“No Man Is an Island”: The Diasporic Performances of Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz and Sheldon Scott

In their reparative performance art practices, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz and Sheldon Scott materialize and animate the diasporic consciousnesses that are foundational to the cultural texture of communities of color in the American South. Both emphasize embodied presence to honor the dignity of their communities in the present and reconnect to their ancestors. They draw on the visual and gestural vocabularies of Black performance art while incorporating site-specificity and contextual references to ground their work in a history of trauma and healing. This essay argues that through their performances Raimundi-Ortiz and Scott seek to reestablish interpersonal connections, making unique interventions into cyclical histories of violent separation, to remind their audiences that “no man is an island.”