Abstract

This essay presents a theory of con-artistry as a queer practice of Black joy that claims relational and material abundance in the face of tropes of deviance and conditions of austerity. Drawing on auto-theory and describes how media-making can foment Black pleasure and institutional critique, it includes a discussion of the author's 2020 film Everyday Black Matter as a documentation of radical Black gathering in Richmond, Virginia. The film centers nuanced conversations about Black joy as a critical practice and the subversive efforts some are willing to undergo to secure it. Inspired by their theories of aesthetics, deviance, and femme worldmaking, the author collaborated with Jillian Hernandez, whose contribution “Ca$h App Connectivities” is included in this issue, to develop a conversation that centers everyday Black matter and extended well beyond the pages of this journal.

Audacious Gathering #1

Starting with my Auntie's house as the holiday after-party spot where traditional holidays are remixed, this essay centers the worldmaking in audacious and nonnormative Black queer gathering. Auntie's house, among its many functions, is the place where we heat up leftovers and the cousins light up in the garage—that is, after sending the youngest to the store to get the must-have late-night snacks and the grown folks go to bed after too much spiked sorrel. We laugh loud enough that the whole house shakes. It has not just become tradition; it is how we heal from the previous year of being Black in America. It is ritual. It is what bell hooks called a homeplace, a site of resistance and refuge.1 And its sounds, visuals, and vibes must be archived as such.

Specifically, the garage at my Auntie's house has become the designated space for the deviants to gather within the good Christian home that she has established for us all these years. Downstairs from the main living space, down a small hall straight past the laundry room doors that have been replaced with an old curtain, is the entrance to the split-level home. As soon as you walk in you must immediately go left or right. Figuring out the easiest way around the car is always unknown, as this route depends on who parked the car last inside the garage. After contorting yourself around its corners, you'll find a large table that my godbrother (Black folks’ way of saying queer chosen brother) has set up. This table is the center of the hang spot, where beats are made, joints are rolled and smoked, and most importantly, where we dialogue in ways that supersede our familial roles and obligations to one another. We talk shit in this radical space amid the hyper-rigid decorum of a Jamaican household.

When I'm home, Aunty rarely joins us in the garage. In one of our regular phone conversations, upon sharing my desire to discuss this space, she states,

That's his [her son/my godbrother] space. You know what it is? He started smoking weed! And I don't want him out in the street. I don't want him at other people's houses. I don't want him smoking in the car. I want him to have a safe space.

It is definitely his chill spot. And it's comfortable for me. It's not like I never smoke weed. . . . It does not bother me. I helped him create the space!

But my safe space is my mind. I need to know in my mind that my child is okay.2

Kelon takes the phone and clarifies a few things:

My garage brings me joy, peace, and relaxation. My garage used to be like everybody else's: a place for the cars! Recently, I've turned it into my space, my zone to just unwind after a long day, roll a piece and let my problems disappear. I've rolled up, made music [from producing to writing songs], planned trips, done makeup, and so much more! But one thing I love in my garage is the freedom I have to be unapologetically myself, and just getting to vibe. Whether it's by myself or with friends/family. I have my village: my born family and my chosen family and they're so amazing! Hanging with them in my garage feels like a moment to remember every time! We don't have to dwell on our days—we can release the frustrations and move past it.3

All three of us have found joy and pleasure in the space that Kelon has established. So many parts of his identity are expressed in the garage. That standing invitation for “others” to join has influenced us all.

Audacious Gathering #2

On any given school night during my childhood, in the white suburban Connecticut town I grew up in, I'm in my room reviewing class notes for a quiz and thinking about what I'm going to wear to the upcoming school function. My mother comes into the doorway of my room, knocks at the door, and says, “Put ya shoes on and come take a ride with me.”

I don't ask where we're going until we're in the car, which normally has expired tags but is luxurious nonetheless. Sometimes these “quick rides” turn into adventures that may start as grocery shopping and then evolve into a shopping spree—hitting multiple stores, funded by magic. An occasional male friend, often so enchanted by my mother's charm, has no qualms financing our adventures, and she never hesitates to ask. Once we got the coins, “for groceries” or “school supplies,” there is no telling where we'd go next. This was a school night with my mother.

When the rent was due, my mother and I went shopping. We'd come home, sit on the floor in my bedroom, and unpack bags of new outfits for school while we stayed up late watching talk shows—she'd translate the drama so I could understand. These moments are a part of my everyday Black matter: the events that colored my childhood under my mother's care and protection.

