Holding Blackness: Aesthetics of Suspension  

Staff

Editorial Board Lauren M. Cramer, Pace University

Charles, “Chip” Linscott, Ohio University

Derek Conrad Murray, University of California, Santa Cruz Holding Blackness: Aesthetics of Suspension Alessandra Raengo, Georgia State University

James Tobias, University of California, Riverside

Social Media Jenny Gunn Brooke Sonenreich

Managing Editor Daren Fowler

Chief Copy Editor Charleen Wilcox

Issue Staff Shady Patterson John Roberts

Visual Design and Layout Cameron Hubbard volume 4, issue 7 Cover Image "Black Up" (Directed by Kahlil Joseph, 2011) October 2017

2 liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven Contents OVERVIEW 05 Contents 08 Introduction Alessandra Raengo 42 Essays 170 Contributors 08 Introduction 174 Acknowledgements

Daren Fowler

42 To Erotically Know: The Ethics and Pedagogy of Moonlight

Arzu Karaduman

60 “Hush-hush, I Will Know When I Know”: Post-Black Sound Aesthetics in Moonlight

Netrice Gaskins

84 Algorithmic Analytics: Race, Blackness and Data in Song of Solomon and “Alright” Steve Spence

96 Hip-Hop Aesthetics and La Haine

Sarah Smith

118 Aesthetic Deception in Selling the Shadow

Lauren M. Cramer

142 Icons of Catastrophe: Diagramming Blackness in Until the Quiet Comes

liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven 5 B l ac k Up (D i r ec ted by K ah li l J os eph , WHAT MATTERS MOST/P u l s e Fi lm s , 2011), fr am e g r ab . The idea for the seventh issue of around forms of suspension in artistic the liquid blackness journal, which practices that move fluidly between it may be precisely where the proper terms of Holding welcomes the contribution of a a number of exhibition venues and newly assembled editorial board visual forms, including filmmaking, the lineage seem the least transparent that the that includes Derek Conrad Murray music video, and installation art.2 Blackness: (UC Santa Cruz), James Tobias (UC The experimental cinematography, Riverside) and Charles “Chip” Linscott the frequent movement across work of the archive becomes most necessary (Ohio University), alongside Lauren scale—from the mundane to the Aesthetics of M. Cramer (Pace University), who is celestial, from the individual to the one of the founding members of the cosmological—synched to a carefully 1 group, came together in occasion calibrated “durational drag,” and the Suspensions of the October 6–7, 2016 screening way it holds in balance the thinking of Nowhere (Ava DuVernay, 2012), Selma (2017), and Jafa’s most recent work different artistic practices, modes and symposium titled “Holding life and the thinking of death, place (Ava DuVernay, 2014), and Arrival as a cinematographer for Solange’s and venues. Yet, as liquid blackness Blackness in Suspension: The Films suspension at the heart of Jafa’s (Denis Villeneuve, 2016), as well as videos for A Seat at the Table member Jenny Gunn has argued, it Alessandra of Kahlil Joseph,” which explored film.3 Whether we approach the idea his directorial debut Black America (2016), as co-director of the title may be precisely where the proper the intensely arresting aesthetics of suspension as a way to bring into Again (in collaboration with Common, video for Jay-Z’s 4:44 (2017), and as terms of the lineage seem the least Raengo of the Los Angeles-based music focus formal concerns or thematic/ 2017); Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood sole author of Love is the Message, transparent that the work of the video director and installation artist. philosophical ones, since our research (2014), Beyoncé’s Lemonade (2016)— the Message is Death (2016). archive becomes most necessary.4 Joseph was also one of Arthur Jafa’s on Dreams and the symposium on which Joseph collaborated— Indeed, the unruly genealogy of a closest collaborators on Dreams are on Kahlil Joseph’s work, we have Berry Jenkins’ Moonlight (2016), In the article, “The Profound Power black aesthetic demands eclectic colder than Death (2013), which was found a somewhat similar sensibility Donald Glover and Hiro Murai’s of the New Solange Videos,” for (or “liquid” as we have called them) the subject of our previous research in a growing list of works and Atlanta (2016)—especially given The New Yorker (October 24, 2016), forms of collection and analysis. It project on “Black Ontology and the practitioners, which include Bradford the way Murai recognizes a debt Cassie Da Costa highlights the requires a willingness to follow hints, Love of Blackness,” and is a film Young’s cinematography for Pariah to Joseph’s work—Joseph’s video challenge of tracing the development hunches, and family resemblances, that crystalized for us the idea of (Dee Rees, 2011), Mother of George for Sampha’s debut album, Process of distinctive black aesthetic modes with the idea that they might a growing aesthetic mode pivoting (Andrew Dosunmu, 2013), Middle of across diverse instantiations spanning

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succeed in providing, supplementing liquidity as a mode of formal analysis of scholarly investigation, processes as the lifting of forces of gravity, liquid blackness I curated in April Similar or at least complicating, existing and a foundational commitment of cultural and aesthetic liquefaction it implies a quasi-contradiction 2016 for the listserv empyre.9 tools of formal analysis. of the group: to keep blackness we had seen already underway in between its “visual effect [..] philosophically safe. In other words, our contemporary visual and sonic (hovering and lightness) and the Although not directly visible in it, to black It is in this spirit that we have we are testing whether “suspension” culture—they also responded to a process that creates suspension questions of hermeneutics, ethics slightly revised the structure of the can offer, as Daren Fowler puts it concern for the difficult ethics of that (force and pressure).”7 This and praxis animated the list of “liquidity,” present publication in two important in his essay for this issue, “a praxis same critical operation. “Liquidity,” I willingness to read for it, we feel, is terms I wrote to announce the ways: first, past issues of the liquid for the ethics of black liquidity.”5 have repeatedly claimed, functions as also at its core an ethical choice—that launching of the liquid blackness blackness journal have pivoted a pressure point: it is diagnostic and is, a willingness to have it orient one’s group, terms that were supposed seeing The need to clarify both ethics and around existing research projects critical, descriptive and generative, scholarly and pedagogical practices. to function evocatively, particularly praxis prompted me to evoke the usually built around a limited set equally evocative of processes of for artists who might have been concept of suspension since the suspension is of objects (such as Larry Clark’s objectification, commodification, and For this reason—and this is the exploring forms of black liquidity in very first public statement I ever Passing Through for the research fungibility, as well as expansiveness second revision to our usual their work or modes of unmooring made about liquid blackness as a on “The Arts and Politics of the and inexhaustible formlessness and publishing structure—we have blackness from the body and the complicated way to characterize the “critical act Jazz Ensemble,” or Jafa’s Dreams potentiality. Similarly, suspension decided to hold this very journal subject so that they (i.e., blackness, one might perform in attempting are colder than Death for the last seeks to identify sites, moments, issue in suspension and offer the body, and the subject) could to understand its contours....What and thus it issue on “Black Ontology and the and modes where the tension ways to continue to “think along,” be momentarily addressed in their if we held blackness in balance,” Love of Blackness”), as a way to between these two poles is placed collectively, around this productive own terms. The list appeared on the I asked, “not necessarily to sever 8 too requires engage this complicated archive and at a distance or held in some form of topic. To this end, we will release a liquid blackness website for the first it from its lived experience, but in continue to emphasize the cultural temporary, if precarious, balance. working bibliography surrounding time in fall 2013 and in summer 2015 and political work of form. Here, order to confront and come to terms this idea and some of the objects and was reprinted in the exhibition a hermeneutic however, we are experimenting with with the many other ways in which Similar to black “liquidity,” seeing that have crystalized it for us, as catalog for Mark Bradford’s show a more inclusive gesture to test it exists?”6 While these questions suspension is complicated and thus it well as an interactive version of the Scorched Earth, curated by Connie decision whether “suspension” might be a posed blackness as a concept and too requires a hermeneutic decision. month-long conversation around Butler at the Hammer museum productive concept to describe a a thing in and of itself—as a way to Even at a basic level, as Lauren M. the concept and methodologies of in L.A. (Figure 1) Bradford is an less ambiguous connection between take seriously, as a legitimate object Cramer puts it, when understood artist whose use of abstraction

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Fi g u r e 1. Liq u i dit y List

• Sensuousness – liquid blackness is sensorially rich and erotically charged • Affectivity – liquid blackness exists and moves in between bodies can productively be regarded as a • Formlessness – liquid blackness fills all available space and fluidly transforms The call for papers for the practice of suspension, insofar as with the shape of its container. current issue contained it is often the outcome of several – in its shape-shifting qualities, liquid blackness is capable of another list (Figure 2). • Penetration Fi g u r e 2. S us pen sio n List processes of layering, machine- infiltrating anywhere. Read alongside one another, sanding, and therefore distanciating • Fluctuation – liquid blackness moves through ripples and waves, like electronic and repurposing concrete, everyday signals their relationship is undeniably • Holding up, holding safe, and holding in balance public objects such as street posters, • Modulation – liquid blackness oscillates and vibrates within a spectrum of confrontational: only the second • Unmooring from predictable scripts, performances, and aesthetic conceits as he has shown again with his possibilities list makes explicit the group’s , flowing, and moving unattached work for the 2017 Venice Biennial, • Absorption and assimilation – liquid blackness manifests fantasies of racial • Floating ethical commitment. Yet, this from misery, death, danger Tomorrow is Another Day.10 amalgamation • Lifting up greater clarity updates our mission • Intensity – liquid blackness channels “intensive affective flows”1 • Withholding judgement, predetermination, finality and demanding different statement towards a more direct modes of engagement • Viscosity – liquid blackness produces fantasies of tactility and experiences of engagement with what in our last stickiness • Rearranging formal properties, expectations, functionalities issue we addressed as “the love • Density – liquid blackness is tangibly material and thick • Interrupting given scripts, expected performances, and predictable aesthetic of blackness,” as a way, in Daren conceits • Slipperiness - liquid blackness can be seemingly touched, but not held, or held Fowler’s words, “to give weight in place • Defying temporal linearity and contiguity and necessity to blackness as an • Elasticity - liquid blackness can stretch, bleed, and slightly give in • Deferring, Delaying and Partaking in forms of circularity, stasis, repetition, ontological question for love.”11 With and recurrence • Allure – liquid blackness beckons and yet withdraws suspension–just like with “the love of forms and modes of surrounding, closing in, and shutting down • Vibration – liquid blackness is animated by the vitality of black matter • Halting blackness”—we seek to deliberately and keeping intact • Unboundedness – liquid blackness is unstoppable and pervasive • Preserving leverage a productive undecidability , making place, making time. • Virality – liquid blackness proliferates and procreates, gaining incremental • Making space of location: of, in fact, acts as a relay vitality with each reproduction. between “for,” “from,” and “toward.” • Channeling – liquid blackness is a channel, a vehicle, a medium – it carries, Similarly, suspension moves freely funnels, and puts in contact between reading practices, aesthetic • Plasticity—liquid blackness mutates within constantly mutating conditions strategies, rhetorical structures, and • Organicity – liquid blackness wades fluidly through processes of appropriation, media affordances and specificities. sampling, grafting, injecting, rejecting, implanting, and transplanting. • Glide – liquid blackness slides transversally across and between surfaces

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In this introduction, therefore, force that is equal and opposite to Yet this mode, whose ethical and placed in the shower in front I will move through examples the obscenely unthinking gesture grounding relies precisely on an of her—water running down both from previous and current liquid that made Officer Johannes Mehserle alignment with a quasi-Zavattinian of their bodies—is able to answer blackness research projects that shoot Oscar in the back as he was sensibility towards regarding all her question: “Where is daddy?” show this productive undecidability lying on the platform floor of the “small” events as having an “equally at work across a number of BART Fruitvale Station—as an act of concrete density,” is suspended In her writing on Burnett’s Killer locations, beginning with Fruitvale care. Oscar is undergoing surgery here to give in to a clearly marked of Sheep (1977), Paula Massood Station (Ryan Coogler, 2013), and she has not yet been able to see poetic gesture—what in a more characterized the film’s formal the text that first brought to my classical Hollywood film would have choices as adopting an “aesthetic him, but, following her prayer, the 14 attention the idea that suspension viewer gets to see him again: a short appeared as a melodramatic one— appropriate to conditions.” Fruitvale begins with an act of will. flashback shows Oscar carrying his that seems to fulfill, although only Station, for me, re-proposes the daughter Tatiana on his back as they momentarily, the mother’s request.13 same issue with an emphasis on Holding up, Unmooring, leave the daycare center as warm aesthetic modes appropriate to The flashback is abruptly cut by a Floating, Lifting up… sunlight bathes them from behind. ethical conditions. The current close-up of a bag of blood being focus of the liquid blackness group At the end of Fruitvale Station Oscar The flashback is drained of sound thrown in a trashcan. Because stems from a similar concern and is Grant’s mother, played by Octavia and in slow motion, momentarily the death is ruled a homicide, interested in family resemblances Spencer, asks her dying son’s friends performing the “lifting” his friends Oscar’s mother will be unable to among works that pursue strategies to “lift him up.” Arranged in a circle, have been asked to pray for. The hold her son and can only look at of halting, unmooring, untethering, on their knees in a hospital’s waiting film has accompanied Oscar’s moves him from a large window outside deferring, and the like, understood room, she then leads them in prayer. throughout the day, following him the operating room. The film ends as “operations” and “clearing She asks God to place his “healing through rather prosaic moments brusquely suspended, in yet another gestures”—as Derek Conrad hands around [Oscar] so that we can and Oscar’s own struggles and sense, before Oscar’s girlfriend Murray might describe them— Fi g u r e 3. Fr u it va l e Statio n (D i r ec ted by R yan C oog ler , Fo r est Wh itak er ’s S i g n i fic ant hold him and see his smile again.” shortcomings, with an understated Sophina facing their daughter that can produce acts of refusal Pro du c tio n s/OG Proj ec t, 2013), fr am e g r ab . In this case, “suspension” indexes a realism, inspired by the sensibility Tatiana, whom she has picked up and defiance and, at times, make radical reorientation—at least the of Charles Burnett’s cinema.12 from a sleepover with her cousins space, place or time for alternative application of a mental or spiritual

