Methodologies of Curiosity and Openness in Explorations of Blackness / Celena Todora

Through intertwined methodologies of visuality and performance, Fleetwood and Campt explore the role of affect in representations and/or perceptions of Black vernacular/quotidian experiences within the dominant public imaginary, which often flattens Blackness to identifiable visual performative codes. Both texts demonstrate how images of Blackness renders the Black subject within the dominant gaze. Concerned with challenging this perpetual simplification of Black identity, Fleetwood poses the question, “How do we return to what we already know with curiosity and openness so that new forms of knowing and recognition emerge?” (7). I argue that Campt’s methodology of “listening” to images exemplifies such a practice of “curiosity and “openness” with the potential to lead to alternative forms of knowing beyond predominant visual and performative codes that perpetuate stereotypes of Blackness.

Campt undoubtedly critiques the dominant cultural “troubling vision” of Blackness and argues that the embodied modality of sound enables us to “listen” to the “lower frequencies” of images (33) to re-envision simplified or problematic understandings of the Black experience. She asserts that attention to these lower frequencies illuminate the connection between touching and feeling in relation to visuality (100), enhancing our attention to the affective domain and the multiple temporalities that contextualize the images. By listening to an “ensemble of images together” (43), Campt offers “a complicated account” (37) as opposed to an “easy reading” (42) of Black identity within the photographed subjects, such as in Chapter 2 when she places the Gulu archive into conversation with Mendolsohn’s collection, imagining multiple possibilities for “strategies of diasporic survival” contextualizing the identities of the “sitters” (41). Thus, Campt’s integration of visuality and performance seeks to approach seemingly “quiet,” quotidian, mundane, or ignored images and challenge initial perceptions or easy readings that risk reproducing normative stereotypes of Blackness.

However, I am curious if, in some ways, Campt’s emphasis on the visuality of Blackness negates the possibility of “openness” in Fleetwood’s sense (as Fleetwood argues that it is the attention to visuality itself that leads to the “troubling vision” of Blackness). For example, how does Campt’s theory play into Fleetwood’s concept of non-iconicity? Fleetwood argues that non-iconicity is a “aesthetic and theoretical position that lessens the weight placed on the black visual to do so much. It is a movement away from the singularity and significance placed on instantiations of blackness to resolve that which cannot be resolved” (9). On the one hand, Campt’s emphasis on multiplicities of diasporic survival and identity surrounding an image align with this movement away from singularity—say, for example, the perception of a Black subject as a “pimp”—but do her suggestions of multiple tropes of Black identity simply expand the iconicity of the Black subject?

Additionally, does her primary emphasis on male Black subjects or “sitters” render the black female as what Fleetwood would refer to as “excess flesh?” Fleetwood argues that “the black visual has been framed as masculine, which has positioned the black female visual as its excess” (9). While Campt approaches her work from a Black feminist perspective and includes multiple female “sitters,” in no way does she ignore Black femininity, but an overwhelming majority of her selected images feature male subjects and (understandably, of course) comment on dominant narratives of the masculine Black vernacular. 

Thus, while this post is mostly questions and positioning of ideas at this point, in my presentation I hope to interrogate how Fleetwood and Campt’s methodologies of integrated visuality and performance align and converge, particularly in terms of their understandings of affect and embodiment.

"Citizen" & The Performance of Existence / Jane Rohrer

On pages 52 & 53 of Citizen is the image of Glenn Ligon’s untitled oil stick, gesso, and graphite on wood, borrowing a quote from Zora Neale Hurston: “I DO NOT ALWAYS FEEL COLORED” on one side, “I FEEL MOST COLORED WHEN I AM THROWN AGAINST A SHARP WHITE BACKGROUND” on the other. The letters are all black, and, at the top of the page, the background is white. By halfway down the page, the background is smudged and splattered in black, and, by the time eyes reach the bottom, the black has grown so that the letters are nearly illegible. Citizen is made up, largely, of lived experiences; whether Rankine herself or friends or family lived them is unclear, but what we are to draw from this genre-bending book is that, for Black people, to navigate the United States’ racism is a series of unending performances, reactions to and against others’ actions. Rankine examines this tension between hypervisibility and invisibility—this tension which Ligon’s untitled portrays, and which we’ve discussed at many other points throughout the semester. On page 55, Rankine’s speaker, or Rankine-as-speaker writes, “you take in things you don’t want to all the time” after a friend tells her “you have to learn not to absorb the world.” The visuals in Citizen lend an interpretive hand, but not one we can control: we are asked to “take things in.”

