Revenant Motion: Danse Macabre in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter

Abstract

Through sensitive engagement with the experimental films of Arthur Jafa, the flex choreography of Storyboard P, and performance of #BlackLivesMatter protests, this essay submits revenant motion as a concept through which to think about black being and phenomenology in this era. The entwined reflections on black life, death, and aesthetics offered up by Jafa, Claudia Rankine, Hortense Spillers, Elizabeth Alexander, and Sylvia Wynter shape these speculations toward a black creative, curatorial, and cultural practice attentive to the other(wise) worlds opened by uncanny reanimation. The suggestion here is that revenant motion might name a genre (à la Wynter) of the perennial danse macabre, which often figures Death dancing among the living as a reminder to too‐worldly humans of its ever‐presence and equalizing power. The creative and critical practices considered here also persistently foreground the melancholy possibilities and pleasures that our collective entanglements with black after/other/lives affords. This study of the macabre aesthetic as it manifests in latter‐day memento mori sharpens our awareness of the proximity of horror and romance. In doing so it provides us with an occasion to think about how the gothic character of black life emerges in the sensual and sensorial performance of mourning and artful response to grief.

In the decade or so since the Movement for Black Lives first began to focus and galvanize our attentions on the peculiar precarity of black life, Arthur Jafa's Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016) has become canonical—a popular touchstone for thinking about the aesthetics and affects of black death. The growing number of pithy museum talks, in-depth articles, academic studies, and YouTube comments dedicated to unpacking this seven-minute cinematic work attests to both its impact and its inscrutability.¹ The New York Times dubbed Love Is the Message “a masterpiece” but also called it “unsparing,” “a phantasmagoria of brutality and magnificence,” and “an expansive, unshakable fever dream of blackness as both a creative force and an object of white violence.”² The vast majority of these critical assessments emphasize the work's aesthetic techniques, singling out for special mention the “improvisational virtuosity of Jafa's editing, with its changes in pace, jump cuts, drags and dissolves,” and noting the tension created by interspersing expressions of black joy, faith, triumph, and love with depictions of arbitrary and gratuitous violence directed at black folk.³ According to Jafa himself, this spellbinding intensity and intimacy is an effect of bringing powerful (and disparate) images into “affective proximity”—a term he borrows from his good friend John Akomfrah—and feeling for the resonance produced by the images themselves. He often claims to have approached the creation of Love Is the Message as a sort of “proof of concept” for what he names “black visual intonation” and cites this work in particular as exemplary of his attempt to make “a cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation, of black music.”⁴ Indeed, most of Jafa's visual artwork is marked by his preoccupations with rhythm and motion, which he persistently asserts as the defining principles of black culture and aesthetics.⁵

The role of dance in particular in establishing the visual intonation, or pulse, of Jafa's cinematic work is perhaps less remarked upon. Careful study reveals the way in which he curates movement in his assembly of found footage, where motion within a clip is carefully linked to what's going on in the next, creating a rhythm that may or not match the pulse of the music soundtrack. (In fact, many times the visual has its own pulse quite separate from the music.) And so the Frankenstein motion of these collaged scenes is punctuated by young girls jumping jubilantly in and then out of a play circle, a baby girl cradled in the arms of a man who must hold her aloft to dance with her, a swarm of players and spectators at a basketball game stomping to an (unheard) downbeat. The church sways, the club swoops, couples exuberantly swirl or cling in a slow embrace. In Jafa's mash-up, the motion created by catching the spirit might be continued in the next frame with catching a bullet. A church lady's falling out dovetails with a man's falling into the hands of the KKK; an erotic grind morphs into a vicious beating; the virtuosic contortion in a dance battle is yoked to the desperate contortions of a man fighting for his life; arms outstretched in religious ecstasy becomes “Hands up, Don't shoot,” the gesture of a terrified mother and her young children who are being roughly and inexplicably detained by police officers (figs. 2–3). The point I am venturing is that for black dancers, here sandwiched between death and the dying, dance is always already perimortem. Seeing how they are swept into the swirl of Jafa's filmmaking sharpens our awareness of the myriad ways in which they—and by “they” I mean “we”—are all dancing with death.

I recently asked Arthur Jafa (AJ) about this persistent tendency of his to pull dancing and death into “affective proximity.” The particular focus of our conversation quickly became Storyboard P's performance in Kahlil Joseph's video for Flying Lotus's “Until the Quiet Comes,” in which the dancer's persona—who seems to have been killed in a shooting in Los Angeles's Nickerson Gardens housing project—suddenly rises from the pavement and floats down the sidewalk and into a waiting car (fig. 4). On full display in this sequence is Storyboard P's inimitable style of flexing, often labeled “robotic” by dance critics but which he himself describes as “mutant.” (More about which later.) AJ, who introduced Storyboard P (Saalim Muslim) to Kahlil Joseph, has long been a fan of the dancer, and his fascination with “Story's” bendy, “broken” body in motion manifests in several of Jafa's works, including Love Is the Message and Dreams are colder than Death (2013). “He's amazing,” says AJ—and this is no mere platitude, for “amazing,” along with “mesmerizing” and “transfixing,” are for him the highest of compliments. Being an LA native with relatives who once inhabited this infamous housing project, I make a dark-humorous suggestion that someone with Storyboard P's contortion skills could dodge bullets in Nickerson Gardens. His lightning-fast response—“Well, not quite”—refers to a pivotal scene in the film wherein Storyboard's character, indeed shot dead but undead and dancing, dramatically rips off his shirt to reveal the bullet hole in his chest (fig. 5). It is a typically AJ answer: the dude is quick with a reminder of the not-quite-successful triumph over death. As noted above, his penchant for yoking pleasure and horror is well established—and not only in Love Is the Message, for I am thinking also of Sharifa Walks (2015), a short film that features a beautiful young couple in love, holding hands, walking in stride over a slinky smooth Isley Brothers tune. It is a study in body language and small gestures, and although violence doesn't ever appear on screen, subtle shifts in posture and dynamic between the two as the film fades to black suggest that they do not meet a happy end.⁶

