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Introduction

I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free

Montreux, Switzerland. July 3, 1976.

On the stage of the Montreux Jazz Festival, the pianist takes a seat behind the piano. She is forty-three years old, and it has been a few years since she played to such a large crowd. At various points during the concert she expresses disdain for the audience. She wanted to write a song for them, but then, she says, “I decided you weren’t worthy. Because I figured that most of you were here for the festival.”1 They weren’t really there to see Nina Simone. Sometimes performance is just a job, and she needed this job. Money wasn’t coming in the way it once did. A few years before Montreux she walked away from a tumultuous, violent marriage. Her ex-husband was also her manager, so when she left him, the money dried up or disappeared. White audiences, alienated by her commitment to the struggle for black freedom, were becoming restless. The other work that sustained her, in spirit at least, was also evaporating, as the once promising movement for black emancipation was falling apart. By the mid-1970s, her friends Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry were dead, Dr. King was dead, Malcolm was dead, and Stokely Carmichael and Miriam Makeba had been chased out of the United States by the reactionary forces of state-sanctioned antiblackness. Reeling from all this loss, she spent the mid-1970s in self-imposed exile in Barbados and Liberia, before returning to work on that stage in Switzerland.

The lights glide across her arms, accentuating the deep hues of her shimmering dark skin. Black dress. White necklace. White audience. She puts her hands in place above the keyboard, and they start to dance, pressing hard at surprising intervals, grabbing hold of the ear, before getting soft, loose, and quick again as baroque flourishes erupt from the fingertips. She sits still, her back straight and arms extended loosely in front of her, eyes concentrating on her hands. And then, after a while, she leans her head back just slightly and starts to sing into the silver microphone: “I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.”

A wish for freedom can be hard to sustain so as she pushes it into the air in front of her, her voice falters, and the word crackles apart. Her expression is opaque, and the vocal cord tightens, holding onto the sound as it slips out from between her lips. Then the wish rematerializes for the second lyric: “I wish I could break all the chains still binding me.” Still. Still binding. Still.

Still.

Baton Rouge, Louisiana. July 16, 2016.

The woman stands still with her feet flat against the asphalt, blocking a highway that runs beneath her and parallel to the horizon. A line of witnesses, mostly journalists, have assembled to watch. She is facing a flank of police in riot gear. The expression on her face, like that of the pianist, is opaque. The air around her lifts up the flaps in the lower portion of the dress, like wings, exposing the skin on her legs. Her right arm is pulled across her torso, hand relaxed against her abdomen. The left arm draws straight down from the shoulder, muscles tensed, as the arm curls at the elbow to reach forward and toward the right side of her body. Her hand, weighed down slightly by a gold bracelet or watch, curls back toward her. She looks like a dancer, body suspended as she prepares for her next move.

Figure I.1. “Taking a Stand in Baton Rouge,” 2016. Photographer: Jonathan Bachman. (Courtesy of Reuters.)

Two white police officers dressed in black battle armor move in her direction. They wear helmets. The gray light of the sky reflects against the clear shields that wrap the space in front of their faces and block significant portions of their expressions. Guarded, she looks toward but not necessarily at them. Their guns are strapped to the holsters on their right hips and white plastic handcuffs dangle from the left sides of their utility belts. Behind them, a flank of police wearing the same defensive shielding, like a dystopian futuristic army except the future is in the present. Glints of pale skin peek out from their armor. They, too, are still.

Though the singular details change, the woman on the highway is playing a role in a by-now familiar masque, scenario, or performance event with dramaturgy routine and reportorial. The inciting incident: fifteen days ago Alton Sterling, a thirty-seven-year-old black man, was wrestled to the ground and shot at point blank range by the Baton Rouge police for selling CDs. This keeps happening: Eric Garner choked to death by the New York City PD for selling untaxed cigarettes; twelve-year-old Tamir Rice shot to death by the Cleveland PD for playing with a toy gun in a park; Philando Castile shot by the Minneapolis PD for riding in a car as his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and her two-year-old daughter watch him bleed to death; twenty two-year-old Rekia Boyd shot in the back of the head by an off-duty Chicago police officer because her boyfriend raised his phone into the air as they walked in an alley with friends; Sandra Bland, who died in Waller Country police custody after being pulled over for a traffic violation.

The rising action: a family in shock with grief assembles a press conference and, in person or through lawyers, issues calls for justice and peace. Reporters descend on the scene, protestors (like the woman in Baton Rouge) take to the streets, mobilizing the black body in performance to draw attention to the persistent devaluation of black life and degradation of black flesh. The climax. In the rare instances where an uprising rises up, the police face down the protestors, beat down the protestors, reload, repeat. Falling action. Investigations and committee reports, staff changes and press conferences, new policies and training protocols are announced. The screaming of the mourning is drowned out by an ocean of white noise. Conclusion. Fuck you, Aristotle. For people of color in the United States of America there’s no such thing as resolution, let alone a solution, because we are always already conceived of as the problem.2 So the cycle simply stops when the next thing happens and the country moves on. Until the pageant starts again with the sound of another gunshot. With the sound of another gunshot. With the sound of another gunshot. Or the sound of a makeshift noose snapping taught in a Waller County, Texas, jail cell.

In the wake of Alton’s murder, the woman stands still with her feet flat against the asphalt as the police advance. “It wasn’t very violent,” said the man who photographed her stand. “She didn’t say anything. She didn’t resist and the police didn’t drag her off.”3 But it was violent, she was saying something, she was resisting. A black woman does not stand on a highway to face down a battalion of heavily armed white police officers in either silence or acquiescence. Her body is the utterance and it sounds a collective “no.” In performance the body can be a resounding articulation of the negation of the negation.

Right now. Where you are.

We live in the face of historical and social conditions that produce an unjust distribution of death toward, and exploitation of, black and brown life and queer and trans bodies, actively shortening black, brown, Asian, indigenous, queer, and trans of color life with alarming and mundane regularity. This book argues that performance is a vital means through which the minoritarian subject demands and produces freedom and More Life at the point of the body. Minoritarian performance is what Nina Simone described as the art of “improvisation within a fixed framework,” working within limited coordinates to make the impossible possible.4 As Alexandra Vazquez argues, in performance, “The minoritarian subject can be understood as improvising with the world around them—even in its most flawed or false rendering.”5 This project thus follows and builds upon a host of minoritarian intellectuals who have accounted for the ways minoritarian subjects mobilize performance to survive the present, improvise new worlds, and sustain new ways of being in the world together.6

This book tells the stories of minoritarian subjects like Simone or the woman in Baton Rouge, who mobilize performance in both the realm of the aesthetic and the everyday to sustain the fugitive flight and revolutionary fight to produce freedom and More Life in the face of subordination, exploitation, annihilation, and negation. More than anything, this book is intended to function as a travel guide and as a kind of tactical manual. In 2013 two of my closest friends died, both with little or no warning. One committed suicide in January, and the other, who was both a teacher and family, became ill and died suddenly a few days later in December. Both were brown queer men; one was in his early thirties, the other was in his mid-forties. This book is something of a journal of the places, performances, art, people, and theory that I took refuge in to survive their loss. While queer of color life is at the center of the frame, queerness comes in and out of focus in this text as I draw on both the traditions of queer of color critique and woman of color feminism to think about the affinities and forms of social solidarity (and rupture) that move across and between queers of color, women of color, and other minoritarian subjects in the collective attempt to survive conditions of negation and annihilation. I wrote the book for and to my missing friends, and to the people they left behind, but it is written for all people of color, and especially queers of color, trans people of color, and women of color. It is a book for the still living, recounting the story of people, like us, for whom performance is a refuge and a means for surviving and producing something the singer wishes she knew how to feel.

