On failure in/as performance, by Nelesi Rodriguez

Christina León's article, "Forms of Opacity: Roaches, Blood, and Being Stuck in Xandra Ibarra's Corpus," examines Xandra Ibarra's trajectory as a performance artist and her attempts to "illuminate how performing racially perverse material often fails because it is read and embodied as reality by my [her] (white) audiences" (Ibarra in León 370, emphasis mine). A week after reading this piece, I am still hung up on the idea of failure in/as performance: what does it take for a performance to fail? Who determines the failure and who becomes responsible for it? And, more importantly, what are the stakes of failure in performance, especially when the distinction between performance as art and everyday performance is no longer clear?

Xandra Ibarra became known through her performances as La Chica Boom, a project in which she played with hegemonic ideas of Mexicanidad and their possible intersections with sexual and religious representations in the context of burlesque performance. In this code, she developed and performed several alter egos: Dominatriz del Barrio, Tortillera, and Virgensota Jota. In her website, Ibarra describes her project as "a performance of Mexican/Mexican-American myths and narratives that render the colonial gaze/relationship laughable; a masterful exhibition of spichood that interrogates modes of sub/objectification." Rather than making her audiences feel interpellated, spectators commonly received La Chica Boom's performances as an invitation to let lose their racist and sexist impulses. After about a decade performing as La Chica Boom, Ibarra decided to "kill the project" in FML, a final performance that culminates with La Chica Boom's transfiguration into La Cucarachica, a cockroach that would come to crawl her way into Ibarra's multimedia projects. In this post, I am interested in putting La Chica Boom's failure and her metamorphosis into La Cucarachica in conversation with Kara Walker's A Subtlety, another failed (?) performative project we have been reading about and discussing in class. My aim in doing this is to flesh out some ideas about failure, anticipation, opacity, and mediation in performance.

When does a performance fail? If we turn to La Chica Boom's performances, the answer would be at the point when audiences' "betray" the performer's trust and respond in ways that are too violating and unbearable to them. Ibarra wrongly trusted in "the audience reading the comedic as well as the critical into the performance" (León 375). The encounters between Ibarra and La Chica Boom's spectators unfolded very differently than the artist intended. Her audiences were consistently unable to think critically about their role as consumers and let Ibarra gaze back at them. As a result, spectators often smacked La Chica Boom's hyperracial and hypersexual performances with their phobic reactions. "FML," is her response to the situation of "being stuck" in colonial readings–a feeling by now too familiar to her. If the exposure, openness, and relationality that characterize performance art are the same elements that render minoritized performers especially vulnerable, how do they partake in this form while dealing with the possibility or the event of failure?

 In her essay, Christina León discusses mediation as a strategy performance artists use to guarantee their own safety. In a way, Ibarra's development of several alter egos for La Chica Boom is a form of mediation in itself. Ibarra resorts to camp performance to create "a buffer" between her and her spectators (Muñoz in León). After a decade of performing as La Chica Boom, Ibarra's alter egos prove to be too weak of a shield for her. The sustained aggressions directed at La Chica Boom evince "…an audience's refusal to recognize an artist's engagement with questions of aesthetics and form because they cannot see beyond the work's sociopolitical message" (León 377). La Chica Boom's failure signals the limits of camp and the fact that not all forms of mediation are equally effective for all performers.

When does a performance fail? I ask again. The answer provided by Kara Walker's A Subtlety might be less straightforward. In this highly performative installation, Walker anticipates some of her audiences' responses (the inappropriate selfies, the consumption of black pain, etc.) and plans for them adhere to the piece in a way that they amplify its meaning. A Subtlety is a highly performative but also a highly mediated piece; the Sugar Baby and the blackamoors (and some audience members, as Musser's chapter on Kara Walker's installation shows) are the ones taking the blow. In A Subtlety, spectators' responses and interactions (with the piece and among them) become the performance. When performances incorporate audiences' failure to account for themselves, are they still failed performances?