This essay extends a line of thinking developed in that conversation with Jafa about uncanny perimortem movement in his work. The myriad and intertwined reflections on black aesthetics, black life, and black death offered up by Jafa (and Storyboard P) frame the following speculations about whether and how “revenant motion” might name a genre (à la Sylvia Wynter) of the perennial danse macabre, which often figures Death dancing among the living as a reminder to too-worldly humans of its ever-presence and equalizing power. The current formulation, however, refuses the universalizing thrust of this aesthetic trope by forwarding Storyboard P's (re)animated performances as already imbued with a hyperawareness of mortality and the fragility of black life and foregrounding the melancholy entanglements of horror and pleasure Jafa posits as particular (and peculiar) to blackness. Thinking about dance as memento mori—that is, as moving (emotionally and kinetically fluid) with the dead—provides us with an occasion to deepen our study of the phenomenology of the black body and to consider the ontological attunements that shape black after-/other-/lives.

Moving Like Something out of My Dream: Storyboard P's Dancing-toward-Death

Jafa's fascination with Storyboard P's “impossible body” is widely shared. The Brooklyn-born dancer is perhaps the best-known practitioner of flex, a style of street dance famous for its “jarring feats of contortion, pantomime, and footwork that simulates levitation.”⁷ Though often described as robotic, Storyboard's idiosyncratic approach to flex is one that draws influences from many other forms, including ballet, break dancing, Memphis jookin, and LA krumping. Dismissing a few years of formal dance training at a neighborhood community center, Storyboard says that his technique comes mainly from “motherfuckers I'd see on the block.”⁸

Like many flex dancers, Storyboard P possesses a strong sense of visual literacy, an awareness of how his moving body will look on camera, and the vast majority of his routines are made to be recorded. He is widely hailed for his ability to make pictures with his body—hence the name “Storyboard” (the “P” is a holdover from an earlier moniker, “Professoar”)—and his mastery of a movement vocabulary that takes its cues from stop-motion animation.

The result is “mesmerizing,” according to critics, who call his dancing “mystical” and thrill to “his spooky power.” “He is a fantasy in the flesh,” marvels one.¹⁰ “The elliptical, undulating shapes he describes are usually accompanied by a wily grin that says he knows he's bewitching you and there's nothing you can do about it,” raves another.¹¹ The adjectives in circulation here are certainly testament to the hypnotic hold Storyboard P has on audiences, but they also hint that some discomfort may lurk behind the praise. At what point does the thrill unleashed by “spooky power” become downright unsettling?

There is much to read, for example, in the following assessment of the ways in which flex as a form, and Storyboard's contributions in particular, have “pushed street dancing in a darker, more mature direction.”¹²

There are several conclusions I want to draw from this brief summary, which to my mind establishes a “dark”—but also uncannily visceral—genealogy for flex dance. While the specter of death always looms large in profiles of street dancers from rough neighborhoods who manage to make good, the attention to disease and disability as formative elements in this history might organize novel ways of thinking about the phenomenology of the virtuous/broken, languorous/pained, graceful/hobbled, twitchy, glitchy body that figures so prominently in Storyboard's performances.¹⁴ It's also worth noting here that the comments about becoming the scariest creature at the dance battle give us a possible backstory for Story's sense of his “mutant” form—one that is rooted in the becoming of a posthuman body that moves like something out of a dream (or a nightmare). So while I appreciate the persistent tendency to associate flex's uncanny motion with (mechanical) glitch, I feel that there is equal probability that Story's connection to animation is a quite fleshy one (fig. 6).

And if we allow that stop-motion animation is all about becoming caricature, creature, and cartoon, what does it mean to pursue an art form whose apex is inhuman motion? I ask the question as a means to refute the suggestion that Storyboard's approach to dance is in any way “cathartic,” and I believe that his own statements about the creative process belie this interpretation. What comes across in his assertion that dance is “never gonna come from a good feeling” is the suffering, physical and otherwise, that goes into his process. It's also made clear elsewhere in the interview, where Story details his methods for “developing his core strength and deepening his tolerance for pain”: “ ‘I'll sit somewhere for hours, cutting off and restoring oxygen to different muscles in my body, to the point where I'm actually giving myself charley horses,’ he said. He sent a string of tiny, violent pulsations down his arm and explained, ‘Doing animation, you're just cramping and uncramping.’ ”¹⁵ Story's purposeful management of cramping and uncramping his muscles might seem to rehearse well-worn and perhaps overstated connections between pain and artmaking, but I want to bring his approach to animation within a line of thinking about the (black) body's holding tension and trauma. To my mind this aesthetic play involving violent muscular tension extends and remixes Fanon's famous reading of the violent muscle spasms of the colonized.¹⁶

I also think it important to interrupt a narrative logic that presents dance as a vehicle for the triumph of true talent over death and life's circumstances. Here catharsis is persistently posited as a kind of release from the trouble that dogs young black creatives. Even though he proudly embraces his status as something of an outsider within the communities in which he grew up, the way Story tells it, his formation as an artist was always inextricably tied, for better or worse, to the neighborhood and the people who lived in it. “That was the 90s in Brooklyn,” he says to (what I imagine is) a wide-eyed interviewer. “It was a jungle.”

