Baltimore” (HBO). In the show, performances of Blackness heavily feature Black people in extreme positions of precarity, even wielding agency through various means of survival, criminal or otherwise. That this is not all there is to Black life should not require saying. Yet, a big part of the concerns over performances of Blackness has to do with a lopsided emphasis on criminal behaviour, which (un)intentionally contributes to the continued cultivation and entrenchment of stereotypes about Black life. In a sense, a reductive focus on Black criminality, to the extent that it amounts to a caricature of Black life, renders it as a type of blackface, even when performed by mainly or exclusively Black characters. Black life, when reductively scripted in seemingly pathological terms, the argument goes, ultimately exists at the whim and for the pleasure of the white gaze. In that sense, it fails the test of an authentic representation of Black Being and worldmaking.

Yet, to be so focused on the uncritical spectacularisation of Black life by white optic consumption can also amount to an undue obsession with the white gaze. For isn’t Black life more than the constraining gaze of whiteness? Whatever level of seriousness we attach to racial authenticity, especially in regard to Blackness, the spectre of respectability would readily haunt genuine or accurate performances of Black life, scripted or lived, when the white gaze is given a backstage pass to Black interiority. And yet, one can also not be content to conclude, as Colbert, Jones, and Vogel do, that the performance of Black life is distinguished by its reparative impulse, its attention to care. Is Black life not more than the imposed burden of care? Perhaps, this is precisely the point of Black life as performance—an invitation to relate to self and others with care, so that the ethics and burdens of living become willing labour, severed from the extractive logics of capital and its demand for productivity.