Project check-in #1: Liv

• Which text have you found most compelling and/or would like to examine further?

I think Souls of Black Folk was easiest to connect with, probably because I was able to understand his writing/the concepts more than other texts. I found Uncle Tom’s Cabin compelling too, as easier to understand. The denser texts about performance are obviously more difficult/harder to interact with (for me), but Jayna Brown’s text (“Letting the Flesh Fly: Topsy, Time, Torture, and Transfiguration.”) inspired a lot of thought and questions.

Which concepts/theories (i.e. liminality, mastery of form, etc.) do you find most intriguing?

The veil/double consciousness are particularly intriguing. I think there might be a way into deformation of mastery from there too. (Naturally I guess) I’m interested in how Black artists/people express those concepts/their experiences – through “texts”/artistic form – to someone, like myself, who are listening but can never fully understand. I think I finally pretty much understand liminality, which is also intriguing. I mentioned Jayna Brown’s text above, a lot of the ideas she presents (particularly about the sexualization of Topsy/the impact of white women playing her) there are interesting.

What kind of performance and/or art are you most interested in? Why?

I really love watching dance – breaking down This is America was really interesting for me, in the light of this class. I haven’t done a lot of performing so I feel like the nuances may get lost on me, but I still love it. I’m good at/enjoy close/analytical reading so that kind of art is easier for me to interact with (except I’m still pretty bad at deciphering poetry). I love studio art, but doing a “close reading” of those sort of “texts” is difficult (despite having 2 artists for parents).

List two research/discussion questions generated by the course materials and/or our class discussions.

1. problems with appealing to white women by relying on the violence perpetrated against Black women and children? Why is this only half empathy? (re: she’s someone‘s sister, daughter, wife) How was the implicit Northern racism shaped by these strategies? Or, on the flip side, how did these strategies play into the existing implicit racism?
2. What is the relationship between Black voices appearing in the intervals of culture? (re: minstral shows) Does this relate to liminality? Does this concept still occur in black art today?

Provide two quotes from any text on the syllabus that in your opinion exemplify the relationship between art and artifice in the black expressive tradition.

1. (Letting the Flesh Fly: Topsy, Time, Torture, and Transfiguration) “It should not be construed as an act of alliance with unfree black women. On the contrary, it stabilizes the differences between them.” “The role always signifies ownership of the black female body.” – how do black women reclaim a space that has been used to keep them seperate and oppressed? How is artifice (and then art) used to reclaim that space? (“Transforms herself in the trappings of colonial wealth” “Transforms herself in her space of labor, reclaims her body in the place of work.” – examples of how Topsy reclaimed her space while her body wasn’t hers – but how do black women reclaim their bodies once they are free (from slavery).

[This reminds me of a scene in Beloved when Baby Suggs preaches to the ex-slaves in a field, telling them to dance before preaching, “Here, in this here place we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh.” (Sethe also notes, “Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”)]

2. (Souls of Black Folk, Of Our Spiritual Strivings) “-this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, for merge his double self into a better and truer self.”“One ever feels his two-ness,–an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

[I know this isn’t directly related to performance, but I guess my point is that I’m interested in how(/if??) art/performance can help to resolve (or mitigate? or provide some relief for?) that merging of the “double self.]

Provide two quotes from black-authored texts other than the ones on the syllabus that in your opinion exemplify the relationship between art and artifice in the black expressive tradition.

I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about this – I did include a couple from Beloved above, but those were sort of accidental. Sooo I just Googled the question and looked for academic papers. Coidinidently, the first one I found included a Toni Morrison quote about the annexation (or erasure) of commentary on black art works. I thiiiink that it relates, at least somewhat, to the long “ownership” of Topsy by white women, as well as liminality. “little restraint has been attached to its uses. As a disabling virus within literary discourse, Africanism has become, in the Eurocentric tradition that American education favors, both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability.” The papers’ authors continue, “That is, although always already a viable contributor to the field, disciplinary practices of exclusion—e.g., the exclusion of black-authored texts in interpretation or the marginalization of black performance scholars in performance studies and the willing omission of the ways that black oratory contributed to the elocutionary moment, an historical epoch many performance scholars locate as the founding moment of the field—have reified the field as a colorless enterprise.” (Sage Handbook of Performance Studies, Chapter 25: Black Performance Studies: Genealogies, Politics, Futures, by E. Patrick Johnson (I think?))

Imagine you are an AP English teacher, and you want to teach your high school seniors about black performance. However your principal and the parents will not allow you to use any texts other than printed narratives (i.e. no videos, music clips, no guests, no field trips, etc.). Draft a lesson plan for how you might go about accomplishing your goal without the aid of anything but copies of the printed text.

I would probably use reviews of the performances to establish how different people viewed the art, and did/didn’t get it – re: deformation of mastery. Maybe before that (or after, depending on the performance) I would try to include writing from the performance’s authors about their intention/process for their performance. This would obviously be easier to do for more recent performances (even defining recent as ~1960). (As we discussed, when there are fewer materials about a performance – re: Henry Box Brown’s panoramas) imagining/understanding the performance can be harder. However, this could also be an interesting experiment for the students to discuss the similarities/differences of what they imagined, and bring up issues about discussing the impact of learning from performances we can’t view. (For example, I wonder how different it would be to discuss This is America only through reviews/interviews with Donald Glover. Would the impact be similar? Even with/despite the step-by-step deciphering articles that are out there?)