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Fruitvale moves.15 In many ways, the goal attempts to retrieve throughout repeated moment does not allow where it features always as a lived genres (from the ethnographic and of suspension is to produce some the film is Juan’s glistening sheen the film itself to reenact the violence experience and a philosophical documentary to the protest and form of disentanglement: formally, of sweat, as indicative of a porous performed by the epithet, but instead position. These films include first art image) of African and Black Station, for theoretically, and pedagogically. movement between solidity and opens up a strategic discrepant gap and foremost, Larry Clark’s Passing American figures, rapidly flashing liquidity and therefore of an opening within which Chiron can be shielded Through (1977), but also a number on screen, and claims them as me, re-proposes Daren Fowler’s and Arzu Karaduman’s between the self and the world. In from the world’s violent shaming of experimental films such as Ben part of a collective memory that essays in this issue reflect this this “gap” or zone of discrepancy, and slowly pursue his “sideways” Caldwell’s Medea (1973) and I & recapitulates the breadth of the the same investment. Cinematography and he argues, lies the possibility for growth.17 Similar to the end of I: An African Allegory (1979), and diaspora in the ontogenesis of sound design in Berry Jenkins’ an ethics and erotics of relation. Fruitvale Station, this asynchronicity Barbara McCullough’s Water Ritual every soon-to-be-born Black child Moonlight (2016), Fowler explains, keeps the audience from “consuming” #1: An Urban Rite of Purification in America.19 As it unfolds, the Arzu Karaduman’s careful attention issue with produces a “pedagogy for caring, black pain as entertainment and from (1979), among others. Caldwell’s montage increasingly conforms to to the suspended sound-image holding, and loving (queer) blackness “touching” Chiron’s body, possessing Medea, structured around a pregnant the pace of the mother’s heartbeat, synchronization in Moonlight without containing, suffocating, and him, or giving in to the charged woman and her delivery, establishes her breathing, and her chanting all an emphasis 16 identifies in the mother’s scream, freezing its vital movements.” In sensuality that pervades the film. a connection between cosmological at once, and then concludes with a which is repeated twice—the first this manner, it creates some kind and generational cycles and black close up of a pregnant belly. It thus time drained of sound, so that only on aesthetic of buffer zone, so to speak, around Withholding, Rearranging, history across the African diaspora. suspends the anti-black logic that the mother’s lips are seen moving its vulnerable main character. At Interrupting, Defying, Deferring, Opening shots of moving clouds governs the organization of these and the second time replayed modes least until he builds himself “hard,” Delaying, and Partaking in juxtaposed to a soundtrack that archives and substitutes for it the backwards—a wedge in the film’s Fowler shows, seeking to achieve the forms of Circularity, Stasis, mimics breathing sounds and then vitality of a life to come, figured in temporality as it concerns Chiron’s sheen of self-contained reassured Repetition, and Recurrence. a heartbeat usher in a woman’s the poignant image that concludes appropriate coming-out. While a cut to Chiron masculinity he admires in Juan, the voice that recites Amiri Baraka’s the film: announced by the cry of knocking on Juan’s door to ask what Retrospectively, suspension also drug dealer and substitute father- poem, “Part of the Doctrine.”18 Her a newborn, a small child enters the “faggot” means suggests that that is seems an appropriate way to to ethical figure who finds him hiding from quasi-hypnotic chant, punctuated frame carrying a white balloon. indeed what the mother just called characterize the determination to his persecutors at the beginning by a recurring refrain—“to raise the him, the specific suspenseful sound- explore the expansive capacity of conditions of the film. In Fowler’s perceptive race . . . to raise the race”—propels Evoking circularity as well as reading, what Chiron is missing and image configuration deployed in this blackness that animates so many perfection, this image gestures of the films of the L.A. Rebellion, a montage of still images of various

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Evoking circularity as well as perfection, Said—throughout the film and is most effectively dramatized in the this image gestures toward the idea of a self- high angle shot onto the projects courtyard as DJ Cut Killer’s sound contained Black history — suspended above its exits his window and floats through the air overcoming the architectural hostile surroundings that finds within itself boundaries put in place by a history — of State policing of the banlieues. While the framing joke “sketches the resources for its fulfillment a kind of dangerous limbo, a freedom that might feel like flight but that must end in catastrophe,” toward the idea of a self-contained the Middle Passage backwards, the weightlessness and defiance of in this scene the unmoored Black history—suspended seeking to go back home. Using gravity in b-boys performances, in camera transforms surveillance above its hostile surroundings— DeepDream software as a way to opposition to the joke that frames footage into contemplation.20 that finds within itself the connect to the algorithmic genius the film: it’s about a guy falling from resources for its fulfillment. blackness has maintained across the a skyscraper and, as he is falling, Halting Forms and Modes Middle Passage, the goal of Gaskins’s repeats to himself, “so far so good, Nettrice Gaskins’s images for this of Surrounding, Closing work is ultimately to render black so far so good.” The joke locates In, and Shutting Down issue point at a similar sense of self- consciousness as constantly moving, the film’s narrative in a moment of reliant circularity. They are inspired untethered, and unmoored. suspension before the deadly crash The critical valence of suspension can by the theme of flight common so that it acts as a mechanism that further be brought down to scale to to Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Similarly, grounding his reading of delays the “inescapable doom.” The bear upon the very understanding Solomon (1977) and Kendrick Lamar’s La Haine (Matthew Kassovitz, 1995) same “delay” is reproduced also of the photographic image itself, as video Alright (2015), and they dialog in the film’s hip-hop sensibility, by the Steadicam shots following a way to place a wedge between with a long deep-rooted imaginary Steve Spence identifies the genre’s the three friends—Vinz, Hubert and the image and its profilmic subject, of “flying Africans” who traveled striving toward suspension, including which, in the case of black bodies, Fi g u r e 4. M ed e a (D i r ec ted by B en C aldwell , 1973), fr am e g r ab .

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The critical valence of suspension can further and her oratory to support the the hull of a ship in order to do so. rigidity demanded by her religious abolitionist cause, suspension Mary Sibande’s sculptures, created habit and the riveting beat of the be brought down to scale to bear upon the very produces a space for a crafting or from casts of the artist’s body, also African drums she hears outside “curating” of the self that, however, is featured in Selling the Shadow, her bedroom window. Her habit understanding of the photographic image itself, kept out of sight, or, more precisely, make suspension even harder to was her coveted prize and greatest in what Smith describes as “plain/ see, but this is because they upend childhood desire—a form of “regal” as a way to place a wedge between the image plane sight,” that is, not immediately the domestic-madam relation and dignified “liveness” she envied in visible because that self is folded in via processes of incorporation the nuns and priests who taught at the architectural structures of anti- and implosion, rather than prying the mission school she frequented. and its profilmic subject blackness. 23 This is what happens open or keeping apart, so much She dreamed of wearing it, being in Torkwase Dyson’s Anthony Burns so that only one sculptural body “shrouded in whiteness like the (In Plane Site: Fugitive) (2016), is left to signify the outcome of mountains I see from my window,” has been historically made to muscles,” the state of muscular and managing their potentially which Smith discusses in her this “monstrous intimacy.”24 her voice-over explains, and earn coincide, as if flattened onto the tension Frantz Fanon diagnoses in eruptive and disruptive force.22 essay as enacting bi-dimensional the “right to never be without it.” same truthful surface. Yet, as long the colonized who are captive of a Again, these conflicting and Similar to the “aesthetic deception” renderings of architectural space as it involves a lens, photography cycle of spatial and temporal denials unresolved tensions remind me of an Shot in black and white, the film practiced by Sojourner Truth, as as a way to suspend technologies also always comprises a space that offer no true mobility and no L.A. Rebellion film, in this case Julie emphasizes the contrast between the discussed by Sarah Smith in her essay of domination and captivity. These (with a specific architecture), a release.21 Campt reads suspension Dash’s The Diary of an African Nun immaculate whiteness of her dress in this issue on selected works from renderings presuppose architectures duration (however small), and the in the facial expressions of a series (1977), adapted from a short story and the richness of her complexion. Gallery Momo’s exhibition, Selling the of enclosure but refuse to reproduce possibility of movement and of its of women featured in a colonial by Alice Walker, where this tension But at the end of the day, when she Shadow (Cape Town, South Africa), them. Instead, they place them at a repression. Thus, it is possible to photographic archive compiled by unfolds dramatically as a question retires to her room the habit has this rhetorical indirection can be remove, through abstractions that regard suspension as the byproduct a Trappist mission in the Eastern of the protagonist’s relationship to come off. As she disrobes to the productively deployed to suspend figure the alternative vectors and of a belabored immobility, as does Cape of Africa in 1894 as the result to the sound of her immediate drumbeat she remarks, “…I sing my foreclosed conclusions, associations, trajectories that unmoor the body Tina Campt, who deploys for visual of tensions produced by holding environment: the young and beautiful whole chant in response to theirs.” and reading protocols. In Smith’s and allow it to “steal itself away” analysis Darieck Scott’s emphasis on competing forces in balance nun, played by Barbara O, is torn The drums she hears carry other reading of Truth’s deliberate use of into freedom, as happened in the what he has described as “Fanon’s apart by competing alliances to the impulses and desires: the food, wine, early photographic technologies case of Anthony Burns, who hid in

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and conviviality she no longer has (including of the overembodiment of no return on our retina.”27 As be a way to unglue, unmoor and access to, or the equally unattainable of racialization), which ultimately such, she regards it as descriptive untether the black body from the way spark of a young romance. They will not do, because the more of the epistemological, ethical but, it has historically borne the burden awaken an unbearable conflict profound mechanics of the colonial ultimately, ontological position held of integrating the moving image between the deep mortification relation still agitate underneath it. by the cell phone photograph Oscar and lubricating its mechanisms.29 required by her vows and the promise Grant was able to take of the BART of incessant movement folded Dreams are colder than Death also officer who shot him moments In Deadpan, as I have discussed in the energy of each drumbeat. gestures toward a place underneath later. In this sense—from this view elsewhere, McQueen remakes with Forced to maintain a composure racialization but from a different from the hold—black consciousness a spectacular stillness a famous both threatened and undermined perspective. In the film, Kara Walker’s emerges still as the place where Buster Keaton stunt from Steamboat by the sounds surrounding her, her comments describe the space of her whatever is suspended (for a Will Jr. (1928): the façade of a house body becomes a battlefield. Yet, creativity as a type of suspension: moment, for a breath, for a thought) collapses on top of Keaton who while she struggles to suspend the under the skin, a skin slightly is also ultimately and unavoidably barely stands up and quickly runs competing impulses that tear her detached, just enough to allow her the place where it also still lands. away. McQueen, instead, stands apart, the editing gives in to her some measure of freedom. Perhaps, perfectly immobile through the falling inner agitation, transitioning to rapid but it’s not fully clear, this type of Suspension can also open a façade and the same stunt is shown cuts and repeated canted shots of retinal detachment also gives her productive space between the repeatedly from a variety of different her hands coming together in prayer the ability to “look at the underside moving image and the (black) angles so that his upright stillness 26 as she falls to her knees. Even the of race a little bit.” However subject’s movement, which the functions as a gesture of suspension. window’s shutters move rapidly and fleeting and precarious, this space cinematic apparatus has historically Building on McQueen’s work on the rhythmically to convey the emotional becomes available once blackness harvested to gain an effect of surplus limits of the film frame and his stated 28 charge of the scene.25 The film is untethered from the body and liveness. Here suspension is meant desire to “pass through” the image ultimately stages a form of embattled held in balance, as if hovering above as disruption, refusal, and endurance “like in a road movie,” I ultimately stillness underneath the cloak of it. Conversely, Christina Sharpe as it is involved, for instance, in the read this installation as staging a whiteness she embraced as a vehicle reads this retinal image evoked by “still act” Steve McQueen performs in form of trespassing and perhaps toward some kind of transcendence Walker as the “optic of the door his installation Deadpan (1997), might also an escape through the porous Fi g u r e 5. D ia ry o f a n A fr ic a n N u n (D i r ec ted by J u li e Da s h , 1977), fr am e g r ab .

