Afro-Fabulations

The Queer Drama of Black Life

Tavia Nyong'o

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479824175
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études afro-américaines

Argues for a conception of black cultural life that exceeds post-blackness and conditions of loss In Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, cultural critic and historian Tavia Nyong’o surveys the conditions of contemporary black artistic production in the era of post-blackness. Moving fluidly between the insurgent art of the 1960’s and the intersectional activism of the present day, Afro-Fabulations challenges genealogies of blackness that ignore its creative capacity to exceed conditions of traumatic loss, social death, and archival erasure. If black survival in an anti-black world often feels like a race against time, Afro-Fabulations looks to the modes of memory and imagination through which a queer and black polytemporality is invented and sustained. Moving past the antirelational debates in queer theory, Nyong’o posits queerness as “angular sociality,” drawing upon queer of color critique in order to name the gate and rhythm of black social life as it moves in and out of step with itself. He takes up a broad range of sites of analysis, from speculative fiction to performance art, from artificial intelligence to Blaxploitation cinema. Reading the archive of violence and trauma against the grain, Afro-Fabulations summons the poetic powers of queer world-making that have always been immanent to the fight and play of black life.

1

Critical Shade

The Angular Logics of Black Appearance

The performance begins while the audience is still waiting for it. The dancer/choreographer is moving through the crowd, greeting arriving guests and fussing with the arrangements, like a good host. The audience is seated on the stage of this one-hundred-year-old proscenium theater located in a working-class district in downtown New York City. We, the audience, are arranged around a catwalk as though we are expecting a fashion show. But unlike in fashion, there is no backstage area, just a rack of clothes off to one side. Just before show time, the dancer/choreographer personally moves two guests of honor—an important curator and her plus one—from their temporary perches off to one side to special reserved seating front and center. Just as it is at a fashion runway, front row is part of the show. With this final adjustment, the audience is seated, and the latest performance of Trajal Harrell’s solo dance piece Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church, Size Small can begin.1

The performance has not yet begun, even though it somehow has. All eyes are now on Harrell, who has just casually changed in front of us into the first of an expected twenty looks: “West Coast Preppy School Boy.” The house lights are still up, but no curtain has been raised; and there is no other ritualized indication that we have crossed over from “everyday life” into “performance.” Harrell hasn’t even moved onto the catwalk; he stands beside the runway, rather than walking down it. The mood hasn’t shifted from one of quiet anticipation. There is no frantic audience applause, no pumping music, no flash of the cameras. From Harrell—no fierce poses, just the almost blank stare with which he breaks the fourth wall, as he stands there insouciantly in his flip flops, looking at us.

For those in the audience familiar with the world of haute couture or with the world of ballroom houses that have stylized a queer, black, and brown response to fashion, or with both, this solo dance piece feels like an abstraction, even a subtraction. Audience handouts explain the quotidian, anti-spectacular note on which the show starts by referencing the postmodern dance that Harrell aims to hybridize with the movement vocabulary of catwalk and vogueing. Since the 1960s, choreographers like Yvonne Rainer have rebelled against traditional conceptions of virtuosic movement and theatrical illusionism in dance and brought the everyday and the ordinary in closer fusion with stage performance. The manner in which Harrell performs in media res reflects and refracts these influences.2

“Postmodern” is a term with at least a double valence in 2017, with equally fraught—if not exactly identically framed—itineraries in dance and in critical theory. Postmodernism indexes, on the one hand, key philosophical developments such as Fredric Jameson’s cognitive mapping of late capitalist aesthetics and Judith Butler’s post-structuralist theory of gender performativity and, on the other, artistic developments such as the Judson Dance Theater. It has been at least two decades since the term was anything like cutting edge in either art or academia, and yet it lives on as an increasingly requisite periodizing term. The distinctive strands and threads of postmodernism have, ironically, become tangled up not with the present or future, but with the quickly receding past. And it is here that the fashion system (which had its own deconstructionist moment) puts its best foot forward.3

As a choreographic meditation on fashion, Twenty Looks toys with the resemblances it espies between the cycle of fashion in clothing and fashion in theory, subjecting both trends to lightly satirical sartorial citation. As if to underscore the degree to which we, the downtown audience, are part of the concept of this piece, the third look Harrell wears is “Old School Post-Modern”: blue sneakers and a generic black outfit that well could be off the rack from Uniqlo. Seated in the audience, I look down at my own black t-shirt, black slacks, and red sneakers. Old School Post-Modern indeed, I wince. That, I recognize, was a read.