No, it's not lost on me that the dodging of bullets recurs here—this time as the flight from street life in order to seek refuge in an artsy one. It's complicated, but the artistic trajectory that Storyboard embodies would only be mistakenly described in terms of a liveliness that beats back black death.

Instead, we might think about Story P's formation as a dancer and aesthetic creator as inextricably linked to what Abdul R. JanMohamed calls a black being-toward-death. The central question of his weighty work is, What happens to the “life” of a subject who grows up under the threat of death, a threat that is constant yet unpredictable?¹⁸ My question then becomes, How might we conceptualize Storyboard P as someone who is, as are we all, dancing under the threat of death, and in the wake of those who didn't make it? There is a telling moment in the short film Everything Is Dance where Storyboard reflects on the location of its photo shoot—a Brooklyn playground where he used to hang out (fig. 7). “I think about the neighborhood before I dance,” he says. “Especially on the basketball court, I thought about a lot of friends I saw die right there on the same basketball court.”¹⁹ The comment brings me back to the beginning of this reflection and to the notion of dancing in spaces where somebody has died, whether it be the Brooklyn playground he mentions in the film or Nickerson Gardens, where he dances in Until the Quiet Comes. It could be the park or parking lot, roller rink, club, or backyard where somebody died last week, last year, or ten years ago. Story's comment strikes me as full of a feeling that is not a simple one to describe, but I want to make room to frame his dancing on the playground as less triumphant than ambivalent with respect to death; the return to the space may be less about survival than séance. I take a special interest, then, in the fact that Storyboard P attempts to incorporate “bygone ways of moving” in his dance routines and that he calls these moments of resurrection séances.²⁰ The practice calls attention to the ways in which we all embody dead dancers, be it our favorite uncles, Michael Jackson, or a kid from the neighborhood (shout out to the Shizz). When we “do somebody's move,” we presence the dead, and sometimes—wholly unbeknownst to us—we eulogize those who dance with us now and won't be here the next time we gather.

Against “Human” Aesthetics: Dance at Death's Threshold

Countless iterations of the danse macabre, or “dance with death,” have appeared in and as art objects—including texts, wall paintings, woodcuts and transi tombs—since its primary flourishing in the late medieval period. It is unsurprising, then, that this centuries-old imagery assumes numerous and diverse forms; what is perhaps surprising is how relatively stable interpretations of dancing with death have been over time. Medieval art historian Sophie Oosterwijk explains, “Modern viewers may find it hard to grasp the character of the Danse as it is almost impossible to define what the Danse Macabre is really supposed to be. Its meaning is clear, however: Death comes to us all, irrespective of age or rank. In order to convey this message the Danse combined different metaphors and formats almost from the start, and continued to develop in a variety of ways.”²¹ The term itself has been variously translated as “dance of or with Death” (singular, personified), or “dance with the dead” (in which several figures appear, some living and some dead, who may be mirror images of each other). Danse macabre is generally read as a morality tale or allegory, a reminder of the ever-presence of death, and its power to act as the equalizer of us all. Often presented as a series of dialogues between Death and the death-bound of all stations, its primary aim is to illustrate that kings and queens, burghers, beggars, popes, and children must abide when summoned. One of the earliest examples of the danse macabre was painted as a series of murals on the walls of Paris's Cimetière des Innocents in 1424–25 and later preserved in a set of woodcuts by Guyot Marchant first printed in 1486 and reprinted many times since (fig. 8).

In these dialogues, Death is often personified and speaks to humans in an unsparing tone. Exemplary in this regard is the text from the Brass of John Rudyng, in which Death warns, “Indeed, in the end all flesh shall feel my furies. I carry terrible spears, I come down upon humans with the bite of death. Sparing neither the common folk nor the master, I drag behind me every single thing.”²² The moral lesson of the danse macabre is here addressed to the hapless victim as well as the terrified audience. While this function of the danse macabre as memento mori is well-known, interpretations of these scenes tend to rely on a facile humanism that either overstates the universality of death or assumes a universal vulnerability to it. Such propensity to take for granted a universal subject of the discourse with death is evident in statements that assert, for example, that danse macabre presents “an image of what the future holds for any human.”²³ I've emphasized the word human in the preceding citations because my thinking on this point is profoundly shaped by Sylvia Wynter's problematizing of “the human”—which she figures as “Man₁”—as the supposed universal subject of philosophy.