At this point, I want to consider yet another way in which mediation can provide protection from failure in performance. In "Forms of Opacity," Christina León emphasizes the importance of minoritized performers to find ways "to exist outside of the paranoid structures that not only wish harm upon such practitioners, but also ask them to bear the impossible task of correcting the past and paving the way for the future." (León 391) If reality is the space of colonial legibility, escaping it (another form of mediation) becomes a viable alternative that forecloses the possibility of failure altogether. In becoming a cockroach, La Chica Boom gives up in her efforts to be acknowledged as subject in favor of remaining "reviled, untamable, and always pregnant with yet another disciplined reality" (León 371). This act of remediation, this "abstraction," as León identifies it, resonates in some ways with Nyong'o's notions of fabulation.

I want to end this brief rumination about failure in/as performance by posing the question of how might this idea of mediation as protective strategy apply or not to the performances of everyday life–especially when talking about minorities. For FML, Xandra Ibarra's took inspiration from the legendary Lupe Velez, the original Mexican spitfire. While La Chica Boom was able to escape reality by becoming a critter, Velez did so by ending her life. In our class meeting, I am interested in discussing forms of mediation as well as their opportunities and their limits in dealing with failure as it relates to performance.

Xandra Ibarra, Molting in Pool (2015)

References:

 

Ibarra, Xandra. "Blog Salon #3 'Stuck with This.'" The *ff Center, 6 Dec. 2012, http://theoffcenter.org/2012/12/06/blog-salon-3-stuck-with-this-by-xandra-ibarra/.

León, Christina A. "Forms of Opacity: Roaches, Blood, and being Stuck in Xandra Ibarra's Corpus." Asap/journal, vol. 2, no. 2, 2017, pp. 369-394.

Musser, Amber J. Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance. New York University Press, New York, 2018.

 

-- 

Nelesi Rodriguez

PhD student and Seminar in Composition Instructor

University of Pittsburgh

bitsofself.com

Theorizing Pornotrope by Gabby Benavente

In the introduction to Sensual Excess, Musser states that "flesh is the territory of the marginalized. It is the side of the Cartesian dualism connected to the body; it traffics in objectification, abject and mindlessness" (5). Musser largely draws from Hortense Spillers, who theorizes flesh through an analysis of how Black bodies were commodified as flesh through the transatlantic slave trade. As such, we can understand the production of flesh as "one of white supremacy's tactics of domination" (6) due to an investment in depersonalizing and removing subjectivity from enslaved peoples.

After unpacking how the concept of flesh operates in her book, Musser proceeds to expand on an important way that bodies have become flesh. Musser states that Pornotroping, that which objectifies people in accordance with hierarchized systems of racialization" (6) is one specific example of how some bodies become flesh. Musser, again, draws from Spillers, who defines pornotroping as "a process of objectification that violently reduces people into commodities while simultaneously rendering them sexually available" (6). Musser illustrates that for Black and Brown people, "violence is inextractible from theorizations of sexuality" (7). This is to say, to be desirable does not protect one from violence, and to experience violence does not solely mean repulsion. Violence and desire can go hand-in-hand.

Due to the conditions of the pornotrope, Black and Brown bodies are not granted the privileges of sovereign subjectivity. As Musser states, "subjectivity has never been granted and that these restrictions on the category of the subject are violently produced; for them desiring is not a possible action" (7). This lack of subjectivity, which can be understood in relation legibility due to the normativity of the sovereign subject, grants those deemed flesh a "mysterious quality". As Musser describes, "Through [the Pornotrope's] discourse of fleshiness it emphasizes the ways that power and projection produce certain bodies as other, thereby granting them a mysterious quality of desirability, which is always already undergirded by violence and the assumption of possession" (6).