Simone has a significant presence in this project because her body of work offers a particularly good example of the work of minoritarian performance. It was not uncommon throughout her long, storied career for the pianist to put performance to work in the service of both survival and the emancipatory will. There were times that freedom came to her through the act of performing. In 1970, Peter Rodis directed a short film about Simone, in which he asked her at one point, “What’s free to you?”7 She is seated on the ground, dressed in a dashiki awash with hues of brown, black, and white, and she thinks seriously on the question for a minute before she begins to answer, shaking her head from side to side, “It’s just a feeling. It’s just a feeling.… You can describe things [like freedom or love], but you can’t tell them. But you know it when it happens. That’s what I mean by free. I’ve had a couple of times on stage where I really felt free.”8 Her body becomes animated as she props herself up, leaning in, voice transforming into a charged whisper, before a shout: “And that’s something else. That’s really something else!” Her tone changes to bemusement, and she continues, “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me. No fear. I mean really, no fear.… That’s the closest, that’s the only way I can describe it. That’s not all of it. But it is something to really, really feel. [It’s] like a new way of seeing. A new way of seeing something.”9 Freedom, for Simone, was only positive content when it was realized as an ephemeral sense, or feeling: the “couple of times onstage when I really felt free.” If it came to her primarily as a sense, it is because Simone, like most of us, knows freedom primarily through its negation, or simply as the surfeit of fear that makes freedom unimaginable. But onstage she was able to practice or perform freedom, and in so doing, she brushed up against the emancipation of her senses, opening up “a new way of seeing. A new way of seeing something.”

Freedom is a problem. Freedom has been colonized, absorbed, stolen, and made a utility by and for white liberal political reason. Freedom, within white supremacist liberal capitalist modernity, is largely understood to be a possession or right: the freedom to own, to enter the market, or to buy and sell one’s labor. As Lisa Lowe argues, “Liberal ideas of political emancipation, ethical individualism, historical progress, and free market economy were employed in the expansion of empire [and these] universalizing concepts of reason, civilization, and freedom effect[ed] colonial divisions of humanity, affirming liberty for modern man while subordinating the variously colonized and dispossessed peoples whose material labor and resources were the conditions of possibility for that liberty.”10 Following Mimi Thi Nguyen, after a century and longer of US military imperialism, freedom is not only colonized by liberalism; it is a discourse through which liberalism justifies colonial and imperial violence.11 Freedom, within liberalism, is an impossibility—a cruel joke or what Lauren Berlant describes as cruel optimism. “Optimism,” she writes, “is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving.”12

And, still, freedom is that which we cannot not want. Especially those of us descended from the children of the children of slaves, against whom the liberal conception of freedom was and is constructed. For them—for so many of us—freedom is not experienced as a right, a possession, or an ability to enter the market, buy and sell. Instead, freedom is experienced as negation and/or the priority of a desire to move beyond the annihilating historical reality of violence, denial, and bodily dispossession and the intergenerational sense memory of having been bought and sold.

When Assata Shakur was asked what freedom was to her, she responded, incredulously, “Freedom? You’re asking me about freedom? You’re asking me about freedom? I’ll be honest with you. I know a whole more about what freedom isn’t than about what it is, because I’ve never been free. I can only share my vision with you of the future, about what freedom is.”13 Following Shakur, any defense of freedom must begin by admitting that we don’t know what freedom is and don’t remotely have the conditions through which we could know what freedom would be except as vision. Vision: sense, aesthetic encounter. But as Simone also suggests, we might yet have the capacity to experience freedom as sense, materializing it in and on the body through performance. This sense of freedom is not located in the future, but in the present. Though ephemeral, when this sense of freedom is generated across the body through performance, the body becomes aware that the rest of the time something’s missing, something better than this is possible, and that something must be done. This kind of freedom is not used on or against us, but is something we put to work against those forces that dull and diminish us, making it impossible to even wish for the knowledge of what freedom would feel like. Or at least, it’s something we put to work as we try to survive those forces.

Through performance Simone opened up and shared an insurgent sense of freedom with her listener. She did this before she even knew that she was doing it. Early in her career, she was touched and surprised to learn that the radical, young civil rights activists of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) played her records during their meetings: “My friends in SNCC told me that when they got started and had their meetings to discuss strategy—meetings which often turned into parties later—there would always be Nina Simone records in whoever’s house the meeting was held in.”14 These albums, like Little Girl Blue (1959) or Nina at Newport (1960), featured seemingly a-political folk tunes, jazz standards, and gospel songs. But the students sensed something insurgent on her records, and they were touched by the sense of freedom radiating from them: “All those afternoons when [her friend] Lorraine [Hansberry] had been telling me there was a struggle going on which I had to get involved in, I had been involved anyway.”15 Performance was the site of her struggle and if the insurgent sense of freedom produced in her song lasted only for the time the record played, the ephemeral instantiation of something better than this in her voice affirmed the validity of the wish for freedom and More Life. So the activists in SNCC kept playing her records as they did the hard work of building a better world for everyone.

The title of this project refers to that which comes after the party: the moment when the record comes off, and the students move into the streets of Selma or Birmingham, mobilizing the body in performance and protest to articulate their demands for black freedom and More Life. But it also refers to what happens when a party comes undone, when the last of the meetings has taken place, and the movement has fallen apart. It’s a reference to life that is lived after your friends and loved ones have died, and it is a gesture to those lingering moments in the early dawn when there is nowhere left to go, though you and your people are still trying to find refuge together. Throughout this project, I insist that the incompletion experienced in the moment after the party’s fall, though often crushing, can be an invitation to throw a new party the next night: the party’s fall is grounds not for nihilism, but for action and praxis. It is in this sense that the title also refers to materialist struggles for freedom and sustainable life that continue to surge in the twenty-first century, despite the collapse of communism, which once seemed (if only for a few flickering moments) a promising vehicle for collective emancipation.