“No single entity marks something as queer dance,” Clare Croft notes, “but rather it is how these textures press on the world and against one another that opens the possibility for dance to be queer.”4 By the time Harrell completes his twenty looks, all the expected elements of a fashion show have eventually appeared, albeit in a deconstructed and syncopated manner. A day before, in this same theater, another performer had taken the stage with a virtuosic display of vogue and hip-hop dance styles that would have gone over in a Berlin nightclub at 3 a.m. But reaching that level of heat was not Harrell’s ambition this night, shot through as his most recent work has been with a melancholic languorous slowness. Looks 12 and 13—variations on the category “Legendary Face”—took me back to the one time I had the privilege of seeing the legendary Octavia St. Laurent walk a ball.5 And now here was Trajal Harrell, in large yellow sunglasses, hiding from the nonexistent paparazzi, almost cringing at the recorded “clop clop” of stiletto heels, coming out of the speakers. The dancer raises his arms before his face, and his hands give off the pronounced tremulous hauteur of a grande dame. She is aged; a crone. Without the instant verdict of a panel of judges, without the chanting of an opinionated crowd, without the flash of a hundred cameras, Harrell can retreat into a languorous, interiorized vogue during his penultimate look, “Legendary with a Twist.” I am transported back to Sunset Boulevard and can almost hear Norma Desmond lament how she was still big; it was the pictures that got small.

Figure 1.1. Trajal Harrell, Twenty Looks, postmodern.

Shade and the Angular Logics of Appearance

The performance analysis of Twenty Looks I commence with helps answer questions about how critical fabulation might work in the realm of dance, movement, fashion, and aesthetics. Like Harrell, I have been fascinated with the problem of history and memory in performance, a medium that is supposedly tethered to the here and now. Twenty Looks is in some respects a choreographic response to these critical debates, at once a reading of them—as in an engagement—and a read of them—in the black queer vernacular sense of “throwing shade” by magnifying and parodying certain flaws and idiosyncrasies in an opponent or rival. This use of shade raises a series of questions whose implications take up much of this study. If, in Twenty Looks, Harrell performs as a screen upon which images of Hollywood glamor and underground queer black fierceness can alike dance and settle, in what ways might this work for the concert stage corroborate—and in what ways complicate—the cultural contradictions that gave rise to vogueing in the first place? Vogueing—as an underground dance form—reflects back, in both homage and hyperbolic parody, the world of whiteness, wealth, and privilege that has become Harrell’s milieu. Given that he is actually performing in the avant-garde milieu that was once the stuff of vogueing fantasy, can we say that the gap between reality and appearance that once marked the frisson of vogueing has been dissolved? Conversely, when a competitive black social dance form is sublimated into solo concert dance before curators, presenters, and tastemakers, does it change in nature? What does it mean to deliver vogue into a space but as an absent presence, a withholding?

Speaking to the tensions aroused by the proposition the performance carried, the program for the evening included a quotation from a well-known essay about vogueing written by performance theorist Peggy Phelan. In the essay (as excerpted in the program) Phelan argues:

The balls are opportunities to use theatre to imitate the theatricality of everyday life—a life which includes show girls, banjee boys, and business executives. It is the endless theater of everyday life that determines the real: and this theatricality is soaked through with racial, sexual, and class bias.

As one [participant] explains, to be able to look like a business executive is to be able to be a business executive. Within the impoverished logic of appearance, “opportunity” and “ability” can be connoted by the way one looks. But at the same time, the walker is not a business executive and the odds are that his performance of that job on the runway of the ball will be his only chance to experience it. The performances, then, enact simultaneously the desire to eliminate the distance between ontology and performance—and the reaffirmation of that distance.6

Harrell’s program note (ephemeral evidence I cite here in critical monographic form) would invite the alert reader to ponder these words, first published in 1993, in the historical perspective made possible by reading them in 2017. This contemporary moment is when, at least for a certain orangeish hue of whiteness, ontology has indeed caught up with performance, and to look like a business executive (or a president) is to be a business executive (or president). Is there perhaps a certain amount of shade implied in Harrell’s granting Phelan’s critical analysis of the balls a first, last, and only interpretive word on the mode and meaning of this angular and oppositional black and brown art form? There is indeed something “old school postmodern” about Phelan’s confident contrast between performance and ontology in this passage, a perhaps untimely affirmation of a distance that has, in subsequent years, unexpectedly collapsed.

And yet, returning to Phelan’s subtle critique of the performative efficacy of the ball world in the context of present day critical debates over afro-pessimism, for instance, would suggest that the predicament she notates isn’t necessarily superseded.7 Performance, Phelan suggests in Harrell’s citation, is not the same thing as agency, even if the malevolent agencies of our world come draped in their own particular theater. The implicit pessimism in this excerpt can be gleaned from the distance between ontology and performance that Phelan affirms for the black queer performing subject in particular. After all, for all too many black people, even actually being a business executive, scholar, (or president) is not enough for them to appear like one, at least, not in the eyes of many of their fellow white citizens. A black person in a position of authority can always be suspected, whether openly or secretly, of merely posing as that particular position. The passage Harrell selects for contemporary recirculation thus contains a crucial ambiguity. Has Phelan missed the ontological difference that blackness introduces into the theatricality of everyday life? Or has she insisted upon it?