Although this mysterious quality, which arises from existing outside the dominant paradigms of whiteness, often leads to different forms of violence, it can also act as a form of limited agency in the face of white supremacy. To make sense of Blackness and Brownness, the majoritarian subject often demands coherence on the part of Black and Brown people. Since Black and Brown people are assumed to not have "subjectivity or interiority" (10), white people often demand transparency on the part of the Black or Brown person to try to make sense of their existence. Opacity then can act as a "minoritarian strategy because it disrupts the assumption that visuality is equivalent to transparency by alluding to something else" (10). Musser builds upon Munoz's concept of "feeling Brown", which affirms that "no matter what its register, minoritarian affect is "always partially illegible in relation to the normative affect performed by normative citizens" (10). Opacity therefore can function as a form of agency, "one that can be an activity of maintenance, not making; fantasy, without grandiosity; sentience without full intentionality; inconsistency, without shattering; and embodying, alongside embodiment" (Musser 5).

In this presentation, I will be focusing largely on Musser's conceptualization of the pornotrope that is laid out in her introduction. I will expand on the concept of the pornotrope to think about ways in which trans women of color experience violence under this system. I will do this largely through an analysis of the television show Pose, which takes place in NYC in the 1980's, and explores Ball culture largely through the lens of Black and Brown trans women. I will be presenting clips in class, but if you want to familiarize yourself with the show, you can read articles / watch trailers on Youtube. See for example: http://www.cc.com/video-clips/mfn6an/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-janet-mock---putting-transgender-characters-front-and-center-with--pose----extended-interview

Additionally, I want us to think of a few questions before class on Wednesday:

When Musser talked about "the flesh being the territory of the flesh", I felt a strong resonance because it encapsulated the ways that is true for many trans women, particularly trans women of color. Often, trans women of color are thought about in terms of flesh through people's fascination with our genitalia, and the surgeries that we have or have not gotten. I am curious if others felt immediate resonance with this idea of the flesh being the territory of the marginalized, either through lived-experience or through observation.

Additionally, I want us to continue conversation we've been having surrounding opacity vis-a-vis legibility. For a lot of trans women of color, opacity does not necessarily operate as strategic because it is precisely our inability to be seen as women that often results in violence. Through this experience, I am thinking about ways in which achieving some level of legibility, for some people, is often a form of strategic survival, i.e some people may never be seen as legible or make coherence, but we can approximate these categories. Within queer and academic theory, which sometimes privileges the nonnormative, can there be space to explore the ways in which opacity and legibility are continuously negotiated?

Lastly, I want us to sit a little longer on the paradox of being simultaneously hated and desired as a condition of the pornotrope. For many trans women, this also immediately resonates because it's the men who are most often attracted to us the ones most likely to kill us due to an inability to come to terms with their desire not fitting normative modes of subjecthood (i.e, heterosexuality). Are there other instances in which you've see this paradox play out?

Thinking against Representation / Caitlin Responds to Afro-Fabulations

 Tavia Nyong’o offers Afro-Fabulations at a crucial juncture—immersed in a “total climate”[1] of anti-blackness and racial capitalism, we are simultaneously saturated by the politics of representation. Nyong’o writes, “We do not know what a human outside an anti-black world could be, do, or look like. The critical poetics of afro-fabulation are a means of dwelling in the shock of that reality without ever becoming fully of it” (26).

Afro-fabulation—less a concept, according to Nyong’o (200), than a placeholder, a transitive force—attenuates the politics of representation through the unexpected, a “now you see me, now you don’t” that works both with and against the camera (or audience or both). A “theory of the event” (5), or a non-event to hearken Hartman, afro-fabulation circumvents our political insistence on and cultural immersion in the in/authentic binary and its corollaries—truth/fiction and the good/bad object, but also optimism/pessimism and even life/death. Nyong’o encourages us to take up the work of “disjunctive synthesis,” to attune ourselves to “angular sociality,” and to tease out the rewards of fictional archiving. He guides us through an afro-fabulating methodology that incites political potentialities and alternative temporalities, all the while envisaging “new genres of the human out of the fabulous, formless darkness of an anti-black world” (26).