In “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes toward a Deciphering Practice,” Wynter turns her attention to how lopsided notions of “human nature” and “human experience” manifest in our practices of artmaking and deciphering. Arguing that we must find new modes for reading visual culture—film in this case—she zeroes in on the question “What does Aesthetics do?”: “Because it is clearly the very condition of existence of all human ‘forms of life,’ and of the role-allocating and ‘cohering principles’ aggregative of their modes of conspecific ultra-sociality, the category of the aesthetic is the determinant. . . of the ensemble of collective behaviors by means of which each human order effects its autopoeisis as a living, self-organizing (i.e. cybernetic) system.”²⁴ Thirty years after Wynter's intervention, we are still wrestling with her reflections on how aesthetics shapes and replicates our world. In “Four Theses on Aesthetics,” Rizvana Bradley and Denise Ferreira da Silva build on these formulations as they pinpoint the ways in which blackness—as “ontological dissonance” and “immanent declension”—haunts the figure of “Man.”

To call out the ways in which the particular experience of black death haunts the universalizing tropes of the danse macabre is perhaps to haunt the notion of haunting. By naming revenant motion a genre of danse macabre, I mean to indicate my interest in thinking about practices and performances of dancing with and for the dead in ways that break with the notion of a transparent universal subject—in this case, homo aestheticus.

Armed with this theoretical perspective, I take a special interest in the version of danse macabre that stages a conversation between the “Three Living and the Three Dead,” in which the latter address the former: “As you are, so we once were; as we are now, so shall you be.”²⁶ According to Oosterwijk, through this address to “You who are alive,” the audience for these texts “becomes directly involved and reminded even more vividly of their own mortality: they could be summoned next to join Death's dance.”²⁷ As sketched in the section above, the aesthetic worlds created by flex dancers such as Storyboard P belies a too-rigid separation between the living and the dead, for in many cases the “you who are alive” know all too well that they could be next. Indeed, the permeability of life and death is a principle that can be said to structure the approach to this particular dance aesthetic in the first place, given the preponderance of ghostly and creaturely revenants in the pantheon of flex pantomime. It's also worth mentioning how the practiced impersonating—if that's an apt word—of a corpse during a dance routine by pretending not to breathe leans into the liminal spaces between life and death.²⁸ The intimacies of death and dance so evident in flex choreography—with its bizarre contortion and uncanny animation, its performance of life (and death) in suspension—are precisely what prompt me to consider its overlap with danse macabre.

Curiously, though, dancing as an actual fleshy, aesthetic practice or performance is rarely addressed in the scholarship on danse macabre. As Oosterwijk notes in her analysis of an imago mortis woodcut from Hartmann Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), danse macabre is largely considered a metaphor for the dialogue between the living and dead and usually involves no reference to actual dancing: “In fact, many examples of the Danse Macabre show anything but a dance, in spite of what the term suggests: the elements of music and dancing are often absent or at best underplayed. Most textual examples consist instead of a dialogue between the living and Death, with little or no reference to dancing.”²⁹ What, I wonder, are the ramifications of thinking dance solely as metaphor? More often than not, this abstraction oversees the collapse of “dance” into “life.” Medievalists Frances Eustace and Pamela M. King present a case in point as they note that within the texts they study “dancing is used as a metaphor to epitomise the essence of life and to emphasise the contrast between vitality and mortality.”³⁰ What emerges in this dance-versus-death formulation is again the notion of dance as an unquestioned symbol of vitality, but also worth noting is that when movement and dance drop out of our attempt to decipher encounters with death, also left hanging is the question of what a dialogue between the living and the dead can be when realized in the flesh.

Intriguing, then, is the contention by medieval art historian Elina Gertsman that danse macabre was in some ways meant to be performed. Her phenomenological reading of viewers’ encounters with danse macabre posits it as potentially a public spectacle, a graveyard procession of the death-bound for all the city to see. The dance of death in Lübeck in particular, she suggests, could be staged as “something of a morality play performed outdoors, against the backdrop of city streets.”³¹ Elsewhere she mentions that danse macabre's dialogic verse lends itself to reading aloud as in a play or performance, and her commentary on the rise of mendicant preachers in the fifteenth century leads to a convincing interpretation of danse macabre as a kind of illustrated sermon.

Deciphering the dance of death as dance performance proves a more complex endeavor, though, due perhaps to the ambiguous nature of dancing in the medieval period. “In the Middle Ages,” Gertsman writes, “dancing was understood to communicate multivalent meanings, many of which were connected with death; the two eventually became so closely associated that one frequently suggested the other.”³² This reading introduces the rather appealing idea of danse macabre as a pictorial response to the act of passing away, an attempt to capture the ephemeral moment of death. Notably this interpretation points up the “sense of liminality and tension” in dance's representation as death, and I am intrigued by its ultimate claim that dance “plays the role of threshold in the danse macabre as it fundamentally separates the world of the dead from the world of those who are about to die.”³³ On this point Gertsman argues that “in the medieval danse macabre, dancing in fact stands for death, as one ambiguous value stands for another. In the Dance of Death, dancing is not only figured as the complete opposite of death, but also as its displacement and its signifier.”³⁴ This focus on the intimacy of dance and death is most welcome, for it manages to break the dance-versus-death binary, but again we see dance collapse, this time into death. I want to linger a minute with the possibility of dance as threshold by carefully considering the figure of the dancing undead.

