After the Party. Joshua Chambers-Letson
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of the murder of four little girls in the 16th Street Church, Dr. King gave a sermon: “They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. So they have something to say to us in their death.”8 Lauren Berlant associates King’s “something” with the “something” that surfaces in two novels animated by the 16th Street Church’s bombing: Toni Morrison’s 1977 Song of Solomon and Michelle Cliff’s 1989 No Telephone for Heaven. In the latter, “something” appears in the text thus: “Today there is a story which should have caused the sun to eclipse the earth—something … something in the heavens should have objected.”9 In these three cases, Berlant argues,
Something … stands for the irreducible violent sublimity of American racism in 1963, 1977, 1987, and beyond; something, a word that holds the place for a demand to produce something like a language … which in this instance might attest to the random encounter of systemic racial violence with individuals who happen to be somewhere, at some time, doing, then suddenly not doing, some “thing.” Always crucially after the fact, these texts take the “fact” back so they create a decolonized history of the “something” that didn’t happen, the thing to be specified, endlessly, just beyond what seems possible.10
Something “stands in” for that which doesn’t have, but needs, a language. Something is an attempt to name “the irreducible violent sublimity of American racism,” the fact that something “didn’t happen,” as well as that something which is “just beyond what seems possible.”
If it’s anything, freedom is something that’s just beyond what seems possible. Something, for Berlant’s King, holds the future of justice. It is mobilized “on behalf of creating at least a prosthetic future where a real scene of justice might take the place held, here, by the word something.”11 So while Simone’s description of freedom illuminates the disruptively and productively excessive, uncontainable capacity of black performance to go past there (“just beyond what seems possible”), it also points to the impossibility of freedom within the conditions secured by the present. Freedom is something that’s missing, so freedom is just a feeling.
For Bloch, the “feeling of freedom” is a kind of placebo—an appearance of freedom that arises to cover over the fact that freedom isn’t here. Within liberal capitalism’s regime of individual (and individuating) civil rights, the “feeling of freedom” masquerades as something like freedom while being tautologically “guaranteed by freedom.”12 For this reason, Bloch derisively observes that, “freedom as feeling does not appear in utopia but in natural law.”13 Freedom, within liberalism and capitalist modernity, is a legal fiction (in terms of rights), rather than an ontological condition; it’s just a feeling. That’s all it is. What we need is freedom of a material kind. This notion of freedom is not the freedom secured by the bourgeois revolutions (the bondage of the “freedom to earn”) but some other kind of freedom that comes with “freedom from earning.”
Press the button and loop back around to the top, but layer the tracks so that it’s Bloch and Simone singing in syncopated polyphony. When we have nothing else, the longing for the feeling of freedom might be the only thing we’ve got to keep us alive. Especially for those with nothing but their labor to sell. So, it’s not our fault that we don’t know how to imagine freedom, that it comes to us as just a feeling. Black people know that freedom is mostly because we know what it is not to have it. We might thus differentiate between the experience of freedom as a sense (Simone’s “just a feeling”) and the Blochian “feeling of freedom” promised by the liberal order. That is, we might consider how Simone mobilizes black performance in order to produce a means to sustain people “with courage and hope, not by looking away from the real, but, on the contrary, by looking into its progress, into its horizon” and by letting the sense of freedom radiate out from her performing body to sustain her listener in turn.14 Between the space of the imaginary and the corporeal (which is the realm of performance), the feeling of freedom glimmers as both concrete reality (as experienced in the body) and anticipatory dawning. When Simone posits freedom as “just a feeling,” she is describing something that is not yet freedom. This something is akin to the way Bloch describes utopia, “it is not yet in the sense of a possibility; that it could be there if we could only do something for it.”15 Whatever freedom is, and whatever something we could do for it, our experience of it has been paradoxical. We have never been free, but we have been being free.
Track 3. “Little Girl Blue”
Press the play button and listen as the right hand introduces us to the familiar melody of “Good King Wenceslas” before folding the song into a Rodgers and Hart tune prepared in the style of Bach. As the right hand climbs the keyboard, the left hand journeys in the opposite direction toward a lower register that keeps us tethered to the earth. The voice hovers between the two as she enters with a lyric that gives a name to herself: “unhappy little girl blue.” Developed during her earliest performances in a small, forgettable bar in Atlantic City, “Little Girl Blue” became a central part of Simone’s repertoire during the mid to late 1950s and it lent its name to her debut album, released by Bethlehem records in 1959.16 Years later, when she performed the song at Montreux in 1976, she amended the lyrics slightly to refer to herself as “liberated little girl blue.”17 How, one wonders, does one get from “unhappy” to “liberated”? Minoritarian subjects know about the need for freedom, but we also know that emancipation is not the same thing as freedom. Emancipation is the ritual act of becoming free, but what comes after is usually not freedom, but its disappointment.
There is a resonance between minoritarian performance, which stages the becoming of freedom’s becoming, and what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a “minor literature.” “How many people,” they ask, “today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve?”18 Twenty years before they wrote this, Simone was already offering a lesson in becoming minoritarian and the deterritorializing capacities of minoritarian performance. This was perhaps most evident in her appropriation of Bach. To get a sense of what this sounds like, press play and wander back into Simone’s first performances on the stage of an Atlantic City bar.
Little Girl Blue was recorded with little production support in a single, grueling fourteen-hour recording session at New York’s independent Beltone studio.19 As Brooks describes the album, “It remains the first (public) record(ing) of Nina Simone’s counterintuitive brilliance as an artist who defied the center, ran circles in the margins, and wove together ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ forms to create an off-beat repertoire that was what some might argue, ‘emo’ before ‘emo,’ Afropunk, folk eclectic, jazz torch song magic.”20 In order to grasp the significance of Little Girl Blue as an event, it’s important to understand how the new sounds contained on that album emerged from the domain of performance as work and Simone’s mobilization of performance to effect the unworking of work.21 But one needs to clarify and distinguish the work of minoritarian performance from performance as a form of labor (or a job) for minoritarian subjects.
At the beginning of her career, Simone’s work as a popular musician was merely employment: a means to raise money for a formal education in classical music. “I didn’t even think of it as music,” she would later reflect; “it was a job.”22 José Muñoz insisted on a minoritarian performance theory that would be “disarming of a celebratory precritical aura that shrouds some performative research. It is important to keep in mind that not all performances are liberatory or transformative.”23 Capitalism transforms every conceivable area of human activity into a source for the extraction of value.24 Performance, as labor, is no exception. Within a racialized division of labor, people of color in the United States are commonly denied access to sustainable and fulfilling employment. Performance has long been one of the few means for getting dinner on the table, but it’s not always an emancipatory one. “Minoritarian subjects do not always dance because they are happy,” wrote Muñoz; “sometimes they dance because their feet are being shot at.”25 Performance is work. Hard work. And when performance is reduced to work for the minoritarian subject, it comes with what he describes as a “mandate to ‘perform’ for the amusement of a dominant power block.… Performance, from the positionality of the minoritarian subject, is sometimes nothing short of forced labor.”26
When