Further, critical shade supplements projects of afro-fabulation by evincing ways to reflect the gaze back onto critics (33). In disrupting evaluation one disrupts representational projections, privileging instead a performance of ephemerality (such as vogue). It is here that fictional archiving elucidates how “fabulation” is neither disingenuous nor truth-functional, but resistant to the binaries articulated above. As defined by Nyong’o, fictional archiving is an affective praxis wherein both distance and proximity (as opposed to authenticity) are measurements of consideration (36). The archiving, fabulating performance, then, engenders a network of tensions, both social and aesthetic, what Nyong’o defines as “angular sociality” (38). Though Nyong’o takes us through many performances—Twenty Looks, Portrait of Jason, Piedra—I want to allocate some of our time to thinking about Kara Walker’s A Subtlety and its investments in critical shade and enactments of angular sociality.  

Just as A Subtlety struggles in its relationship to commodification and gentrification, as it becomes the site of what Jodi Dean defines as communicative capitalism,[2] Walker’s piece “already knows, anticipates, stages, and unsettles” (120). Given this tension—mimetic to our own vacillations between complicity and resistance—Nyong’o urges us to think beyond “pure cynicism” (118) and into the rewards of afro-fabulation. How does A Subtlety engage the politics of representation? How does the piece enact afro-fabulation to resist binaries of in/authenticity and truth/fiction? And perhaps most fraught about the piece, how does it collect and mediate public response?

It is also in this chapter on A Subtlety where Nyong’o locates his discussion on temporality and memory, in effort to illuminate the non-neutrality of time. He writes, “readings of black art, cinema, and performance must acknowledge the insurrectionary stance taken in the everyday, not just to anti-black times, but to time itself, at least to time considered as a neutral, universal, and, as it were, ‘colorless’ phenomenon” (51). Nyong’o goes on to contest innocent time and leverage “thick” and “expansive” black temporality, echoing his earlier call for “a virtual, tenseless blackness that shadows and camouflages the communicative apparatus that colonizes time” (11).

Nyong’o helpfully offers the “crystal image,” borrowing from Deleuze, as a way to visualize time as fractal and collation. The crystal also functions as a response to Hartman’s description of the archive as a tomb. By marking time’s collusion in colonialism and through a polytemporal embrace of “dark time,” Nyong’o afro-fabulates memory, releasing us from the pressures of “working through” or “escaping” the past (105) and pressing us into a disjunctive present. I’m wondering how we see such handling of time played out in Kara Walker’s piece, or in any of the other performances described throughout the book. Does A Subtlety invest in dark time or black polytemporality, as described by Nyong’o or as we understand it? Is A Subtlety a crystal image? If we can answer affirmatively, how then is Walker casting a gaze back against communicative capitalism and its binaried constituents?

Nyong’o reiterates throughout Afro-Fabulations that our pursuit for establishing truth has us losing our way, losing the plot. Rather, he insists on disjunction, through which we strike illegibilities across the surfaces of expectation and by which we foil “any effort to cohere the narrative of the past into a single, stable, and linear story” (99). He also fastens various working definitions to “afro-fabulation,” which serve to expose the term’s manifold uses, rewards, and potentialities. So I’ll end with a question, Nyong’o’s, not my own: “Could a poetics of afro-fabulation supplement, or even supplant, the politics of representation?” (199)

---

[1] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 22.