 Throughout Citizen, Rankine masterfully examines the daily effort of existing-as-performance, asking that readers stand witness to the everyday racism the speaker tolerates. Over and over, we read as the speaker is mistaken for someone else, as the speaker is not who someone expects them to be, as the speaker is expected to laugh at racist jokes, as the speaker is the sole viewer of “invisible” racism. The speaker, who is often a universal “you,” not an “I,” fights for the right to be nuanced, to be a whole self; this speaker makes careful distinctions between bendably-alike terms: “it wasn’t a match, I say,” she writes on the last page, “It was a lesson” (159). I think part of what Citizen does most effectively is trouble our notions of the absolute human existence which is so often taken for granted in the white lived experience—that for someone, something as “simple” as sitting in a car (here, I am again referencing the last page) can be an act of menace in the eyes of someone else, a source of trouble or power or selfhood for the one doing the sitting. According to Rankine, every second of every day can be very much more than a simple existence, no matter how seemingly quotidian.

In the Introduction chapter to Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness, Nicole Fleetwood offers a helpful elaboration on the “polyvalent meaning” of the word render, in reference to black visuality: “to give help; to translate; to deliver a verdict; to submit for consideration; to purify through extraction; to surrender something; to exchange or give something back—as they each contribute to an understanding of the visual, viewed and viewing black subject” (7). Here, and after Fleetwood references Wahneema Lubiano’s theorizing that “telling the ‘truth’ demands that we consider the truth of something compared to something else,” I had margin notes about how similar this felt to Shane Vogel’s concepts of the “real” and “authentic” (5). To be “real” or to be “rendered” is to be understood by an outside group as such—“real” or “rendered” and “existing” are not synonymous. So, if we are to understand that “truth,” “reality,” “authenticity” (etc.) are matters of nuanced performance, not binaries of good & bad, should we not be concerned with doing a form of close listening? Here, I mean listening as a way to approach visuality (and visual performance/performance cues) that is complicated, curious, and thus less natural, perhaps, than simply looking at it. As Fleetwood suggests, “how do we return to what we already know with curiosity and openness so that new forms of knowing and recognition emerge?” (7). I ask: how does one listen critically to a book of text which defies boundaries of genre and selfhood? Is close listening a companion to visuality or a challenge to it?  

To end, I would like to provide two examples of “video poetry,” where visual performance(s) (of race) are central to both the original poetry's content and the video which couples it. Senna Yee, who is Chinese-Canadian, and Monica McClure, who is Mexican-American, both use visuals to supplement, complicate, compliment, or otherwise, to borrow from Fleetwood, “render,” the poem itself.  I’d like us to think about how this visual interacts with the visuals throughout Citizen—in what ways do these visuals compare/contrast/interact with each other? How do they complicate our ideas of what it means to be a visible, legible, person?

Senna Yee, book trailer for "How Do I Look?"

Monica McClure, "Chiflada"

¡Oye Como Va!: Vazquez’s Listening in Detail

A difficult question that scholars focusing on the study of Cuba face is how to adequately represent the complexities of its culture. As Alexandra T. Vazquez—a child of the Cuban diaspora—has noted in the Introduction to Listening In Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (2013), scholars have tried to find qualities that solidify Cuban culture into a definitive set of practices, often erasing the diverse identities that form Cuba’s national and international community. The strive to define Cubanidad also creates a false essentialism, and one of the solutions to this problem is Vazquez’s invitation to a detailed listening of Cuban musicality. 

To listen in detail to Cuban music, according to Vazquez, is to consider “the ways that music and the musical reflect—in flashes, moments, sounds—the colonial, racial, and geographic past and present of Cuba as much as the creative traditions that impact and impart from it” (4). This theorization of listening is also a method that resists totality of academic argument, honoring the quality of being in a detail’s simplicity. This theoretical gesture creates room for more permutations of Cubanidad: “Totalizing attempts to define what and who Cuba is have long inspired possessive attachments to it. When approached through it’s details, and not via the overbearing bombast typical of any nationalism, Cuba offers creative furrows for being and belonging” (7). The greatest contribution of the introduction is the gift of a method that strives to resist totality, critiquing in praxis US imperialist forms of knowledge production. 

