After the Party. Joshua Chambers-Letson
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expectations that bourgeois society would rationalize social relations and demystify social consciousness, the obverse occurred. The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism.”41 The marriage of white supremacy to liberal capitalism produced its own set of internal contradictions. From the founding of the republic, as the United States has (to appropriate the words of Lisa Lowe) “sought to serve capital, this contradiction between the economic and the political spheres was sublated” and violently worked through by way of the dehumanization, disenfranchisement, and subjugation of the black body, the dispossession, murder, and removal of the indigenous body, and the domination, exploitation, and exclusion of Asian and Latino bodies.42 This has critical implications for even the possibility of freedom. As Du Bois concluded, our freedoms are tangled up within each other: “The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown, and black.”43
If the dark proletariat has never fully materialized as a politically active force, we still regularly catch a glimpse of it in the realm of the aesthetic, and performance in particular. In Simone’s 1967 collaboration with Langston Hughes, “Backlash Blues,” for example, Simone assumes the perspective of a working class black woman, addressing “Mr. Backlash,” who is a personification of white supremacy. In the song, she references the insurgent power of a much larger racialized commons:
When I try to find a job
To earn a little cash
All you got to offer
Is your mean old white backlash.
But the world is big
Big and bright and round
And it’s full of other folks like me
Who are black, yellow, beige and brown44
Like Du Bois, Simone describes and calls for a revolutionary alliance between people of color who collectively struggle against shared conditions of domination, exploitation, and death, without relinquishing the particular, but overlapping histories that have produced their marginal, or minor, relationship to dominant systems and structures of power.
The difference between majoritarian and minoritarian being is not a question of statistical or numerical majority or minority; it’s a relation structured by proximities to power and alliance. For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri, majority is assumed when a particular class (the bourgeoisie, white people, colonists, heterosexuals, men, cis-gender people) assumes the position of a universal metric, or constant. “Majority,” they write, “implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate it.”45 But majoritarian being also implies a privileged relationship to power, often resulting in the domination of descendent or minor classes (the proletariat, people of color, indigenous people, queers, women, trans people) whose deviation from the constant paradoxically confirms the norms, borders, and boundaries by which the ascendant (or major) class is defined: “Majority assumes a state of power and domination, not the other way around.”46
Through the appropriation of the materials produced by (and productive of) the dominant (or major) culture, minoritarian cultural practitioners improvise and perform into being routes toward freedom and survival that would otherwise be impossible. “Even when major,” they write, “a language is open to an intensive utilization that makes it take flight along creative lines of escape which, no matter how slowly, no matter how cautiously, can now form an absolute deteritorialization.”47 Following Deleuze and Guattari, Berlant notes that their theorization of the major/minor suggests that “sensual locations of political marginality might provide an unpredicted energy for reconfiguring power, identity, and collective knowledge.”48 In minoritarian performance, we find a means for taking “flight along creative lines of escape” in order to improvise new worlds and new, common or collective ways of being in and knowing the world. But the revolutionary, world-making commons, or “we,” that is produced through minoritarian performance is not without its dangers and limits.
Vazquez insists on a nuanced approach to theorizing and complicating the “we” produced by minoritarian performance. In a comparative study of two post-revolutionary Cuban music documentaries, she describes the “nosotros” deployed in both films as an insurgent “we” characterized by radical social heterogeneity. This “nosotros,” she writes, is a form of “we” that ultimately “prevent[s] the reduction of the project of making music (or nation) to a select few and open[s] it up to a heterogeneous societal whole. The worlds incorporated in the films place pressure on the tyrannies, ideological and otherwise, that often overdetermine the ‘we.’ ”49 The need for this pressure is particularly acute within the context of post-revolutionary Cuba and the empire to the north, where much of Cuba’s diaspora settled.
In both Cuba and the United States, the tyranny of totalitarian power can be disguised as collective will, or the authorizing will of “We/the People.” As Vazquez observes, “Because it is often evoked to muffle difference and dissent, and because it has been employed to repressive effect in regimes everywhere, the ‘we’ can be intolerable. This is especially true in Cuba where each generation is continually called upon to sacrifice mind and body for the national ‘we.’ ”50 In the final instance, Vazquez, like Muñoz, describes the “nosotros” or “we” produced by minoritarian performance as a form of being together in difference: it does “not necessarily have to report back to an official ‘public’ or an official ‘nosotros’ or ‘we.’ This space of being is within and at the same time gestures towards the possibility of being outside of the ‘we.’ ”51 Minoritarian performance produces a “we” that includes but does not enclose; it is a form of being with by being “within” and also “outside” of “we.”
“We” is ontologically enmeshed with performance and performativity. As Jean-Luc Nancy observes: “Only in such a case can we speak of a ‘we’—or better, only in this case is it possible that a we comes to be spoken. Better still: if the we can only and each time be a speech act, then only a we existentially spoken may perform its significance.”52 The “we” of minoritarian performance is temporary and never fully authorized, but its ephemerality and lack of authority give it the capacity to remain fugitive from the majoritarian and totalitarian tendencies of the revolutions of historical communism, while appropriating and amplifying their most revolutionary impulses and drives toward democratic and collective being. Under such circumstances, minoritarian performance isn’t just a part of the revolution; it is the revolution. “Minoritarian performance labors to make worlds,” writes Muñoz, “worlds of transformative politics and possibilities. Such performance engenders worlds of ideological potentiality that alter the present and map out the future.”53 As minoritarian subjects mobilize performance to produce a common sense, they speak as a “we” capable of “envision[ing] and activat[ing] new social relations. These new social relations would be the blueprint for minoritarian counterpublic spheres.”54 This, ultimately, is the work of minoritarian performance.
New York, New York. Sometime in 1964. And London. 1857.
Simone recorded jazz pianist Billy Taylor’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” for her 1967 album, Silk & Soul. Composed in the early 1950s, the song gained traction as the struggle for black emancipation erupted into a series of organized movements by the middle of the century. The song’s opening, where Taylor introduces the melody, is slow. The notes are extended by the drag of the bassist’s bow pulling across the strings, while Taylor stretches out the spaces and gaps between the phrases, taking on the tone, air, and tempo of a somber church processional. But in the second verse the pace revs up, the bassist begins plucking the strings as a percussionist joins the fray. Taylor comes back around for another, looser pass at the melody, and a few voices erupt in the background as hands begin to clap. As these various elements crash into each other, the sense of the song takes shape and it begins to produce (or make) a world.
To describe Taylor’s performance as producing, or making a world, is to brush up against a problem faced by Marxism and performance