[2] That is, that our engagement in media only accumulates profit for a capitalist machine motored by our “chatter.” Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

Langston Hughes: The "Voice" of Black Nostalgia and Futurity. By Krystal Marsh

     In The Muse is Music, Meta DuEwa Jones is just as interested in Hughes’ status as an elusive figure in American poetry as she is with his poetry itself, and she uses jazz as the framework through which we can see and hear him and his poetry anew. Jones points out that hearing Hughes through the “weary blues” will “undermine the idea of Hughes as primarily a folk poet and the insistence on his racialized authenticity” (36). Though Jones does not specifically go here, I think her scholarship also challenges criticisms made by writers like James Baldwin, who wrote a scathing review of Hughes’ poetry in the late 1950’s. Baldwin writes, “Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts—and depressed that he has done so little with them.” He continues to say that black speech is, “ a kind of emotional shorthand -- or sleight of hand” that brings black communities together and “Hughes knows the bitter truth behind these hieroglyphics: what they are designed to protect, what they are designed to convey. But he has not forced them into the realm of art, where their meaning would become clear and overwhelming.”

     What Jones gives us in this book is a way into Hughes’ that showcases his own unique understanding of black “hieroglyphics,” particularly through the incorporation of jazz prosody into his text (through syncopated rhythm and jive language) and his own identity as a jazz performer. In other words, his text can be seen -- among many things -- as a script, a dramatic literary voice that has the potential to become a musical literalized voice on a stage. In this figuration, in Hughes’ poetry hieroglyphics transform into jazz, highlighting the synaesthetic experience Jones is emphasizing throughout her chapter on Hughes’ work. For Jones, Hughes’ vocality and musicality is vital to the evolution of his poetry as text, and invoke the racial, gendered, and sexual identifications Baldwin thinks is largely missing in Hughes’ “hieroglyphics.”   

     I found her phrase “rituals of recital” particularly useful when considering how Hughes’ performs his poetry. More specifically, I am interested in discussing the “unnaturalness” that seems inherent to “rituals of recital” and Langston Hughes’ own stiff, measured, and controlled (I don’t mean this pejoratively) cadence/performances when next to the improvisational, swirling, and responding jazz band that accompanies him. I’m reminded of the quote from Al Young than Jones includes in her Introduction in which he says, “One woman told me, ‘I just love it when you read your own poetry; I don’t like it when you jazz it up and all that because you do things that seem unnatural.’”. Here, Jones and Young are interested in the differences between a performance versus a reading, but I can’t help but think of Brooks and afro-alienation, and how Hughes’ controlled performances could be understood as quotational and gestural as opposed to consuming and signifying. 

     The inclusion of jazz further complicates his readings/performances. In my listening to Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods For Jazz, it seems as if jazz responds to text more than Hughes’ performance, acting as “quotation,” response, and punctuation all together (in other words, it is the syntax of his performance and through performance, his text). As Jones points out, these jazz poetry performances can read as everything from “wrestling match” to “collaboration,” but notes that Hughes’ text very rarely changes, even if his cadence and rhythm does. Jones is excited by the idea of performance as a remarkable act of revision and reimagination (and how those acts can help us reimagine race and gender), however, the inevitably of Hughes’ words may indicate that it was the one thing he didn’t think performance could further “jazz.” In fact, I think the concreteness of text further confirms the ritual of his recitations. Jones writes, “Hughes deflects the racialist pigeonholing by describing less ‘a sense of rhythm’ and more a sense of ritual -- a process for the ceremonial aspects of creating and reciting poetry” (44). With that being said, jazz is the thing that creates a new poem on record, which makes Langston Hughes an even more fluid and flexible figure ripe with variety and interpretative possibility. The collaborative jazz performance, then, create a public composition in which Hughes’ musical -- and not just literary -- voice is vital. In this, Hughes showcases how poems and performance both create and exert their own critical and theoretical frameworks. 

     To bring this further, Hughes’ jazz performances demonstrate the ways in which the voice is the hinge to how poetry comes to signify race and gender. In just the text of his poetry alone, his usual collective and ungrounded “I” foreground his elusive identity and makes him an easy target on which to displace and project our own figurations of race and gender. In these jazz performances, though, it is jazz that creates a new poem on record, which allows Langston Hughes the man to remain an “embodied memory” while his poetry can live on through “constant states of again-ness” and “re-presentation” through performances: in and outside of the archives that contain them (The Archive and the Repertoire, Taylor). 

