4.4: Opportunities and Possibilities

Black Studies Concerns of Liberation 

We might end by observing a few case studies and applications that perform complementary abolitionist and dark sousveillance in efforts to realize Black Studies concerns of liberation. To aid this final inquiry, we return to Browne’s theorization: “Dark sousveillance is also a reading praxis for examining surveillance that allows for a questioning of how certain surveillance technologies installed during slavery to monitor and track blackness as property…anticipate the contemporary surveillance of racialized subjects, and it also provides a way to frame how the contemporary surveillance of the racial body might be contended with.”[1]

Browne helps us to think through and imagine otherwise possibilities of performing or realizing liberation that extends our definition of negation, dispossession, and fugitivity. We learn through Gilmore that freedom is a place and that bodies are small territories. This knowledge combined with ideas of dispossession, negation, and fugitivity presented by Moten, Hartman, and Jacobs, respectfully, helps us to render a working ideation of Browne’s theory of dark sousvillience as a means of performing Black fugitivity: anti-surveillience, countersurvillience, and freedom practices which “plots imaginaries that are oppositional and that are hopeful for another way of being.”[2] Abolitionist praxis of liberation become ways that counter, subvert, and undermine Euro practices that objectify, oppress, and seek to dehumanize Black ontology and epistemologies.

Here, we examine historical and contemporary ways of realizing and performing abolition through Black fugitivity and modes of liberation that imagine otherwise ways of being despite carceral or oppressive systems.

Critiquing the Racialized ‘Prison Fix’: A Black Geographic Dark Sousveillance of the Prison Industrial Complex

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Author and Abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore lecturing on Prison Abolition at UC Merced, 2014. (CC BY; Tanya Boza via Flickr)

Our first turn is to Gilmore’s Golden Gulag, where Gilmore provides a genealogy and historic overview of the socio-political-economical-racial systems that have surveilled Black bodies, rendered them in excess and out of place, and extracted them from their temporal lives so that they no longer possess freedom—freedom to change their internal and external condition or to work and make meaning of their lives.[3] Gilmore appropriately reads this surveilling as predicated on an anti-Black practice that dehumanized those incarcerated. Gilmore illustrates in Gulag how the “prison fix” was a financial, social, racial, and political system that relied on a judicial discourse that overly criminalized Black and Latinx people. These laws “widened and deepened the capacity of police, prosecutors, and judges to identify, arrest, charge, and convict people and remand them to CDC [California Department of Corrections] custody,” which was heightened through enhanced surveillance of neighborhoods and individuals suspected of nonlegal activity.[4] Gilmore performs a kind of written dark sousveillance through her work critiquing racializing surveillance. Her work is a fungible reading of California's carceral system, and a contested reading of the landscape that provides us with the means to know and understand otherwise.           

Stealing Labor Liberation: Quotidian Labor as Abolition Work

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Historian Robin D. G. Kelley, 2014. (CC BY; The Laura Flanders Show via Wikipedia Commons)

In Race Rebels, Robin D.G.Kelley provides several contested readings of the Black Working Class: hidden histories of working class people often viewed as shiftless and degenerate or lazy, the Black working class’ opposition to public transportation during the second World War, Zoot Suit Fashion, and finally Hip Hop music. A few of Kelley’s contested readings provide us with key ways to observe Black liberation through subversive acts of ontology and epistemology. First, he opens the text with a memory of working within McDonald’s as a young adult. This scene comes alive with the ways adolescent Kelley and his peers performed their work and rendered themselves fugitively in place. Kelley shares that just throwing away trash was an opportunity to practice a jump shot, and that young ladies maneuvered the cash register with long, stylized nails that seemed incredulous to their work.[5] He spoke of brooms becoming dancing tools, and of opportunities to steal away hours by phoning in a clock-in if one was running late.[6] These examples illustrate the ways Black embodiment finds ways to subvert the will of the dominant capitalist system to render them unseen and unthought and to exploit and exhaust their labor. Calling in a clock-in is stealing hours and money—a subversion of two resources that are paramount to the racist-capitalist system, time and money. It is a dark sousveillience through its performance of anti-surveillience that negates the action of being seen and rendered on time, its ability to steal resources (time and money), and its willingness to see the body as a fungible landscape that can exist in two places at a time for the wellbeing of the one performing fugitivity.

Kelley moves on from his reading and retelling of Black youth’s subversive work tactics to explore the ways Black domestics (Reconstruction through the early/mid 20th century) subverted their positions by taking in homework so that they might avoid and subvert the experience of indignant house service where they were subjected to sexual harassment, along with racial harassment. These women resisted wearing uniforms because the attire connoted their bodies with place, rendering them at work even if they were not at work—coming to and from their post. As such, they became day workers where they could wear their own clothes and display an ability to make choices about their own bodies.

