Language Disclaimer
Historical Language (always in citations): Negro, Colored
Contemporary Language: Black people
Don‘t say the N-word
[C19 Podcast “The N-Word in the Classroom: Just Say No”]
Recap
Theatre and Performance
Judith Butler and Gender Performativity
- Everyday life and performance
- How social difference is constructed
Black Performance
The Fact of Blackness
Walker and Weems
This is America
The Fact of Blackness
Frantz Fanon
20 July 1925, Fort-de-France, Martinique
The Fact of Blackness
French Army
Studied Psychiatry in Lyon
Algeria 1953
-Algerian Independence War 1954
Joins FLN
Tunis 1957
Death 1961
The Fact of Blackness
The Wretched of the Earth 1961 [1963]
Black Skin, White Masks 1952 [1967]
The Fact of Blackness
‘‘“Look, a Negro!”
I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in
things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the
world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other
objects.’ (82)
The Fact of Blackness
‘Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to
others. Their attention was a liberation, running over my body
suddenly abraded into nonbeing, endowing me once more with
an agility that I had thought lost, and by taking me out of the
world, restoring me to it.’ (82)
The Fact of Blackness
‘But just as I reached the other side, I stumbled, and the
movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there,
in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was
indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst
apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by
another self.’ (82)
The Fact of Blackness
‘In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the
development of his bodily schema.’ (83)
‘A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and
temporal world—such seems to be the schema. It does not impose
itself on me; it is, rather, a definitive structuring of the self and of the
world—definitive because it creates a real dialectic between my body
and the world.’ (83)
The Fact of Blackness
‘Then, assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled,
its place taken by a racial epidermal schema. […] It was not that I
was finding febrile coordinates in the world. I existed triply: I
occupied space. I moved toward the other . . . and the
evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there,
disappeared. Nausea. . . .’ (84)
The Fact of Blackness
‘historico-racial schema’ that operates ‘below the corporeal [or
bodily] schema’ (84)
‘the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details,
anecdotes, stories.’ (84)
The Fact of Blackness
‘And so it is not I who make meaning for myself, but it is the
meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me’
(102)
Surveillance and The Fact of Blackness
Lectures on Surveillance at University of Tunis
Closed Circuit Television
19th Century Lantern Laws in New York
See:
Simone Browne, Dark Matters
Nicholas Mirzoeff, We Are All Children of Algeria
Kara Walker
Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress
and Her Heart (1994) [DETAIL]. Cut paper on wall; 13 x 50 ft. (4 x 15.2 m)
Bill Traylor, “Untitled (Construction with
Yawping Woman),” circa 1939-1942
(opaque watercolor and pencil on
cardboard)(1994) [DETAIL]. Cut paper on
wall; 13 x 50 ft. (4 x 15.2 m)
Kara Walker
Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress
and Her Heart (1994) [DETAIL]. Cut paper on wall; 13 x 50 ft. (4 x 15.2 m)
Kara Walker
A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby: an
Homage to the unpaid and overworked
Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes
from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the
New World on the Occasion of the demolition
of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant’
Glenn Ligon
Claudia Rankine, Citizen, 2014
Carrie Mae Weems
The Louisiana Project, 2003 The Kitchen Table 1990
This is America
Adrian Piper, Mythic Being 1975
‘she demonstrates how to perform for and against the camera.’
Crystal LaBeija in The Queen (1967).
Screenshot by Tavia Nyong’o.