Given the crimes and failures of historical communism, communism is an odd thing to call for. By insisting that communism is not-yet-here and has never-been-here, I am following José Muñoz and Fred Moten, as well as C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Grace Lee Boggs (of the Johnson-Forest Tendency), who concluded, in their midcentury critique of Stalinism that not only was socialism nowhere present in any of the revolutionary societies of the day, but that the revolutionary parties in places like the Soviet Union and Tito’s Yugoslavia were instruments of fascist domination in which workers remained subordinate and subject to the cold exploitation (at best) and brutal, fascist machinations (at worst) of “the bureaucratic-administrative one-party state.”16 Still, they did not advocate a retreat from Marxism, which would cede the world’s development totally to the annihilating tendencies of capitalism. Rather, they insisted, as James wrote elsewhere, that “Marxism is the doctrine which believes that freedom, equality, democracy are today possible for all mankind.”17

As the capitalist mode of production drags the world ever closer to the precipice of total destruction, our survival may rely now upon the realization of communism’s promise, whether we call it “communism,” or by another name.18 In place of racial capitalism’s market-based commons of race, sex, gender, and class stratified, yet formally colorblind equivalence, a communism of incommensurability is a sphere of social relation structured less by the social fictions of possession, equality, and exchange, than by collective, entangled, and historically informed practices of sharing out, just redistribution, sustainability, and being together in difference. This kind of communism might take its cues not so much from the failed political parties of historical communism, as from the parties the SNCC activists threw while listening to Simone’s records or the performance-rich parties of queer of color nightlife. Not because these spaces were perfect—they were and are replete with their own violences—but because they were trying to produce something else, something we don’t even have a vision of. Yet.

This book undertakes a self-consciously heretical deployment of the tradition of Marxist aesthetic criticism, mobilizing Marxism in an (often uneasy) alliance with critical race theory, feminist theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, and minoritarian performance theory. Marxism, here, is a means not to be mistaken for the end. As Ernst Bloch insisted, “Marxism in its entirety, even when brought in in its most illuminating form and anticipated in its entire realization, is only a condition for a life in freedom, life in happiness, life in possible fulfillment, life with content.”19 Marxism cannot produce freedom, but it labors to bring about the conditions from within which we might finally begin to imagine, sense, or see what freedom could be or feel like. But to pursue this goal, Marxism must reconcile with its own fundamental limitations.

For Fredric Jameson, following Lenin, the lesson of system is that, “one cannot change anything without changing everything.”20 But the dominant Marxist tradition has long subordinated questions of race, colonization, indigeneity, sex, gender, and sexuality to the question of class and political economy—even when this reduction was and is unsustainable in the face of the complexity of actually occurring historical events. As Cedric Robinson argues, “Western Marxism, in either of its two variants—critical-humanist or scientific—has proven insufficiently radical to expose and root out the racialist order that contaminates its analytic and philosophic applications or to come to effective terms with the implications of its own class origins. As a result, it has been mistaken for what it is not: a total theory of liberation. The ensuing errors have sometimes been horrendous, inducing in their wake dogmas of certainty characterized by desperation.”21 While this book cannot pretend to solve this problem, it suggests that the aesthetic is one place to look for answers and/or experiment with possible solutions. For as much as Marxism opens up our understanding of the labor undertaken by performance, Marxism has much to learn from minoritarian freedom struggles carried out within the domain of performance.

The Middle Passage. Four hundred years ago. But also, today. In Baton Rouge. And where you are.

We’re back in Baton Rouge. We never left. Here on this highway, the chains from which Simone wishes to break free are both metaphorical and literal. The woman’s name is Ieshia Evans, and she is a thirty-five-year-old nurse and mother.22 Police, plastic handcuffs, guns in holsters, battle armor, the law, thirty-five hours in a jail cell. These are the expensive, but impoverished, things that the state mobilizes to quash her rebellion. A body, a dress, two shoes, the names of the dead, and a wish for freedom and More Life make up the poor, yet rich, materials of her act of resistance.

All minoritarian performance, like Simone’s wish or the woman’s stand on the highway, are animated by the drive toward freedom. This book’s theorization of minoritarian performance, though deeply informed by Asian American studies, Latinx studies, and other areas of minoritarian thought, owes a particular debt to black studies, black performance studies, and black feminist theory. For Fred Moten, black performance is “the universalization or socialization of the surplus, the generative force of a venerable phonic propulsion, the ontological and historical priority of resistance to power and objection to subjection, the old-new thing, the freedom drive that animates black performances.”23 To be clear, when I suggest that Moten’s conceptualization of the freedom drive that animates black performance is foundational to the theory of minoritarian performance, I do not mean to sublimate the blackness of black performance into the abstraction of minoritarian performance. Rather, I am suggesting that blackness and black performance animate what I’m describing as minoritarian performance, as much as I’m thinking of minoritarian performance as that which struggles for the long-deferred liberation of all black people. Black performance and minoritarian performance do not subsume or sublate each other so much as they are entangled within, determinative of, and determined by each other.

The ontological and historical priority of black performance’s resistance to (white) power was (to steal language from Althusser) “originary; not derived.”24 The chains that bind, or “hold,” the pianist and the plastic handcuffs that threaten the woman in Baton Rouge share a lineage that traces back to acts of black resistance at the moment of capture. In The Black Jacobins, C. L. R. James insists that from slavery’s beginning, black resistance and the will toward freedom prefigured the masters’s brutal tactics of corporeal domination: “Contrary to the lies that have been spread so pertinaciously about Negro docility, the revolts at the port of embarkation and on board were incessant, so that the slaves had to be chained, right hand to right leg, left hand to left leg, and attached in rows to long iron bars.”25 Stolen from their homes, stripped of their names, sold apart from their families, and held in chains, people were transformed into living property, and slaves were reduced to “flesh,” or what Hortense Spillers calls “that zero degree of social conceptualization.”26 But, still, they fought back and fought to be free, and when they had nothing left but a body reduced to flesh, they often put the flesh to work in the service of the revolutionary will toward freedom. For as Amber Musser writes, “within studies of difference [flesh] oscillates between being a symptom of abjection and objectification and a territory ripe for reclamation. Despite its resonance with objectification and the negation of subjectivity, flesh has become an important political space.”27 Stripped of everything else, a body could still perform, and through performance the flesh could fight for freedom and More Life.

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 held in bondage and of non-white people across the world who were conquered by “reason,” “enlightenment,” and “liberty.”40 Thus, as Cedric Robinson writes: “In contradistinction to Marx’s and Engels’s expectations that bourgeois society would rationalize social relations and demystify social consciousness, the obverse occurred. The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism.”41 The marriage of white supremacy to liberal capitalism produced its own set of internal contradictions. From the founding of the republic, as the United States has (to appropriate the words of Lisa Lowe) “sought to serve capital, this contradiction between the economic and the political spheres was sublated” and violently worked through by way of the dehumanization, disenfranchisement, and subjugation of the black body, the dispossession, murder, and removal of the indigenous body, and the domination, exploitation, and exclusion of Asian and Latino bodies.42 This has critical implications for even the possibility of freedom. As Du Bois concluded, our freedoms are tangled up within each other: “The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown, and black.”43

If the dark proletariat has never fully materialized as a politically active force, we still regularly catch a glimpse of it in the realm of the aesthetic, and performance in particular. In Simone’s 1967 collaboration with Langston Hughes, “Backlash Blues,” for example, Simone assumes the perspective of a working class black woman, addressing “Mr. Backlash,” who is a personification of white supremacy. In the song, she references the insurgent power of a much larger racialized commons:

When I try to find a job

To earn a little cash

All you got to offer

Is your mean old white backlash.