     This brings me to Jones’ methodology and the archive. Jones’ writes that the circulation of black poetics through archival performances functions discursively, which “creates an unofficial ‘archive of feeling’ for succeeding generations through which to be memorized, cited, and performed” (5). She showcases this work in how her book is organized, beginning with Hughes and ending with spoken-word poetry: the structure of the book itself proving that black poetics works on a continuum as opposed to marked “renaissances.” That word is particularly striking, as someone who works in another field named primarily for its artistic “renaissance.” As an early modernist, the label “renaissance” makes broad and arbitrary assumptions regarding the quality of work that came before it, but here, marking a black literary movement as a “renaissance” seems to do something much more troublesome. That is, the word “renaissance” could potentially obfuscate the archive of black music and literature, and makes deep moves of signification that potentially eradicates, erases, or recontextualizes all which came before it. Jones’ book seems to want to undo some of this by allowing us to reimagine jazz and Hughes both separate from and apart of the “renaissance” that usually defines their work. As Jones writes, if archival gaps can signify, they can also testify, and in this book she is accounting for both the “anticipatory nostalgia” and black futurity that black music and literature constantly grapple with.

     Jones’ methodology asks us to be mindful of both nostalgia and futurity, particularly as it pertains to how we understand broad cultural understandings of blackness and, more specifically, black aesthetics. Throughout her book, she is constantly questioning, answering, and revising what the “black” in “black poetics” actually means, and her ultra-discursive methodology makes it difficult to signify “black” as any one thing and, instead, showcases the “formal records of remembrance” as integral to the continuum of black art and aesthetics (173). 

     In thinking about our conversations about “feeling” and “analytics” in our close-reading, Jones here, I think, demonstrates what a marriage between the two actually looks like. She is approaching the archive affectively, but is doing is to mark a new understanding of the continuum and richness of black literary activity. In my activity tomorrow, I want to think about Jones’ big ideas regarding nostalgia, furity, quotation, and feeling by looking at clips from the film Looking for Langston and a performance of “Song for a Dark Girl” by Audra McDonald as a way for us to be mindful of how the be both spectators in the archive while also being spectators of feeling.

Things to listen to / watch:

Harlem in Vogue full album: https://fingertipsrecords.bandcamp.com/album/harlem-in-vogue-the-poetry-and-jazz-of-langston-hughes

Looking For Langston: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cplJ1WvMDyE
“Song For A Dark Girl:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1YSMY97Pbw

Playlist(s) Inspired by Carrie Mae Weems Talk

Hi folks!

I just wanted to drop these links, which hopefully both work.

I re-made my original Spotify playlist since it had since been amended to include some of my personal (and embarrassing, haha) additions. I've made this playlist both public and collaborative, meaning that anyone with Spotify and this link can add to it! I was thinking, if folks wanted to, they could add other songs that we've discussed in the course and as they come up, so that this playlist could function as a soundtrack for/later reminder of this wonderful course! (also, i couldn't remember which Stevie Wonder song she mentioned, so i just included my own personal favorite--but please add/correct me if you do remember!)

https://open.spotify.com/user/1230032730/playlist/3czGvMlp1yzrIAOiYcPhL1?si=kmJVy6dlTvO1m1bfKqRZcg

& In case people do not have Spotify, I've also made a youtube playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLccnNFeRcdfkV93WN5PvO1bPDzUUj3SS1

I took some liberties in including live stuff with various other features/tangentially related performances here, since I think it is interesting to compare the live performances to each other (i particularly was struck by the beginning bit of Aretha and Andy Williams (of all people) discussing how radically different their interpretations of "gentle on my mind" are, and Aretha's assurance: "don't let that bother you")

See you all next week!

