When the Stakes Are Too D*mn High

• In Event: 63.055 - Staging Black Queer Resistance and Futures: Performing Educative Possibilities

Abstract

A co-performed piece emanating from a collaborative research project, there is only one summary (abstract) for this submission.

Objectives

This performance analyzes our current political moment, to reveal the entanglements of race, gender, sexuality, violence, and their affective productions in education. We explore the omissions and questions foregrounded by #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName regarding when, if, and which Black lives matter, are collectively remembered and mourned. Through multiple artistic mediums, when the stakes are too d*mn high, explores the intersections of anti-black and anti-queer violence to reimagine these relationships towards Black feminists articulations of resistance, joy, and freedom (Brown 2013, Lorde 1984).

Theoretical Framework

The undergirding framework for this performance are Black feminist and performance theory. Both theoretical frameworks allow for a rooted understanding of Black identity, culture, and experience. Black feminist theory renders the body essential to theorizing lived experience (Collins 2000) and accounts for subjugation endured by Black girls and women. In situating positionality as a tool for theorizing, it also allows for intersectional analyses of power and systemic domination as they manifest across experience and institutions (Crenshaw 1991). Black Performance Theory (BPT), “shows us how subjects and subjectivities animate Blackness across landscapes that are all spectacularly excessive in the cause and effects of African dislocation” (Madison, 2014, p. vi). Performance theory serves as a framework to provide concrete applications, aesthetics, politics, and ways of comprehending how human beings make culture, affect power, and reinvent their ways of being in the world (Madison and Hamera, 2006). Together, both frameworks facilitate critiques of structural systems, doctrines, and sociocultural realities that perpetuate and magnify conditions that seek to inhibit Black life, and Black life persisting.

Data and Methods

This performance engages collage, dance, spoken word poetry, and theatre to provide a type of resonance (Leavy 2010) as an entryway into understanding and valuing Black and queer lives. As a multimodal engagement, data for this performance comprises personal narrative, archival documents, field notes, and original poetry. Together, these data sources have attendees consider how performance serves as a tool for crystallizing social justice in education, racial and gender equity, ecojustice, and to reimagine education research.

Significance

The integration of art and embodied praxis invites educational researchers to see the subject of interest (i.e., Black queer people) and to trouble, disrupt, and confront, along with us, understandings of the intersections of education, art, justice, love, and Blackness. By rendering visible the interlocking nature of Blackness, queerness, love, and violence, a more complex portrait of Black livelihood is brought into view.

Furthermore, this performance displays the value of ABR to facilitate rethinking and re-imagining of student/teacher relationships, classroom culture, as well as the role of love and justice in educational research. Furthering the work of educational philosopher Greene (1977, 1995), cultural critics and educators like Eisner (2009, 2006, 2003), Freire (1970, 1973), hooks (1995), Lea & Sims (2008), and scholar/artists Brown, (2013), Boal (1985), Jordan (1995, 1985), and Weems (2003), this performance demonstrates the rich and interwoven relationship between art, education, and social justice.

Authors

• Dominique C Hill, Amherst College

• Durell Maurice Callier, Miami University