But the world is big

Big and bright and round

And it’s full of other folks like me

Who are black, yellow, beige and brown44

Like Du Bois, Simone describes and calls for a revolutionary alliance between people of color who collectively struggle against shared conditions of domination, exploitation, and death, without relinquishing the particular, but overlapping histories that have produced their marginal, or minor, relationship to dominant systems and structures of power.

The difference between majoritarian and minoritarian being is not a question of statistical or numerical majority or minority; it’s a relation structured by proximities to power and alliance. For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri, majority is assumed when a particular class (the bourgeoisie, white people, colonists, heterosexuals, men, cis-gender people) assumes the position of a universal metric, or constant. “Majority,” they write, “implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate it.”45 But majoritarian being also implies a privileged relationship to power, often resulting in the domination of descendent or minor classes (the proletariat, people of color, indigenous people, queers, women, trans people) whose deviation from the constant paradoxically confirms the norms, borders, and boundaries by which the ascendant (or major) class is defined: “Majority assumes a state of power and domination, not the other way around.”46

Through the appropriation of the materials produced by (and productive of) the dominant (or major) culture, minoritarian cultural practitioners improvise and perform into being routes toward freedom and survival that would otherwise be impossible. “Even when major,” they write, “a language is open to an intensive utilization that makes it take flight along creative lines of escape which, no matter how slowly, no matter how cautiously, can now form an absolute deteritorialization.”47 Following Deleuze and Guattari, Berlant notes that their theorization of the major/minor suggests that “sensual locations of political marginality might provide an unpredicted energy for reconfiguring power, identity, and collective knowledge.”48 In minoritarian performance, we find a means for taking “flight along creative lines of escape” in order to improvise new worlds and new, common or collective ways of being in and knowing the world. But the revolutionary, world-making commons, or “we,” that is produced through minoritarian performance is not without its dangers and limits.

Vazquez insists on a nuanced approach to theorizing and complicating the “we” produced by minoritarian performance. In a comparative study of two post-revolutionary Cuban music documentaries, she describes the “nosotros” deployed in both films as an insurgent “we” characterized by radical social heterogeneity. This “nosotros,” she writes, is a form of “we” that ultimately “prevent[s] the reduction of the project of making music (or nation) to a select few and open[s] it up to a heterogeneous societal whole. The worlds incorporated in the films place pressure on the tyrannies, ideological and otherwise, that often overdetermine the ‘we.’ ”49 The need for this pressure is particularly acute within the context of post-revolutionary Cuba and the empire to the north, where much of Cuba’s diaspora settled.

In both Cuba and the United States, the tyranny of totalitarian power can be disguised as collective will, or the authorizing will of “We/the People.” As Vazquez observes, “Because it is often evoked to muffle difference and dissent, and because it has been employed to repressive effect in regimes everywhere, the ‘we’ can be intolerable. This is especially true in Cuba where each generation is continually called upon to sacrifice mind and body for the national ‘we.’ ”50 In the final instance, Vazquez, like Muñoz, describes the “nosotros” or “we” produced by minoritarian performance as a form of being together in difference: it does “not necessarily have to report back to an official ‘public’ or an official ‘nosotros’ or ‘we.’ This space of being is within and at the same time gestures towards the possibility of being outside of the ‘we.’ ”51 Minoritarian performance produces a “we” that includes but does not enclose; it is a form of being with by being “within” and also “outside” of “we.”

“We” is ontologically enmeshed with performance and performativity. As Jean-Luc Nancy observes: “Only in such a case can we speak of a ‘we’—or better, only in this case is it possible that a we comes to be spoken. Better still: if the we can only and each time be a speech act, then only a we existentially spoken may perform its significance.”52 The “we” of minoritarian performance is temporary and never fully authorized, but its ephemerality and lack of authority give it the capacity to remain fugitive from the majoritarian and totalitarian tendencies of the revolutions of historical communism, while appropriating and amplifying their most revolutionary impulses and drives toward democratic and collective being. Under such circumstances, minoritarian performance isn’t just a part of the revolution; it is the revolution. “Minoritarian performance labors to make worlds,” writes Muñoz, “worlds of transformative politics and possibilities. Such performance engenders worlds of ideological potentiality that alter the present and map out the future.”53 As minoritarian subjects mobilize performance to produce a common sense, they speak as a “we” capable of “envision[ing] and activat[ing] new social relations. These new social relations would be the blueprint for minoritarian counterpublic spheres.”54 This, ultimately, is the work of minoritarian performance.

New York, New York. Sometime in 1964. And London. 1857.

Simone recorded jazz pianist Billy Taylor’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” for her 1967 album, Silk & Soul. Composed in the early 1950s, the song gained traction as the struggle for black emancipation erupted into a series of organized movements by the middle of the century. The song’s opening, where Taylor introduces the melody, is slow. The notes are extended by the drag of the bassist’s bow pulling across the strings, while Taylor stretches out the spaces and gaps between the phrases, taking on the tone, air, and tempo of a somber church processional. But in the second verse the pace revs up, the bassist begins plucking the strings as a percussionist joins the fray. Taylor comes back around for another, looser pass at the melody, and a few voices erupt in the background as hands begin to clap. As these various elements crash into each other, the sense of the song takes shape and it begins to produce (or make) a world.

To describe Taylor’s performance as producing, or making a world, is to brush up against a problem faced by Marxism and performance theory alike: What does the labor of performance produce, or make? Peggy Phelan might say that as pure expenditure, performance produces nothing but itself, but Marxism, a realm of thought wholly invested in the question of production, opens up another set of possibilities.55 Marx was sure that performance “produces something,” he just couldn’t decide what this something is.56 In an attempt to provide an answer, he turns his attention in a passage in the Grundrisse to the example of a piano player. He begins, as he so often does, by playing the part of (and ventriloquizing) his archenemies (bourgeois economists), asking their question: “Is it not crazy … that the piano-maker should be a productive worker but not the piano-player, although surely the piano would be a NONSENSE without the piano-player?”57 In response, Marx distinguishes between the reproductive labor of the piano-maker and the apparently unproductive labor of the piano player: “The piano-maker reproduces capital; the pianist only exchanges his labour for revenue.”58 Put otherwise, the piano-maker makes a commodity with measurable value, whereas the pianist produces no thing; the pianist merely performs. Much later in the text he contradicts himself, describing performance as a productive form of labor: “Actors are productive workers, not by virtue of the fact that they produce plays, but in so far as they INCREASE THEIR EMPLOYER’S WEALTH.”59 I turn to this internal debate because, in the final instance, Marx’s confusion over the contradictory nature of performance teaches us more than his attempts to resolve it. His confusion reveals performance to be that which confounds quantification, confuses definition, and reorganizes the very notion of value, opening up new ways of conceptualizing and organizing the world beyond the limits defined by the capitalist mode of production.