A key suggestion of the introduction is that Cubanidad is a performance. Even the exiled queer novelist Severo Sarduy has pointed to the performativity of Cubanidad in De donde son los cantantes(1967), a novel that uses the logics of sound to theorize constructions of space in Cuba’s landscape. Sarduy also does two important things: he criticizes gender by exaggerating it on the body of his not-quite-human characters and communicates what he believes is the fragmentary quality of Cuban culture by composing seemingly unconnected scenarios. The logics of sound, Vazquez beautifully proves, was also a great tool for the now lesser known but very influential Cuban playwright Maria Irenes Fornés, who felt artistically “oiled” by the sounds of Olga Guillot’s Añorando el Caribe (23). What Vazquez is pointing readers to are the details, these logics of sound, that are often missed or dismissed by critics searching for more obvious markers of Cubanidad. Musical details and the logics of Cuban sound as performative tools for the construction of identity, fluid or otherwise, are the subject of Vazquez’s inconclusive study. 

At the heart of Chapter One is a critique and reevaluation of the work that anthologies do. Tracing a brief history of the anthology and its function during colonialism and after the formation of nation states, Vazquez claims that anthologies have been an exercise in defining national boundaries. Examining Alfredo Rodríguez’s Cuba Linda(1996), a musical anthology as she puts it, Vazquez extends Cubanidad outside national boundaries, illustrating how Rodríguez’s music is in companionship with jazz in the US, for example, through a performative reflection of sound on the page. Sound migrates, and a sonic anthology would have to account how these migrations transgress and transform national boundaries. 

Chapter Two begins with a discussion of the subversive intellectual and the difficulty she represents for the academy. On the one hand, the academy needs her subversive work, but it cannot deal with the weight of her messy, unstable methods and methodologies, needless to say the material she works with. For Vazquez, this notion of the subversive intellectual is embodied by the music of and recorded oral histories by Graciela Pérez, a jazz singer who would have traveled the world by the time she was in her twenties. The chapter, while centering on Pérez’s work and her relationship to Vazquez, offers us a meditation on the work that we as striving subversive intellectuals must do: “There are no prescriptive because the subversive intellectual leaves none behind. Which is not to say that there are no rules. Openness seems to be inarguable condition. One has to go beyond reliable critical locations, listen a little harder, feel comfortable with flexible theories. A willingness to become trained in their methods of insurgence, escape, and risk taking is required” (95). Vazquez prescribes intellectual vulnerability as a tool for destabilizing the violent totalities of our productions. 

I leave you with an invitation to listen in detail to the work of Celia Cruz, Alexander Abreu, Krudas Cubensi, Los Van Van, and Orishas. Some of these artists were exhiled, some are queer, and some are bound to the island.

CeliaCruz , Yo Vivire 

Abreu, Me Dicen Cuba

Krudas Cubensi: 

Los Van Van, Amiga Mia

Orishas: Cuba Isla Bella

Abreu, Conga Pa' Cerrar 

Tengan pa’ que se entretenga (Suggested outside materials)

The Rest I Make Up (A film about Maria Irene Fornés)

https://vimeo.com/181778589

In search of Non-Nation/Un-history/Non-Race in the disruptive configuration of race, nation, and gender in Calypso craze

To be an Indian or East Indian from the West
Indies is to be a perpetual surprise to people out-
side the region...you don't go to Trinidad...
expecting to see Hindu pundits scuttling about
country-roads on motorcycles;to see pennants with
ancient devices fluttering from temples; to
see mosques cool and white and rhetorical against
the usual Caribbean of concrete and cor-
rugated iron; to find India celebrated in the street
names of one whole district of Port of Spain...
To be an Indian from Trinidad is to be unlikely. It
is in addition to everything else, to be the embodi-
ment of an old verbal ambiguity.
-----V.S. Naipaul, The Overcrowded Barracoon

In the 2004 Soca Monarch competition a crowd favorite was Denise Belfon, the Afro-Trinidadian former beauty queen who grew up watching Mastana Bahaar musical competitions, Hindi cinema produced in Bombay, and is of all things fascinated by Indian classical dance forms. Belfon's pelvic thrusts (influenced by Hindi film dances and the indentured migrants from Indian hinterlands specifically Bhojpur) and her rambunctious voice singing "Tonight I'm looking for an Indian man" performed an implicit critique of normative Creole Trinidadian masculinity. For decades male Calypsonians sang about the exotic Indian woman, representing her as the normative feminine, this was the first time that an Africana woman represented in her music sexual desire for an Indian man.