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visual aesthetics of suspension can produce ekphrastic efforts to describe the former—a seven-minute montage loopholes and escape routes, or otherwise of original footage (including shots from Dreams and stills that have uphold and halt forms and modes of surrounding, appeared in previous works), YouTube clips, archival footage, Civil Rights closing in, and shutting down imagery, and film clips to the pace of Kanye West’s gospel-inspired song Ultralight Beam—accumulate as the installation travels from New York to L.A. and beyond, the emphasis continues to fall on the seemingly organized by Renée Green on preoccupied with this wavering incomprehensible and yet sublime black screen that early cinema made John Akomfrah’s work, Fred Moten between euphoria and shame. Arthur logic that strings this montage exchangeable with the black body.30 critiqued the overdetermined Jafa’s attempt to create a Black together in a constantly reversible Yet, this does not mean that the body manner in which black subjectivity Visual Intonation (BVI), instead, can continuum between exhilaration is necessarily set free, but rather in the cinema unfolds between the perhaps be seen as an effort in the and pain. Jafa has described it as that visual aesthetics of suspension dream of exaltation into sovereignty opposite direction, as the search for a an attempt to build empathy, which, can produce loopholes and escape and the shame that comes from mechanism to withhold and halt this as Hortense Spillers articulates in routes, or otherwise uphold and halt the realization of the impossibility closing in of the apparatus around Dreams, is the experience of the flesh, forms and modes of surrounding, to fulfill that dream—an oscillation the black body and its movements. and to show, exercise, and ultimately closing in, and shutting down that the cinematic apparatus, in This is nowhere more evident than develop “empathy muscles,” which sanctioned or legitimate moves. turn has institutionalized in the in Jafa’s more recent work Love is Fi g u r e 6. Lov e is th e M ess ag e , th e M ess ag e is D e ath (D i r ec ted by A rth u r Jafa , TNEG, 2016), black people already have because tension between movement and the Message, the Message is Death fr am e g r ab . they have to identify with people But here is a productive complication: stasis.31 For Moten, McQueen’s work (2016), as well as the video he co- other than themselves.33 Ultimately, in his talk at the 2014 Cinematic is perpetually (and delusionally) directed for Jay-Z’s 4:44.32 While the Migration Symposium at MIT he claims, “I’m trying to make my

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shit as black as possible and still for The Geffen Contemporary at trajectories, or, “flow through situated in relation to their subjects, have you deal with my humanity.”34 MOCA, where the installation showed figures,” architectural meanings of suspension for Cramer describes earlier this year, further points out “suspension” begin to come into the way a much deeper logic of Greg Tate describes the video as how “all the movement and gestures focus. 39 This is in Torkwase Dyson’s anti-blackness diagrams spaces, “an alternatively mirthful-cum- [Jafa] has chosen are expressions of Anthony Burns (In Plane Site: including cinematic spaces, their melancholic-cum-cardiac-arresting bodily compression and release.”37 Fugitive) (2016) that Smith discusses architectures and their “joints,” and meditation on race-agency wrapped in her essay, and even more so in the way Joseph brings that logic to in a visually sermonic recitation of The pursuit of a Black Visual Lauren M. Cramer’s reading of Kahlil the brink of catastrophe and then race tragedy wrapped in a nuanced Intonation can be seen as an attempt Joseph’s "Until the Quiet Comes" unfolds it toward a different outcome. and feverish exultation of diverse to pry wide open this gap between (2012), which was central to the Indeed, she argues, “'Until the Quiet Black American lives at various states exertion and composure, exhilaration liquid blackness group’s decision to Comes' practices suspension by fully of collapse and regeneration.”35 and pain, compression and release address suspension as a thematic, inhabiting its tension: it “renders Sharpe describes it as an oscillation —a gap that, in another conversation methodological, and formal concern. a seemingly weightless image of between exertion and composure, with Jafa, about the difference blackness … by becoming denser,” noting how, although at times between painting and photography, Architectures of suspension by diagramming its predictable flowing quickly, its images require Kerry James Marshall characterized outcome, its already predetermined “a biophysical response of a held as a place of “discrepancy”—and In architecture, suspension describes doom, and then unfolding that very breath, an elongated sigh.” They suspend black bodies within it, the technique of dispersing a diagram according to vectors that demand lingering: “We are left…to making it a suitable dwelling place structure’s mass across multiple are possible within it, but have not linger in the reverb, to experience where they might at their own grounding positions so that even been imagined, conceived or desired, duration, to live in the body split chosen direction and pace, and the most complex and weighty by the structures of anti-blackness. and reconfigured by sound…, in the where all e-motions from the human structures can appear “light” Blackness is excluded from the afterimage of the suffering that Fi g u r e 7. Lov e is th e M ess ag e , th e M ess ag e is D e ath (D i r ec ted by A rth u r Jafa , TNEG, 2016), spectrum can equally take place.38 because of how their material 40 “world” we live in, Cramer argues by forged Blackness and the joy and fr am e g r ab . elements are held in tension. While building on Katherine McKittrick’s song that yet, and still, emerge.”36 In Jafa’s sustained focus on rhythm immediately descriptive of Joseph’s argument in Demonic Grounds, and Helena Molesworth, Chief Curator and vectoriality, and black people’s camera movements, sometimes facility with “spatial arrays,” traveling upside down or vertically yet it provides the ground on which

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it is built. What happens then, when black bodies leave this ground? Blackness is excluded from the “world” we live “Where Are We Going?” Belhaven Meridian (2009) is the in ... and yet it provides the ground on which it first video Joseph directed for Shabazz Palaces. Shot in Watts, in is built. What happens then, when black bodies 35mm black and white film, it is an homage to Charles Burnett’s Killer leave this ground? of Sheep (1977). It begins with the roar of a car engine over a black screen, then a side shot of a car. A job. This precious glance into the She gets into the car—the car that his step quickly conforms to her “making” of Killer of Sheep—a labor young man is at the wheel and a Killer of Sheep’s protagonist Stan stride and their combined movement young woman is sitting on the roof of love and respect, and patience could never get to work—and they lulls at the beat of the soundtrack. and community—is enough to of the car. There is no diegetic dialog quickly ride away. The camera follows but a caption, instead, appears: As if by chance, tilting to the right, cause the camera to rotate on its them until they disappear behind axis and turn upside down. In this a row of houses, then it tilts to the the camera picks up the (re-enacted) HIM: IT’S TIME. shooting of a scene from Killer of new world, where the top and left to frame an empty street, as an bottom have exchanged places, the She slides off the roof and swiftly attractive woman enters the frame Sheep itself, which took place on the front steps of Stan’s house as silhouette of a young man appears turns around the car while he from the right strolling confidently in running down the same street. stretches towards the passenger’s the middle of the street. Quickly, and two of his “buddies” attempt to lure seat and opens the door for her. predictably, a young man approaches him into a more facile life of crime Juxtaposed to the silhouette there her and tries to make small talk. They as a way out of his predicament: appears also an African mask floating Then another caption: are young and brash and at home. the perverse cycle that entraps him on the surface of the image, but not as both the killer and the sheep HER: WHERE ARE WE GOING? As they walk away from the camera for long: the young man inexplicably he routinely slaughters in his day Fi g u r e 8. B el h av en M er i dia n, (D i r ec ted by K ah li l J os eph , WHAT MATTERS MOST/P u l s e grabs it and rushes through a group Fi lm s , 2009), fr am e g r ab .

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of boys who are trying to tackle by disrupting the experience of the as a “fever dream” inspired by grammatical unit, a question, that is, him, like a running back going for ground and the forces that anchor the duo’s music— (the image we of style, and stylistics not necessarily a touchdown. The camera remains bodies to it. Suspension features chose for the cover of this issue) dependent on word (or image) and upside down and the long take as weightlessness, but not as an and vertically looks down on them, rather communicative of something continues as we see him eventually un-grounding—not a severance they too possess a sense of levity like the “Black Talk” which Ben Sidran passing the mask to a bike rider from home, experience, intimacy and composure that defies the famously introduced back in 1971 by from a group of motorcyclists who or community. Propelled by the idea that they might be dead. Now describing “listening to a Coltrane suddenly ride through the same movement of various bodies in that the ground has become the solo and hearing my mother’s voice.41 street. The music settles on a quieter the frame—the couple in the car, ceiling, the “weight” of their stillness register and the camera follows them the couple in the street, the lone has shifted from possible death to Toward the end of Black Up, we gliding through streets progressively silhouette and so on—the camera rest, from stiffness to softness. hear Gil Scott Heron’s raspy voice: filling up with traffic, moving freely progressively leaves behind tractions “There were some African poets This quality of Joseph’s camera—just and almost floating effortlessly away. and attritions and ushers in an that would only speak syllables,” like the logic of Jafa’s montage— experience of lightness that, however, he intones, with a slight stutter, The answer to her question are very hard to describe. Yet, in is never divorced from gravitas. “it’s like reading the yellow pages finally comes here: James Tobias’s account, when asked Extraordinarily, the camera’s backwards.” This communicative about the reasons for some of his nimbleness in Joseph’s work always opacity that highlights the musicality HIM: WHEREVER WE WANT. camera movements, Joseph related adds to the solemnity of the image. of words over their signification This is one of Joseph’s earliest that sometimes he is thinking about inspires the suspension Joseph’s films but suspension is already Thus, while the camera hovers over the way an uncle speaks—in my seemingly always-moving camera central to it. The camera upside a number of bodies dressed in white understanding—and I’m paraphrasing performs around his characters who down in the middle of a long take and draped over architectural ruins and interpreting here using a critical become part of what feels like a upholds the world as we know it, reclaimed by lush vegetation in a idiom that Joseph doesn’t necessarily much more sensitive environment. Fi g u r e 9. B el h av en M er i dia n (D i r ec ted by K ah li l J os eph , WHAT MATTERS MOST/P u l s e Fi lm s , but it does not compromise the scene shot on location in Puerto value—the words themselves may not By removing the black body 2009), fr am e g r ab . integrity of the space. It simply Rico from his later video for Shabazz matter, but there is a larger question “from the architectural function makes it feel a bit more miraculous Palaces titled Black Up—described of speech beyond the semio- that requires its subjection,”

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Cramer claims, Joseph articulates and there is only so much tension Endnotes cinematic spaces that are no longer that can be reconciled or absorbed 1. More than usual, this introduction has benefitted from the careful comments of Lauren M. Cramer, Charles “Chip” “brutalizing to black bodies.”42 before implosion or explosion: Linscott, Jenny Gunn, John Roberts, Shady Patterson, Daren Fowler, and Charleen Wilcox. as Cramer’s analysis of “Until the Black Up’s closing image offers yet Quiet Comes” reminds us, “any 2. another illustration of architectural The research project included public screenings and artist’s talks, and culminated in the publication of the sixth issue of violence visualized in the process suspension, as we see Ishmael Butler the liquid blackness journal. of building this world always lands (one of the two artists who make 3. on the black body,” which remains Jafa’s use of the term “durational drag” is reported in Angela Brown, “Video Art at the Tempo of Emergency: Arthur up Shabazz Palaces) standing in this world’s very ground.43 Jafa on His Recent Work,” ArtNews, February 15, 2017, http://www.artnews.com/2017/02/15/video-art-at-the-tempo- line in front of a restaurant window of-emergency-arthur-jafa-on-his-recent-work. For a more detailed discussion of Dreams are colder than Death in the at night in the Bronx, while a/his ■ context of questions of black ontology and the love of blackness, themselves a form of holding blackness in suspension, girl huddles in a gray hoodie leans see my introduction to the no. 6 issue of liquid blackness as well as my essay “Dreams are colder than Death and the against him and, her weight now Gathering of Black Sociality,” Black Camera, 8, no. 2 (2016): 120-140. slightly suspended, closes her eyes. 4. Jenny Gunn, “Re: ‘The Profound Power of the New Solange Videos,’ by Cassie da Costa, October 24, 2016,” letter to the Like liquidity, suspension works editor of the New Yorker, November 18, 2016. best when it is pursued in all its 5. rich polysemy and undecidability. Daren Fowler, “To Erotically Know: The Ethics and Pedagogy of Moonlight” in this issue, 45. Unlike liquidity, suspension demands 6. Alessandra Raengo, “liquid blackness: A Research Project on Blackness and Aesthetics,” in Mark Bradford: Scorched to be held and to be, in turn, Earth, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, exhibition catalogue ed. by Connie Butler and published by DelMonico-Prestel, suspended so that the critical work 2015, 170. it performs can be amplified and built upon. Yet, suspension does not 7. Lauren M. Cramer, “Icons of Catastrophe: Diagramming Blackness in Until the Quiet Comes,” in this issue, 145.

indulge in fixation and it defies the 8. stillness of fetishization. Suspension Within the liquid blackness group, we describe as a “think along” what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney might describe acknowledges that pressure requires as “black study,” which is a practice of thinking with others that, since our research project on Larry Clark’s Passing release, elevation will eventually end, Through, we have attached to the dynamics of the jazz ensemble, see Lauren M. Cramer and Alessandra Raengo,

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“Freeing Black Codes: liquid blackness Plays the Jazz Ensemble,” in “Black Code Studies,” ed. Jessica Marie Johnson distance,” that is precariously similar to the constant surveillance Oscar undergoes as he moves in public spaces. Her and Mark Anthony Neal, special issue, The Black Scholar 47, no. 3 (2017): 8-21. observations make the tone of the flashback even more strikingly discontinuous to the rest of the film. See also Jennifer M. Barker and Adam Cottrel, “Eyes at the Back of the Head: Precarious Masculinity and the Modern Tracking Shot,” 9. As a project that seeks to continue our experimentation with digital forms of “black study” the hyperlinked text of this Paragraph 38, no. 1 (March 2015): 86-100. lively discussion invited by Derek and Soraya Murray will also be open to feedback and other forms of contribution and augmentation. 14. Paula Massood, “An Aesthetic Appropriate to Conditions: Killer of Sheep, (Neo)Realism, and the Documentary Impulse,” Wide Angle 21, no. 4 (2004): 20-41. 10. Bradford, Scorched Earth. Bradford’s contribution to the Venice Biennial, Tomorrow is Another Day, occupies the U.S. Pavilion very much in the mode of a suspended obstruction. Visitors can only enter from the side door and are 15. See Derek Conrad Murray’s contribution to empyre, April 2016, and specifically his characterization of the similarities immediately confronted by densely labored masses suspended from the ceiling (Spoiled Foot, 2016), sprouting from between the concept of “post-blackness” and “liquid-blackness.” http://liquidblackness.com/twine/empyre.html.