Whatever Taylor produces as he labors at the piano undoes quantification insofar as it is “not productive for capitalization.”60 Still, Marx insists that the pianist is producing something: “Doesn’t the pianist produce music and satisfy our musical ear; doesn’t he also produce the latter to a certain degree? In FACT, he does so.”61 And notice that it’s not merely that Taylor produces sense (“music,” the song), but that in so doing he produces the listener or, more accurately, a community of listeners (“our musical ear”) who now listen for the sense of freedom (“how it would feel to be free”).62 The pianist makes this new kind of subject in the form of the listener, as much as the listener oriented toward the sound of freedom’s becoming calls the song into being.

Marx understood the creation of an audience, a public, or common sense as the work of aesthetics: “An objet d’art—just like any other product—creates a public that has artistic taste and is enjoying beauty. Production therefore produces not only an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.”63 Production cultivates a subject with a taste or desire for an object (“Production therefore creates the consumer”), a process through which production makes two things: the “material to satisfy a need, but it also provides a need for the material.”64 Like the younger Marx (of 1844), who argues that the regime of private property reduces people’s senses to the singularly impoverished “sense of having,” the Marx of 1857 argued that capitalism manufactures the “sense of having” by creating a feeling of need and the desire to have: “The need felt for objects is created by the perception of the object.”65 Aesthetic production, like any other form of production, not only produces objects for consumption (“the material to satisfy a need”); but also produces the sense of needing itself (“the need for the material”), and thus a “subject for the object.”

Taylor’s song calls for and produces listeners who listen for the sound of freedom’s feeling. His melody follows a fairly simple pattern: four couplets, followed by a bridge back to the top. Repeat. But each time the group returns to the start of the circuit, Taylor’s fingers express a fugitive, improvisatory drive, dancing across the keys and constructing new patterns of sound or innovative lines of flight from within the limited coordinates set by the melody. Perhaps “standard,” these jazz improvisations still insist that wandering and exploring might be the most interesting route toward freedom—a kind of always pushing away, breaking off, going somewhere and toward something. As the song posits the wish for freedom, it gives concrete, corporeal form to this wish at the level of the sound.

Simone’s friend, Lorraine Hansberry, insisted on the documentary and transformative functions of the aesthetic in her midcentury call for young black writers to “write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be.”66 As Shana Redmond describes it, Hansberry’s “insistence that art be used also accounts for what it should be used in the service of; she argued that [the writers] must tell the story of ‘our people,’ whose stories speak to not only the present at hand but also the future that will someday exist.”67 This praxis was exemplified by the playwright’s use of the stage in the service of black freedom struggles, where performance functions as a means for both indicting present conditions and rehearsing and realizing other possible futures.

Performance reaches into a spectator through the senses, and it also produces sense in and for the community of spectators. In so doing, it may produce a collective consciousness, or common sense. As Robinson writes, “The shared past is precious, not for itself, but because it is the basis of consciousness, of knowing, of being.”68 Such shared consciousness, or what Kara Keeling calls “common sense,” may reify the dominant order by providing, “in the form of clichés, a way of continuing present movements.”69 But common sense may also “enable another type of mental and/or motor movement to occur, thereby enabling an alternative perception.”70 In such circumstances, common sense may provoke, and inspire alternative perceptions to surface. It aids the birth of new consciousness and the new worlds that spring forth from such consciousness. It may simply be the sense of being together, of sharing something, but it can also be the seed of revolutionary praxis.

Performance, in Louis Althusser’s assessment, has the capacity to produce “a new consciousness in the spectator,” but recognizing the zone of indeterminacy between an art object and the spectator, he insisted that this consciousness will be “incomplete, like any other consciousness, but moved by this incompletion itself, this distance achieved, this inexhaustible work of criticism in action.”71 Rather than functioning as deficit, the encounter with incompletion can drive the spectator toward action, or praxis: “The play is really the production of a new spectator, an actor who starts where the performance ends, who only starts so as to complete it, but in life.”72 To be “moved” by incompletion is to recognize, as Bloch wrote (citing Brecht), that “Something’s Missing,” and then do something about it.73

Aesthetics are imbued with a powerful capacity to envision and foster change. As conceptual artist Adrian Piper writes, “One reason for making and exhibiting a work is to induce a reaction or change in the viewer.… The work is a catalytic agent, in that it promotes a change in another entity (the viewer) without undergoing any permanent change itself. The value of the work may then be measured in terms of the strength of the change, rather than whether the change accords positively or negatively with some aesthetic standard.”74 Herbert Marcuse similarly argued that art achieves its revolutionary power not by virtue of its explicit political content or formal quality, but because of its ability to play with and transmute form, while catalyzing a transformation in the spectator’s consciousness: “The critical function of art, its contribution to the struggle for liberation, resides in the aesthetic form.… By virtue of its aesthetic form art is largely autonomous vis à vis the given social relations. In its autonomy art both protests these relations, and at the same time transcends them. Thereby art subverts the dominant consciousness, the ordinary experience.”75

Art’s formal alienation from the “real world” (its translation and abstraction of reality into the aesthetic dimension) opens up the possibility for subverting and sublimating the existing world—like Taylor’s improvisations, which move past the constant (the melody) from which his song is continually breaking free. His song rehearses but also realizes (in aesthetic form) the ceaseless capacity for new possibilities to emerge into the world as it trains the listener in a fundamental revolutionary truth: that which merely is (the norm, the constant, the straight line, the melody) is not the only way things have to be. But Marcuse is careful not to exaggerate art’s emancipatory capacities: “Art is also the promise of liberation … the promise is wrested from established reality. It invokes an image of the end of power, the appearances (Schein) of freedom. But only the appearance; clearly, the fulfillment of this promise is not within the domain of art.”76 Instead, like Althusser, Marcuse argues that the fulfillment of this promise ultimately falls to the people who encounter the work: “Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world.”77

A performance’s end always carries with it the promise of a new horizon. Take James’s description of the iconic conclusion to Charlie Chaplin’s movies: “And you know his famous endings: after all the trouble, you see him walking off into the distance along the road, into the horizon. He has been in a lot of trouble, he has been defeated, but he is still unconquered, and he is going off. And the next time he turns up as bright as ever. His vision of the good life is undying.”78 Following James, Muñoz argues that performance offers “more than a vision of a future moment; it is also about something new emerging in the actuality of the present, during the scene of performance. The stage, like the shop floor, is a venue for performances that allow the spectator access to queer life-worlds that exist, importantly and dialectically, within the future and the present.”79 Performance doesn’t just rehearse a different world, it makes it anew, again and again.

