Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible PDF
Preview Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible
Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left SEXUAL CULTURES General Editors: Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyong’o, and Joshua Chambers- Letson Founding Editors: José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini Titles in the series include: Times Square Red, Times Square Blue Samuel R. Delany Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces Juana María Rodríguez Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture Frances Négron- Muntaner Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era Marlon Ross In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives Judith Halberstam Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality Dwight A. McBride God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence Michael Cobb Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual Robert Reid- Pharr The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory Lázaro Lima Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth- Century America Dana Luciano Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity José Esteban Muñoz Another Country: Queer Anti- Urbanism Scott Herring Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination Darieck Scott Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries Karen Tongson Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading Martin Joseph Ponce Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled Michael Cobb Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias Eng- Beng Lim Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law Isaac West The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings Juana María Rodríguez Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism Amber Jamilla Musser The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies Rachel C. Lee Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men Jane Ward Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance Uri McMillan A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire Hiram Pérez Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality Katherine Franke Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post- Humanist Critique Robert F. Reid- Pharr Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible Malik Gaines For a complete list of books in the series, see www.nyupress.org. Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left A History of the Impossible Malik Gaines NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York www.nyupress.org © 2017 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. ISBN: 978-1-4798-3703-8 (hardback) ISBN: 978-1-4798-0430-6 (paperback) For Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data, please contact the Library of Congress. New York University Press books are printed on acid- free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppli- ers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: A Legacy of Radical Differences 1 1. Nina Simone’s Quadruple Consciousness 21 2. Efua Sutherland, Ama Ata Aidoo, the State, and the Stage 55 3. The Radical Ambivalence of Günther Kaufmann 95 4. The Cockettes, Sylvester, and Performance as Life 135 Afterword: A History of Impossible Progress 179 Notes 203 Bibliography 213 Index 223 About the Author 233 vii Acknowledgments This writing has been accomplished with the insistent support of many tremendous people to whom I wish to express my gratitude. I started discussing this book with José Esteban Muñoz, who bril- liantly and generously organized the field this publication enters. I am grateful for the extra life Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyong’o, and Joshua Chambers- Letson granted this project. Nyong’o has been a generous advisor, offering important mentorship, even though I am a little older than he. Jennifer Doyle and Francesca Royster gave fantastic feedback and welcome encouragement, and thanks to Eric Zinner and Alicia Nadkarni for their support. Great jobs and inspiring colleagues in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and Hunter College’s Department of Art and Art History have made it possible for me to get to this acknowledgment. Sue-E llen Case advised the research from which this book was de- veloped. Her rigor, clarity, and years of attention kept the train on track, and her own scholarship has served as a queer inspiration. I was fortu- nate to work with a number of consequential professors during my time at UCLA, including Susan Leigh Foster, Steven Nelson, Janet O’Shea, Joseph Roach, Carol Sorgenfrei, Frank Wilderson III, and Haiping Yan, who each helped me think. Before that, while I was studying writing at CalArts, Mady Schutzman planted several seeds that bore colorful fruits. In this list of instructors, I am compelled to mention my high school German teacher, Dorena Kehaulani Koopman, who taught me a lot about order and ambivalence. Alexandro Segade, gifted facilitator and interrogator, boyfriend par excellence, has much to do with anything that is produced from that which might be construed as my “self” and cannot be thanked enough. Along with Alex and our collaborator Jade Gordon, as the group My Barbarian, I have been able to pose in performance the questions of rep- resentation, action, collaboration, influence, and location that instigated ix x | Acknowledgments this study. I remember once leaving a graduate seminar on transnational theory in Los Angeles, flying to Munich, taking a train through the Ital- ian Alps, arriving at an old castle, performing a short musical adapta- tion of Titus Andronicus that asked the audience to decide whether or not a black baby could be the emperor of all of Italy, then taking a train back to Munich, flying back to L.A., and going to a graduate seminar on theories of representation. While scholarship and practice are different, they have plenty to say to each other. In what follows, I describe the year I was born as the end of the ex- cessive sixties, and in some sense, this book interrogates that primal scene. My parents, Barbara Gaines and Charles Gaines, with their vari- ous boldnesses, are behind the pages of this labor. My in-l aws Gustavo Segade and Irina Kaplan Segade add their own influence to the politics and unstable raciality through which I emerged. And much support has come my way from Joseph Rosato and Roxana Landaverde. The diversity of these chapters reflects very different archives. Special help negotiating these came from Rumi Missabu, Daniel Nicoletta, Pam Tent, David Weissman, Irwin Swirnoff, Lawrence Helman, Joseph Zac- carella, Emory Douglas, Sam Durant, Wenzel Bilger, Christina MacMa- hon and the University of California African Studies Research Group, Emeka Ogboh, Alicia Hall Moran, Jason Moran, Isaac Julien, Mark Nash, Thomas Lax, and David DeWitt. Thanks to Yasmeen Chism, J. M. De- Leon, and Ethan Philbrick for their assistance in the final stretch. Much of chapter 1 appeared as the article “The Quadruple-C onsciousness of Nina Simone” in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, July 2013, and elicited excellent feedback in that process. This project began with the artists who are the subjects of these chap- ters. I have only met one in person, the gracious, witty writer Ama Ata Aidoo; the rest are deceased by the time of this acknowledgment, which is perhaps telling. Their enduring works, in a certain parlance, give life still. One must only consider the present ubiquity of Nina Simone’s music to think of generation in a generative way. Despite her lifetime of difficulties, I hear her songs played regularly these days, in all sorts of settings. On a trip to the Middle East, I heard recordings of Simone in cafés in both Ramallah and Jerusalem, and as I hummed along I thought this must be an instance of transnational imagination, in all of its pos- sibility and impossibility.
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