the ground (Medusa, 2016), or colonizing the vault of the rotunda like overgrown vine (Saturn Returns, 2013). The video 16. that concludes the exhibition, Niagara (2005), shows Bradford’s LA neighbor walking away from the camera with Fowler, “To Erotically Know,” in this issue, p. 45. recognizable swagger. Slow motion comings and goings of cars in the street index the passage of real time but, in 17. Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, terms of spatiality, progress is not being made. He seemingly does not gain any ground and remains suspended instead, 2009). almost hovering over the sidewalk, as if walking in place. 18. 11. Amiri Baraka, Part of the Doctrine: Black Magic: Sabotage, Target Study, Black Art: Collected Poetry, 1961-1967 Fowler, “To Erotically Know,” 44. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969). 12. Killer of Sheep, obviously, which Coogler has indicated as influential in his aesthetic choices, but I am thinking also about 19. For a longer discussion of these films see Alessandra Raengo, “Encountering the Rebellion: liquid blackness reflects his Project One film, Several Friends (1969). on the expansive possibilities of the L.A. Rebellion films,” in L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, ed. Allyson 13. Andre Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality: Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation,” 37, in What is Cinema? Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, Jacqueline Stewart (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015), 291-318, and Vol. II, transl. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). In “Eyes at the Back of His Head: Precarious Allyson Nadia Field, “Rebellious Unlearnings: UCLA Project One Films (1967-1978),” Ibid., 83-118. Masculinity and the Modern Tracking Shot.” Speaker series sponsored by the Corporeality Working Group and the 20. Steve Spence, “Hip Hop Aesthetics and La Haine,” in this issue, 100. Franklin Humanities Group. Duke University, 14 April 2014, Jennifer Barker calls attention to the film’s commitment also to exposing the limits of the representational logic of realism, to the extent that it never affords a point of view shot 21. Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New from Oscar’s camera although it opens with cell-phone camera footage of his death. More importantly, she focuses York: New York University Press, 2010). on the camera position throughout, in what she describes as “follow shots” which enact a form of “witnessing at a

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22. A tension that strains the muscles and might be visible in the face if one is willing to “listen” to the photographic image. epidermal blackness becomes one of the pretexts for the narrative and racial switcheroo. See also Trond Lundemo, “The Without reference to the rich theoretical backing by Fred Moten in his discussion of “Black Mo’nin’ in the Sound of Colors of Haptic Space,” in Color: The Film Reader, edited by Brian and Angela Dalle Vacche Price, 88-101 (New York: the Photograph” (a chapter from In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Minneapolis, University Routledge, 2006); Stephen Best, The Fugitives’ Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (Chicago and London: of Minnesota Press, 2003), Campt describes as “listening” her attentive, sympathetic reading for the counter-archival University of Chicago Press, 2004), 203-267; Susan Courtney, Hollywood’s Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular moves that might be articulated even by the most seemingly disciplined photographic archives. Tina M. Campt, Listening Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903-1967 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005). to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 31. As Alice Maurice takes steps to show in The Cinema and Its Shadow. 23. Charleen Wilcox suggested that Truth’s aesthetic deception can also be regarded as a type of self-curation. For a 32. rigorous approach to the architectures of anti-blackness see Lauren M. Cramer’s essay in this issue. Jafa showed the video that became Love is the Message, the Message is Death in Atlanta in the context of the special event that liquid blackness hosted for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (April 2016), still untitled. 24. I take liberally this expression from Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies. Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham, NC: 33. Duke University Press, 2010). Arthur Jafa and Tina Campt, “Love is the Message, The Plan is Death,” e-flux journal #81, April 2017. 34. 25. In a way that is reminiscent of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Arthur Jafa qtd. in Antwaun Sargent, "Arthur Jafa and the Future of Black Cinema," Interview (January 11, 2017): http:// www.interviewmagazine.com/art/arthur-jafa. Because grounded in the “flesh,” empathy deepens and suspends at the 26. Dreams are colder than Death (Arthur Jafa, 2013). same time: Dreams presents it both, and equally, as a profoundly personal, intimate and singular experience, especially when Spillers talks about her loss of family members, while it is also one black people share, as black people. 27. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 100. 35. Greg Tate, “The Changeling Mise-en-Scène—Arthur Jafa’s Meta Love and the New Black Reportage,” in Arthur Jafa, Love 28. Alessandra Raengo, On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2013) and is the Message, The Message is Death (New York: Gavin Brown Enterprise, 2016), n.p. Alice Maurice, The Cinema and its Shadow: Race and Technology in Early Cinema (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 36. Christina Sharpe, “Love is the Message, The Message is Death,” in Arthur Jafa, Love is the Message, n.p. 29. Alessandra Raengo, “Blackness and the Image of Motility: A Suspenseful Critique,” Black Camera, 8, no. 1 (2016): 191- 37. Helen Molesworth, “Arthur Jafa: Love is the Message, The Message is Death,” brochure for exhibition at The Geffen 206. For Andre Lepecki, the still “acts because it interrogates economies of time, because it reveals the possibility of Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, April 2-June 12, 2017.

one’s agency within controlling regimes of capital, subjectivity, labor and mobility.” André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: 38. Performance and the Politics of Movement (New York: Routledge, 2006), 15. Writing for Art News, Angela Brown reports a conversation between Jafa and Kerry James Marshall where the latter characterized the difference between painting and photography as one about “discrepancy,” a gap between the 30. See What Happened in the Tunnel (dir. Edwin S. Porter, 1903) when the association of the black screen with the maid’s rendering of something and what is being rendered, “a very complicated thing for black folks, because we live in [it] all

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the time.” http://www.artnews.com/2017/02/15/video-art-at-the-tempo-of-emergency-arthur-jafa-on-his-recent-work. 39. Jafa and Campt, “Love is the Message,” 6. Jafa has also repeatedly indicated that, at Howard University he had initially studied architecture and had brought to that discipline similar questions about how an architectural structure might correspond to a black sound. 40. Lauren M. Cramer, “Building the Black (Universal) Archive and the Architecture of Black Cinema,” Black Camera 8, no. 1 (2016): 131-145. 41. James Tobias, "Untitled," In Media Res (October 13, 2016), http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2016/10/13/ untitled. 42. Cramer, “Icons of Catastrophe,” in this issue, 149. 43. Ibid., 155.

38 liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven 39 Moo n lig ht (D i r ec ted by Bar ry J en ki n s , 2016, A24, Pa stel , an d Pl an B Entertai n m ent), fr am e g r ab . Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2016) space between love and domination; has something to teach us through an aesthetics of suspension points to consider the love of blackness as an its efforts to show how to engage to the ways images, bodies, spaces, To Erotically vibrant images of a gay black and times linger with, for, and as kid coming of age and coming each other—an ethics of relation. The ontological question is to give weight and The to terms. Moonlight’s images aesthetics at the forefront of this Know: and narrative have rightly been journal issue pose the questions of necessity to blackness as an ontological praised for providing nuanced what is being suspended and how Ethics and and complicated representation that suspension occurs. Suspension question for love. to the underrepresented. The film functions as a culmination of sorts gives space and care to its main for liquid blackness, especially character, Chiron, as he navigates his considering the previous two issues Pedagogy of there must be room to pass through, for issue five, was to theorize Fred than Death (2013), Moten asks “Can community’s poverty, his mother’s and their concerns with the “study” and this passing through should not Moten and Stefano Harney’s “Black black people be loved? Not desired, addiction, and his own queerness. and “love” of blackness. In issue be interrupted.”1 Cramer argues for Study” for film, to ask what it means not wanted, not acquired, not lusted The concern for suspension that five, Passing Through Film: The Arts Moonlight a mode of close analysis oriented to study black film and how such after…Can blackness be loved?”3 propels this issue is, in part, a and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble, toward movement that embraces the study might be undertaken. What As Raengo writes in that issue’s concern for bringing care and Larry Clark’s Passing Through (1977) fluidity of filmic images and the lives was being offered was a mode of introduction, of central concern are love to the study of blackness and necessitated a different mode of they are representing and imagining. being with, as Moten and Harney “the repercussions of approaching its aesthetic forms. Alessandra study. Clark and his film deny the Daren Fowler She deploys not singular frames, but argue, a process of thinking alongside the ontology of blackness from the Raengo, the founder of liquid freeze frame style of film scholarship a horizontal filmstrip-like collection blackness in its open, lived, fluid, point of view of death rather than the blackness, frames suspension as where an image is captured, frozen, of images that attempt to preserve and filmic possibilities.2 Moten also point of view of life. Said otherwise, an ethical move—to suspend is to and contained so that it can be the movement and change that film oriented the concerns for the sixth what is the ontology of black lift up, to hold, to unburden, but analyzed and picked apart. As Lauren as a medium makes possible and in issue of liquid blackness: Black lives, when they are so thoroughly also to contain, to freeze, and to M. Cramer argues in her essay for which Clark’s film thrives. Cramer’s Ontology and the Love of Blackness. wrapped in an atmospheric anti- scientifically, chemically collect. that issue, Clark’s film “is about proposition, and the guiding premise In Arthur Jafa’s Dreams are colder blackness?”4 I do not want to recount Suspension lingers in the liminal movement, connectivity, and scale—

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has been theorizing—a praxis for movement. Chiron is a young black the haunting of what is to come. the ethics of black liquidity. And I kid from Miami whom we first see see Moonlight as offering one of around eight years old as a blur of This sense of haunting is one of the the most cogent and affectively color (his black skin standing out critical poles in Arzu Karaduman’s impactful demonstrations of what against his white polo) being chased essay, also included in this issue. an aesthetic of suspension can by three other kids. In part two, we Karaduman and I are drawn to the visualize and open for film while also see him again as a thin and lanky ways the film holds and protects presenting a pedagogy for caring, teenager barely in the frame, as his Chiron from the world he lives in and holding, and loving (queer) blackness bully, Terell, berates Chiron over the world in which the film is made without containing, suffocating, whether it is his “time of the month.” visible (i.e., recognized and deemed Tri pt ych 1. Moo n lig ht (D i r ec ted by Bar ry J en ki n s , 2016, A24, Pa stel , an d Pl an B Entertai n m ent), fr am e g r ab s . and freezing its vital movements. In part three, a twenty-something valuable). In her essay, “‘Hush- Chiron has transformed, his body hush, I Will Know When I Know’: the ontological questions parsed in the world come to know, care, and of suspension. As I wrote in the Within this frame of an aesthetic of Adonis-like; he stands in a kitchen Post-black Sound Aesthetics in that issue, however; instead, what fight for and with blackness. The opening of this essay, suspension suspension, I finally turn in earnest lit in blue light as the camera stares Moonlight,” Moonlight’s “suspension strikes me as crucial, and why I have research group has posed study exists in a liminal space between care to Moonlight. Barry Jenkins’s at his muscled back with his face of synchronization” between sound opened with this seeming detour and love as terms for reconsidering and domination, and to turn toward Moonlight follows the coming-of- hidden and stretched into the freezer. and image is key. For example, a through liquid blackness’s past, is how and where blackness is such a term and the aesthetics it age story of Chiron (alternately Each Chiron stands as an outgrowth scream from Chiron’s mother begins that to consider the love of blackness confronted by academics, artists, can produce is to turn toward ethics called Little in part one and Black of what came before—what the the end of part one and marks as an ontological question is to give and activists—that is, an ethical once more. I propose suspension in part three). Moonlight thus exists viewer has been shown and what the beginning of part three; this weight and necessity to blackness declaration for the centrality and as a continuation and culmination as a triptych: three sections work the viewer has been denied. Each suspension produces a rift between as an ontological question for love. necessity of blackness and its of that ethical project. Suspension to imagine three Chirons. And like a part of the film (i. Little; ii. Chiron; iii. the violent shaming of the mother’s Which is to say, I view the work of aesthetic liquidity in the world. offers not a new mode of seeing, triptych, the dividing lines between Black) seeps into the next, though (and the world’s) disdain and the liquid blackness over at least the but a new practice of being with the three stories and worlds are film’s need to protect and care for The purpose for this brief reflection rarely with images; more often, this previous two issues as a thorough, and caring for. It is a mode of black blurred with characters, settings, Chiron and his queer blackness. As on liquid blackness is to offer a frame intermingling of parts is enacted experimental dive into theorizing aesthetic possibilities that does and moods lingering in the harsh Karaduman argues, the aesthetic for how I understand the terms for by the affective and narrative how we as theorists and people in in motion what liquid blackness black screens that separate each work of rupturing aurality contains the current issue on the aesthetics remains of what came before and