New York, New York. August 21, 1967.

Simone first recorded “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” in August of 1967. As in Taylor’s version, the song’s introductory passages carry us back to church, but with a much faster tempo. In the place of the accompanying double bass, the pianist lends her voice, offering a lyrical content that does not describe the feeling of freedom so much as it narrates the desire to sense a freedom that remains just beyond her capacity to grasp, know, and share it:

I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.

I wish I could break all the chains holding me.

I wish I could say all the things that I should say.

Say ’em loud, say ’em clear, for the whole round world to hear.80

Freedom, for Simone or for Taylor, is not a thing; nor is it an empty, abstract, ahistorical, universal ideal: their music was produced within and as contributions to ongoing struggles for the concrete realization of black freedom. Following their lead, throughout this book I think of freedom less as a point of arrival, or as a right that one possesses, then as an ephemeral sense and a practice of becoming that is performed into being by the body within tight and constrained spaces. In a study of improvisatory dance, Danielle Goldman describes performance as a “practice of freedom.”81 To think of freedom as practice and/or performance (as that which is ephemeral, embodied, and flickering in and out of being) is to understand freedom not as something to be had or used, but instead as something to be collectively improvised, produced, and made by and for the undercommons. As James described it, following Hegel, this form of “freedom is creative universality, not utility.”82

We might say that the freedom named in Simone’s song is marked by a subterranean and black communism. The first verse’s wish to break the chains resonate, for example, with Marx and Engels’s famous directive to the world’s proletarian masses: “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.” In these two sentences, which Simone most certainly encountered in her studies in Marxism with Hansberry, Marx and Engels offer a vision of a new world where emancipation emerges through common struggle. But the breaking of chains, as Bloch would say, is only a precondition for a life in freedom, not freedom itself. And a precondition to this precondition is the coming together of a being in common (the united workers of the world) to build a new world capable of sustaining freedom and More Life for everyone.

In Marx, this new world liberates the senses as much as it is graspable as sense. For the young Marx, sense plays a critical role in the constitution of communism as much as communism will ultimately achieve the liberation of the senses. In the 1844 Manuscripts he teaches us that sense is the means through which the individual knows or apprehends difference, the other, and the external world: “Each of his [sic] human relations to the world—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving—in short all the organs of his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form, are in their objective orientation or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of that object.”83

Simone, too, was a theorist of the relationship between sense, the senses, and collective emancipation. At the beginning of her version of the song, her voice is compressed, and it strains as she reaches for the upper shelf where she’s installed the word “wish.” But in the second verse, she returns to “wish,” this time supporting the lyric with more breath, letting the voice reach out to touch, grab, and brush up against the listener with confidence. At this point, the wish for freedom is described in more detail as a freedom to share (out) a sense of the self with the world: “I wish I could share all the love that’s in my heart/ I wish I could give all I’m longing to give.” Simone’s longing to share, give, and say articulate a precondition for freedom: the capacity to share a sense of the self with the world in a fashion that is, as Karatani Kojin might say, “simultaneously free and mutual.”84 Sharing in order to support and sustain all life is the mode of exchange common to the commons and it is what is common to all forms of communism.

That Simone’s wish is always articulated from the point of deprivation locates it within the domain of the incomplete. Sharing through sense is always an experience of incompletion, but here incompletion is not a deficit so much as a condition of possibility. The incompletion of sharing is part of what allows plural-beings to exist in a common relationship, to be with each other, without flattening or obliterating the singularity and difference of each other. As Nancy describes it, “Sharing is always incomplete, or it is beyond completion and incompletion. For a complete sharing implies the disappearance of what is shared.”85 While the totalitarian tendencies of historical communism planned for complete sharing, often at the expense or even disappearance of great numbers of the masses that the party was supposed to liberate and work for, a communism of incommensurability is predicated on relations of incompletion and nonequivalence, expressed by Marx most directly in the Gotha Critique: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”86

To the pianist, the ability to share out the self with others and with the world (“I wish I could share all the love that’s in my heart / Remove all the buzz that keep us apart”) is interrupted by conditions, or a “buzz,” that individuate the singular subject, keeping “us” apart. The undoing of these divisions would produce a new relationship between the listener and her senses but also reorient those senses toward the creation of a new world in which “you’d see and agree that every man should be free.” Marx effectively describes the whirling vortex of the capitalist mode of production as “the buzz that keeps us apart.” Capitalism individuates and diminishes each person’s senses (including their sense of others), while reducing the individual subject’s capacity for sense to the sole “sense of having.”87 But as he wrote those words in 1844, he could not or would not imagine that for his black contemporaries, the trade in flesh reduced a slave’s senses to a sense of being had. The ontological and historical priority of black resistance that animates black performance is thus fundamentally rooted in a yearning to emancipate sense, to open sense out into a plurality of alternative possibilities of sense for the black body and for black people across the world.

If sense was, as Marx implied, foundational to the definition of the human being, the violent denial, destruction, and negation of the black body’s capacity for sense was one of the master’s primary mechanisms for achieving the dehumanization of black people during (and after) slavery. Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection describes the central role performance played as the masters set about devising and staging scenes of subjection to transmit, reproduce, and reify the dominant racial ideology.88 The masters’ violence was often deployed to negate or control the slave’s capacity for sense, yet the slave’s body went on sensing, even if all she could sense was pain.89 For as James insisted, the slave pushed back by continuing to sense, to feel, and thus to claim an ontological status as a human being: “The difficulty was that though one could trap them like animals, transport them in pens, work them alongside an ass or a horse, and beat both with the same stick, stable them and starve them, they remained, despite their black skins and curly hair, quite invincibly human beings; with the intelligence and resentments of human beings.”90 So whether we are following Simone, James, Du Bois, or Marx, the conclusion that we reach might be the same: The emancipation of all people requires the long deferred freedom of black people, people who labor under the remaining effects of having once been property. The freedom of black people, in turn, requires the liberation of the senses, which itself requires the abolition of private property.

Simone’s conclusion, that “you’d see and agree that every man should be free,” resonates with Marx’s suggestion that the transcendence of private property could lead to emancipation and, in particular, the emancipation of sense: “The transcendence of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all the human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human.”91 A world where “every man [is] free” would necessarily be a new world, one that would reterritorialize what it means to be “man” or “human.” Indeed, the concept of Man itself might simply wither away in such circumstances, giving way to new and better ways of being a being, and being together, in the world.92

The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division. New York, New York. July 29, 2016.

There is one thing that no one can be fully emancipated from. Death, like performance, is a central site for the production of collective being, and in the face of death’s unjust distribution to black and brown queer and trans people, minoritarian performance becomes a means for sustaining life—life that is still living, as well as the lives that we have already lost. Of central concern throughout this book will be the world-making dialectic of queer life and death. Sometimes, minoritarian performance is about freedom. But much of the time it is simply about survival. And we need the latter to get to the former.