If we look for key arguments in Shane Vogel’s book, Stolen Time two things stand out. Firstly, the fact that the spectacle of mid-century Caribbeana in the form of what he refers to as the “Calypso craze” was not simply a musical fad or a recording phenomenon. It operated within a battery of performances and media-economic events which include music, dance, theatre, cinema, television, club culture, fanzines, paratextual materials, and local competitions as well as a middle class curiosity in island exotica, and the proliferation of a new world network culture across airlines, concert halls, hotels, hospitality and interracial sex fascination, taboo, and tourism in the “coconut circuit”. Secondly, the craze destabilized the notions of that destabilized authentic/inauthentic binaries and unsettled the epistemological grounds of colonialism, and racial antagonism. Heavily criticized for its inauthenticity (Belafonte’s rallying cry against the calypso craze, “This is not that”) the musically driven cultural sensation reorients our notions of cultural authenticity and the political charge of diasporic practices. While the craze of the 1950s is marked by black fad performances in America, this is a fad that is premised on technological mass mediation, ‘idle chatter’, and ‘vulgar time’ of racial tensions of Jim Crow era. In embracing and acknowledging the inauthentic, these performances modified inauthenticity itself and allowed for the possibility of an authenticity through inauthenticity, enabling black performers in the United States to exploit the distance between the ethnographic and the faddish in order to refigure relations between African America and the Afro-Caribbean, using artifice and performance to challenge fixed notions of blackness within the certain finitude of fad performance. To the point that the act of going out dancing to perhaps faddish music in a phony exoticized club becomes a temporal formation of race and cultural expression. Vogel narrates the processes of black performers who throw into sharp relief the real-ness of true Calypso which can only be articulated in terms of the not-real fad, with a culture of racial appropriation in which they appropriated not Caribbean culture but the fad itself and in doing so mocked American epistemologies of racial authenticity. He writes: “The calypso craze offers blackness as change and exchange. It is a copy that displaces the very question of the original.”(10) Calypso and its circles of continuing fad musical cultures thus steal time via twisted claims of ownership and possession in unexpected ways. What Vogel manages to do in the course of the book is curate a deep time of black performances and diasporic expressions using examples of these untimely iterations of Calypso. The deep time can be traced through unfixed origins and histories of gossip, rumor, misspellings, and the truth and un-truths in all of them.

In chapter 4, Vogel suggests the two meanings of mock as imitation and as assemblage whereby this duality of the term mock, allows mock transnational performance to open up a space of contradiction and disjunction in which “the false starts and dead ends of transnational commodification could themselves be productive of new political and cultural possibilities.” (139) Using examples of productions, he argues that these complicate the relationship between African American racial consciousness and theatrical form, on the one hand, and African diasporic histories and fantasies, on the other. Such that even if these musicals were not about Africa or Jamaica they refer to the very construction of diasporic thought and the terms of racial representation. It is a strategy to advance a diasporic imagination that shaped relations between the multiplicity of black ethnicities within the United States and beyond its shores. The mock transnational mode works as a commentary on midcentury US- Caribbean cultural relations by virtue of its self-reflexive quality. Thus while being hinged on the erotics and aesthetics of an undifferentiated Caribbean landscape and folk simplicity it foregrounds the economic dependence of the local economy on the global market. They open up a “sensate democracy”. (162)

With this I will segue us into the directly performative part of the day. In the edited volume titled Globalisation, Diaspora Caribbean Popular Culture, Christine G.T. Ho and Keith Nurse point out the dual play of globalization and diaspora in modern Caribbean, composed of transplanted European elite who had exterminated the indigenous population, forcefully enslaved Africans, indentured South Asians, and integration of other groups from the Middle East. One of the most penetrated and extroverted in the developing world economies, the role of remittances, international aid and foreign direct investment in the Caribbean, especially Trinidad stands testimony to the extremely uneven and unequal flows of labor, media, and capital in the globalizing process. This is signified in the rapid growth of labor migration, proliferation of transnational networks, deterritorialization of nation-states, and cultural hybridity in the region. The un-beginnings and instability of the form, and Caribbean non-history is best explored in Chapter 5 of Vogel’s book on dancing bodies, celebrities and dance memorabilia. Engaging with the unfixed temporality of dance movement vocabulary he gestures toward the play of terms in scholarship on the Caribbean. Doogla or dougla as a form refers to not simply the pejorative term for miscegenation of Indian indentures with the African descendants of the islands but also a sign of self identity and pride, a new corpus of sensibility adhering to a political and cultural identity rather than a biological one. These dance forms integrated a mythic particularity in their repertoire to address racial distinction anchored on aesthetic invention. With examples of dance instruction manuals like Glamour and other calypso fanzines, and their failures to chalk mark the essentials of Caribbean dancing, Vogel underscores the recycled choreographies involved here which acknowledge the miscegenation of dance forms in the Caribbean archipelago and the impossibility of fixed lines of origin. “It is an empty gesture that refers only back to the fad.” (178). The masterstroke of the chapter lies in recognizing the ephemeral temporality of calypso dancing with the play on the song Limbo-Calypso, the phantom limb, and the emerging queer time associated with the limb of the performing celebrities.