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and holds Chiron’s queerness away film demands through its aesthetic his back almost touching the wall. He from queer shame until he finds a fluidity an open participation with stands just far enough back to avoid path otherwise and, crucially for the and alongside Chiron—a study of and its touch. A body-length away stands pedagogical ethics of suspension, love for. This essay, therefore, will Kevin, the man Chiron has driven nine keeps the film from enacting a attempt to embrace the fluid triptych hours from Atlanta to Miami to see repetition of that shaming violence. structure that the film deploys. I after a decade. Chiron’s eyes stare offer three sections of my own— down, his mouth slightly open, ready What is at stake for Karaduman hardness, water, and erotics—that to speak should the energy come. and I, and why this issue turns theorize three modes of Chiron’s Kevin stares straight ahead, trying to multiply to Moonlight, is precisely image and the implications they find Chiron behind the averted gaze this pedagogical potential in the have on him for himself, for the film and tight grip of his muscled body. Tri pt ych 2. Moo n lig ht (D i r ec ted by Bar ry J en ki n s , 2016, A24, Pa stel , an d Pl an B Entertai n m ent), fr am e g r ab s . film. The film aesthetically makes itself, and for those bearing witness The camera stays in a medium shot available and aesthetically teaches Chiron). “So, you hard now?” Kevin, to be hard, how does one achieve it, be hard is to not be soft, to not be to both. These three terms are not from Chiron, close enough to see his the viewer the love and care for after hours, finally utters the question and what are the ramifications for weak, to not be gay. Juan, a drug addressed discretely in the film, body and apprehension but too far queer blackness. And—like Cramer’s that sums up what he sees as the gap doing so? In part one, we see Chiron dealer who finds Chiron after he has but exist simultaneously within and to really gaze into him. The camera development of an alternative mode between this older Chiron, this Chiron and Kevin playfully wrestling after escaped from his bullies, performs without each other. Therefore, this cuts to Kevin, his eyes still attempting of textual analysis that preserves the who now goes by “Black,” and the Chiron has left a larger group of hardness most clearly and powerfully is not a progression or hierarchy to penetrate Chiron to find the kid multiplicity and fluidity of the filmic lanky Chiron whom Kevin touched, boys. Kevin asks if Chiron is soft, and in the film. Juan is a beautiful, dark- of terms, but the atomic materials he grew up with, the kid he desired, jazz ensemble—to watch, know, and caressed, and kissed on a beach Chiron unequivocally declares that he skinned Cuban man. His body is holding Chiron and Moonlight in a the kid he broke. Kevin finally speaks, speak of Moonlight is not to consider a decade before. Another pause isn’t soft. Kevin says he knows, but muscled, and his skin is flawless but conflicting and stressed movement “Who is you, man?” Chiron looks up, a singular moment or a singular stretches out, and the camera stays that Chiron has to act harder so that always contains a slight glisten of between care and containment. confused and frustrated, “Who’s me?” instance of Chiron, but to consider Once more, Kevin asks, “Who is you, on Chiron hunched in the corner. His everyone else will know too. Hardness sweat. Juan becomes Chiron’s father the fluid, non-linear movement of the i. Hardness Chiron?” A pause stretches out, filling body grows tighter; his lips close, is a performative act of masculinity. It figure. He takes Chiron swimming for film’s entirety. Just as Chiron is not hiding his fronts. Kevin’s question, “So can be visually signaled through the the first time, gives Chiron a second To begin thinking about the film, I will the room with affective desire—desire simply Little, Chiron, or Black, but an to answer, desire to scream, desire to you hard now?” frames much of the hard body—a muscled, masculinist family, and pushes Chiron’s mother to amalgam of each and much more, the turn to where it ends. Chiron stands tension of the film: what does it mean image of solidity and fortitude. To get her life together and stop taking hunched in the corner of the kitchen, touch, desire to know (each other and

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Tri pt ych 3. Moo n lig ht (D i r ec ted by Tri pt ych 4. Moo n lig ht (D i r ec ted by Bar ry J en ki n s , 2016, A24, Pa stel , Bar ry J en ki n s , 2016, A24, Pa stel , an d an d Pl an B Entertai n m ent), fr am e Pl an B Entertai n m ent), fr am e g r ab s . g r ab s .

the drugs that he sells her. Juan is the first opening of himself we have After Kevin’s confrontation with and liquidity. That sweat marked a the first person Chiron confronts heard since. Back then, Chiron spoke Chiron’s hardness, Chiron is finally porousness between Juan’s inside about his own sexuality, asking, about those breezes that blow out able to respond and speak of his own and outside, between his hardness “What is a faggot?” Juan answers from the ocean and through the choices, his own agency—something (the performative act of masculinity) honestly—“a hateful word for gay hood, breezes that feel so good “all Kevin consistently denies him from and the caring caress of family and people”—and tells Chiron that he will you can hear is your own heartbeat,” childhood to the present adulthood. love he showed Teresa and Chiron. figure it (his implied sexuality) out breezes so good, they “make you Chiron speaks of the work and labor These are not oppositions, but facets eventually, but not to worry about start to cry [...and] turn into drops he did to make himself hard. After of Juan that made him the lingering, it now. Juan becomes the symbol and just crawl out into the water.” shattering that chair, Chiron is sent haunting figure in Chiron’s life. What of a proper-life: his body his hard, One such breeze rushed out from to juvenile detention and eventually is at stake, aesthetically, for Chiron in his wife is beautiful, he is open and the ocean to hit them, to pull Kevin’s moved to Atlanta. He builds himself that kitchen, and in his life, is finding caring, and he sells drugs. There is a hand up to Chiron’s neck, to guide his up anew; he builds himself up as his access to the exuding of liquidity, a normality to Juan, despite his illegal mouth to Chiron’s mouth, to caress ideal male figure of consistent love— fluid openness of self and world. trade, that becomes a clear idol and his fingers against Chiron’s pants, Juan. The film, unlike Kevin, does not future model for Chiron (Triptych 2). to touch Chiron (Triptych 3). But reject this hard Chiron, nor does it ii. Water this new opening spoken in Kevin’s argue that his identity as Black is a The film does show Chiron as wet, In that kitchen—with his body, kitchen comes faster than on the simple performance covering over identity, and self so thoroughly his skin covered in water, but it is just beach; it comes harder and stronger his “real” desires. However, the film that—covered. We see Little make questioned, just as it was when he and more desperate. Chiron speaks does share Kevin’s apprehension. first heard “faggot” as a child and himself a bath after his mother’s of his life after Kevin made him When we, and Kevin, return to this latest bender. We see Chiron dunk Terell pushed Kevin to punching bleed to cover over his own fears. older Chiron we see Juan, a hard- Chiron—he finally speaks the closest his beaten face into a sink of ice. And He speaks of his life after he broke a bodied drug dealer, but Chiron is we see Black submerge himself in a thing he has to an epistemology of chair over the back of his tormentor, missing something, and it is not the himself. It has been a decade since sink of ice as a ritual for his hardened Terell. Chiron speaks: “When we got heteronormative family. Chiron is body, a step alongside pushups and Kevin and Chiron sat on that beach to Atlanta, I built myself from the missing the slight glisten of sweat, the together, smoking a blunt, and this the rest of his workout. Chiron must ground up. I built myself so hard.” porous movement between solidity always place water upon his skin; he

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liquidity to flow as it did for Juan. aesthetic formation—one of water, we are witnessing. That rapture on he cannot reach inside himself to know his The inability to extend himself into of hardness, and of suspension. the beach or Juan holding Chiron this space is not a failure of Chiron’s up in the water are spaces of care, agency—his hard body and trapping. iii. Erotics of coming into contact with the liquidity...the flowing queer contingency of a Rather, it comes from his inability to I turn toward Audre Lorde’s erotics other through and for the self. orient himself as someone beyond for its consideration of those For Lorde, “The erotic is a measure debt unpaid, a debt rejected as never being owed. the closeted world in which he lives. bodies and feelings long denied As is made clear in the next section, between the beginnings of our and othered, those that have sense of self and the chaos of our no one has touched Chiron since been regulated and constrained 7 his encounter with Kevin on the strongest feelings.” To reach for the by oppressive heteropatriarchal erotic inside ourselves is to reach beach. But his lack of touch is not orderings. Other sensuous terms simply physical. The empowering for the empowering flow of energy cannot exude the liquidity of Juan. in The Cultural Politics of Emotions, the skin.”6 She sees this as a form are readymade for Moonlight; the knowledge of the erotic eludes between our self and our desires. Chiron’s ritual submersions in water Sara Ahmed argues that “What of labor that works over and on scenes of crucial importance to him; he remains closed off from the In Lorde, for a woman to know demonstrate a need, a yearning for needs closer examination is how bodies to shape their surfaces into this essay are filled with bodies fountain of possibility and liquidity herself is to know her desires—not that thing that he does not have, that heterosexuality becomes a script proper form, to orient bodies toward touching, seeing, smelling, and found in the dark and hidden places to necessarily achieve them, but to he cannot perform (Triptych 4). that binds the familial with the proper affects, and to produce all the hearing. However, these terms fail of the past and of the future. He recognize what she needs, wants, global: the coupling of man and limitations that orientation entails. to account for the multiplicity of and has been given or earned. It is a Unlike Juan, Chiron has a different must cover himself in water because woman becomes a kind of ‘birthing’, feelings and sensations occurring in reflective but never easy act of self- weight, a different alterity: the closet. Chiron is oriented toward the object he cannot reach inside himself to a giving birth not only to new life, any of those moments and the ways care that is fundamental, for Lorde, Chiron’s orientation—sexuality and he has made of Juan; he is following know his liquidity—the flowing queer but to ways of living that are already those sensations linger in and change to black womanhood, long denied directionality—forms his body and the path he feels Juan explored contingency of a debt unpaid, a recognisable as forms of civilisation.”5 the bodies they encounter. The the time and agency for thought and its potentials differently. How one before him. And yet, that path has debt rejected as never being owed. Ahmed is speaking directly to the sensuousness of touch is apparent feeling. The erotic knowing of oneself is oriented, whether one follows or been its own form of restriction. The norms of sexuality that oppress and What is left, for Chiron and when Kevin and Chiron sit on that comes at the expense of a system veers off the proper line, produces home he has built does not breathe suppress queer bodies and feelings this essay, is to find a means to beach, but that touch is momentary of oppression that exists around different effects and affects upon the way it did for Juan; Chiron’s that “accumulate as impressions on this erotics through a different and emphasizes the physicality of women and those left to the side.8 the body. Writing on queer feelings skin does not open up to allow his what Chiron is experiencing and

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The system Lorde speaks of values erotic suspends queer blackness in life lived otherwise. First, when he and in that openness, Kevin touches them end that way. The means work only in terms of its usefulness between the violence of the world arrives at Juan’s home and asks, him. Third, Chiron stands in Kevin’s through which Chiron knows himself The film cares to capital, and that usefulness and expansive, ancestral love. “What’s a faggot?” Chiron, as Audre kitchen being challenged on the is through speaking, through letting stretches beyond the product made Lorde calls for, recognizes himself, validity of his hardness, his agency, his voice radiate toward the other’s and the labor deployed; it stretches Returning once more to Kevin’s his own way of knowing other than and thus he speaks of his abstinence. ear, but also toward his own. The for Chiron into the skin, bones, muscles, and kitchen: Chiron, for possibly the the way before. His question is not The lack of physical touch Chiron erotic cannot exist simply inside the even the sinews of the self. The first time in the film, stares fiercely an attempt to return to the proper; has experienced since Kevin does individual. To know the erotic is to by leaving body is sapped of feeling and at another person. The camera has it is not an attack on the possibility not read as Chiron simply desiring encounter an ancestral past so that force, especially those bodies never cut in close to Chiron so that he of being a faggot nor utter terror Kevin once more, but instead of one can see what one must share itself open, conceived of as compatible with can be seen in ways entirely new at its possibility. His question is one not knowing how to return to that with others. And this sharing is the humanity. The erotic, then, is not just to both Kevin and the audience. of reaching out and hoping for an moment of reaching in toward the key; for “the sharing of joy, whether some abstract feeling of the Other Chiron’s hesitation is no longer answer so that he may learn who fountain of possibility. When he physical, emotional, psychic, or by producing with no substance or thrust. The timid or nervous. It is bubbling with he is and why he has so little space tells Kevin he “really hasn’t touched intellectual, forms a bridge between erotic, in the face of suffocating and something else. “You’re the only man to extend. He gestures out to the anyone since then,” he is letting go the sharers which can be the basis for gaps and vile racist heteropatriarchy, stands that’s ever touched me,” he says. queer paths around him. The second of that which weighs him down, the understanding much of what is not as a radical act of self-care that “You’re the only one. I haven’t really opening occurs when Chiron and thing keeping him stuck, the thing shared between them, and lessens nurtures, soothes, and grows the self touched anyone since.” The camera Kevin are at the beach and Chiron that doesn’t allow him to flow the the threat of their difference.”10 The holes that beyond the limits of expectations cuts away to Kevin in a medium shot, speaks of crying so much that he way his skin so desires. He opens erotic, and its poetic origin, produces while going on to form new and his body seen holding his green tea opens up completely, returning to himself up and lets out the solidity a profound act of knowing the self keep Chiron hard-fought possibilities.9 The erotic, in his small kitchen. His eyes are water and crawling back into the of expectations for the “good life” so that one may know another. The I wish to argue, offers a category soft, his gaze longing. He smiles a ocean. He speaks once more of a so that he may know his body, growth of the self helps grow one’s apart from of revolutionary aesthetic self-care smile that gestures to relief—relief desire to know who he is, of the know himself, know his erotics. relationship with the rest. These three that momentarily ruptures space that Chiron has finally spoken. liquidity he knows he has but is too moments are erotic because Chiron, Importantly, these three moments the viewer and time so that bodies, selves, I contend that there are three times afraid to reach inward to claim. He in his own voice, reaches into himself and souls can hold each other in gives himself up to the contingency of opening are not propelled by so that he may encounter those dark Chiron opens himself up to the physical contact, though two of collective embrace. That is, the contingencies of a queer life—a of queer futures, of becoming liquid, and hidden places long denied him