Even before a performance begins, the world of the audience begins to come together. Voices converge, fall apart; bodies brush up against each other, repel each other, collide back together in new configurations; old friends talk in clusters, and new acquaintances exchange awkward banter; exes avoid eye contact, which is hard in such a small space; there are drinks and there is noise and art in weird places. And then people start to take their seats in folding chairs arranged in rows, stretching from the screen and microphone at the front of the room to the book display at the back. People without seats gather at the perimeter, they line up along the ramp that stretches up the length of the room. Someone takes the mic and an anticipatory air settles in as the audience turns the volume down and the faint parameters of a world flicker into being.

The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division is a queer bookstore, exhibition space, and event center located in a compact room at the back of (but autonomous from) New York’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center. The Bureau’s representative at the mic explains that the Bureau is part of a government that “doesn’t exist yet.” In the meantime, the Bureau has been itinerant, moving through a host of different spaces since its founding in 2012. The evening’s events celebrate the launch of the seventh issue of Apogee, a literary journal featuring the work of writers of color, queers, feminists, and other workers in the minoritarian subcultural sphere. Apogee is proof that in dark times people are getting together, and they’re making a plan.

There is a fundamental relationship between what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call “planning” and the work of minoritarian performance. “Planning,” as they use it, must be distinguished from the forms of central planning enacted by the regimes of historical communism, in which “the plan” was often a means for subordinating the multitudes to dictatorial state authority.93 Against this, Moten and Harney define planning thus: “This ongoing experiment with the informal, carried out by and on the means of social reproduction, as the to come of the forms of life, is what we mean by planning; planning in the undercommons is not an activity, not fishing, or dancing, or teaching, or loving, but the ceaseless experiment with the futurial presence of the forms of life that make such activities possible.”94 The planners are neither a ruling elite, nor a vetted aristocracy. They’re the kids in SNCC listening to Simone and throwing a party. In planning, rather than being ruled by the plan, the planners “are still part of the plan,” and they are planning because the plan is to change the world.95 Both planning and minoritarian performance are the continuum of “ceaseless experiment[ation]” through which minoritarian subjects materialize life-sustaining futurial forms of life that don’t yet exist.

Early in the program the playwright moves to the front of the room to read a section from his contribution to the issue, “Notes on Returning to San Francisco Twenty-Five Years Later.”96 Jorge Cortiñas stands behind the microphone holding his text, a few sheets of paper stapled together and creased in the middle. The paper is recycled and printed on the back are pages from a New Yorker article about (then-candidate) Donald Trump’s (lack of) reading habits. He speaks with a steady tone, moving through an enumerated sequence of observations about a return to a city full of ghosts and, even more, full with the people who have built luxury condos on the grounds where the dead lived and died.

“One.” San Francisco? “It’s changed,” he says. It’s no longer a brown frontier at the edge of the edge. Today, capital is rapidly reterritorializing the city for the financial elite, bringing with it the whiteness that gentrification aggressively imposes upon increasingly imperiled black, brown, and queer urban lifeworlds. “The people you moved to the Mission District to get away from? They live there now.” He pauses for emphasis and then, forceful, precise, sharp: “Two.” Little pause, followed by “It doesn’t matter where you walk; you keep walking past the apartments of dead people.” Three and Four. He wonders at the intermixture of the beauty of the landscape, which is populated by the ghosts of the no longer here.

The playwright uses performance to bend time, taking us back to the first wave of the AIDS pandemic, when death was every day, and the “city was full of vacant apartments”: “That battered city suggested you might be left alone and back in 1989 the hope of being left alone was the best your country had to offer you.” Only a few years before, in the 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick, the United States Supreme Court declared itself “quite unwilling” to recognize a “fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy.”97 In effect, queers had no right to be left alone, even and especially when fucking. But the desire to be left alone is not the same thing as the desire to be alone. Fucking doesn’t usually happen alone, nor does one move to a city, even or especially a “battered city,” to be alone, although cities can certainly be lonely.

The playwright’s fugitive flight to the Mission might have been to get away from the people he had to get away from so he could have some chance of survival, but it was also to get to the people he would need in order to survive. There, he helped to produce a world as much as this world helped to (re)produce him. As he writes in the penultimate “Note,” which he did not read that night in the Bureau, “When you were young and moved to San Francisco, new friends took you in and made you anew. San Francisco and your friends made you anew.”98 They made each other anew to keep each other alive. And when More Life was no longer an option, they carried each other to death, and beyond it. They had to. The country would rather they die, and when the plague came to take them, the country was happy to let it. Five. Six. “You can’t stop crying.”

Seven. When the plague came, they got in formation, got organized, and got to planning. Moten and Harney insist that planning can happen in “any kitchen, any back porch, any basement, any hall, any park bench, any improvised party, every night.”99 It used to happen in coffee shops as well: “You and your friends went to coffee shops to hold committee meetings and always found a large table to commandeer. In exchange for, say, an Orangina, you wrote press releases and planned acts of civil disobedience.” Of course, they were already being disobedient. Queerness, blackness, and brownness is itself disobedience, the swerve, the ontological and historical priority of resistance, and a break from the standard measure, the constant, the straight line, or of the major. Eight: “Turns out you had realized fairly quickly that being left alone was not enough.” When we haven’t got anything else, we’ve still got each other and ourselves. And we need each other in order to keep each other alive.

Nine. Ten. Twenty-five years later, the coffee shops in San Francisco are no longer the sites of planning, but extensions of the techno-economy. The playwright can’t find a seat. Eleven and then the final note, “Twelve,” with which the playwright concludes the performance: “You can’t remember the names of everyone who died. None of your friends can. You have to ponder old photographs. You ask each other. Remember him? What was his name?” Quiet. A beat. A rumble of applause passes through the Bureau. He pulls the paper to his side and shuffles away from the microphone, before dissolving back into the audience.

