Improvisation as the Thrust of Blackness: Race, Gender, (Dis)Ability, and the Performative Possibilities of Self-Definition

• In Event: Fashioning New Grammars: Black Survival, Critical Educative Spaces, and Knowledge Production

Abstract

Student development literature tends to privilege cognitive dimensions of knowing, in particular, the subject-object principle of theorizing (Baxter Magolda, 1992; Kegan 1982, 1994). This gesture toward cognitive dimensions obfuscates, or at the very least, leaves unintelligible, the body as a site of meaning-making (McKittrick, 2006; Hill, 2017), propping up the social construction of able-mindedness. As an extension of anti-Blackness, able-mindedness exists to create fixed versions of a self that are consistent with the status quo (Dumas, 2016), and yet, Black bodies have always made meaning while in motion (Danticat, 2015). In order to stretch beyond the “limited expectations and definitions of what Blackness is, isn’t, or should be” (Alexander, 2004, p. 5), this paper foregrounds performativity as an epistemic-ontological project. If race, gender, and (dis)ability cooperate to construct delimiting ways of seeing, understanding, and relating to Black bodyminds (Schalk, 2018), foregrounding identity as performative operates as a form of praxis that gives individual permission to engage with(in), confront, unsettle, acquiesce to, and expose definitions as necessary. Furthermore, it is a challenge to gendered Cartesian discourse that tends to problematize rather than historicize the Black body. Historicization reveals the grip(s) that have functioned to still Black bodies in motion, creating legible ways of knowing and being that are marked by consistency.

Author

• Wilson Kwamogi Okello, University of North Carolina - Wilmington