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harsh breaks in time; the stark black and purple light. The film finally cuts underneath that blue moonlight, his screens cutting each section; the backward, returning us to Chiron’s skin absorbing its luminescence and fracturing, silent screams of Paula, hand clutching sand as Kevin touches glowing all its own. The film is no Chiron’s mother; and the absent and him. The film cuts back one final time longer representing some coming-of- dead characters left in that off- to an image we have never seen: age story, a genre whose form is well- screen and past-black space—each Chiron as a child faces away from known and reliably cliché. The film of these challenges the assumption the camera, looking out at the ocean has flowed and stretched, like Chiron, of knowledge that the viewer may in blue moonlight. Chiron turns and into an expression of the erotics, an desire from a film. In particular, these looks back at us, back at his future, aesthetic reaching in toward the self suspensions preclude the sort of back at Chiron’s present (Triptych 5). to find a fountain of contingency, Tri pt ych 5. Moo n lig ht (D i r ec ted by Bar ry J en ki n s , 2016, A24, Pa stel , an d Pl an B Entertai n m ent), fr am e g r ab s . mastery and wholeness that viewers a coursing liquid suspending one’s often expect from a film that gives Chiron’s final moment of erotic self up through the energy of queer and speak them to and for others. what the erotic can teach us as an we cannot consume him whole and access to the underrepresented— opening ruptures the film’s form black life and potentiality. The His hardness and his liquidity come aesthetic engagement with queer assume a knowledge of completeness the multiply exoticized other. and temporality. The film has been glowing young Chiron looks back into an open, suspended embrace by blackness. The erotic, as a mode of and clarity that Chiron does not moving persistently forward, the at the camera and peers forward hearing Chiron speak of himself to ethical self-care proposed by Lorde have and that we are not owed. The In this disruptive care, Moonlight previous sections only felt in the through time to the adult Chiron others. These are moments of self- and made aesthetic in hardness film circles and moves through the also begins to teach us how to affective radiation they left behind sitting on that bed, his head nestled knowledge and agential declaration and water by Moonlight, does the world as it flows around Juan in its aesthetically, erotically care—a on the frame. But here—after this in Kevin’s shoulder. Little, Chiron, that make Chiron open to others work that I propose suspension opening, or as it delicately follows practice of aesthetic suspension. moment of Chiron owning his body, and Black look at, know, and hold and open to his own erotic love. asks for and that Moonlight offers Chiron through rippling, colorful This is how I understand the final owning his choices, owning his each other. They speak in a collective and teaches—an aesthetic taking concrete, and as it meanders behind montage of the film. The camera erotics—the film begins reaching I have focused more on the erotic voice of love to, of, and for each care of Chiron and a practice for Black’s car as he stretches out cuts into Kevin’s bedroom. The two back toward the past moments of rather than the other two modes other. In that embrace, an opened aesthetically caring. The film cares toward Kevin once more. This fluidity sit on the edge of the bed, Chiron’s self-care. The film spirals so far back of the triptych not to present it as and emptied Chiron knows himself, for Chiron by leaving itself open, by could give a sense of mastery, but head cradled in Kevin’s neck and into its memory that we are given a primary, but to lift up what the erotic knows a radiating vitality of queer producing gaps and holes that keep that fluidity instead keeps us at bay, Kevin’s hand gently resting on wholly unseen recollection: the image does uniquely and crucially in this possibility, a caressing of a radical Chiron apart from the viewer, so leaving us desperately behind. The Chiron’s head. The room is lit in red of Chiron, a child once more, standing film. I have worked to show some of epistemology of queer blackness. ■

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Endnotes 1. Lauren M. Cramer, “Passing Through: A Methodology for Close Analysis,” liquid blackness 2, no. 5 (2015), 41. 2. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013). 3. Dreams are Colder than Death, dir. Arthur Jafa (2013). 4. Alessandra Raengo, “Introduction,” liquid blackness 3, no. 6 (2016), 18. 5. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Duke University Press, 2004), 144-145. 6. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke University Press, 2006), 9. 7. Audre Lorde, “Use of The Erotic: The Erotic s Power” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches Audre Lorde (Berkley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 54. 8. Ibid., 55. 9. Ibid., 57. 10. Ibid.

56 liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven 57 Moo n lig ht (D i r ec ted by Bar ry J en ki n s , 2016, A24, Pa stel , an d Pl an B Entertai n m ent), fr am e g r ab . Within Derrida’s thought, suspension we hear a group of kids calling him is both spatial and temporal, “faggot” and chasing him into a dope We might think of suspension as that which pervasive and elusive. It operates hole. The first chapter ends with “Hush-hush, under a number of different signs, Little’s search for the meaning of this and in a number of different derogatory word frequently hurled holds (holds together, holds back), but does so languages that either resist or yield at him by other kids and possibly I Will Know to translation in ways that are not uttered by his mother in her scream loosely, allowing for movement and the coming easily gathered together: epochē, the film presents in slow motion and arrêt, syncope, bracketing, iteration, without sound. In this first scene of When I deferral, Aufhebung, and différance. the distorted scream, Chiron’s mother of the unexpected

1 Paula lashes out at him following her —Anne McCarthy confrontation with Juan on the street. Post- beach under the moonlight. The night image relations through an and queerness bracketed and in Know”: In this slow-motion scene, the mother Based on Tarell McCraney’s 2003 with Kevin remains an unforgettable aesthetics of suspension. In this suspension in (between) those takes out the anger she has built play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look memory for Chiron as we see in essay, I will analyze the two scenes two scenes by engaging with Kara during her confrontation with Juan Black Sound Blue,” Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, the third chapter, which opens of the mother’s distorted scream Keeling’s notion of “the interval,” that on Little. The verbal assaults continue 2016) is the coming-of-age story of with the mother’s scream distorted that close the first chapter and is waiting as a state of existence in in Chiron’s adolescence in the second Little becoming Chiron becoming differently, played in reverse motion open the third one, in which time suspension.3 While Keeling’s waiting chapter only to escalate into physical Aesthetics in Black on his journey of self-discovery until the cut to the scream played at is stretched through slow motion in “the interval,” originally developed violence. The only person Chiron can as a black gay man growing up in regular speed in its loud and clear and synchronization is put on hold by David Marriott following Fanon, talk to is his childhood friend, Kevin, Liberty City, a poor neighborhood in audibility, in Black’s nightmare. in the film’s post-black cinema refers to a predestined state of being 2 before their friendship is broken by Moonlight Miami . Presented in three chapters, aesthetics. Following an elaboration in an inescapable, vicious circle, I the bullies at school who force Kevin respectively titled “Little,” “Chiron,” Sound plays a key role in Moonlight’s on the aesthetics of suspension approach the thinking of suspension to knockout Chiron in front of their Arzu Karaduman and “Black,” the film exposes the aesthetic responses to society’s in the two scenes of the mother’s in the following Derridean gesture: schoolmates. The night before the difficulties in the protagonist’s search marginalization of black queer men; distorted scream, I will address how “To think suspension as suspension day of violence at school, Kevin and for a sexual identity. Even before we the film queers a heterologocentric the film holds Chiron’s blackness means thinking it beyond privation, see the protagonist on the screen, Chiron pleasure each other on the understanding of time and sound

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conflation of the success of racial who dismissed the label “black disturb the idea that racial and Moonlight operates in queer terms by ... skewing identity with an ideal manhood.8 artists” as they were careful to avoid national formations are obviously The redemption of an emasculated the potential limitations brought by disconnected.”16 Increasingly in black male identity in the form of “a the codes of cultural authenticity of the twenty-first century, queer sound-image relations as well as incorporating worship of the phallus” limited the black nationalism.12 The term is also scholars have rendered the voices black artists’ capacities in expressing defined by Derek Conrad Murray as of intersectional groups audible the chopped and screwed style of hip-hop to themselves and their experiences.9 “an effort to redefine the parameters as “[s]exuality is always racially Racial uplift, positive images, and of blackness in the twenty-first marked, as every racial marking stretch and distort all kinds of music cultural authenticity left no room century, and to push it beyond is always imbued with a specific for satire, critique, or queerness. the stifling dictates of nostalgia sexuality (gender, class, and other With few notable exceptions, Black for past political movements.”13 classificatory inscriptions are equally queer artists existed like ghosts determined and determining).”17 As as constitutive of what it suspends. Chiron’s sexuality” in an interval.5 of the earlier, mutually exclusive, during the 1920s Harlem Renaissance Due to racial patriotism, Johnson and Henderson claim in We might think of suspension as The aesthetics of suspension is and hence criticized scholarships and in the Protest Era of the 1950s fundamentalism, and policing, Black Queer Studies, intersectionality that which holds (holds together, one specific way in which the of blackness and queerness. and 1960s.10 They finally came out black people were threatened with and a non-single-variable politics holds back), but does so loosely, film relates to post-blackness by starting in the late 1970s and more in exclusion from their communities and are the tools to fight oppression allowing for movement and the constituting, triggering, and enabling Black Nationalism’s misogyny, the 1980s when black gay activism labeled “turncoats” or “sellouts” once and respond to the “complexity coming of the unexpected.”4 queerness in abeyance, suspended, homophobia, and hetero-patriarchal 11 they crossed the borders of “black of contemporary subjectivities” 6 stance led to hostility towards was also happening. However, 14 in the middle. Before analyzing the authenticity.” Similarly, queer studies 18 Suspensions of time and queer sexualities and added to advocates of post-blackness believe in the post-modern era. distorted screams that join post- was accused of pushing queer people of synchronization, which is “the its discrimination in terms of the struggle is not yet over and black aesthetics in cinema in their of color to the margins and bringing Thematically interested in queer audiovisual lock” and “the lynchpin social status, class difference, and that the discriminatory demons of suspensions, resonances, echoes, and the experiences of white middle- sexuality in the coming-of-age of sound cinema,” in the two scenes educational background.7 The the hetero-patriarchal black power ripples in Moonlight, I offer to turn class and mostly male subjectivities story of a black boy from a poor of the mother’s distorted screams Black Power movement’s goal of movement still demand an exorcism to post-blackness and its embrace to the fore.15 It is the “queer of color neighborhood in Miami, Moonlight “create a kind of mirrored ellipsis redeeming blackness, as in “black today. “Post-black” is a term first of black/queer—or “blacqueer”— critique” that “challenges ideologies joins the contemporary debates in the film, with all of the space (man) is beautiful,” through macho used by curator Thelma Golden in bodies after drawing a short map of discreteness” and “attempts to on intersectional politics and in-between holding the weight of hetero-patriarchy resulted from a reference to a group of black artists

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post-blackness through its queer The first scene of the mother’s on the street. The soaring strings films in which characters’ voices are marks a turning point in the narrative. elongation aesthetics of suspension as well. distorted scream occurs in slow- are already highly strung from the unheard.24 The specific aesthetic For the same reason, the muted Moonlight operates in queer terms motion, a technique that stretches tension between Paula and Juan. choices of muting the mother’s scream cannot be categorized as by specifically skewing sound-image time and in that elongation suspends The violin in Paula’s blast in the scream allows the composed piece “emanation speech,” another type of suspends relations as well as incorporating the the linear forward progression of hallway at home is “screwed down to rise to a breaking point, after rare and difficult-to-notice technique chopped and screwed style of hip- narration, putting it on hold and to a key … that a normal violin which it keeps resonating to suspend offered by Chion “found infrequently the linear hop to stretch and distort all kinds of sustaining ambiguity like a fog can’t play,” and the chopped and time by stretching it in slow motion in films, wherein the words are not music including classical scores with that covers a road blocking one’s screwed violin creates a deep bass and to bring out the tension of the completely heard or understood. forward piano or violins.19 In its post-black vision in traffic. The scene not only rumble sonically arresting bodies mother’s anger.25 With its suspenseful Speech becomes a sort of emanation aesthetics of playing with sound and defies a capitalist understanding and touching the flesh in its strong aesthetics, the scene mimics a of the characters, not essential for image relations, Moonlight queers— of homogeneous and measurable penetrating vibrations.22 Donnelly’s feeling of being choked, invoking understanding significant action or progression better yet, quares—such relations time of forward progress and point that “[w]hen a sequence chest compression and movements meaning.”27 Alternately, the possibility through its aesthetics of suspension, teleology of reproduction—or goes into slow motion, it is almost being slowed down when confronted of categorizing the muted scream as of narration, specifically of synchronization and “reproductive futurism”—through never accompanied by diegetic with difficulty of breathing. As “voice-out” coined by Justin Horton hence of audibility/inaudibility, slow motion, but also deflects sounds that match the speed of the Chion explains in Audio-vision, is also infeasible, since the replay of presence/absence, and linear/out- hetero-patriarchal shaming of queer action” is not the reason, though, “Often just one audio element of the the scene opening the third chapter putting it of-joint time in the two scenes of sexuality by rendering the mother’s why Paula’s scream is muted.23 The soundscape is ‘suspended,’ with the exscribes the first muted scream the mother’s distorted screams.20 I words inaudible.21 The mother yells scream is muted to mimic the futility result of heightening one moment in a loud and clear synchronization on hold and argue the technique that exemplifies at Chiron, possibly uttering the of a potential utterance of a word of the scene, giving it a striking, that gives the body back its scream, post-black aesthetics in Moonlight, word “faggot”—possibly, but not that is totally pointless to Little, disquieting or magical impact.”26 surprisingly lacking the ugly term.28 sustaining namely suspension of synchrony in certainly. Her words are muted, and who does not know its meaning. However, unlike the “often-goes- the two scenes of Paula’s distorted we hear only the music. Britell’s The sound design of this scene also unnoticed” nature of the type of In its deliberate silencing of the screams, is critical in terms of the gripping music continues over recalls silent film aesthetics, in which suspension Chion talks about, the mother whose muscle tension slows ambiguity film’s defiance of shaming queerness from the previous scene starting musical accompaniment is offered suspension through the mother’s down the temporal flow, the film as well as opening an interval for as Paula and Juan go their own in lieu of unheard characters’ voices muted scream in Moonlight boldly, is thinking on the elusiveness of the possibility of queerness. way after their tense confrontation with musical accompaniment to conspicuously, and even terrifyingly the meaning of what Little might