The garage at Auntie's house is a surplus space, where a surplus population whose joy and rest are often stolen by the systemic injustices on the outside can go and just be, without interruption.4 The shopping adventures with my late mother are expressions of the abundant access that she provided to me and my sister during my formative years, one that enabled me to experience my body in a future that was not yet here.5 This is how my mother showed care for me in ways that became ritualistic and, like Auntie's garage, provided temporary breaks from all of the things that interrupted our lives, like housing insecurity, homophobia, and joblessness. Both serve as critical interruptions to the catastrophic effects of white time: a manufactured sense of urgency imposed by white supremacy that manifests in rigidity, perfectionism, and capitalist-defined notions of productivity that take up so much Black time.6 As such, remembering these breaks offers an embodied knowledge of what Cathy J. Cohen calls “a mobilized politics of deviance.”7

In this autoethnographic account and the discussion of my 2020 film Everyday Black Matter to follow, I remember the joyful gatherings in everyday Black life, often orchestrated by my maternal line through many years of care in taking and holding space for me (fig. 1). Through these stories, I understand the ways Black women and femmes’ everyday practices of trickery, scamming, and alternative gathering undermine racial and gendered structures of oppression. These strategies made it possible for us to take agency over our joy, pleasure, thriving, and survival through the “catastrophic continuities” of anti-Blackness.8 This is a practice I call con-artistry.9

Expanding on Black queer practices through con-artistry, the critical genealogy of this work is inspired by Ellen and William Craft, two enslaved Black persons from Macon, Georgia, who escaped in 1848 and remained on the run before ultimately settling in London around 1850.10 A lavish scam, their escape was a radical performance by Ellen, a light-skinned Black woman who used bodily contortions, a masterful manipulation of her experience of gender and ableness, to appear as a white male slave owner with a broken arm traveling with this enslaved African American male (William Craft).11 The first time I read Ellen and William's story, I immediately thought about the maternal line in my own family network, where there has always been a reinterpretation of the rule of law and the gender binary in order to renegotiate our survival.12 Ellen and William's legacy gives recognition to lived experiences like mine that are often silenced and suppressed and yet foundational to the fugitive praxis of Black life, wherein the pursuit of freedom means stealing one's body back from the state.13

Con-artistry theory offers a framework for mapping the connection between deviant practice, defiant behavior, and political resistance in the mundane experiences that sustain Black and other minoritized people “whose everyday life decisions challenge, or at least counter, the basic normative assumptions of a society intent on protecting structural and social inequalities under the guise of some normal and natural order to life.”14 Informed by the women who raised me and did everything possible to clear the debris from my path, I argue con-artistry is interested in the attainment of pleasure, material (e.g., brand-name clothes, bills paid) and often ephemeral, these acts of abundance are orchestrated to combat white supremacist heteropatriarchal oppressions of Black life.

My mother, a primary interlocutor in this theory, was always certain that we needed joy here and now. Con-artistry foments and recognizes knowledge production from the Black quotidian and how tending to these archives bridge scholarship created in the academy with scholarship created in everyday Black life—whether it be the fugitive performance of Ellen Craft or the scamming that my mother did to compensate for the system failing Black people. Audacious gatherings function as case studies, illuminating how con-artistry posits a subversive take on circumventing academic hierarchies. Rather than understanding theory in a traditional, linear fashion (one reads theory and then applies said theory to everyday life), I embrace the uneven, discursive temporality of con-artistry, contending that its embodied engagements write, speak, and practice the theory itself. A con-artistry framework asks, What is the scholarly commitment to provide joy and pleasure by any means necessary? How could we approach an archive that includes these kinds of deviant performances in Black cultural production to express something more about Black queer quotidian experiences? How could we do this kind of Black study, everyday?

For me, being a young, Black, queer, first-generation emerging scholar in the academy is already an answer to these questions. I am here, theorizing legacies of Black deviance as the cultivation of aesthetics, affect, and temporal expansiveness that simulate or tangibly realize abundance.15 I hold the ability to enact this theory in my professional and personal life not solely as a survival praxis but also one of/for pleasure—for example, through gathering: with Black people, for Black people, and by firmly centering on communal creative production and daily, shared expressions of joy and subversive world-building (fig. 2).

Everyday Black Matter (Audacious Gathering #3)

I return con-artistry theory to practice through Everyday Black Matter, a film I wrote and directed in Richmond, Virginia, in 2020. Rather than remaining within the confines of the academy, I wanted my Black feminist autoethnography and multidimensional media-arts analysis connected to the Black cultural production that was (literally) moving through the streets of Richmond, the former capital of the confederacy and an epicenter of a pivotal dialogue about monuments that paid homage to historical white trash, which have since come down. Creating this film while Black people were also being disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 was about centering something that I felt was also critical in that moment: the joyful Black gathering that I have experienced in Richmond (fig. 3). While cameras from PBS and 60 Minutes were descending upon our town, I decided to collaborate to create an alternative media archive. This was to make sure that Black joy was part of the story of 2020.

