Modes of Reading

Black Performance

Dr. Christine Okoth

christine.okoth@warwick.ac.uk

Language Disclaimer

Historical Language (always in citations): Negro, Colored

Contemporary Language: Black people

Don‘t say the N-word

[C19 Podcast “The N-Word in the Classroom: Just Say No”]

Recap

Theatre and Performance

Judith Butler and Gender Performativity

- Everyday life and performance

- How social difference is constructed

Black Performance

The Fact of Blackness

Walker and Weems

This is America

The Fact of Blackness

Frantz Fanon

20 July 1925, Fort-de-France, Martinique

The Fact of Blackness

French Army

Studied Psychiatry in Lyon

Algeria 1953

-Algerian Independence War 1954

Joins FLN

Tunis 1957

Death 1961

The Fact of Blackness

The Wretched of the Earth 1961 [1963]

Black Skin, White Masks 1952 [1967]

The Fact of Blackness

‘‘“Look, a Negro!”

I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in

things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the

world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other

objects.’ (82)

The Fact of Blackness

‘Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to

others. Their attention was a liberation, running over my body

suddenly abraded into nonbeing, endowing me once more with

an agility that I had thought lost, and by taking me out of the

world, restoring me to it.’ (82)

The Fact of Blackness

‘But just as I reached the other side, I stumbled, and the

movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there,

in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was

indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst

apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by

another self.’ (82)

The Fact of Blackness

‘In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the

development of his bodily schema.’ (83)

‘A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and

temporal world—such seems to be the schema. It does not impose

itself on me; it is, rather, a definitive structuring of the self and of the

world—definitive because it creates a real dialectic between my body

and the world.’ (83)

The Fact of Blackness

‘Then, assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled,

its place taken by a racial epidermal schema. […] It was not that I

was finding febrile coordinates in the world. I existed triply: I

occupied space. I moved toward the other . . . and the

evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there,

disappeared. Nausea. . . .’ (84)

The Fact of Blackness

‘historico-racial schema’ that operates ‘below the corporeal [or

bodily] schema’ (84)

‘the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details,

anecdotes, stories.’ (84)

The Fact of Blackness

‘And so it is not I who make meaning for myself, but it is the

meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me’

(102)

Surveillance and The Fact of Blackness

Lectures on Surveillance at University of Tunis

Closed Circuit Television

19th Century Lantern Laws in New York

See:

Simone Browne, Dark Matters

Nicholas Mirzoeff, We Are All Children of Algeria

Kara Walker

Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress

and Her Heart (1994) [DETAIL]. Cut paper on wall; 13 x 50 ft. (4 x 15.2 m)

Bill Traylor, “Untitled (Construction with

Yawping Woman),” circa 1939-1942

(opaque watercolor and pencil on

cardboard)(1994) [DETAIL]. Cut paper on

wall; 13 x 50 ft. (4 x 15.2 m)

Kara Walker

Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress

and Her Heart (1994) [DETAIL]. Cut paper on wall; 13 x 50 ft. (4 x 15.2 m)

Kara Walker

A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby: an

Homage to the unpaid and overworked

Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes

from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the

New World on the Occasion of the demolition

of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant’

Glenn Ligon

Claudia Rankine, Citizen, 2014

Carrie Mae Weems

The Louisiana Project, 2003 The Kitchen Table 1990

This is America

Adrian Piper, Mythic Being 1975

‘she demonstrates how to perform for and against the camera.’

Crystal LaBeija in The Queen (1967).

Screenshot by Tavia Nyong’o.