After the Party. Joshua Chambers-Letson
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anything. She didn’t resist and the police didn’t drag her off.”3 But it was violent, she was saying something, she was resisting. A black woman does not stand on a highway to face down a battalion of heavily armed white police officers in either silence or acquiescence. Her body is the utterance and it sounds a collective “no.” In performance the body can be a resounding articulation of the negation of the negation.
Right now. Where you are.
We live in the face of historical and social conditions that produce an unjust distribution of death toward, and exploitation of, black and brown life and queer and trans bodies, actively shortening black, brown, Asian, indigenous, queer, and trans of color life with alarming and mundane regularity. This book argues that performance is a vital means through which the minoritarian subject demands and produces freedom and More Life at the point of the body. Minoritarian performance is what Nina Simone described as the art of “improvisation within a fixed framework,” working within limited coordinates to make the impossible possible.4 As Alexandra Vazquez argues, in performance, “The minoritarian subject can be understood as improvising with the world around them—even in its most flawed or false rendering.”5 This project thus follows and builds upon a host of minoritarian intellectuals who have accounted for the ways minoritarian subjects mobilize performance to survive the present, improvise new worlds, and sustain new ways of being in the world together.6
This book tells the stories of minoritarian subjects like Simone or the woman in Baton Rouge, who mobilize performance in both the realm of the aesthetic and the everyday to sustain the fugitive flight and revolutionary fight to produce freedom and More Life in the face of subordination, exploitation, annihilation, and negation. More than anything, this book is intended to function as a travel guide and as a kind of tactical manual. In 2013 two of my closest friends died, both with little or no warning. One committed suicide in January, and the other, who was both a teacher and family, became ill and died suddenly a few days later in December. Both were brown queer men; one was in his early thirties, the other was in his mid-forties. This book is something of a journal of the places, performances, art, people, and theory that I took refuge in to survive their loss. While queer of color life is at the center of the frame, queerness comes in and out of focus in this text as I draw on both the traditions of queer of color critique and woman of color feminism to think about the affinities and forms of social solidarity (and rupture) that move across and between queers of color, women of color, and other minoritarian subjects in the collective attempt to survive conditions of negation and annihilation. I wrote the book for and to my missing friends, and to the people they left behind, but it is written for all people of color, and especially queers of color, trans people of color, and women of color. It is a book for the still living, recounting the story of people, like us, for whom performance is a refuge and a means for surviving and producing something the singer wishes she knew how to feel.
Simone has a significant presence in this project because her body of work offers a particularly good example of the work of minoritarian performance. It was not uncommon throughout her long, storied career for the pianist to put performance to work in the service of both survival and the emancipatory will. There were times that freedom came to her through the act of performing. In 1970, Peter Rodis directed a short film about Simone, in which he asked her at one point, “What’s free to you?”7 She is seated on the ground, dressed in a dashiki awash with hues of brown, black, and white, and she thinks seriously on the question for a minute before she begins to answer, shaking her head from side to side, “It’s just a feeling. It’s just a feeling.… You can describe things [like freedom or love], but you can’t tell them. But you know it when it happens. That’s what I mean by free. I’ve had a couple of times on stage where I really felt free.”8 Her body becomes animated as she props herself up, leaning in, voice transforming into a charged whisper, before a shout: “And that’s something else. That’s really something else!” Her tone changes to bemusement, and she continues, “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me. No fear. I mean really, no fear.… That’s the closest, that’s the only way I can describe it. That’s not all of it. But it is something to really, really feel. [It’s] like a new way of seeing. A new way of seeing something.”9 Freedom, for Simone, was only positive content when it was realized as an ephemeral sense, or feeling: the “couple of times onstage when I really felt free.” If it came to her primarily as a sense, it is because Simone, like most of us, knows freedom primarily through its negation, or simply as the surfeit of fear that makes freedom unimaginable. But onstage she was able to practice or perform freedom, and in so doing, she brushed up against the emancipation of her senses, opening up “a new way of seeing. A new way of seeing something.”
Freedom is a problem. Freedom has been colonized, absorbed, stolen, and made a utility by and for white liberal political reason. Freedom, within white supremacist liberal capitalist modernity, is largely understood to be a possession or right: the freedom to own, to enter the market, or to buy and sell one’s labor. As Lisa Lowe argues, “Liberal ideas of political emancipation, ethical individualism, historical progress, and free market economy were employed in the expansion of empire [and these] universalizing concepts of reason, civilization, and freedom effect[ed] colonial divisions of humanity, affirming liberty for modern man while subordinating the variously colonized and dispossessed peoples whose material labor and resources were the conditions of possibility for that liberty.”10 Following Mimi Thi Nguyen, after a century and longer of US military imperialism, freedom is not only colonized by liberalism; it is a discourse through which liberalism justifies colonial and imperial violence.11 Freedom, within liberalism, is an impossibility—a cruel joke or what Lauren Berlant describes as cruel optimism. “Optimism,” she writes, “is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving.”12
And, still, freedom is that which we cannot not want. Especially those of us descended from the children of the children of slaves, against whom the liberal conception of freedom was and is constructed. For them—for so many of us—freedom is not experienced as a right, a possession, or an ability to enter the market, buy and sell. Instead, freedom is experienced as negation and/or the priority of a desire to move beyond the annihilating historical reality of violence, denial, and bodily dispossession and the intergenerational sense memory of having been bought and sold.
When Assata Shakur was asked what freedom was to her, she responded, incredulously, “Freedom? You’re asking me about freedom? You’re asking me about freedom? I’ll be honest with you. I know a whole more about what freedom isn’t than about what it is, because I’ve never been free. I can only share my vision with you of the future, about what freedom is.”13 Following Shakur, any defense of freedom must begin by admitting that we don’t know what freedom is and don’t remotely have the conditions through which we could know what freedom would be except as vision. Vision: sense, aesthetic encounter. But as Simone also suggests, we might yet have the capacity to experience freedom as sense, materializing it in and on the body through performance. This sense of freedom is not located in the future, but in the present. Though ephemeral, when this sense of freedom is generated across the body through performance, the body becomes aware that the rest of the time something’s missing, something better than this is possible, and that something must be done. This kind of freedom is not used on or against us, but is something we put to work against those forces that dull and diminish us, making it impossible to even wish for the knowledge of what freedom would feel like. Or at least, it’s something we put to work as we try to survive those forces.
Through performance Simone opened up and shared an insurgent sense of freedom with her listener. She did this before she even knew that she was doing it. Early in her career, she was touched and surprised to learn that the radical, young civil rights activists of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) played her records during their meetings: “My friends in SNCC told me that when they got started and had their meetings to discuss strategy—meetings which often turned into parties later—there would always be Nina Simone records in whoever’s house the meeting was held in.”14 These albums, like Little Girl Blue (1959) or Nina at Newport (1960), featured seemingly a-political folk tunes, jazz standards, and gospel songs. But the students sensed something insurgent on her records, and they were touched by the sense of freedom radiating from them: