African American Arts

Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity

Sharrell D. Luckett

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781684481545
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Signaling such recent activist and aesthetic concepts in the work of Kara Walker, Childish Gambino, BLM, Janelle Monáe, and Kendrick Lamar, and marking the exit of the Obama Administration and the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, this anthology explores the role of African American arts in shaping the future, and further informing new directions we might take in honoring and protecting the success of African Americans in the U.S. The essays in African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity engage readers in critical conversations by activists, scholars, and artists reflecting on national and transnational legacies of African American activism as an element of artistic practice, particularly as they concern artistic expression and race relations, and the intersections of creative processes with economic, sociological, and psychological inequalities. Scholars from the fields of communication, theater, queer studies, media studies, performance studies, dance, visual arts, and fashion design, to name a few, collectively ask: What are the connections between African American arts, the work of social justice, and creative processes? If we conceive the arts as critical to the legacy of Black activism in the United States, how can we use that construct to inform our understanding of the complicated intersections of African American activism and aesthetics? How might we as scholars and creative thinkers further employ the arts to envision and shape a verdant society? Contributors: Carrie Mae Weems, Carmen Gillespie, Rikki Byrd, Amber Lauren Johnson, Doria E. Charlson, Florencia V. Cornet, Daniel McNeil, Lucy Caplan, Genevieve Hyacinthe, Sammantha McCalla, Nettrice R. Gaskins, Abby Dobson, J. Michael Kinsey, Shondrika Moss-Bouldin, Julie B. Johnson, Sharrell D. Luckett, Jasmine Eileen Coles, Tawnya Pettiford-Wates, Rickerby Hinds.Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

PART 1 BODIES OF ACTIVISM

1•TRANS IDENTITY AS EMBODIED AFROFUTURISM

AMBER JOHNSON

Black gyrls, womyn, and bois carry the weight of the world’s oppression in our skin, hair, breath, and gait.¹ Our mere existence is an act of invisible labor in a world that treats us as hyperinvisible—where the stereotypes attached to our bodies are so powerful that they inform how others treat us. In a world where canonical exception—or the rules determined by whiteness that dictate which minorities get to be included versus excluded, or deserve justice, love, and humanity versus violence, hatred, and death—we struggle to transgress these stereotypes while loving ourselves, caring for ourselves, and caring for the world that does not care for us. If loving ourselves is a constant struggle, then imagining the body into a future without domination is an even larger one. Afrofuturism—Afrocentric art forms that render a technologically advanced and liberated future for Black people—is the antidote to the canonical exception and hyperinvisibility bequeathed upon the Black body that make imagining futures a revolutionary act. However, I want to take Afrofuturism a step further and look at the embodiment of trans identities as antidotes that push the boundaries of Afrofuturism. I label this critical embodiment Transfuturism.

This essay begins with two theoretical frameworks, hyperinvisibility and canonical exception. Then using Afrofuturism as a departure point, I tease out the aesthetic and social constructions of gender and race through Transfuturism, a photography, oral history, and art activism project that serves three goals: (a) render the critical embodiment of trans identity and blackness visible, (b) act as an aesthetic antidote to systemic oppression operating at the intersection of race and gender, and (c) mitigate the discursive and physical violence that haunts the lives of trans women and gender fluid people of color, resulting in twenty-five murders in 2017, the highest number in history.² It is time to radically reimagine gender at the intersections of race.

HYPERINVISIBILITY

To render something visible is to give our sense of sight an experience.³ But seeing is only a part of the equation, for how we see, what we see, and the frequency with which we see something matters. It is hard to imagine a time before the Internet when we had to share physical space to see others, or “see the other.”⁴ We live in a world of mediated seeing, where historical, cultural, political, and personal assumptions chaperone how we understand texts, people, and context.⁵ Who we see, how we see them, and how often we see them guide what we decode when we experience an artifact, leading to invisibility, visibility, and hyperinvisibility. Invisibility occurs when there is a lack of mediated representation. Bodies are missing from narratives en masse, or represented in singular ways that deny human complexity.⁶ Visibility occurs when bodies are represented in media in ways that lead to a fuller understanding of the human experience.⁷ Representation occurs with a high frequency and complexity, resulting in a lesser likelihood that narratives lead to stereotypes.

Hyperinvisibility starts with hypervisibility, or stereotyping the body so much that the stereotypes become more visible, and thus believable.⁸ When a mediated image becomes hypervisible, that image begins to represent an entire group of people in mediated space or large forums where people do not have time to interact with others at the personal level. However, when we do interact with different others at the personal level, we can forgo these mass-mediated images and see them as complex individuals. This is not the case for those who buy into hypervisible images at the interpersonal level.⁹ Bodies that are different become invisible in interpersonal interactions, too, resulting in hyperinvisibility.

After 9/11, stereotypes of Muslims became so hypervisible that Americans began treating Muslims, Arabs, or people who could potentially be identified as Muslims in discriminatory ways.¹⁰ American media failed to depict Muslims as anything other than terrorists, resulting in systemic oppression, dehumanization, and exclusion. Another example exists in the folds of the Ferguson uprising. Much like Darren Wilson seeing only a superhuman, dangerous thug, Michael Brown’s body was both present (in the flesh) and absent, due to mediated representations of black masculinity, resulting in Wilson only seeing the stereotype.¹¹ Instead of a human with complex emotions, behaviors, needs, and desires within a system of power, Michael Brown became hyperinvisible, and Darren Wilson felt justified in shooting a villainous monster he described as a demonic Hulk Hogan.¹² When bodies are marked absent and present simultaneously, it results in hyperinvisibility, or a space where bodies are marked generic and nonhuman.¹³

When the single story renders bodies both hypervisible (we see the body all the time in its stereotyped form) and invisible (we fail to see the complex human standing before us), it creates a space of hyperinvisibility where the stereotyped body is so visible that we fail to see complexity. The real is replaced with fiction, and the fiction is so powerful it does not allow the real to exist. Hyperinvisibility can explain the skewed representations of hypersexualized or angry Black women’s bodies in media, as well as overly aggressive, toxic images of Black men that result in police brutality and murder, and the explicit connection between stereotypes of trans people and the desire for mass publics to use fear of pedophilia and sexual assault to justify discriminatory bathroom legislation.¹⁴ Once bodies are marked hyperinvisible, consumers tend to see those identities as not only true but normal, viable, and expected, resulting in violent mediated and interpersonal interactions.

CANONICAL EXCEPTION

Canonical exception also stems from rigorous stereotyping and is informed by canonical prejudice. Scholar David Román defines canonical prejudice as an “overinvestment in the cultural forms of the elite” that erases nonnormative experience and cultural production from canonical archives.¹⁵ While several scholars use the term canonical prejudice to look at the ways in which texts become marginalized and erased because they stray from normal conventions in literature, music, or other art genres, Celia Daileader specifically addresses how White supremacy, racism, and female subordination serve as points of erasure for Black literature that could be considered canonical texts.¹⁶ Canonical prejudice illuminates the ways in which systemic oppression consistently denies bodies of color the right to live their lives, produce artifacts about those lives, and archive them into the fabric of American history. Instead, canonical prejudice ensures that we are erased, dismissed, and read via very particular modes of framing.

Jeffrey McCune, in his working manuscript Read!: An Experiment in Seeing Black, discusses “canonical ways of reading/seeing Blackness that further produce canonical prejudices, which fundamentally sediment a practice of framing Black bodies in nonproductive ways.”¹⁷ Canons function at the core of institutions as designators of value, which legitimize the institution and the process of erasure.

