The aff’s focus on “performance as resistance” pre-suppose black relationality and reproduce anti-black violence

A major conceptual framework that underwrote the conference was “diaspora,” so much so that a plenary panel and a roundtable were devoted to it. The conviction with which the concepts of diaspora and performance were sutured evinced a collective belief in the analytic integrity of this suture and a collective faith in the promise it holds for social change. A related theme of the conference was the impact of specific performances as sites of and strategies for local resistance. This included papers on the AIDS pandemic and community- based theatre; the politics of contemporary African performance in the United Kingdom; theatre as a mode of intervention in postelection, violence-torn Nairobi; dance and the representation of intra-African genocide; performers who refused to play Sun City during apartheid; and the transformative power of graffiti in the slums of Dakar.¶ The conference was seeking, not always explicitly, not always consciously, the grammar with which to address the ghosts that haunted it. But all too often it was seduced by an overvaluation of performance art’s sociopolitical effectiveness. Having delineated the methods, syntax, and social context of a given performance or performance practice, a speaker would make a leap of faith and assert a causal link between the performance and the emancipation of the black people who produced and consumed it—as though art was the very essence of, rather than an accompaniment to, structural change. Such assertions were typically hobbled by a mix of rhetorical registers, one analytic, the other sentimental—with the sentimental register going unacknowledged as such, and often hastily tagged on at the end of a paper or conversation. This substitution of sentiment for analysis mystifies instead of clarifies the grammar and ghosts of Africa’s structural violence, a structural violence that is not analogous to that of Asians, working-class Europeans, or Latinos. Attention to it problematizes the articulation between performance and emancipation. This easy, largely intuitive articulation of performance and emancipation was also manifest in the declarations of performers themselves. On several occasions, artists declared that they wanted to be known simply as artists and not as Africans or black artists. As with any demand that is charged with high emotion, this one was not always made with rhetorical scaffolding and extended explanation—in part, because such statements were often made during Q & A sessions or in the buzz between sessions. As a critical theorist, it would be easy for me to deconstruct these cries and demonstrate their dependency on outdated notions of a unitary self. Freud and Marx, to name but two, have long ago compelled us to come to grips with the partitioned “nature” of our existence. And Lacan pushed the prospects of self-knowing beyond hope of retrieval with his assertion that “the wall of language” guarantees our capacity for relationality while simultaneously severing us from the Real. There is no self to be known; hence, there is no artist whose status is free of the “taint” of race and place.¶ But if we think of this demand not as a wish to disavow relationality, but as a wish to be imbued with relationality, then something else emerges. Freud, Marx, and Lacan’s subjects don’t suffer from the violence of enslavement, which is an explicit interdiction against relationality; they suffer from having imbibed the mystifications of the ruling class (Marx), the ego (Freud), or the Imaginary (Lacan). There was something in the force of the performance artists’ cry just to be artists that resonated with the force that first turned subjects into cargo. Lest we think that this force is merely the grammar and ghosts of blacks in the “New” World, that somehow Africans of the twentieth and twenty-first century have an altogether different rebar of ontology, we should note Achille Mbembe’s argument that, once Hegel (as a placeholder for all the punishing discourse of the Maafa, or African Holocaust) renders Africa “territorium nullius,” “the land of motionless substance and of the blinding, joyful, and tragic disorder of creation,” even the African who was not captured was a slave in relation to the rest of the world, his or her freedom from chains and distance from the Middle Passage notwithstanding.3 Though this “free” African may know him/herself [themselves] through coherent cultural accoutrements unavailable to the black American or black Caribbean, s/he is [they are] positioned, paradigmatically, as someone unable to “attain[ ] to immanent differentiation or to the clarity of self-knowledge.”4 S/he is [they are] recast as an object in a world of subjects. “Even the status of free blacks,” Saidiya Hartman argues, is “shaped and compromised by . . . slavery.”5¶ Here, the prohibition against attaining differentiation or self-knowledge rests, in the first ontological instance, with a structural violence that removes black “people” from the world. The cry to be known and appreciated as an artist and not as an “African” or “black” artist operates on several levels, but the most profound recognizes (if only intuitively or unconsciously) the damage of being marked as such, not in the sense of a compromised artistic status, but a compromised existential status. The cry is not the effect of a neurotic complex that refuses to live in a deconstructive relation to the ego; it is a narrative strategy hoping to slip the noose of a life shaped and compromised by slavery. No other gathering of artists and critics is overdetermined by this dilemma. No slavery, no diaspora. No diaspora, no conference. Such gatherings are always haunted by a shared sense that violence and captivity are the grammar and ghosts of our every gesture. This is where performance meets ontology. But all too often, such meetings take place not on a well-lit stage, but in a fog.