-Jane

Blackness, Truth and Nothingness: The Thinking Voice(s) of Ruth Fernández and Lucecita Benítez in Puerto Rico’s Twentieth Century Musical Imaginary /Lana E. Sims

Taking from Heidegger’s essay, “What is Called Thinking?,” Fiol-Matta establishes the concept of the thinking voice, or “an event that can be apprehended through but is not restricted to music performance. It exceeds notation, musicianship, and fandom, although it partakes of them all. No artist owns the thinking voice; it cannot be marshalled at will or silenced when inconvenient” (173). Although the author expands on the thinking voice mostly in Lucecita’s chapter, I would also like to highlight the thinking voice manifested through Ruth Fernández as a token Black voice during the twentieth century in Puerto Rican society and as a political vehicle to promote an ideal of racial unity. Furthermore, appreciating the fact that Fiol-Matta’s conceptualization of the thinking voice is quite broad and abstract, I imagine it as also constituting an assemblage in which many contradictory phenomena can exist at the same time to create something that is not easily definable or articulable, but perhaps detectable at moments through musical performance. In this presentation, I focus on Ruth Fernández’s contradictory sociopolitical role as the first so-called authentic Black voice of Puerto Rico, who, while seemingly breaking racial barriers in society, was musically stifled by demands of the white elite, eager to be entertained, and at times, also seemed to internalize associations of blackness with the grotesque, cheap and undesirable. Similarly, I also talk about Lucecita’s constantly changing image, first as a model of mainstream American consumerism and later as the poster child of political dissonance, against her affirmations of truth and nothingness. In the end, I want to get us to think about what their thinking voice is trying to think through or transmit to us. What is your definition of the thinking voice? Is it detectable in the performances below?

In Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, Alexander Weheliye coins the term racializing assemblages, from Deleuze and Guattari’s original conceptualization of assemblage (or agencement in French) defined as “continuously shifting relational totalities comprised of spasmodic networks between different entities (content) and their articulation within ‘acts and statements’ (expression)….Assembleges are inherently productive, entering into polyvalent becomings to produce and give expression to previously nonexistent realities, thoughts, bodies, affects, spaces, actions, ideas, and so on” (46). Weheliye defines racializing assemblages, on the other hand, as constituting components that create constructed racial categories that over time come to appear natural. I think that both the concept of assemblage, coined by Deleuze and Guattari, and the racial component that Weheliye adds to this are helpful in understanding what I perceive as the thinking voice in both singers. 

Throughout the chapter “So What if She’s Black?” Fiol-Matta constantly questions whether Fernández used racial discourse as merely an artistic and political tool or as a reflection of her own self-perception. Although in earlier interviews, even up until her transition into politics in the 1970s, the singer often claimed that she had never experienced racism, keeping with the ELA (estado libre asociado, or in English, commonwealth) discourse of Puerto Rico as a territory virtually devoid of racism. However, in later interviews, Fernández confesses to not even being aware of her blackness until one of her schoolteachers prohibited her from going on a choir trip simply because she was the only Black girl in the group. A passionate speech by her grandmother on perseverance in the face of racial prejudice then leads to her now infamous tagline “so what if I’m Black?” (104). Surely, Fernández knew that blackness—or racism— in Puerto Rico, although not talked about or recognized—represented a much graver issue than her “so what?” persona might lead one to think. Despite Fernández’s insistence on the fact that she did not just want to sing music that made people dance, but something that made people really stop and listen to her voice, which she managed to do by resorting to the semiclassical genre, her earlier releases of Afro-Cuban music, her musical interpretation of “Y tu abuela onde etá,” and her role in the Cuban operetta Cecilia Valdés as the slave woman Dolores Santa Cruz in the 1930s and 1940s, had clearly marked her as representing a certain cultural primitiveness, an “acousmatic blackness” as Fiol-Matta calls it (84). Even songs of black identity affirmation like “Yo soy la que soy” and “Yo soy mulata” strongly indicated her role as an Afro-Puerto Rican songstress commissioned by the ELA to diffuse the anti-Black racism prevalent in Puerto Rican society. As Fiol-Matta asserts, there is inevitably sorrow, pain and disappointment that constitutes her “So what if I’m black?” and her affirmative “I always make people want me” (103). Through this triumphant diva attitude is an assemblage of personal experiences, racial imaginaries and state business that does indeed leave a gap in the thinking voice. What exactly was her voice, what other voices were superimposed on hers, and is it even possible or productive to separate them?