Calypso Craze: A Partial Playlist

A partial playlist of performances mentioned in Stolen Time. Consider their sonic and visual aesthetics as you read the text.

Lord Invader "Rum and Coca Cola" (1943)

The Andrews Sisters "Rum and Coca Cola" (1944)

Harry Belafonte, Day-O (1956)

Louise Bennett (Jamaica) Day dah Light (1956)

Maya Angelou in Calypso Heatwave (1957)

Geoffrey Holder in Carib Gold (1956)

The afterlives of ungendering, the legacy of Hortense Spillers: Sam Corfman

This week, I'm interested especially in what I'm calling "theoretical methodology" (although maybe that's just a fancy way to point us to theoretical intervention or framework?): how do our theoretical investments/interlocutors/interventions come to bear on the people or objects we think with or about?

One major way I thought about Black on Both Sides was as a kind of extended think-through of Hortense Spillers' work, applying it where it should absolutely should be/should have already been applied, but hadn't quite been yet. That is, it elaborates Spillers' work—especially her argument that captivity "ungenders" the body—in a sustained way for trans and black studies. In one of my favorite blog posts about teaching theory, Kyla Tompkins (who shows up briefly in Snorton's work on p66) succinctly describes the tension surrounding Spillers' "Mama's Baby Papa's Maybe":

"[D]oes it matter that Spillers wrote 'Mama’s Baby' three years before Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and The Subversion of Identity was published? Yes, it matters very much. What is there to say about the fact that Spillers is mentioned only once, in a footnote, in Butler’s groundbreaking book? What is produced by the force of that exclusion? What if we rewrite Butler’s theory from within the work that Spillers does to re-narrate gender as an always-already raced American grammar book. What other ideas about matter, performativity, abjection and regulatory normativity might be produced? (Answer: read Spiller’s essay, in which almost the entire gist of critical theory – particularly on race and sexuality – for the next thirty years is predicted.)" (Emphasis mine.)

Another answer is what we get in Black on Both Sides, a genealogy of gender "fungibility" that emerges from blackness such that black and trans become coeval. (Snorton, pg 7: "What pasts have been submerged and discarded to solidify—or, more precisely, indemnify—a set of procedures that would render blackness and transness as distinct categories of social valuation? Relatedly, what insights are yielded in a reading of 'black' and 'trans' that do not regard these as social markers that are manifestly transparent?") One synopsis of Snorton's work might say that the afterlives of captivity and slavery's undegendering of enslaved people render blackness as an already-trans way of being (or, that gender is stabilized by blackness and so trans is also produced out of blackness)—on page 68, Snorton calls this "the impossibility of normative gender and sexual reciprocity under captivity." (for those of you wanting more about the root of this, you might look at chapter one, although be warned it has an explicit rendition of J. Marion Sim's gynecological experiments.)

This is both extremely convincing to me but also raises an interesting place to extend or put pressure on this link for the contemporary moment: Snorton notes in the introduction a kind of resistance to "trans" as a stable identity category, which on the one hand I agree with—but on the other hand, naming blackness as an impossible location for gender normativity risks in its uptake effacing that there are material differences between the lives of cis and trans black people, too, even if those are different categories from cis and trans people of different races. (And, coming off of Alvarado, thinking through where indigneity or Latinidad might fit could be productive, too.) (Side note: for those wanting more of Snorton's engagement with trans individuals in the archive, look at chapter 4!)

