After the Party. Joshua Chambers-Letson
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going on which I had to get involved in, I had been involved anyway.”15 Performance was the site of her struggle and if the insurgent sense of freedom produced in her song lasted only for the time the record played, the ephemeral instantiation of something better than this in her voice affirmed the validity of the wish for freedom and More Life. So the activists in SNCC kept playing her records as they did the hard work of building a better world for everyone.
The title of this project refers to that which comes after the party: the moment when the record comes off, and the students move into the streets of Selma or Birmingham, mobilizing the body in performance and protest to articulate their demands for black freedom and More Life. But it also refers to what happens when a party comes undone, when the last of the meetings has taken place, and the movement has fallen apart. It’s a reference to life that is lived after your friends and loved ones have died, and it is a gesture to those lingering moments in the early dawn when there is nowhere left to go, though you and your people are still trying to find refuge together. Throughout this project, I insist that the incompletion experienced in the moment after the party’s fall, though often crushing, can be an invitation to throw a new party the next night: the party’s fall is grounds not for nihilism, but for action and praxis. It is in this sense that the title also refers to materialist struggles for freedom and sustainable life that continue to surge in the twenty-first century, despite the collapse of communism, which once seemed (if only for a few flickering moments) a promising vehicle for collective emancipation.
Given the crimes and failures of historical communism, communism is an odd thing to call for. By insisting that communism is not-yet-here and has never-been-here, I am following José Muñoz and Fred Moten, as well as C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Grace Lee Boggs (of the Johnson-Forest Tendency), who concluded, in their midcentury critique of Stalinism that not only was socialism nowhere present in any of the revolutionary societies of the day, but that the revolutionary parties in places like the Soviet Union and Tito’s Yugoslavia were instruments of fascist domination in which workers remained subordinate and subject to the cold exploitation (at best) and brutal, fascist machinations (at worst) of “the bureaucratic-administrative one-party state.”16 Still, they did not advocate a retreat from Marxism, which would cede the world’s development totally to the annihilating tendencies of capitalism. Rather, they insisted, as James wrote elsewhere, that “Marxism is the doctrine which believes that freedom, equality, democracy are today possible for all mankind.”17
As the capitalist mode of production drags the world ever closer to the precipice of total destruction, our survival may rely now upon the realization of communism’s promise, whether we call it “communism,” or by another name.18 In place of racial capitalism’s market-based commons of race, sex, gender, and class stratified, yet formally colorblind equivalence, a communism of incommensurability is a sphere of social relation structured less by the social fictions of possession, equality, and exchange, than by collective, entangled, and historically informed practices of sharing out, just redistribution, sustainability, and being together in difference. This kind of communism might take its cues not so much from the failed political parties of historical communism, as from the parties the SNCC activists threw while listening to Simone’s records or the performance-rich parties of queer of color nightlife. Not because these spaces were perfect—they were and are replete with their own violences—but because they were trying to produce something else, something we don’t even have a vision of. Yet.
This book undertakes a self-consciously heretical deployment of the tradition of Marxist aesthetic criticism, mobilizing Marxism in an (often uneasy) alliance with critical race theory, feminist theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, and minoritarian performance theory. Marxism, here, is a means not to be mistaken for the end. As Ernst Bloch insisted, “Marxism in its entirety, even when brought in in its most illuminating form and anticipated in its entire realization, is only a condition for a life in freedom, life in happiness, life in possible fulfillment, life with content.”19 Marxism cannot produce freedom, but it labors to bring about the conditions from within which we might finally begin to imagine, sense, or see what freedom could be or feel like. But to pursue this goal, Marxism must reconcile with its own fundamental limitations.
For Fredric Jameson, following Lenin, the lesson of system is that, “one cannot change anything without changing everything.”20 But the dominant Marxist tradition has long subordinated questions of race, colonization, indigeneity, sex, gender, and sexuality to the question of class and political economy—even when this reduction was and is unsustainable in the face of the complexity of actually occurring historical events. As Cedric Robinson argues, “Western Marxism, in either of its two variants—critical-humanist or scientific—has proven insufficiently radical to expose and root out the racialist order that contaminates its analytic and philosophic applications or to come to effective terms with the implications of its own class origins. As a result, it has been mistaken for what it is not: a total theory of liberation. The ensuing errors have sometimes been horrendous, inducing in their wake dogmas of certainty characterized by desperation.”21 While this book cannot pretend to solve this problem, it suggests that the aesthetic is one place to look for answers and/or experiment with possible solutions. For as much as Marxism opens up our understanding of the labor undertaken by performance, Marxism has much to learn from minoritarian freedom struggles carried out within the domain of performance.
The Middle Passage. Four hundred years ago. But also, today. In Baton Rouge. And where you are.
We’re back in Baton Rouge. We never left. Here on this highway, the chains from which Simone wishes to break free are both metaphorical and literal. The woman’s name is Ieshia Evans, and she is a thirty-five-year-old nurse and mother.22 Police, plastic handcuffs, guns in holsters, battle armor, the law, thirty-five hours in a jail cell. These are the expensive, but impoverished, things that the state mobilizes to quash her rebellion. A body, a dress, two shoes, the names of the dead, and a wish for freedom and More Life make up the poor, yet rich, materials of her act of resistance.
All minoritarian performance, like Simone’s wish or the woman’s stand on the highway, are animated by the drive toward freedom. This book’s theorization of minoritarian performance, though deeply informed by Asian American studies, Latinx studies, and other areas of minoritarian thought, owes a particular debt to black studies, black performance studies, and black feminist theory. For Fred Moten, black performance is “the universalization or socialization of the surplus, the generative force of a venerable phonic propulsion, the ontological and historical priority of resistance to power and objection to subjection, the old-new thing, the freedom drive that animates black performances.”23 To be clear, when I suggest that Moten’s conceptualization of the freedom drive that animates black performance is foundational to the theory of minoritarian performance, I do not mean to sublimate the blackness of black performance into the abstraction of minoritarian performance. Rather, I am suggesting that blackness and black performance animate what I’m describing as minoritarian performance, as much as I’m thinking of minoritarian performance as that which struggles for the long-deferred liberation of all black people. Black performance and minoritarian performance do not subsume or sublate each other so much as they are entangled within, determinative of, and determined by each other.
The ontological and historical priority of black performance’s resistance to (white) power was (to steal language from Althusser) “originary; not derived.”24 The chains that bind, or “hold,” the pianist and the plastic handcuffs that threaten the woman in Baton Rouge share a lineage that traces back to acts of black resistance at the moment of capture. In The Black Jacobins, C. L. R. James insists that from slavery’s beginning, black resistance and the will toward freedom prefigured the masters’s brutal tactics of corporeal domination: “Contrary to the lies that have been spread so pertinaciously about Negro docility, the revolts at the port of embarkation and on board were incessant, so that the slaves had to be chained, right hand to right leg, left hand to left leg, and attached in rows to long iron bars.”25 Stolen from their homes, stripped of their names, sold apart from their families, and held in chains, people were transformed into living property, and slaves were reduced to “flesh,” or what Hortense Spillers calls “that zero degree of social conceptualization.”26 But, still, they fought back and fought to be free, and when they had nothing left but a body reduced to flesh, they often put the