One reason we cannot fully ascertain the tone of Harrell’s citation of Phelan, I would argue, is because, at least in this performance, he has chosen not to perform fully within the matrix of vogueing. That is to say, he doesn’t invite his audience to appraise him as directly fulfilling or transcending Phelan’s pessimistic equation. Instead of vogue, it is the possibility of vogue that dances around this iteration of Twenty Looks, which work collectively, as a set of appearances that, paradoxically, disappear. This particular performance disappoints expectations of hyperbolic blackness and queerness in dance and theatrical contexts instead of fulfilling them. Of course, vogueing appears at various points and through a range of performers over the course of Twenty Looks. But it almost never appears on demand or on cue, and thus, it remains difficult or impossible for the viewer to disentangle vogue from postmodern dance or, for that matter, from any of the other performance genres Harrell draws from.

In drawing from vogue as a performative resource, rather than exhibiting it as the expressive essence of black queer subcultural embodiment, Harrell adopts an analytic and even spectatorial relationship to the form that preempts any simple identification of him as a “voguer.” Harrell routinely breaks the fourth wall in his performances, sitting in the audience, talking, even sleeping. If “Old School Post-Modern” presented a look that suggested that he could be in his audience as readily as on his stage, the performative tactics used by Harrell ironize the virtuosity expected of black queer performing bodies. Harrell experiments with a kind of reversal of audience participation, by suggesting that he himself is ready to become his own audience. The public staging of his rehearsal process as part of a residency at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City intensified this hall of mirrors effect, as an audience stood behind a velvet rope, looking into the atrium at Harrell looking at his own dancers improvise. While this staging of the rehearsal process was in itself highly theatrical (in that Harrell ordinarily does not allow anyone not directly involved in a piece into his studio), the artificiality of the scenario underscored the paradoxical degree to which Harrell manages to be at once inside and outside of his performances, disrupting the evaluative and objectifying gaze critics might seek to direct toward them.

The irony of Harrell’s project, of course, is that vogueing continues to circulate internationally as a competitive social dance form associated primarily with black and brown queer and transgender culture. His own choreographies in highly valorized venues like the Museum of Modern Art, New York Live Arts, and the Hebbel Am Ufer theater in Berlin are all staged against the backdrop of this living repertoire, even as its actual participants—dancers and announcers—only occasionally cross over into his shows. In this respect, Harrell inherits and updates a classic concern within minoritarian performance, one that José Esteban Muñoz, in his book Disidentifications, termed the “burden of liveness.” Responding to Phelan’s famous claim that performance lives only in the now and becomes itself through disappearance, Muñoz argued that such a definition tended to minimize the violence liveness does to those subjects denied history and civic standing, those for whom liveness can circulate as commodity fetish. Corroborating Muñoz’s insistence on attending to the ephemera and afterlives of performance, Rebecca Schneider has argued forcefully that “performance remains”—a point of view that dovetails with Bergsonian duration as focalized at the time and space it is however never wholly identical with—a sensibility that we very much see in Twenty Looks.8 But if performance remains—through repetition, ephemera, and haunting—so, too, does performance theory. And, just as ethnographers of contemporary ballroom performance like Marlon Bailey have shown how the vogue scene has incorporated Jennie Livingston’s film Paris Is Burning into its own historical memory, so too does Harrell in Twenty Looks incorporate the critical tradition that would make sense of his aesthetic—as indicated in the handout citation of Phelan’s Unmarked and his sardonic references to postmodernism as fashion. Reflecting the gaze back upon the critics and theorists who have sought to explicate and define the meanings that inhere in the dance, Harrell’s back and forth between critic and choreographer is playful but pointed: at its limit it suggests that interpretation itself is conditioned as much by performance as the other way around.

Channeling the diva is a familiar queer move, but what interests in me in particular about Harrell’s performances is his mercurial capacity to toggle between affable ordinariness and haughty glamour, as if he were joking about both and, at the same, incredibly serious. I track this strategic mimesis of both the exceptional and spectacular performing body—the deep archive of what Francesca Royster terms “eccentric acts” on the outskirts of black performance—and a countermimetic invasion of the positionality of the spectator. Highly cognizant of the debates around performative agency and spectatorial exploitation that raged in the 1990s, Harrell develops new performative and choreographic techniques for performing both for and against the camera. We can think of these strategies, I suggest, as “critical shade.”

Shade as a vernacular method of active and aggressive interpretation of an unfair and unequal social order is a frequent resource in this countermimetic choreography.9 It is worth noting, in this respect, that Muñoz explicates his concept of the burden of liveness at greatest length in a chapter on the topic of chusmería, a term that originated in Cuba and its diaspora and refers to people and behavior that “refuse standards of bourgeois comportment.” Chusma, Muñoz notes, operates as “a barely veiled racial slur suggesting that one is too black” (contemporary Anglophone cognates for chusma might thus include “ghetto,” “cunty,” or “ratchet”...