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In this chapter, Indie A. Choudhury examines the ways that Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin conflated sight and visibility and how performance became the functional apparatus that mediated the relationship between these modes. Using Baldwin’s play Blues for Mister Charlie (1964) and Delaney’s painting The Time of Your Life (1945) as examples, the essay asserts that performance offered both artists the opportunity not only to perceive Blackness but also to render it visible. Performativity became a way both to navigate and to displace already given codes and stereotypes about the expectations associated generally with race and gender, and specifically about Black male sexuality. For Baldwin, the lesson of Delaney’s seeing was that visual acuity was connected to a perceptual, cognitive, and synesthetic acuity that for each artist was linked intrinsically to Black sight and the capaciousness of Black existence beyond the binaries of light or dark, black or white.

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