Scenes of resurrection

Black Lives Matter, die-ins, and the here and now of queer futurity

Bibliographic Data

ID4517100
AuthorsJesse A Goldberg (Auburn University, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume30
Issue2
Pages127-139
Publication date2020-05-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueWomen & Performance a journal of feminist theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0740-770X • E-ISSN: 1748-5819
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0740770x.2020.1869409
OpenAlexW3124270497
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited18

This essay considers the fraught possibilities for resistance to anti-black violence in contemporary performative acts of protest. I turn to Saidiya Hartman’s work in Scenes of Subjection and Fred Moten’s dialogue with her in In the Break as a theoretical foundation to specifically think for the problems and possibilities of resistance in performances of “die ins.” Ultimately I argue that the die-in, through the simultaneously ephemeral and traceable/iterable ontology of performance, inaugurates a black queer future-in-the-present that departs from without leaving behind Jose Munoz’s notion of the “Then and There of Queer Futurity.” I posit that in the scene of the die-in, black performance presents both a scene of subjection (the reenactment of death) and a scene of resurrection (the protestors get up and continue their lives after the protest “ends”), and thus urge us to hear in Hartman’s phrase “scenes of subjection” the lower frequencies of “scenes of resurrection” which are possible in black performance. Black performance, then, becomes a site where the binary between pessimism and optimism might break down, which I argue makes possible what Christina Sharpe calls “wake work.” In the scene of resurrection, black performance is imminent to death but not reducible to that imminence

Aesthetics · Art · Ephemeral key · Literature · Lyrics · Performative utterance · Pessimism · Queer · Sociology · Theology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Computer Science · Diversity and Impact of Dance · Gender Studies · Philosophy · Theatre and Performance Studies

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