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have heard in his vulnerability.29 what the derogatory term means. form of antidevelopment requires Approaching vulnerability as the Little understands debasement, healthy doses of forgetting and The film condition of responsiveness, Butler degradation, and shaming as well as disavowal and proceeds by way offers: “[S]omething affects us, his deviation and separation from of a series of substitutions.34 or we find ourselves affected; we his mother and bonds sideways demands are moved to speak, to accept the with the two adults who do not The transition from a door closed terms by which we are addressed, necessarily expect him to “grow on Little by his own mother to a that we or to refuse them, or, indeed, to up” to contribute to “reproductive door opened by Juan to welcome skew them or queer them.”30 While futurism.”33 In their embrace and Little inside adds extra space in- understand the film stylistically responds with understanding, substitute parents between the doubled opening its queer aesthetics of suspension, Juan and Teresa confirm Little brackets, namely the failed inaudible Little responds by diverging from does not have to know if he is gay scream and the end of the first the trauma the mother’s path: “She and Little or not “now,” as his now will come chapter signaled in a quasi-theatrical are drifting apart and whatever is later when his childhood is over: fashion by four flickering elliptical of the muted back there in that room is something blue lights on the black screen, that he will never understand or Queer culture, with its emphasis mimicking an epileptic seizure that see.”31 Separating his path from on repetition (Butler), horizontality suspends a body through twitches scream 35 the mother’s, Little deviates, and (Munoz, Stockton), immaturity and and convulsions. It is as if time is “deviation brings with it anxiety, fear, a refusal of adulthood (me), where elongated for the sake of a proper followed by and a sense of thrill” but at the same adulthood rhymes with heterosexual synchronization to be given to the time “when it is undertaken in concert parenting, resists a developmental substitute parents who clarify “the the parental with others, it is also the beginning model of substitution and instead linguistic register of autonomy” for Fi g u r e 1. Ter esa telli n g Lit tle h e wi ll k n ow i f h e is gay wh en th e ti m e co m es i n Moo n lig ht of new forms of solidarity.”32 After invests in what Stockton calls Little “against those who really fail (D i r ec ted by Bar ry J en ki n s , 2016, A24, Pa stel , an d Pl an B Entertai n m ent), fr am e g r ab . 36 they separate paths, Little finds “sideway relations”, relations that to address him.” The mother’s love solidarity and communion at Juan grow along parallel lines rather than scream is marked as lost time while and Teresa’s house where he learns upward and onward. This queer time is stretched to connect the two

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homes, through the opening and scream; the same shot of the mother closing —literal and metaphoric—of entering her bedroom after yelling Fi g u r e 3. Hallway i n J uan an d Ter esa’s ho us e. Lit tle is k n ocki n g o n th e doo r fr am e lef t i n doors, as a single space occupied at Little is played backwards in slow Moo n lig ht (D i r ec ted by Bar ry J en ki n s , 2016, A24, Pa stel , an d Pl an B Entertai n m ent), fr am e by Little. Visually, the transition motion. The reverse motion continues g r ab . from the closed door to another one until the sleight of hand of a cut to opening for Little is like a reversed the loud and clear scream that is mirror image. The mother walks synchronized and hence played at frame right and enters her bedroom the regular speed. The mother yells and closes the door; next is a cut “Don’t look at me!” and Black jumps to a very similar short hallway with forward in bed waking up from a door frame left inside Juan and his nightmare. To our surprise, this Teresa’s house. The film demands time in its precise synchronization, that we understand the trauma of the scream “retroaudibly” lacks the the muted scream followed by the ugly term that we expected to hear parental love in the form of proper after Little’s search for its meaning communication as a single scene at the end of the first chapter. With in its smooth transition through a its power to destroy the elasticity graphic match. In Allen’s terms, Little of time, synchronization ends the becoming Chiron becoming Black will suspension achieved through the be able to “conjure blacqueer love” muted scream in slow motion that through “time compression magic” was able to deflect the hetero- by learning from the lessons in the reproductive logic of forward Fi g u r e 2. Hallway af ter th e m oth er i nau di b ly y ell s at Lit tle an d go es i nto h er b edroo m fr am e past and by forming a community.37 progress.38 However, the audible ri g ht. Th e m oth er clos es th e b ed roo m doo r o n Lit tle i n Moo n lig ht (D i r ec ted by Bar ry J en ki n s , repetition of an otherwise distorted, 2016, A24, Pa stel , an d Pl an B Entertai n m ent), fr am e g r ab . The third chapter starts with the or doubly distorted and hence double distortion of the mother’s synchronized, scream surprises us

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only to prove the term of humiliation scream and not present in the that we expected to hear has gone repeated loud scream of the mother. The inaudible term of shaming ... missing in the audible inaudibilities In its impossible (in)audibilities, the of both of the distorted screams. discarded term of shaming is not Indeed, Black is haunted by his endowed with synchronization in a becomes a taboo word for the past, and as Derrida explains in heterologocentric understanding of Ghost Dance: “To be haunted by a presence and forward teleological mother ... silenced like a crypt ghost is to remember something movement in time. The possibly you’ve never lived through. For traumatic moment is skewed, quared, formed inside the film memory is the past that has never and distorted from its hetero- taken the form of the present.”39 patriarchal efforts of excluding queerness that it tries to render The repetition of the mother’s only deferral and repetition but also work of opening a space of interval; abject.40 I hear Moonlight echo scream, no matter how traumatic, is difference and a play with presence the muted scream, “call it, perhaps, post-black aesthetic convictions also productive. It reminds us that and absence in the suspensions of a plenitude without presence, that black unity, as holding one the aesthetics of suspension works to synchrony.42 In the first distortion marked by an ellipsis (points de position—namely ideal manhood, disrupt the act of shaming queerness of the scream, the act of shaming is suspension) which signifies omission “flattening out differences,” and and hence paradoxically constitutes muted, turned into “the scream of and pause, but also an opening and “sweeping certain things under the an interval for Chiron’s sexuality to Medusa by definition ‘stuck in the waiting for response.”44 In the way rug” in the pretentions of alikeness blossom in the second chapter. The throat,’” and marking “the suspension I read Chiron’s queerness, I take with no room for queerness—is two scenes of the mother’s distorted of life,” rendered inaudible and hence the potential Keeling sees in the inaudible, out-of-sync, and distorted scream operate like parentheses; they unintelligible.43 The silent scream interval rather than the viciousness in today’s “liquid blackness.”41 Fi g u r e 4. J uan an sweri n g Lit tle ’s q u estio n abo ut th e m e an i n g o f th e ter m i n Moo n lig ht (D i r ec ted precede and follow Chiron’s coming operates at best like an ellipsis of the circle that renders blackness by Bar ry J en ki n s , 2016, A24, Pa stel , an d Pl an B Entertai n m ent), fr am e g r ab . to terms with his sexuality, with the In its doubling of the scream, given or opening parenthesis—that is, a impossible: “The challenge the inaudible and incomprehensible a latent audibility only later as if in symbol in a text rather than a word experience of the interval provides term swallowed first in the silent the form of an echo, there is not with a meaning silently doing its entails opening thought to ‘the

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The bracketing of Chiron’s blossoming sexuality produced through the parenthetical distorted Queer sexuality...is already inside, part of, and a screams of the mother is accentuated and doubled through the flickering blue and red lights on the black possibility in blackness screen that punctuate the sequential breakdown of the three chapters in a quasi-theatrical fashion. The two scenes of the mother’s distorted screams as the outer brackets halt the linear narrative flow twice by unforeseeable, the unanticipatable, parenthetical screams in the film The two outer parentheses hold elasticating, stretching, and distorting the non-masterable, non-identifiable.’ aporetically opens up a space, an blacqueer sexuality suspended and a possibly traumatic moment Perhaps a whole other reality— interval for the possibility of black stretched in an interval centered perversely while they operate one that we do not yet have a queer sexuality. Queer sexuality inside, in the middle: “Suspension through différance by not only memory of as such—opens up.”45 that the mother intends to leave is not, for Derrida, the exclusion of differing from each other and what out, discard, and expel is already anything, … but a way of bracketing, could logocentrically be thought The inaudible term of shaming in the inside, part of, and a possibility in keeping contingency present, of as an origin but also deferring distorted screams becomes a taboo blackness. The impossibly possible including it.”47 It is an interval eternally in the suspensions and word for the mother, unutterable, queer sexuality works as a trace or opened in post-black aesthetics repetitions of the event rendered censored, and silenced like a crypt différance in the distorted screams; that conjures blacqueer magic formed inside the film, repeatedly highly dense and thick in affective their “operations of suspension in its inaudible audibilities and Fi g u r e 5. Th e flick eri n g b lu e o n a b l ack scr een s epar ati n g th e fi rst an d th e s eco n d chapters i n making distorted and inaudible calls terms and as uncertain and elusive resemble that of différance, opening impossible resonances echoing Moo n lig ht (D i r ec ted by Bar ry J en ki n s , 2016, A24, Pa stel , an d Pl an B Entertai n m ent), fr am e through a rippling in suspended time. in its semiotic vulnerability.49 The intervals and breathing spaces into “rhizomatic agencement,” “temporal g r ab . flickering elliptical dots of blue and The suspended act of abjecting and the structure of signification.”46 dispersal,” and “litany for survival.”48 shaming queerness by the mother’s red lights on the black screen, (Points

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de suspension or Points:...), double to the interval Keeling explains centered inside centrifugally the bracketing of the blooming of in relation to the muscle tension ripples through the aesthetics of Chiron s queerness in the film, accentuating and the threat of explosion Fanon suspension of the ellipses, visual, ' the paradox of the (in)significance diagnoses in the colonized, there is a sonic, or textual. It is an interval for of the adolescent years as highly specific temporal configuration of the a bonding, communion, and union to queerness is in critical and in constant resonance distorted screams in Moonlight.53 On last forever in a suspension without with childhood and adulthood.50 the one hand, the first muted scream, end: “(...the state of suspension in the interval, This spatial and temporal interval inaudible and indecipherable, is, like which it’s over—and over again, of queerness opened by the the muscle tension or the “necrotized and you’ll never have done with suspended parentheses is an interval similar flesh”, too early.54 On the other hand, that suspension itself).”55 to and different from the one Kara after the night Chiron spends with ■ Keeling proposes in “In The Interval.” Kevin on the beach, the second inside and in Keeling understands the interval as loudly synchronized scream following an infernal cycle, as a predetermined a reversed slow motion return of waiting, but duration starting with an opening the mother, just like the explosion, and ending with an explosion that is too late. Differently in Moonlight, immediately restarts the entire Chiron’s queerness is in the interval, impossibly cycle of the wait echoing Hartman’s suspended inside and in waiting, but notion of the “afterlife of slavery.”51 impossibly possible like his blackness possible like Unlike the wait in the interval Keeling that turns blue in moonlight at reveals, the suspension in Moonlight night, the one night he will have his blackness takes queerness in an interval as spent with Kevin on the beach. Fi g u r e 6. Th e l a st scen e s howi n g K e vi n an d B l ack r eu n ited: bo n di n g , love, an d affec tio n i n “... a text with uncertain quotation Moo n lig ht (D i r ec ted by Bar ry J en ki n s , 2016, A24, Pa stel , an d Pl an B Entertai n m ent), fr am e marks, with floating parentheses It is an interval initiated by time that turns blue g r ab . (never to close the parenthesis is suspended and stretched through its very specifically: to drift).”52 Similar ripplings from inside out; queerness in moonlight

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Endnotes Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity after Civil Rights (London: I.B. Taurus, 2016), 5-7. 1. Anne McCarthy, “Suspension,” in Jacques Derrida: Key Concepts, ed. Claire Colebrook, (London: Routledge, 2015), 24. 10. With its accompanying cultural arm known as BAM (Black Arts Movement). 2. Barry Jenkins explains in his commentary in the special features of the DVD. 11. Simon Dickel, Black/Gay: The Harlem Renaissance, the Protest Era, and Constructions of Black Gay Identity in the 1980s and 90s (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011), 21–23. 3. Kara Keeling develops this understanding of suspension following David Marriott, “‘In the Interval’: Frantz Fanon and The ‘Problems’ of Visual Representation,” Qui Parle, Vol. 13, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2003): 91–117. 12. Victoria L. Valentine, “A ‘Freestyle’ Take on Post-Black Art,” Culture Type, Oct 31, 2013, http://www.culturetype. com/2013/10/31/a-freestyle-take-on-post-black-art/. 4. McCarthy, “Suspension,” 24. 13. Murray, Queering Post-Black Art, 9. The term became popularized, although also partially conflated with ideas of post- 5. Kevin J. Donnelly, Occult Aesthetics: Synchronization in Sound Film (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, raciality, with the publication of Tourè’s book, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now, where all 2014), 12; I would like to thank Charleen Wilcox, who described the suspensions in the two instances of the distorted kinds of expressions of blackness are legitimized within post-blackness including queer sexualities. scream as “mirrored ellipsis” in a conversation. 14. Murray, Queering Post-Black Art, 2. 6. Impossible and atemporal synchronization in the diner scene in the third chapter and the technique of, what Jenkins calls, “portrait vignettes” with Paula and Kevin separately are the other scenes which deliberately queer synchronization, 15. Ian Barnard, Queer Race: Cultural Interventions in the Racial Politics of Queer Theory (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 3–4. a technique I find teleological and heterologocentric. 16. Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 7. Murray, Queering Post-Black Art, 7-8. See also Rinaldo Walcott, “Beyond the ‘Nation Thing’: Black Studies, Cultural Press, 2004), 4.