Gertsman persistently scrutinizes gesture in danse macabre imagery, paying particularly close attention to the exaggerated motion of the dancing skeletons and the stuck reluctance of the summoned.³⁵ In stark contrast with the stillness of the living and still-dying, she notes, the skeletons (who here represent death), “move dramatically, raising their legs, swinging their arms, and turning their heads; the skulls wear constantly changing expressions.”³⁶ “The marked difference between the motionless living and the aggressively moving figures of Death forces upon the viewer the following question: What does death deprive us of? What is it that death takes away, and what does it leave behind? Of primary importance, of course, is bodily animation: death confronts us with an immobile, silent body.”³⁷ The description of the skeleton's dance, all contorted limbs and disquieting mobility, while the stilled world of the living looks on reminds me of the Storyboard P performance in Until the Quiet Comes described at the outset of this essay. This is truly dancing at the threshold, for the dancer is lively but not living—and I'm never sure whether we should consider him dead or undead, though the coexistence of both possibilities continues to intrigue me.³⁸ His undead dancing limns the world in ways that recall other afro-diasporic performances that draw death and dance into proximity such as funerary rites and spirit possession. Assuming the revenant motion of those figured as dead, Storyboard P forwards an inhuman aesthetic that subverts universalizing representations of mortality. To my mind, this dance practice instantiates what Wynter calls “performative acts of counter-meaning” that challenge the “human” imaginary of the present cultural order (fig. 9).³⁹

What would it mean, then, to consider danse macabre not in terms of an abstract universal but as an actual fleshy encounter of the living and the dead or undead (ghosts, creatures, zombies)—even if mimed in dance battles? To put it another way, how might our thinking about the dancing lives of the undead reorient our study toward unthought modes of black sociality and aesthetics? My thinking around the fantastic—literally—performance of Storyboard P suggests we might seriously consider the other(wise)worlds opened through revenant motion, by the reanimated black dead. Taken together, these questions pose important challenges to the assertion that dance is always already a symbol of vitality, or that dance is opposed to death—as Fred Moten would say—“in some simple-ass way.”⁴⁰

Corpse Pose: #BlackLivesMatter and the Phenomenology of Mourning

In “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,” a piercing existential reflection written in the aftermath of the 2015 assassination of nine black people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Claudia Rankine describes the way in which our daily lives—indeed, the very daily-ness of our lives—is shaped by our being-with-corpses. “We live in a country,” she writes, “where Americans assimilate corpses in their daily comings and goings. Dead blacks are a part of normal life here. Dying in ship hulls, tossed into the Atlantic, hanging from trees, beaten, shot in churches, gunned down by the police, or warehoused in prisons: historically, there is no quotidian without the enslaved, chained, or dead black body to gaze upon or hear about or to position a self against.”⁴¹ It is our awareness of this deep-rooted practice of living with corpses, their ubiquity as b(l)ackground to “normal” life, that undergirds the metastasis of new grief into a sort of ambient dread that organizes our everyday.

Rankine soberly reports that two of only three survivors of the Charleston shooting—a black woman and her five-year-old granddaughter—escaped death by acting as if they were already dead. Here she highlights a fact that is not ironic but axiomatic: the condition of possibility for their survival was their posing as corpses. For me, Rankine's comment brings into focus the macabre experience of performing dead while waiting for the gunman to pass, the solidarity—if that's the right word—with the death-bound others in the room, the proximity of the dying and newly corpsed. The sensory environment, saturated with sound and smell. The deliberate and desperate stilling of breath and suspension of gesture that must characterize the attempt to be one with the killed.

There is much to read in Rankine's insistence that

If Rankine's lengthy catalog of the situations in which daily can turn deadly underscores the importance of thinking about “living while black” as a type of knowledge, it also asks us to recognize how and where this knowledge manifests. She reminds us that the horror here is phenomenological; it suffuses the everyday with a “strain of knowing” that unsettles how we inhabit our bodies and move through space.

Or is it our body? I think it worth considering whether the racial phenomena that shape Rankine's sense of living while black posits a sort of a collective and yet single and fungible black body of which our own bodies are but local iterations. “The Charleston murders alerted us to the reality,” Rankine notes, “that a system so steeped in antiblack racism means that on any given day it can be open season on any black person—old or young, man, woman or child.”⁴⁴ The observation highlights the ways in which black being-with-corpses presses upon us the knowledge of a shared or interchangeable fate. This comment regarding “open season,” for example, calls to my mind the haunting way in which Ahmaud Arbery was hunted; the pursuit we watch on grainy video reinforces the knowledge of our own killability. As Ahmaud darts and dodges, his body contorting with the effort of running for his life, it is my breath that quickens and upon my flesh that the goosebumps rise. I am left to wonder about the ways in which the illbient vibration of our witnessing activates what Hortense Spillers calls a “flesh memory” or draws on what Elizabeth Alexander calls “the history that our bodies know.”⁴⁵

