Malik Gaines - Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible

SEXUAL CULTURES

General Editors: Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyongo, and Joshua Chambers-Letson

Founding Editors: Jos Esteban Muoz and Ann Pellegrini

Titles in the series include:

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Samuel R. Delany

Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism

Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malav and Martin F. Manalansan IV

Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces

Juana Mara Rodrguez

Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance

Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini

Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture

Frances Ngron-Muntaner

Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era

Marlon Ross

In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives

Judith Halberstam

Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality

Dwight A. McBride

God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence

Michael Cobb

Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual

Robert Reid-Pharr

The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory

Lzaro Lima

Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America

Dana Luciano

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Jos Esteban Muoz

Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism

Scott Herring

Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination

Darieck Scott

Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries

Karen Tongson

Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading

Martin Joseph Ponce

Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled

Michael Cobb

Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias

Eng-Beng Lim

Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law

Isaac West

The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture

Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride

Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings

Juana Mara Rodrguez

Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism

Amber Jamilla Musser

The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies

Rachel C. Lee

Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men

Jane Ward

Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance

Uri McMillan

A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire

Hiram Prez

Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality

Katherine Franke

Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique

Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible

Malik Gaines

For a complete list of books in the series, see www.nyupress.org.

Malik Gaines

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2017 by New York University

All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

ISBN : 978-1-4798-3703-8 (hardback)

ISBN : 978-1-4798-0430-6 (paperback)

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This writing has been accomplished with the insistent support of many tremendous people to whom I wish to express my gratitude.

I started discussing this book with Jos Esteban Muoz, who brilliantly and generously organized the field this publication enters. I am grateful for the extra life Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyongo, and Joshua Chambers-Letson granted this project. Nyongo has been a generous advisor, offering important mentorship, even though I am a little older than he. Jennifer Doyle and Francesca Royster gave fantastic feedback and welcome encouragement, and thanks to Eric Zinner and Alicia Nadkarni for their support. Great jobs and inspiring colleagues in the Department of Performance Studies at NYUs Tisch School of the Arts and Hunter Colleges Department of Art and Art History have made it possible for me to get to this acknowledgment.

Sue-Ellen Case advised the research from which this book was developed. Her rigor, clarity, and years of attention kept the train on track, and her own scholarship has served as a queer inspiration. I was fortunate to work with a number of consequential professors during my time at UCLA, including Susan Leigh Foster, Steven Nelson, Janet OShea, Joseph Roach, Carol Sorgenfrei, Frank Wilderson III, and Haiping Yan, who each helped me think. Before that, while I was studying writing at CalArts, Mady Schutzman planted several seeds that bore colorful fruits. In this list of instructors, I am compelled to mention my high school German teacher, Dorena Kehaulani Koopman, who taught me a lot about order and ambivalence.

Alexandro Segade, gifted facilitator and interrogator, boyfriend par excellence, has much to do with anything that is produced from that which might be construed as my self and cannot be thanked enough. Along with Alex and our collaborator Jade Gordon, as the group My Barbarian, I have been able to pose in performance the questions of representation, action, collaboration, influence, and location that instigated this study. I remember once leaving a graduate seminar on transnational theory in Los Angeles, flying to Munich, taking a train through the Italian Alps, arriving at an old castle, performing a short musical adaptation of Titus Andronicus that asked the audience to decide whether or not a black baby could be the emperor of all of Italy, then taking a train back to Munich, flying back to L.A., and going to a graduate seminar on theories of representation. While scholarship and practice are different, they have plenty to say to each other.

In what follows, I describe the year I was born as the end of the excessive sixties, and in some sense, this book interrogates that primal scene. My parents, Barbara Gaines and Charles Gaines, with their various boldnesses, are behind the pages of this labor. My in-laws Gustavo Segade and Irina Kaplan Segade add their own influence to the politics and unstable raciality through which I emerged. And much support has come my way from Joseph Rosato and Roxana Landaverde.

The diversity of these chapters reflects very different archives. Special help negotiating these came from Rumi Missabu, Daniel Nicoletta, Pam Tent, David Weissman, Irwin Swirnoff, Lawrence Helman, Joseph Zaccarella, Emory Douglas, Sam Durant, Wenzel Bilger, Christina MacMahon and the University of California African Studies Research Group, Emeka Ogboh, Alicia Hall Moran, Jason Moran, Isaac Julien, Mark Nash, Thomas Lax, and David DeWitt. Thanks to Yasmeen Chism, J. M. DeLeon, and Ethan Philbrick for their assistance in the final stretch. Much of chapter 1 appeared as the article The Quadruple-Consciousness of Nina Simone in