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).
Hi Caitlin,
ReplyDeleteThank you for the thought-provoking post and the equally thought-provoking presentation that you gave on Wednesday. In your post, you mention Nyong'o's valorization of a "virtual" blackness, and it is this concept of the "virtual" that most interests me, especially vis-a-vis the relationship between performance (historically considered an ephemeral and "live" art form) and the media through which performances have often been captured and preserved e.g. cinema and photography. What Nyong'o would say is that, yes, differences exist, but to reify difference would be to "[mask] precisely those aspects of performance that are calibrated in dialogic tension with actual or potential recording" (18 in the ULS eBook version). Subsequently, he says that, "rather than consider the live as that which disappears, [he approaches] it instead as that which accumulates in and as the virtual" (18).
While I agree with Nyong'o's insistence that to fuss over differences in medium risks obfuscating the important ways in which black performance persists into or is even oriented toward non-"live" media forms, I wish I could hear more about Nyong'o's thoughts on the virtual as a concept. The "virtual" has specific connotations in film and media studies (including a certain myth of timelessness that accompanies the departure from degradable celluloid, even though digital infrastructures are themselves far from stable), so I would be interested in hearing if anyone has thoughts on how Nyong'o's formulation of a virtual blackness is qualified or complicated by the virtuality of the media that facilitate the making-virtual of blackness. If the virtual is not necessarily timeless, can it still be tense-less?
This is Jonah, by the way (just realized that I show up as "Unknown")
DeleteI found it highly intriguing how Caitlin connected Nyong’o’s theories in Afro-Fabulations to the poetry of Danez Smith. One of the chapters that caught my attention most was chapter 2, “Crushed Black,” where Nyong’o explains that this term commonly used in photography refers to “the ‘shadow areas that lack detail and texture due to underexposure’ and are thus called ‘blocked up’ or ‘crushed’” (44). I was thinking about, as the author points out, how this notion of the crushed black relates to any form of artistic creation (writing, filmmaking, stage performance, music videos, movies, etc.) In theorizing on the archive and representation in any of these mediums, it is interesting to think how many works on Black or Afro-diasporic culture may be trying to communicate something with us that simply ends up becoming crushed or underexposed for a variety of reasons. However, as Nyong’o mentions “the blackness that we leave behind is the blackness that will find us in the end” (47). Black art and culture work on their own time and it is up to us to decipher these meanings through our time, waiting for them to surface or be found.
ReplyDeleteObviously, art, because of the sort of atemporal quality that it possesses and the leaps that it allows us to make in that regard, is a useful tool to theorize on the archive in order to disarticulate, mend, or even tell a new story from a piece of archive that just does not exist. Smith’s last poem in Don’t Call Us Dead really struck me as a good example of how to rethink the archive alongside the many tragedies that have marked Afro-diasporic histories. The fact that, within this poem, those pleading with the sea to return what it has so violently swallowed end up calling at least one of theirs home, is just one poetic narrative that blends the impossibility of reunion with an imagined agency that I believe helps to cope with this loss. Those being called out of the sea had more stories to tell, ones in which, thanks to the imagination, will find us in the end. As for the rest of the crushed blacks, Nyong’o gives at least some hope that what appears lost may simply be hidden and still retrievable.
I just ran across this in the BOMB interview between Claudia Rankine and Lauren Berlant:
ReplyDeleteClaudia: "I believe we all want to keep enacting our necessary adjustments in response to the pressures we experience when we are awake to the world, but sometimes I find I come to a stand-still. Yesterday, with friends, I went to see Kara Walker’s A Subtlety at the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and was surrounded by people saying things like, “I am not into the slavery thing right now” and taking selfies in front of the sculpture of the black Mammy sphinx, posing in ways to appear to be touching her breasts or cupping her buttocks. When we asked a group if they understood the significance and resonance of the piece, as it relates to slavery and the black body, they told us they were immature. Good answer, and yet, my group felt injured and exhausted by the spectacle. I sometimes wonder if Walker’s intention is to redirect the black gaze away from the pieces themselves and onto their white consumption? On the street outside the show, my group got in an argument with a lady about a cab. Another cab would have come along; clearly some maneuvering, some slight adjustments that needed to be made, were beyond us. Our curating abilities were exhausted suddenly. Lunch was a subdued affair."
Hi, Caitlin! I appreciated your emphasis on Nyong’o's argument that “We do not know what a human outside an anti-black world could be, do, or look like" (26). This reminded me of the common metaphor of fish unaware of the existence of water. Our world is irreparably harmed and shaped by inescapable anti-blackness, and optimistic perspectives should not erase this fact but look forwards. Thus, I am interested in Nyongo's's point that "the critical poetics of afro-fabulation are a means of dwelling in the shock of that reality without ever becoming fully of it” (26). I think that people tend to see art/performance as a product representative of a culture/artist/time/etc., and this statement enables us to think about the prepositional difference between a representation **of** and **in.** Relying on the preposition "of" seems to privilege the perspective of the white gaze, rather than the lived experience of the artist. The excerpt from the Claudia Rankine interview considering Kara Walker's art deals with this notion of white gaze/consumption shaping Black art, demonstrating how the material realities of racism can result in their "curating abilities" becoming "exhausted suddenly." While we must be aware of the impacts of white consumption of Black art, how can one look forward when the "water" is always present?
ReplyDelete