Alexander begins her 1994 essay “Can You Be BLACK and Look at This?” searching for language to aptly describe the sense of affiliation and abjection experienced by black people upon witnessing gratuitous violence inflicted on a black body in pain. The this to which the title refers is the videotaped beating of Rodney King by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department, an incident that drives the subsequent reflection on “how bodily experience, both individually experienced bodily trauma and collective cultural trauma, comes to reside in the flesh as forms of memory reactivated and articulated at moments of collective spectatorship.”⁴⁶ At the core of Alexander's essay is her reading of scenes of violence—from King to Frederick Douglass's Aunt Hester to Emmett Till—in order to demonstrate how “corporeal images of terror suggest that ‘experience’ can be taken into the body via witnessing and recorded in memory as knowledge.” “This knowledge,” she solemnly avers, “is necessary to one who believes ‘it would be my turn next.’ ”⁴⁷

Saidiya Hartman, a frequent interlocutor in Arthur Jafa's work, underscores some of Rankine's and Alexander's perceptions on the fungibility of fate in the film Dreams are colder than Death, wherein she describes how the constant threat of death structures black social life. “I know that at any moment my life could end because of an act of gratuitous violence. . . . That's one of the things I know. . . . Every year, two or three people in my world—they die, they disappear. I think that's part of the social existence of blackness, that intimacy with death.”⁴⁸ The intimacy with death that Hartman posits here—and although Hartman uses it quite casually, I will stress the word choice—is an important frame for understanding how I'm taking up questions of black ontology and phenomenology in this essay. The notion of intimacy with the dead—as opposed to say, alignment with the dead, or defense of the dead—has its sensual, and even macabre resonances.⁴⁹ This intimacy, constructed as a sensory knowledge with important ethical and even aesthetic orientations, shapes the present attempt to think with Rankine toward a black ontology and phenomenology of mourning.

Important affective resonances and political reverberations attend this topic, as folks take to the streets to protest, to mourn—and yes, to dance—in order to manifest their insistence that black lives matter (fig. 10).⁵⁰ I take a special interest in the profusion of dance tributes, both elegiac and exuberant, choreographed and spontaneous, that have been occurring in our streets, as they enact a kind of mourning in motion that reinforces the notion, discussed above, that dance is not merely an occasion for catharsis or forgetting. They also underscore the existence of the body as a primary site for holding collective memory and generating the knowledge that we rely upon to werk things out.⁵¹ I would like to advance, though, an expanded notion of dancing with death, for it strikes me that the choreography of even the most everyday of protests concretizes the being-with-corpses or the performance with or as corpses outlined above. Because these streets—whose streets?—are sites of many a makeshift memorial; they also belong to the dead. In some ways, then, protest performances become séances where our gestures—hands up, don't shoot!—draw our bodies into intimate connection with victims of state violence and even revivify the dead. To the degree that it mimes the assaulted and the dead, the choreography of die-ins, in particular, injects ambivalent meaning into the familiar command to assume the position. While I believe the die-in as a protest gesture has its limits, I do want to think more carefully about what it means to impersonate—and then reanimate—a corpse. If by slipping into the bodies of corpses—isn't that the performance of a die-in?—protesters manifest their grief and grievance, are they enacting “scenes of resurrection” when they get back up after playing dead?⁵² When they declare “I am Eric Garner,” “I am Breonna Taylor,” “I am Tamir Rice,” can we interpret these as assertions of collective or interchangeable being-with-corpses that seek to reanimate the lost? In what ways does the recognition of our could-be-next-ness inform these macabre forms of social and sensual intimacy? These questions make plain my special concern with the ways in which the practice and performance of mourning center a shared social life with corpses. The point here is that the fraught debates over black social life and social death—even black social life in social death—might too easily dismiss the existence of the socially undead, revivified not just metaphorically (in memory) but via séance performances wherein the living assume the bodily posture and gesture of the dead.

Ever mindful of the social intimacy of the living and undead, I argue that the genre of protest performance that seeks to finish whatever gesture was interrupted by untimely death is exemplary of the uncanny animation that I dub revenant motion. Notable actions of this sort include “I Run with Ahmaud” meetups, where runners gather to complete the run that he did not; wearing hoodies and buying Skittles and iced tea as a means to grieve and protest the death of Trayvon Martin; and the numerous collective meditation sessions—can we call them “breathe-ins?”—for George Floyd (fig. 11).⁵³ I see a significance in these congregations and commitments to Run with Ahmaud, Cry for Tamir, and Breathe for George that indicates that these acts of moving with and for the dead are less an impersonation of someone else and more an acknowledgement of a fleshy body and being that connects us all. These movements for black lives certainly seek to revitalize the dead in the sense that they memorialize the lost, but the decided and collective action of protestors—taken up with full knowledge that any one of them could be the dead one (or “next”)—also organizes and deploys a determined being-with-corpses. “They tried to bury us” is the uncanny cry as their revenant motion carries them down main street.

To Alienate and Ravish: The Fleshy Aesth-Et(h)ics of the Abject Sublime

Jafa frequently refers to himself as an “undertaker.” While he never tells us exactly what that means, I want to suggest that we think seriously about it. Two things he does in proximity to this pronouncement clue us in as to why he adopts the label. One is to assert that he “doesn't do uplift,” a declaration that posits undertaking as against the prescriptive pursuit of black respectability or redemption.⁵⁴ The second is to tell a favorite tale about the origin of the West African tradition of the griot, who is charged with keeping the history and therefore ensuring the cultural survival of his community. According to the story, at least the way Jafa tells it, the griot is esteemed within the community but also ostracized because he (literally and figuratively) “feeds off the flesh of the people.”⁵⁵ I want to say that the undertaker moniker speaks to a strain in Jafa's work that is equal parts negrophilia and necrophilia; it manifests his twinned obsessions with horror and pleasure and revels in their inextricable intimacies. The worlds he creates are shot through with sensations both gruesome and exhilarating. The black sociality that emerges in and through his artwork is fraught. In what follows I attempt to track the ways in which Jafa's approach to artmaking—that is, to undertaking—rests on a certain idiosyncratic understanding of ontology, phenomenology, cosmology, and ethics that is synthesized into a theory of aesthetics he calls the abject sublime.

