In the Flesh: Black and Brown Performance in the Age of Emergence

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Dialogue Format

Abstract

For people of color in the United States of America, the state of emergency in which we find ourselves is not the exception but the rule. This panel gathers a collective of thinkers (Joshua Chambers-Letson, Soyica Colbert Diggs, Amber Musser, Tavia Nyong’o, Sandra Ruiz, and chair Riley Snorton) who are working at the intersections of performance studies, Black studies, Asian American studies, and Latinx studies to attend to the thick entanglements between performance, the body, flesh, and the potentials of and for black and brown life in an age of emergence/y. Panelists will discuss performance as that which has the capacity to continue what is familiar, legible, and dominant through the repetition of behavior that becomes consolidated into a seemingly consistent state of being. But they will also attend to performance as that which has the capacity to restore what has been forgotten, overlooked, misremembered, suppressed, or denied. Against the unjust distribution of death and diminished life chances for black and brown people, the roundtable will attend to the way that performance has long functioned as a means for living and subsisting within conditions of impossibility. We will explore how, in performance, minoritarian subject mobilize the flesh to create potential where it is otherwise absent. Panelists will attend to the black and brown powers of performance and of the flesh. They will explore the possibilities opened by the entanglement of blackness and brownness with the pornotrope and the sensuality that exceeds that frame in order to think with the ways that aesthetic forms rearrange knowledge by engaging differently with fleshiness and how we apprehend it. They will query the relationship between performance, race, and mass media by discussing the particular temporal phenomenon of black fad performance: a particular ontological stance toward the inauthentic, hokum, and the fake that allows for the possibility of an authenticity-through-inauthenticity. Disclosed in and as performance, such authenticity momentarily shimmers through the vulgar time and idle chatter of mass media and the anxiety of US racial antagonisms. Panelists will also investigate the relationship between black and brown performance by investigating the rubric of "race against time" while paying attention to the categories like truth and veridiction to suggest that, if our current era is one of ubiquitous disinformation, propaganda, and "fake news," Afro-American traditions of hokum, signifyin', shade, and tea can be reconceived, not merely as forms dissimulation but, more nearly, as modes of Foucauldian "fearless speech" that have their own performative truth-making function. How, the roundtable will ask, can attending to the unconscious properties of the flesh re-shift our ontological understanding of Black and Brown life-worlds. And how might going inward help us re-materialize the external, that is, by re-reading the skin, the whole spectrum of our senses—including ones we may not know we own? Thus, the panelists will explore the limits of and horizons of black and brown performance as both a means for surviving the perpetual end of this world and as a fleshy practice for bringing new worlds into emergence.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• CR Snorton, University of Chicago

Panelists

• Joshua Chambers-Letson, Northwestern University

• Soyica Colbert, Georgetown University

• Amber J Musser, George Washington University

• Tavia Nyong'o, Yale University

• Shane Vogel, Indiana University-Bloomington