If canonical prejudice is rooted in erasure, negative framing, and devaluing the lives of marginalized communities, we might consider canonical exception as a critically useful term that pinpoints the ideological system that perpetuates canonical prejudice. Canonical exception serves as a point of departure for interrogating the exceptional bodies that are accepted. Ideological systems like respectability politics grant entry to particular kinds of bodies in dominant spaces, and further ostracize bodies that don’t make the cut, due to embodying stereotypes, and instead are deemed deserving of erasure. Canonical prejudice and canonical exception then work concomitantly by creating the criteria for inclusion and erasure. Providing particular kinds of exceptions directly correlates to demonizing other bodies, resulting in a vicious cycle of aesthetic cleansing.

Canonical exception is more than just being accepting of exceptional Black excellence; it is also a frame of accepting the negative stories tied to marginalized groups, as if they are always warranted, always right, and always on time. The perpetual sharing of negative narratives creates an unsafe space that breeds more canonical prejudice and spite. The way the media frames protesters, racially charged incidents, and peaceful demonstrations mimics exactly what we have come to expect, which is why it is a canon of exception. We expect and accept that everything is the protesters’ fault. We accept that protesters are a disgrace as they perceivably go against the very will of the parents of the deceased who call for peace. We expect and accept protesters to disregard U.S. presidents calling for calm and peaceful protests. We accept that protesters are opportunistic looters, capable of burning their own cities. We expect that Black on Black violence is a qualifier for disregarding police brutality until we respect ourselves enough to not kill ourselves because that just makes logical sense. Canonical exception is the root of postracial nonsense that pretends we live in a racially equitable world. We do not.

Canonical exception is as much about Black excellence as it is about Black demonization. Dominant society accepts exceptional Black people while accepting the demonization of those thuggish, uncivilized Black people. Thus, canonical exception is the foundation for postracial discourse. Because certain spaces are accessible by some marginalized people—such as someone with my body, an attractive, lighter skinned, articulate, respectable Black professor—others deem those spaces as accepting, inclusive, and without issue. Barack Obama is an exception, which means we live in a postracial America. The fourteen Black actors who have won Academy Awards are exceptions, which means the Academy Awards aren’t racist. Black professors, doctors, lawyers, athletes, and entertainers are ALL exceptions. And as we flaunt our exceptions in our career pathways, we watch our Brothers and Sisters dying in the streets, their lives deemed worth little value, their pain obsolete. “They” are the norm. “They” fit into the canon of prejudice that deems their bodies DO NOT MATTER. “Their” bodies are forgotten, erased, undeserving, and tragic.

Unfortunately, even for those who are granted access, canonical exception has limits. Our exceptions expire in certain spaces. There is an invisible line that extends along the borders of good and welcome Negro versus bad and dehumanized Negro. For those of us who can traverse that border as it bleeds, because we are at once on both sides, in any given situation, we know how it feels to be respected, adored, and honored in one space, like this space, where I have your eyes, ears, and hopefully listening hearts. But those who are exceptions can also be arrested, beaten, silenced, raped, and/or shattered in any given moment or situation. Consider Imani Perry’s recent incident with the police at Princeton University where she was handcuffed to a table over an unpaid parking ticket.¹⁸ Consider Henry Louis Gates’s arrest outside of his own home as he tried to force his front door open when his key failed to work.¹⁹ Reflect upon all the Black folks killed in the streets and how they were doing mundane things like walking, waiting for a tow truck, or selling cigarettes. What happens when Black bodies represent the constructed frame of Black bodies “asking for it” by being Black and in any space? What happens when my body is stripped of its accolades and pulled over by a police officer on University Drive in Prairie View, Texas, at my former institution, Prairie View A&M University? I ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editor Foreword
• Visual Foreword
• Introduction: African American Arts in Action
• Part I: Bodies of Activism
• Part II: Music and Visual Art as Activism
• Part III: Institutions of Activism
• Afterword:Blackballin’
• Acknowledgments
• About the Contributors
• Index