This idea of clothing as resistance is also found in the reading of the Zoot suit. Kelley states, “While the suit itself was not meant as a direct political statement, the social context in which it was created and word rendered it so.[7] The Zoot suit is one of many examples that illustrate Black embodiment through the choice of clothes and their ability to signify fungibility in place. A Zoot out of place rendered a body out of place. Kelley accurately acknowledges “the capacity of cultural politics, particularly for African American urban working-class youth, to both contest dominant meanings ascribed to their experiences and seize spaces for leisure, pleasure, and recuperation.”[8] We observe the same use of clothing in Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Reading and Everyday Resistance, where Camp provides a contested reading of Black women’s labor and their self-fashioning of cloth:

[e]nslaved women’s second shift of labor, however, presented the opportunity for self-expression. Just as bondwomen made creative work of quilt making, they spent some of their evening turning the plain, uncolored tow, denim, hemp, burlap, and cotton cloth they had woven into fancy, decorative cloth.[9]

It is important to note this act of transforming cloth was a form of resistance to the edict that enslaved women were not allowed to wear fancy, imported cloth. The cloth’s transformation through dye material, sewing practices, and weaving techniques were fugitive acts that allowed the women to resist being surveilled and racialized in the land.

Liberating Literature: Narrative Writing as Abolitional Labor

Should we travel back and examine early Black literature, our study would begin within the vernacular tradition of Negro Spirituals and those first impulses to craft texts that resisted the inhumanity of slavery, preserved the identity, culture, and spirituality of the enslaved, and spoke of justice and resistance to chattel slavery. Building from the vernacular tradition, enslaved narratives allowed their authors to identify and define their identity while rendering their collective identity of the group at large. Within the Negro Spirituals the lead voice was intimately aware of the choral voice ready to respond, reflect, and reiterate her cries for peace and justice. This ‘call and response’ tradition, which was an inherent and inherited rhetorical tradition within Africana people, also became integral to the vernacular and literary tradition, resulting in narratives that allow space for the choral and the ancestral voice. The ability of the narrative to contain these specific goals birthed an autobiographical tradition within Black letters that remain committed to and capable of voicing the individual alongside the chorus, and the descendent alongside the ancestor. This practice is witnessed most acutely within the narratives of the enslaved, particularly those penned by enslaved women, who experienced an intersectional terror of enslavement. We also see evidence of this tradition within narratives penned by those incarcerated and experiencing a loss of freedom by the Draconian Prison Industrial Complex, which steals the freedom of Black bodies.

Figure \(\Henry Louis Gates, Jr., American Literary Critic and Professor. {1}\): . (CC BY; Jon Irons via Flikr)

Within the Black Literary tradition, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. describes a “double-voiced nature of the Signifyin(g) utterance” which occurs when “one text Signifies upon another text, by tropological revision or repetition and difference, the double-voiced utterance allows us to chart discrete formal relationships in Afro-American literary history.”[10] This double-voicedness, or literary Signifyin(g)[11] when performed by Black women, queer, or disabled authors traces back to a “rootedness” Toni Morrison detailed, which seeks to engage in a discourse between literary antecedents and contemporaries.[12] Gates explains this as “[B]lack textual grounding through revision.”[13] This discourse between texts is the foundation—historical, cultural, and gender—from which the Black Literary tradition as a means of liberation might be rooted and grounded in critical and theoretical language. To fully understand the ways the Black Literary Tradition practices fugitivity and advance notions of dispossession, we must first examine and understand Signifying(g) as it relates to Black literature and rhetorics, from there, we are able to read Black liberation through Signifyin(g) and fugitive acts penned within texts.

The Signifying Monkey, a descendent of the Pan-African, trickster figure of Yourba mythology, Esu-Elegbara, is defined by Gates as “the figure of a black rhetoric in the Afro-American speech community” who “exists to embody the figures of speech characteristic to the black vernacular.”[14] Accordingly, the Signifying Monkey and the derivative language of Signifyin(g) embodies the Black tradition and inclination to render self-consciousness within the Black vernacular tradition, and essentially represents the nature of the Black rhetorical tradition of “obscuring apparent meaning.”[15] Signifyin(g) is the act of reassigning meaning to words, using figurative talk to “double-talk,” and the intentional repetition and revision to construct new meanings. Colloquially, Signifyin(g) is defined as playing the dozens, testifying, loud-talking, rapping, and calling someone out; however, literary Signifyin(g) acutely refers to the use of antecedent texts and language in specific ways: textual repetition and revision, the punning of language/words to speak figuratively, and the conscious manipulation of language through rhetorical strategies to create indirect meaning. These definitions are not exhaustive and do not seek to define the scope of Signifyin(g), but what becomes evident is the intrinsic role

Signifyin(g) plays within Black language traditions and the necessity to include Signifyin(g) into Black theories and critical language when considering Black literature’s ability to perform fugitivity.[16] The Black Literary Tradition is always already rooted in Signifyin’ though its need to steal the Black body and mind away from an oppressive system of inhumanity and assert an otherwise way of being and knowing within a language that alienates and seeks to oppress Black ontology and epistemology. At its core, the Black Literary Tradition is always already a rhetoric of liberation and an act of abolition.