After three years since its official debut at the Afrikana Film Festival in 2020 in Richmond, I am still in awe that we—every Black, queer, trans+ Richmond-based or Richmond-loving artist who had a hand on this piece—were able to pull it off. The film was an important media contribution to the archive of the catastrophic 2020. While my collaborator and comrade Jillian Hernandez's text for this journal issue provides a close reading of the completed film, I include Everyday Black Matter's production, what took place behind the camera, among the audacious gatherings of con-artistry.16 The production and dissemination of Everyday Black Matter is a product of the creative tricks undertaken by my collaborators and I, showing how Black people create worlds by working within and pushing beyond the constraints of institutional support to make a way out of no way. For one, it was pivotal in the production of the film that the community I know and love be able to express themselves on their own terms. This speaks to the conflict inherent in making a piece that embraces a critical but often unheard positionality of Black queer community while not being swayed by the funding institution to portray the film's interlocutors—the gurls—through the gaze of respectability. Instead, the film shows Black folks gathering in spaces that reflect home and having conversations about Black identity on their own terms.

Much of the narrative that turned into Everyday Black Matter was built from curating episodes of the podcast Black Matter I created as an ongoing oral history project to bridge the theory I encountered in the academy with theorists and knowledge producers outside it who were equally instrumental to my work.17 From local radio host Chelsea LeMore (@ChelsealeMore) to Museum of Black Joy founder Andrea Walls (@urbanarchivist), I hosted diverse Black artist scholars for critical kikis about their creative process. The film builds from this accessible way of knowing Black life that does not separate our stories from theory. As such, the film is set in other spaces where critical conversations happen, places like Auntie's house and Black-owned beauty salons and barbershops (figs. 4–6). Once there, I use my on-screen presence to repeatedly break the fourth wall, reminding audiences that compensation is owed for access to these conversations and spaces. That is particularly true in Richmond, where the everyday lives of Black people are constantly interrupted and fucked with by institutions that don't always acknowledge our cultural contributions in tangible ways, while the city's gentrification erases emergent Black cultures. Thus, scamming is embedded in every scene, from the unsanctioned location shooting and transactional framing to the wayward movement of dancing Black bodies—because that is often how we get shit done for us—in ways that expedite resources to care for folks who need coins right now (fig. 7).

The film's production bypasses the respectable and oppressive power structures that are often tethered to institutional supports of minoritized communities in the form of portraying or asking us to perform and recite Black trauma and pain for a coin or an “approval” on a grant stipend that comes with several restrictions. During a time where so much media attention, specifically on Richmond, was about white supremacist outbursts, death, and trauma, making a piece like this emphasized the importance of centering audacious gathering.18 It was critical to show, as Enjoli Moon remarked of the film, “Black people powerfully taking up space in the exploration of Black joy and the multidimensional experience of Black personhood.”19 The production of Every Day Black Matter equally beams on Black Richmond in ways that centers a Black gaze on joy practice as part of the Black Lives Matter archive and narrative.20

In this work, I use critical storytelling and media-making to center how some of us live and create alternative worlds that prioritize queer Black joy practices and reimagine how we remember acts of resistance and refusal orchestrated by Black and indigenous communities in the past. Those acts of deviance reverberate in the present and future, including in my own life and work.21 Con-artistry as Black joy remembers and draws creative scholarship from the radical imaginaries of the deviant.

Notes

2

Aunty Charron, pers. comm., September 2023.

3

Kelon, pers. comm., September 2023.

5

I refer here to queer futurity as articulated by José Esteban Muñoz in his 2009 text Cruising Utopia.

8

liquid blackness Issue 8.2 CFP—‘Catastrophe (a black gathering),’” The liquid blackness Project (website), last modified February 23, 2023, https://liquidblackness.com/news/liquid-blackness-issue-82-cfp-catastrophe-a-black-gathering.

9

My larger project also traces con artistry via ethnography, history, and readings of popular culture performances such as JoAnne the Scammer.

11

My use of “contort” here is in dialog with Chapman, “Limbologics.” 

12

As discussed by Christina Sharpe in the 2023 book Ordinary Notes.

13

Invoking Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's concept of fugitivity from The Undercommons.

17

Chaz Antoine (host), Black Matter (podcast), 2019–2022, last updated November 21, 2022, https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/black-matter/id1493447713.

18

liquid blackness Issue 8.2 CFP.”

19

Enjoli Moon, creator of Afrikana Film Festival in RVA, quoted in Everyday Black Matter: Film Syllabus, 8.

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This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).