LITMIR.BIZ

      Figure I.2. Carrie Mae Weems, Ebo Landing, 1992. Two silver gelatin prints and one screen print text panel, 20 x 20 inches (each), 60 x 20 inches installed. (©Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.)

      Carrie Mae Weems’s Sea Islands Series is an atmospheric study of the Gullah Islands composed of combinations of text and photography, offering us a vision of the complex entanglements between performance, the slave’s body, freedom, and death. The Gullah Islands—famous setting of Julie Dash’s seminal 1991 film Daughters of the Dust—are an isolated archipelago off the Georgia and South Carolina coasts. “Because of the islands’ physical isolation from the mainland and their majority black population,” writes curator Kathryn E. Delmez, “the residents were able to retain many aspects of African culture throughout the period of slavery and into the present day.”28 In Ebo Landing (1992), Weems stages a horizontal triptych: a body of text with photographs of the islands’ wetlands above and below it. The text forms a circle to tell a story:

      One midnight at high tide / A ship bringing a cargo of Ebo (Ibo) / Men landed at Dunbar Creek on the / Island of St. Simons. But the men refus- / ed to be sold in to slavery; joining hands / together they turned back toward the / water, chanting, “the water brought us, / the water will take us away.” They all / drowned, but to this day when the / breeze sighs over the marshes and / through the trees, you can hear the / clank of chains and echo of / their chant at Ebo Landing.

      It’s hard not to hear the “clank of chains and echo of their chant” in the photographs, as if their ghosts are lingering, still chanting on the marshes of Dunbar Creek.

      Weems produced the piece while pursuing a graduate degree in folklore at UC Berkeley. In a single, condensed passage, the text’s folkloric tone conjures the conclusion of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon or Ovid’s Metamorphoses.29 Even if (or especially because) the story is lore, we know that it refers to something that happened: Black people were dragged to these shores against their will, but once here, they improvised (often through performance) ways to fight back against capture. As Weems’s image performs for the spectator, it keeps some part of the dead (and their insurgent demand for freedom) alive.

      It is not that the woman, as she stands her ground, or the pianist, as she presses her hands into the keys, is the same as the rebellious slave struggling to get free of the ship’s hold. Rather, it is that the history of black subjection and objectification that springs from the primal wound of slavery accumulates in the present of both the pianist and the woman on the highway, expressing itself in the performance scenario as it is enacted at the point of each woman’s performing body. As performance shuttles between past and present, rearranging the spaces that divide them in the process, it rips open history and disorganizes our movements through time and space.30

      In the time of performance, as Rebecca Schneider teaches us, time folds across and through itself.31 The “time of slavery” similarly undoes any logic of linear progression and any clear demarcation between past and present. As Saidiya Hartman writes, “The ‘time of slavery’ negates the common-sense intuition of time as continuity or progression, then and now coexist; we are coeval with the dead.”32 The material effects of slavery continue to characterize and determine the conditions under which black life presently exists, including “the diffuse violence and the everyday routines of domination, which continue to characterize black life but are obscured by their everydayness.”33

      The scenarios of torture and subjection devised by the masters for the black body (scenarios of violence still visited upon the descendants of slaves) carved into the black body what Spillers describes as the “hieroglyphics of the flesh.”34 Spillers invents a certain strand of performance studies (which is to invent Joseph Roach and then Diana Taylor) when she queries, “We might well ask if this phenomenon of marking and branding actually ‘transfers’ from one generation to another, finding its various symbolic substitutions in an efficacy of meanings that repeat the initiating moments?”35 Isn’t this how Roach and Taylor describe performance insofar as performance affects a “symbolic substitution” that transmits and transfers the “initiating moment” from spectator to witness, generation to generation, performer to performer, body to body?36 Wasn’t George Zimmerman’s execution of Trayvon Martin or Sandra Bland’s death in a noose made of sheets an echo or a reperformance of the lynching of Emmitt Till or Mary Taylor? Don’t these acts of violence stage the “act of transfer” that rematerializes and reproduces the burning brand of white supremacy as hieroglyphics in black flesh? And doesn’t the woman’s insurgent stand or the pianist’s performance of a wish for a not-yet-known sense of freedom preserve, transmit, and transfer the echo of that ontologically and historically prior act of resistance to power? As she performs, her body reverberates across a historical slipstream to conjure back into the present an echo of those first uprisings at the docks, “an echo of their chant at Ebo landing.”

      Havana, Cuba. 1967.

      Throughout these pages, the reader will encounter José Muñoz, whose thought serves as another major theoretical anchor for this project. Muñoz’s Disidentifications was one of the earliest texts to popularize the use of “minoritarian” for contemporary readers in queer theory, performance studies, and critical race theory. This book draws on Muñoz’s use of “minoritarian” as a shorthand to describe a communism of incommensurability made up of the often fractious and incommensurable, but no-less necessary alliances forged between people of color (and especially women, queers, and trans people of color). For Muñoz, minoritarian describes less an identity than a commons marked by the exigencies of social identity-in-difference: “Although I use terms such as ‘minoritarian subjects’ or the less jargony ‘people of color/queers of color’ to describe the different cultural workers who appear in these pages, I do want to state that all of these formations of identity are ‘identities-in-difference.’ ”37 Elaborating on this point, Vazquez notes that Muñoz also “defines the ‘minoritarian subject’ in relationship to the majoritarian public sphere in the United States. The public sphere in this sense is one that privileges whiteness, the masculine, the ‘native born,’ and the heterosexual.”38 Minoritarian being is, in this sense, defined by a set of relations and proximities to the major (“the ‘native born,’ and the heterosexual”).

      I don’t mean to use “minoritarian” to subsume, flatten, or obliterate the differences between the different types of subjects who might choose to gather under that name. Rather, it describes a place of (often uncomfortable) gathering, a cover, umbrella, expanse, or refuge under and in which subjects marked by racial, sexual, gender, class, and national minority might choose to come together in tactical struggle, both because of what we share (often domination in some form by the major, or dominant culture) and because of what makes us different. Though I will expand on these entanglements to a greater degree in the fourth chapter, my conceptualization of the minoritarian subject is directly inspired by Du Bois’s theorization of the dark proletariat, which Du Bois described as a “dark and vast sea of human labor in China and India, the South Seas and all Africa; in the West Indies and Central America and in the United States—that great majority of mankind, on whose bent and broken backs rest today the founding stones of modern industry.”39 By spatializing the dark proletariat, Du Bois suggests that this insurgent community is defined less at the level of identity than through position: by one’s proximity to empire, nation, capital, power, and the entanglement of these systems with white supremacy.

      Racial formation, for Du Bois, was not anathema to the development of capitalism in the United States; it was a foundational component of it. Indeed, modern global capitalism was both goal and effect of the slave trade. And to dispel the moral dissonance that the trade in black flesh posed to the liberal ideals of the white bourgeoisie? The invention of racial ideology in Europe and the United States, which could justify the contradiction posed by slavery and colonization through the dehumanization of black people

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