By defining himself as a creative artist and storyteller who feeds off the flesh of the people, Jafa locates his work within the griot tradition but also takes up—in very deliberate and deliberative ways—Hortense Spillers's theorization of the flesh. It is Spillers who is given pride of place as the first speaker in Jafa's film Dreams are colder than Death. Her opening reflection on what it means to be flesh is both delicious and devastating and establishes the mood and momentum for the rest of the documentary.⁵⁶ “We were available in the flesh to slave masters. In the flesh: immediate, hands-on. I can pluck your lil nappy head from wherever it is—bang! Don't care nothing ’bout who your mama and daddy is. And how many babies you got here—bang! . . . Bang! . . . That's flesh. Another word to explain it is empathy. The flesh gives empathy.”⁵⁷ Spillers's quote reverberates with unusual frankness about an insidious quality that attends blackness—the potential to be handled—or as she says, “plucked,” snatched up. Yet, as noted, flesh also inaugurates a line of thinking about our history of being handled that emphasizes collective care; it is this part of the formulation that dovetails with so much recent work on feeling with and for each other in the hold.⁵⁸

In his artist talks, Jafa repeatedly cites these Spillersian connections between flesh and empathy, referring to the experience of being chained together on slave ships as learning to live in one another's skins.⁵⁹ Jafa's understanding of the double sense of being handled shows up in Love Is the Message in his staging of the intimacy of violence and care. A joint in the film that best exemplifies what Jafa means to say about the perils and protections of being handled is the one in which the injured sprinter Derek Redmond, cradled by his father as he limps across the finish line at the Barcelona Olympics, cuts to Dajerria Becton, a teenager in a yellow bikini being thrown to the ground by Eric Casebolt, a McKinney, Texas police officer sent to break up a pool party (figures 12–13). While they elicit entirely different affective responses, each of these scenes makes manifest the haptic thrust of black fleshy existence.

The structure of these joints tells us much about Jafa's approach to assembling the images used to create his films; they also index extraordinary ruminations on black being, culture, sociality, and aesthetics.⁶⁰ When he invokes the notion of affective proximity to describe his process, Jafa is doing more than merely name a technique of assemblage; it is a way to announce a concern with the affects and atmospheres that attend the practice of making.⁶¹ The affective impact of films like Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death and Dreams are colder than Death owes much to Jafa's keen sense of atmosphere and array. What I want to emphasize is how his attention to the atmosphere and energy of objects and peoples—which he often does not differentiate—is situated within a larger body of thinking about the phenomenology of blackness.

In his most formal statement on black aesthetics, an essay titled “My Black Death,” Jafa writes, “The trauma provoked by the introduction of the black body into white spaces is profound.”⁶² Informally, one of his favorite talking points on aesthetic principles includes a tour of various “scenes of subjection” involving the insertion of “black objects” into “white spaces.” It is a discussion that moves fluidly, if idiosyncratically, in many directions—from exposition on how African artifacts were brought into European art canons to speculative readings of the classic science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). More recently, the black-object-thrown-into-the-white-world thesis has extended to personal reflection on how he himself navigates the white gallery spaces of the international art scene.⁶³ While he names this experience of thrownness into the world a trauma, it is one that he ultimately finds dynamic, for his theory holds that a radical, creative energy is unleashed whenever objects are alienated from their natal contexts. “In a way,” he notes, “you could almost say on a kind of phenomenological but also mythic level when African people find themselves on slave ships and the kind of sort of existential world-ending but world-making thing that happens when people are bonded to one another nonconsensually so to speak, the kind of possibilities that arise as a result of that is a kind of assemblage, you know.”⁶⁴ I want to foreground what I see as Jafa's minute and sensory attention to assemblies of the “nonconsensually bonded.” To my mind, they reflect a persistent concern with phenomenology and myth as they merge in these (primal) scenes of black artmaking and highlight the often overlooked significance of nonconsensual collective existence that surfaces in his art and in his understanding of blackness itself.