Coinciding with Fernández’s declaration, “negra, ¿y qué?” in the making of the thinking voice(s) of these great woman singers is Lucecita’s “I am nothing.” Taken from an interview done in 1974, Fiol-Matta highlights the definition of nothing that the singer fervently implies, suggesting that “she was not legibility, but potentiality. She could not be generalized: She was singular” (3). Indeed, from the very start of her career in the 1960s Lucecita herself, as well as the molders of the music industry who tried to match the young pop sound with the political sentiments of the time in Puerto Rico (Operation Bootstrap, a burgeoning middle class). Her transformation from a youthful, girly and very moldable singer into a mature, melodramatic, and at times aesthetically “masculine” artist reveals just how much this notion of nothingness, a fluid, even rhizomatic identity, shaped her career and her public reception, often in very misunderstood ways. Due to her beliefs in truth and freedom across any and all boundaries, as manifested through her activity in leftist political groups and her public support for the Cuban Revolution, Lucecita was essentially blacklisted in the 1970s, her name slandered in the Puerto Rican press and her career—at least in a commercial sense—almost completely ruined. The 1980s saw a comeback, but only within the confines of the dominant cultural trends of the time, relegating Lucecita again to a place where her voice became nothing more than a source of pure entertainment, her next albums mainly targeting the middle-upper class crowd and the nostalgia market.  Lucecita’s notion of sonic truth, described by Fiol-Matta is “a moment of suspension when the listener was completely keyed into her voice, subordinating the social content, the symphonic arrangement, the conductor’s authority, everything to that moment of transmission and reception, creating a fugitive subjectivity” (212). One might say that this truth ultimately fizzled towards the latter part of her career. Just as the singer had stated years earlier, she could sing, but she could not speak (199). Much like Ruth Fernández, Lucecita did not just want her voice to be danced to, she wanted to call people’s attention, to create silences in the crowd, and to have them really listen. I think that it might be interesting to think of not just those heart-stopping performative moments as constituting the thinking voice, but to also consider those times of restraint and cultural conformity in both Fernández’s and Benitez’s careers as constituting a chain of performative assemblages in an untold racialized, feminine Puerto Rican history.

For the activity in class, I will have everyone watch the following three videos, the first, a live performance of Lucecita’s award winning “Génesis” at Carnegie Hall, and the last two, performances by Lucecita and Ruth Fernández singing in movies. I would like you to first ask yourself, based on Fiol-Matta’s definition, or your own thoughts and experiences: what is the/a thinking voice? What does it sound like, and what does it do? Can you think of any other artists who have iconic or even very little-known songs and performances that transmit your conception of the thinking voice? Secondly, can you perceive a thinking voice in the on-screen performances of these great woman singers? If so, what does it say? How does the intersection of voice, staging, and visuality affect your listening (in general, or compared to live performance, for example)?

 Lastly, if you care to watch the videos now to get a feel for both singers’ performance styles, please do so!

                                                        Lucecita Benítez – “Génesis”

                                                Lucecita Benítez – “Todas las mañanas”

                                               Ruth Fernández – “Yo soy la que soy”

Additional sources cited

Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, 2014.

The Grain of the Voice: Listening to Blues Aesthetics (posted by instructor)

"Backwater Blues," Bessie Smith

"Strange Fruit, " Billie Holiday