Logically, we must ask whether the general definition of Signifyin(g) as it relates to the Black rhetorical tradition fully addresses the literary tradition, and as a result the literary tradition of Black women, queer Black people, and disabled Black people who are often triple-voiced and tri-toned. The genesis of Signifyin(g) from the Signifyin(g) Monkey as derived from Esu-Elegbara are male and able bodied in origin, which feminine, queer, and disabled theories must instinctually question when broadly applying the trope to Black women, Black queer, and Black disabled texts and theories. Though the literary trope applies to the cultural and historical nature present in Black texts, the sociological and gendered nature of the trope demand we consistently investigate and query the trope for adaption and expansion when and where needed to wholly address the lived experiences of those Black women, Black queer, and Black disabled people who represent multi-voiced, intersectional experiences. Two places to look within Gates’ discourse as possibly addressing Black feminist, queer, and disabled literary traditions within the Black Literary tradition are intertextual revision and encoding meanings with elements of indirection and alternative or queer meaning. Drawing from Black Feminist, Black queer, and Black disabled Literary Traditions offers ways to uncover voices that are triple-voiced and/or tri-toned and how they might utilize intertextual revision, encoding meanings, indirection, alternative or queer meanings to perform acts of liberation that negate, dispossess, and act fugitively to Euro standards and systems that perpetuate ontologies and epistemologies of harm and oppression. These tri-toned, triple-voiced narratives extend and build off the Black literary tradition’s ability to perform acts of literary fugitivity through their narratives.                  

Afrofuturism

To provide a clean and concise definition of Afrofuturism is a task of considerable difficulty as the concept of Afrofuturism is quite broad and contested. What might prove more generative is to engage the varying conceptualizations of Afrofuturism to articulate the ways in which Afrofuturism can be situated as a central position in the field of Africana Studies. (For further details on Afrofuturism refer back to chapter 3.) The work of Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones in Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro- Blackness serves as the ideal text for working through the various iterations and conceptualizations of Afrofuturism. Anderson and Jones employ the work of Alondra Nelson in attempts to expand the working definition of Afrofuturism. Nelson proposes, “Afrofuturism can be broadly defined as ‘African American voices with other stories to tell about culture, technology and things to come.’”[17] Through the words of Kodwo Eshun, Anderson and Jones offer another definition, “Afrofuturism may be characterized as a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afrodiasporic projection and as a space within which the critical work of manufacturing tools capable of intervention within the current political dispensation may be undertaken.”[18]

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Author Ytasha L. Womack sitting on stage, 2017. (CC BY; New America via Flickr)

Ytasha L. Womack in her text Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture provides further definition positing, “Afrofuturism is an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation.”[19] Working through the words of Ingrid Lafleur, Womack asserts, “I generally define Afrofuturism as a way of imagining the possible futures through a black cultural lens… I see Afrofuturism as a way to encourage experimentation, reimagine identities, and activate liberation.”[20] Womack continues,

“Whether through literature, visual arts, music, or grassroots organizing, Afrofuturist redefine culture and notions of blackness for today and the future. Both an artistic aesthetic and a framework for critical theory, Afrofuturism combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-western beliefs. In some cases, it’s a total revisioning of the past and speculation about the future rife with cultural critiques.”[21]

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Endnotes

[1] Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015, 24.

[2] Ibid, 21.

[3] Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press, 2007.

[4] Ibid, 110.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid, 166.

[8] Ibid, 180.

[9] Camp, Stephanie M. H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. University of North Carolina Press, 2004, 82.

[10] Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, (New York: Oxford UP, 1988), 88.

[11] Signifyin(g), spelled with a capitol ‘s’ and with the ending of ‘(g)’ separates it from the Western/European term signifying and connotes the intrinsic difference between the two terms. See Gates’ Signifying Monkey pg. 45-47 for more information regarding Gates distinction between the English signifier, “signification” and the Black American culture of Signifyin(g).

[12] Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” Black Women Writers (1950-1980):

A Critical Evaluation. Evans, Mari, ed. New York: Doubleday, 1984. 339-345. Print.

[13] Gates, Signifying Monkey, 171.

[14] Ibid., 53.

[15] Ibid.

[16] For a more elaborate list of Signifyin(g) tropes see Gates’ Signifying Monkey.

[17] Anderson, Reynaldo and Jones, Charles E. Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness. New York: Lexington Books. 2016. Viiii

[18] Ibid. ix

[19] Womack, Ytasha L. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Chicago: Lawerence Hill Books. 2013. 9

[20] Ibid. 9

[21] Ibid. 9