Remember him? What was his name? The index of the playwright’s question (the missing friend) is an absent referent that you should remember but you can’t because it’s hard to keep track of all of the people who aren’t here anymore. You can’t remember the names of everyone who died, which is terrifying, because you worry that in forgetting them (or parts of them), you might be killing them a second time over. In the unread fourteenth note, Cortiñas writes that “memory is not any one person’s task: memory is something we build together. The reason for this is because memory is a burden.”100 Performance, as it was on that night, can be a means of sharing this burden and of keeping the dead alive. And we need More Life.101

If minoritarian performance serves the will to More Life, it does so out of necessity. Death stalks people of color. Just a few years before his performance that night in the Bureau, the playwright lost José Muñoz, who was one of his closest friends. In a 2014 essay on that death, and on the significance of each and every queer brown death, Cortiñas wrote the following:

The dominant social order has always been hostile to or cavalier about brown queer lives. It’s not just the marginalization brown queer lives are subjected to or the way brown queers are always fodder for someone else’s metaphor; it’s the way brown queer lives are actively shortened. The aim is to erase brown queer lives, diminish them, gentrify them out of the neighborhood, deport them, profit from them, pave them over, and be done with them. I want to invite us to resist this praxis and to guard closely against finding ourselves in service of its decimating logics. I would suggest, given the myriad ways the present social order exploits brown queer lives, that until we have radically reorganized the present we might begin by suspecting that every brown queer death is premature. Such a posture might generate new insights into the enormous challenges brown queers face when building (many times from scratch) the resources and systems we need to learn and practice mutual care.102

Death, for queers and trans people of color, is a constant threat, an always-unfolding material reality produced by and through system. “Resisting the decimation of brown queer lives,” Cortiñas writes, might require an understanding of “death not as an abstraction but as socially constituted and distributed unjustly.”103

In a section of the “Notes” not performed in the Bureau, the playwright offers a ledger of the forms of destruction distributed toward minoritarian subjects:

Trouble seems to stalk the lives of your friends like bruises erupting years after the blows were delivered. You ready yourself to hear which of your friends seroconverted (six of them), were homeless for a while (three of them), struggle with addiction (five of them), had a recent hospital stay (one of them), were assaulted on the street (three of them), were evicted (six of them), or lost their tenured teaching job (one of them). Be prepared to revisit the stories of former activists who died from overdosing (two), who died from the strain of detoxing (one), or died after they stopped taking their medication (one). Be prepared to hear about the mutual friend who has become a hoarder (one), never leaves his apartment (another one), or is depressed (five).104

These quantitative abstractions add up. They are the kinds of burdens that can’t be borne alone. They have to be shared out, lest we, too, get pinned to the earth beneath their weight. Under such conditions, the commons produced by and in minoritarian performance is, in Muñoz’s words, a response to “the necessity for communal practices that speak to the current genocidal crises affecting black and queer communities globally.”105

Surely we have to read the playwright’s performance as addressing and offering qualitative and even quantitative evidence of the unjust death and destruction distributed to queer and trans people of color. But this narrative is tangled up with, and indeed inextricable from, a story about survival. “You doubt you will be able to keep this up,” he writes about the constant barrage of bad news, “but it turns out you are, in fact, able to, you’ve had practice.… Mostly it makes you wonder at how it is that any of you are still here.”106 Stillness, like the woman standing still in Baton Rouge, can be a form of durational performance, persistence, and even resistance. To remain alive, still, in the face of annihilation can itself be a revolutionary act. This is to think of still life as, in the words of C. Riley Snorton, the “even so and as yet of living.”107

Black life, like brown queer life, is often lived in close proximity to death, and as Snorton reminds us, black trans life often bears an even closer proximity to death. But if death stalks black and trans life, the fact of still being alive is rich with a world-changing, revolutionary power: “In the future imperfect … [the activist formation of] Black (Trans) Lives Matter provides a conceptual framework to understand the ongoing struggle in the present by way of a future (aspiration) in which black lives will have mattered to everyone. For some, including and following Fanon, that future effectively means the end of the world. And perhaps black and trans lives mattering in this way would end the world but worlds end all the time.… Even so and as yet, there is still life.”108 Black or brown, queer and trans, our differences are many. What we share is a need for More Life, and structural conditions that often make this impossible. When minoritarian performance functions as the “rehearsal for the example,” it can be decent “practice” for what comes next. And when you get to what comes next, it can be the means of keeping alive and carrying on to the next thing after that. Performance, as the playwright mobilized it that night in the Bureau, is a way of lingering, sustaining, and staying. Of remaining here still. Still here. Still.

Still.

The Mission 1989 Virginia 1619 Fukushima 2011 London/Edo 1857 Baton Rouge 2016 RCA Studios 1967 Washington Square Village 2013 Vietnam 1975 Rossmore 1990

Rather than providing a survey of minoritarian performance, the following chapters are organized around artists whose work exemplifies some aspect of this labor. Chapter 1 turns to the live performances of Nina Simone to offer a deeper engagement with this book’s key terms: “work,” “performance,” “freedom,” and “survival.” The second chapter turns to the work of four artists (Danh Vō, Ryan Rivera, Martin Wong, and Audre Lorde), offering a meditation on the relationship between reproductive labor and performance’s mode of reproduction, while considering the ways women of color and their queer children mobilize performance to sustain queer of color life, both before and after death. The third chapter is a study of “The Marxism of Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” which argues that Gonzalez-Torres mobilized performance to effect a system of redistribution that could foster the collective sharing (out) and survival of black and brown queer life.109 Dancer Eiko’s A Body in a Station occupies the fourth chapter’s exploration of a choreography of emancipation, while theorizing the entanglements that constitute and are constituted by minoritarian performance. The book closes with a study of performance artist and conceptual photographer Tseng Kwong Chi to ask how we survive the party’s fall and the end of the performance.110 Inspired by these artists, and as Gonzalez-Torres insisted, “I’m still proposing the radical idea of trying to make this a better place for everyone.”111 While this objective may seem naïve, minoritarian performance has always traded in the miraculous capacity to make the impossible possible.

Figure I.3. Utagawa Hiroshige, Fukagawa Susaki and Jumantsubo, No. 107, from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, 5th month of 1857. 14 3/16 x 9 ¼ in. Brooklyn Museum. Gift of Anna Ferris, 30.1478.107. Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 30.1478.107. (Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum.)

Describing Simone’s performance practice, Malik Gaines argues that “the singer and pianist’s expressive approach [consists of] performing agency where it’s a structural impossibility.”112 You catch a sense of this in her version of “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.” Near the conclusion of the song, she takes flight, describing the “wish to be like a bird in the sky.” Her voice climbs the octave up the word “wish” into the upper register, soaring as she surveys the world beneath:

How sweet it would be if I found I could fly.

I’d soar to the sun and look down at the sea.

Then I’d sing cause I’d know how it feels to be free.”

This lyric recalls Hiroshige Utagawa’s 1857 ukiyo-e (woodblock print), Fukagawa Susaki and Jumantsubo. Produced the same year Marx began the Grundrisse, the print features a black eagle in flight, swooping into the top third of the frame as snow falls behind it. Beneath the eagle is a snow-covered landscape and undulating waves surrounding a fish trap that floats at the center of a sea shaded with deep gradations of blue. The viewer’s perspective is fixed at a height nearly parallel to the descending eagle, offering a vision of the ground that is akin to what a flying bird would see. Well before humans took to the skies, Hiroshige’s print mobilized the aesthetic encounter to give his audiences (mostly middle- and working-class Edo [Tokyo] spectators) the sense of flying.113 Through performance, Simone, too, mobilizes the aesthetic to do the impossible, soaring up to the sun and looking down to the sea. As she shares out that sense with her listener, she manifests the work of minoritarian performance.