This also might be a good moment to work through some distinctions or shared axes between performance, passing, and being, especially vis-a-vis the abject, and especially given Alvarado's attention to performance art. On 70 Snorton notes that as passing "became a term to describe performing something one is not, it trafficked a way of thinking about identity not only in terms of real versus artificial but also, and perhaps always, as proximal and performative...passing is figuratively represented by moving up or down hierarchized identificatory formations." But Snorton is also re-thinking passing by positing "fungibility" such that a "passing performance" (McMillan's term when thinking about the Crafts) is not a "put-on" but an alternate mode of being.  There might be some correlation between Snorton's "passing down" and the abject (maybe!). This feels pressing for this work because Snorton's idea maybe holds or doesn't for us in the way it re-orients (or doesn't) our understanding of the case studies that have been conventionally scripted with temporal bounds or specific "goals" for those performances (i.e. the Crafts, Harriett Jacobs).

Writing histories, Performing Archives: Sri Chatterjee

 Is it possible to rewrite a history, an account of the banal and the mundane incidents of the lives of the dispossessed, the wronged without “replicating the grammar of violence”? How does narration or recreation of such histories define the limits of “the locus of impossible speech”? Whom do we narrate to and with what critical purchase? Is the act of narration its own end or can narration be generative to think about the question of agency and reparative justice? Are acts of listening, translation and transmutation fundamental to articulation of “counter-histories of human” which in turn enable a practice of freedom? I use these questions as an entry point to understand the tenuous relationship between narration, forms of storytelling, silences and the trope of the archive in Hartman’s “A Venus in Two Acts” and Snorton’s book Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans identity intersects with  the ephemeral nature of performances(written, oral, aural, visual) in an act of knowledge production, circulation and exchange. My objective is not to posit “archive” and “performance” in binary opposition to each other but to unpack how the operation of these two conceptual categories hangs precariously between the material and the metaphor, such that it becomes difficult to locate where and how power operates.

At the very outset of her essay, Hartman chronicles the difficulty in articulating the identity or to name someone as Venus because the name here is generic and a metonymy of women violated on the ship-board and specific at the same time. This indeterminacy of naming makes her present everywhere and therefore nowhere. Therefore, her story or the possible camaraderie that she might have shared with another girl on the board is an impossible act of narration. Her existence, as a name, as a spectre and as a numerical figure is accessed by Hartman through the ledgers, log-books of ships and autobiographical narratives where she is only referred in passing. She encounters her only through her death and therefore in such a scenario the archive becomes “…a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body…an asterisk in the grand narrative of history.(2)”. The question is neither of mourning the dead or the ethics involved in “giving” voice to them but that of utilizing the archive to tell a speculative history which would also “amplify the impossibility of such a telling”(11). Hartman calls such a method of writing, “critical fabulation” which as she explains constitute the “rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done. By throwing into crisis “what happened when” and by exploiting the “transparency of sources” as fictions of history, I wanted to make visible the production of disposable lives (in the Atlantic slave trade and, as well, in the discipline of history), to describe “the resistance of the object,”(12). What is perhaps subversive about such a form of writing is how the archive does not necessarily  dictate how the story is being told. The concept of an originary order or point is in apposition and contradistinction to the act of writing or what would be the performance of the writer. Is “critical fabulation”, then an act of illusion or is it an act of “parrhesia” in performance? More importantly,  in attempting to write a counter-history of the human, how is the notion of the “human” expanded and recharted?

            As critical fabulation talks about recreating histories, another concept which is helpful to think about the relationality between performance and archive is the concept of biomythography, which as proposed by Snorton in the book blurs the concept between fact, fiction, history and the archive. Although biomythography has a specific genealogical history as a term, in the context of the book chapter it is relevant to contest a situation in a movie where the raciality of the character is almost erased, “Referring to the ethical and aesthetic implications of DeVine’s erasure from the feature film, Jennifer Devere Brody explains that “Boys Don’t Cry is emblematic of the way in which the radical erasure of blackness makes queer stories queerer” (178). Therefore, my question would also be the role of critical fabulation and biomythography in thinking about intersectionality in performances and the role of the market?

For the purpose of the interactive element in the presentation(some of which are included in this post)I would show you underwater sculptors by Jason deCaires Taylor and Ellen Gallagher’s Watery Ecstatic to understand how archives and performance can be put into dialogues for a revisionist and speculative historiography. I will provide more context about these art-performances in my presentation:

Image 1: Jason deCaires Taylor

Image 2: Jason deCaires’ sculptor

Image 3: Jason deCaires’ sculptor

Image 4: Ellen Gallagher’s “Bird in the Hand”