The concept of alienation in particular represents an intersection in Jafa's thinking about the phenomenology, ontology, and aesthetics of blackness. Generally a word with negative connotations, here it conjures the power and possibilities realized by captive Africans at the threshold between worlds and so represents a radical approach to creativity.⁶⁵ This notion resounds in a scene in “My Black Death”—which is something of an aesthetic manifesto—wherein Jafa depicts his coming-of-age as an artist in Mississippi, declaring that an early encounter with cinema sparked in him the desire to create art with the power to “alienate and ravish.”⁶⁶ The fleshy sensibilities, overt and subtle, that organize such an aspiration reflect Jafa's melancholic attachments to and abiding love for black people, their “arresting beauty and dense corporeal being.”⁶⁷

Jafa's reflections on blackness's dense corporeal being strike me as intimately connected to fleshy formulations of black being discussed earlier in this essay, particularly what Jafa defines, via Spillers, as empathy. I've been concerned throughout with working through different notions of what it means to “learn to live in one another's skin” and venture that this fleshy affective, nonconsensual existence might find its fullest actualization in the popular colloquial expression “my black ass.” The phrase is ubiquitous, and its uses are varied, so an “official” definition of the term is hard to pin down; one is hesitantly offered in a dictionary of African American slang with the all-caps caveat: “POTENTIALLY OFFENSIVE UNLESS USED BY AFRICAN AMERICANS”: “n., Self, when referring to an African American.” Cited uses include “1989: Do the Right Thing, film: ‘Sit your black ass down!’ ” and “1993: Menace II Society, film: ‘If it wasn't for him, my black ass would be dead by now.’ ”⁶⁸ But perhaps the most mainstream invocation of the term in recent years occurred around the time of the 2016 US presidential election. In a guest appearance on a late-night talk show, the actor Samuel L. Jackson firmly declared, “If that motherfucker becomes president, I'm moving my black ass to South Africa.”⁶⁹

It is an admittedly unorthodox approach to thinking about black phenomenology, but I believe the colloquialism fits nicely with the spirit of Jafa's work and dovetails with the notion of a collective and fungible “self” that conceptualizes the racial phenomena shaping our sense of living while black. It informs the dread, for example, of your black ass getting pulled over by police, meaning there is already within you an awareness of the precariousness of your situation. You understand that to some degree it is not your (individual) situation but linked to a history of possible outcomes that precede this moment. While it's hard to articulate properly,⁷⁰ I do want to offer an impression that my/your/her/their black ass is a collective thing that doesn't necessarily belong to you and isn't always employed as a purely negative concept, as in the examples above (my black ass going to jail). It is also used to delight (Kiss my black ass!) and humor (That's why I stay my black ass out the pool!).⁷¹ And to be very clear, rather than litigate whether this colloquial term is essentializing or totalizing—i.e., not all black people are afraid of water—I want to lean into its social life, understanding the ways in which folks use my black ass to mark important intersections between collective bodily experience, habit, and knowledge.

The twinned experience of dread and delight that structures Jafa's understanding of black life emerges in his theory of the abject sublime. “So the abject sublime to me is just basically a codification of this idea,” he says, “that inside of the black worldview, black being, the black continuum, it's impossible to completely separate out what's magnificent about it and what's miserable about it. Like, they're intrinsically bound up.”⁷² With the abject sublime Jafa requires us not only to reckon with but find new vocabulary to describe what is so “magnificent and miserable” about being black. Our deliberations also involve complex ethical concerns about re-presenting horror—particularly as intermingled with pleasure—that have long tormented scholars of black studies. Jafa is perpetually pressing our limits, forcing us to seriously consider what it means to embrace abject sublime modes of black sociality and to forward blackness as a critique of the proper, property, and propriety.

In what may be one of his most controversial statements, Jafa articulates some “dark, decadent” connections between horror and pleasure and describes his work as a mash-up of eroticism and catastrophe. That people—including himself—stop to stare at it is, at the end of the day, merely a kind of “rubbernecking.”

As the man said, he doesn't do uplift: “I'm not an activist,” he frequently reminds us. “I'm trying to embody the complexity of who we are.”⁷⁴ In principle and practice, Jafa embraces modes of black subjectivity and sociality that eschew what he posits as the poles of activism and pessimism. I will hasten to note that this fascination with blackness and horror is an argument against uplift but also against pure taste.⁷⁵ Here he leans into horror, emphasizing the most macabre sensibilities that were only latent in comments about his position as undertaker and “flesh-eater” within the community.

Significantly, both of these formulations center the vulnerable body. Body horror is a subgenre of horror that emphasizes violations of the human body, often depicting images of strange sex, mutation, decomposition, gratuitous violence, mutilation, and uncanny movement. The ways in which these regularly feature in Jafa's art underscore his keen perception of the forms of body horror that attend our black assedness. Tellingly, he often recounts that he was subconsciously moved to create Love Is the Message in response to the “tsunami” of videos depicting violence against black people posted to the internet in recent years. One video in particular, of the mother with her terrorized kids—“It broke me,” he admits. Although the monstrous product of his assemblage was not initially intended for an audience, he felt compelled to share it later. “It seems in hindsight, you know, after I put it together, that it was my attempt to struggle with this wave of evidence, video evidence of what black people have been saying since time immemorial. That people don't treat us nice, you know what I mean, and that when we say it, they say we're tripping.”⁷⁶ Yet for all of the horror, what I've attempted to outline in these ruminations on flesh, feeling, mourning, and collective being is how this work furthers a sense of blackness that simply transfixes. I want to say that it has to do with Jafa's handling of the black body. If, as he asserts, Love Is the Message is art in the aftermath of a kind of “wreck” that we are living through, Jafa is indeed the skilled undertaker who diligently cares for our corpse. There is also within him a bit of the mad scientist, who scavenges body parts at the site of the wreck, gleefully stitches the corpse together, and electrifies it into revenant life.

Notes

Works Cited