Studies, and Diaspora Discourse (Or the Post-Black Studies Moment) in Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora 17. Studies, ed. Carole Boyce Davies et. al., (New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2003). Institutionally, the reflections of such Barnard, Queer Race, 2. cultural nationalism and black authenticity were usually found in African American studies, a field born as an academic 18. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae. Henderson, ed., Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Durham, NC: Duke University discipline resulting from social activism. Press, 2005), 5–7. 8. As phrased by Angela Davis in Black Is Black Ain’t (Marlon Riggs, 1994); Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, 19. In DVD commentary, Jenkins explains that the chopped and screwed style is a genre of Southern hip-hop popular in Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 98. Houston and Tampa where the music is slowed down and the pitch goes down. 9. As phrased by bell hooks, Essex Hemphill, and Cornel West in Black Is Black Ain’t; Derek Murray, Queering Post-Black 20. E. Patrick Johnson, “‘Quare’ studies, or (almost) everything I know about queer studies I learned from my grandmother,”

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Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no.1 (2001): 1–25. 29. Scott, Extravagant Abjection, 109. 21. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 30. Judith Butler in “Interview with Judith Butler” by Sara Ahmed, Sexualities 19, no. 4 (2016): 485. 22. “Moonlight | Live Orchestra | Official Featurette HD | A24,” YouTube video, posted by “A24,” February 17, 2017, https:// 31. Jenkins explains in his commentary in the special features of the DVD.

youtu.be/4isV4dZLJn4. In the video, Britell explains the difference between scoring the film in the studio vs. the 32. performance of the live score in the theater at a special screening at Million Dollar Theatre in LA. Butler, “Interview with Judith Butler,” 484. 33. 23. Donnelly, Occult Aesthetics, 192. Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 73. 34. 24. The film indeed enjoyed a special screening with a live orchestra accompaniment in a common silent film exhibition Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, (Durham and London: Duke manner, joining the trend of other contemporary films being screened with musicians performing the score live in a University Press, 2009), 15. theater. 35. I would like to thank Charleen Wilcox, who made me think of “epileptic seizures” in relation to the flickering elliptical 25. “Moonlight | Live Orchestra | Official Featurette HD | A24,” YouTube video, posted by “A24,” February 17, 2017, https:// dots on the black screen that recall strobe light effects triggering epileptic seizures. A seizure is a suspension for the youtu.be/4isV4dZLJn4. In the video, Tim Fain plays part of the piece in the distorted scream scene and explains body that moves uncontrollably. how they had to replace his violin with an electronic one during the live performance. Fain says: “I was playing those 36. Butler, “Interview with Judith Butler,” 485–486. Butler interprets the political power and appeal of Sara Ahmed’s work in passages on an electric violin. We would pitch it down, get this sort of like otherworldly quality to it. I think we arrived this way. at something that got us the very emotional quality for the film. I could feel moments when people were holding their breath.” 37. Jafari S. Allen, “Allure: Conjuring Blaqueer Magic,” a keynote discussion with Tarell McCraney and Jafari S. Allen hosted by Morehouse College Safe Space, March 31, 2017. 26. Michel Chion, Claudia Gorbman, and Walter Murch, Audio-vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 133. 38. On time and synchronization, Chion offers: “The sound of the spoken voice, at least when it is diegetic and synched with

27. the image, has the power to inscribe the image in a real and linearized time that no longer has elasticity”, and hence the Chion, Audio-Vision, 222. negativity of such a destructive power (1994, 18). 28. Justin Horton, “The Unheard Voice in the Sound Film,” Cinema Journal 52, no. 4 (2013): 3-24. https://muse.jhu.edu/. The 39. Jacques Derrida in Ghost Dance directed by Ken McMullen in 1983 (DVD release by Cornerstone Media, 2006). unheard scream of the mother would be a perfect example of “voice out” if it was not endowed synchronization later in the film. 40. Scott emphasizes the potential powers of accepting degradation and humiliation in his understanding of abjection.

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Although my reading of abjection is different from his, I am certainly interested in his discussions of trauma and 52. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. by Richard Howard (Hill and Wang; 2010), 106. nonlinear time as well as lost time providing escape from subversiveness and subjugation in the rest of this paper. 53. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, trans. by Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 1; Keeling also 41. hooks explaining the problem of “ideal manhood” in Black is Black Ain’t; Alessandra Raengo, “Blackness, Aesthetics, elaborates on the specific temporal configuration on page 103 in “‘In the Interval’.” Liquidity,” liquid blackness 1, no. 2 (2014): 4–18. 54. Scott, Extravagant Abjection, 103. 42. Jacque Derrida, “Différance” in Margins of Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 1984). 55. Jacques Derrida, “Living On,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom et. al. (New York: Continuum, 1979), 77. 43. Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 671. 44. McCarthy, “Suspension,” 26. 45. Keeling, “‘In the Interval’,” 110. 46. McCarthy, “Suspension,” 24. 47. McCarthy, “Suspension,” 29. 48. Jafari S. Allen, “Black/Queer Rhizomatics Train Up a Child in the Way Ze Should Grow…,” in No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies, ed. E. Patrick Johnson (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 28. Jafari Allen prefers the use of the term “agencement” to “assemblage”; Scott, Extravagant Abjection, 111. Borrowing the term “temporal dispersal” from Merleau-Ponty, Scott offers that it is one of the powers of blackness; Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn: Poems (New York: Norton, 1995). 49. Murray, Queering Post-Black Art, 23. 50. Points de suspension: Entretiens is the title of a 1992 book, a collection of interviews with Jacques Derrida; the book is titled Points…:Interviews, 1974–1994 in its English translation. 51. Keeling, “‘In the Interval’,” 103–105.

80 liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven 81 N e t trice R. Ga s ki n s , So lo mo n ’s Le ap, 2017. D eepD r e am G en er ato r an d Photos ho p. Artist's Statement in this instance, move beyond prior — flight — considers the notion of Endnotes conceptions of blackness, explores consciousness in constant movement, 1. My work explores the concept of new questions, and develops new while I used algorithmic art to Michelle D. Commander, Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and Algorithmic "deep dreaming" as a way to create theoretical concepts that follow explore movement and flight. The the Black Fantastic. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 3. algorithmic art in real time and the development of visual culture resulting images show how themes 2. Roman Verostko, “The Algorists.” Web. http:// understand the process by which in the twenty-first century. in literature, media, and AI systems www.verostko.com/algorist.html. Analytics: human and spirit beings surrender provide information to explore This visual essay juxtaposes 3. and take to the air. Algorithmic art territory previously uncharted, Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon. (New York : Knopf, 1977). algorithmic art with images evoked can be found throughout history, by surrendering preconceived 4. Race, Blackness by Toni Morrison in Song of Solomon Kendrick Lamar. “Alright.” YouTube. 30 June 2015. from prehistoric basket weaving to notions of race, blackness and in Kendrick Lamar’s music video generative art in the twenty-first (culture), and technology. century. In the latter half of the last for “Alright.” In “Alright,” Lamar hangs and Data in from a crane as he travels down the ■ century, with the growth in computer science and digital media the use of streets of Oakland, California. Lamar Song of Solomon algorithmic procedures spread far takes his leap but his ascension is beyond the dreams of the earliest cut short by a policeman’s invisible practitioners. For this project, I bullet. In Song of Solomon, we do not and “Alright” used DeepDream, computer vision know whether or not the protagonist software that evolved from the study Milkman Dead actually achieves of pattern recognition in artificial flight or succumbs to death, joining Nettrice Gaskins intelligence or AI. DeepDream uses his ancestors. It could be argued algorithms that can learn from and that Milkman has finally found what make predictions on data. Examples he was seeking for most of his life: of this technology include self- the realization or fulfillment of his driving cars and image and facial potential. The underlying theme of recognition. The use of AI algorithms, Morrison’s novel and Lamar’s video

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Fi g u r e 1. N e t trice R. Ga s ki n s , Not D octo r Str ee t, 2017. D eepD r e am G en er ato r an d Photos ho p. Fi g u r e 2. K en drick L amar , "A lri g ht " (D i r ec ted by C o li n Ti lle y an d Th e Lit tle H o m i es , 2015, To p Dawg/A f ter math /I ntersco pe), fr am e g r ab .

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Fi g u r e 3. N e t trice R. Ga s ki n s , D r e a m i n g, 2017. D eepD r e am G en er ato r an d Photos ho p. Fi g u r e 4. K en drick L amar , "A lri g ht " (D i r ec ted by C o li n Ti lle y an d Th e Lit tle H o m i es , 2015, To p Dawg/A f ter math /I ntersco pe), fr am e g r ab .

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Fi g u r e 5. K en drick L amar , "A lri g ht " (D i r ec ted by C o li n Ti lle y an d Th e Lit tle Fi g u r e 6. N e t trice R. Ga s ki n s , B r e a ki n g Fr ee, 2017. H o m i es , 2015, To p Dawg/A f ter math /I ntersco pe), fr am e g r ab . D eepD r e am G en er ato r an d Photos ho p.

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Fi g u r e 7. K en d rick L amar , "A lri g ht " (D i r ec ted by C o li n Ti lle y an d Th e Lit tle H o m i es , 2015, To p Fi g u r e 8 – N e t trice R. Ga s ki n s , Su r r en d er, 2017. D eepD r e am G en er ato r an d Photos ho p. Dawg/A f ter math /I ntersco pe), fr am e g r ab .

92 liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven 93 L a Hai n e (D i r ec ted by Math i eu K a s sovitz, 1995, Le Stu dio C anal+), fr am e g r ab . Studying le hip hop in a hardscrabble increasingly autonomous. 2 French radical possibilities of life within the French neighborhood at the turn of artistic practices are often quite worlds in which they find themselves. the century, dancer and professor distinct from those of their American France’s hip-hopeurs have developed Hip-Hop Felicia McCarren discovered an cousins. However, le hip hop also a movement vocabulary that is almost dialectical tension: honors its roots in New York City in rooted in U.S. models, and in rage, Aesthetics the late 1970s, within the aesthetic but that is bound by neither. Though Even in class, there is a kind of system created and nurtured by still very much an art form of the rage in the form: some of the African-diaspora youth in America. dispossessed, McCarren writes, “… and La moves are outrageous. We are In dance, for example, these debts this dance has come to speak about taught to move frenetically, not are expressed not just through other things: to figure its dancers 4 just to the beat. We learn to crawl the (seeming) contradiction of as something or someone else….” on the floor and skim over it “outrageous” moves pursued with Haine backwards. We all try to spin on In this essay, I examine another discipline and extraordinary skill, artistic statement with a similar our heads. But these moves are but also through a preference for all at the service of a performance project: the brutal, elegant, and Steve Spence the aerial. McCarren notes that this widely celebrated film La Haine, that is disciplined, skill that is Africanism manifests itself in the acquired, and dancing that is directed by Matthieu Kassovitz and emphasis on upward movements released in 1995. As I demonstrate, not only for oneself but also for during the initial, “top-rock” stages of others. It is not jazzercise and the parallel sensibilities that a hip-hop performance, so that feet link La Haine to le hip hop are it is not gym; it is a dance class seem barely to touch the ground.3 with a recognizable format.1 no coincidence. In ways that And it is most clear in the form’s have not been fully appreciated, As McCarren and many others “air moves” and “power moves,” La Haine is a hip-hop film. have noted, le hip hop’s artists including its distinctive head spins and interpretive communities are and windmills. By defying gravity in At the level of mise-en-scène, of Fi g u r e 1. B- boys dan ci n g i n a wr eck ed tr ai n statio n i n L a Hai n e (D i r ec ted by Math i eu K a s sovitz, thriving, multi-generational, and this way, hip-hop dancers are making course, few could miss La Haine’s 1995, Le Stu dio C anal+), fr am e g r ab . gestural statements about the passion for hip-hop. Shot on location

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in a working-class suburb of Paris, Marseilles. Like many inner cities house. M’Bowole had been arrested 1960s the banlieues have served from it.”11 Unlike its sociological “to shock the film showcases the artistry of in the U.S., the banlieues are home on suspicion of stealing cigarettes. as backdrops for the experimental contemporaries, Vincendeau notes, the neighborhood’s graffiti writers to Black and Brown communities The film’s narrative culminates in a and highly personal work of many “…La Haine is polished and seductive. and b-boys, and it also includes of the African diaspora—most with similar bauvre, and its fictional story French auteurs, including, for It aims to shock and please….”12 and to a cameo performance by DJ Cut roots in former French colonies in is framed by a complex set of devices example, Deux ou trois choses que Killer (Anouar Hajoui), a renowned the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa, that undergird the film’s claims to je sais d’elle (Jean-Luc Godard, As it happens, “to shock and to please” offers Parisian DJ. For a great many critics, and the Antilles.6 And while white realism. The narrative’s opening 1966) and Le Camion (Marguerite please” offers a useful summary however, hip-hop’s appearances supremacy and anti-black racism of shot, for example, is preceded by Duras, 1977).9 Many reviewers within of the aims of hip-hop aesthetics, a useful serve at best as evidence of the film’s course have distinct histories and an intertitle—spare, plain text on a France’s cinematic establishment evident in the outrageous moves ethnographic impulse or, worse, of manifestations in France, in some black background, with no music— drew similar comparisons. Cahiers du of b-boys and b-girls as well as the Kassovitz’s efforts to tart up the cases their workings are grimly that dedicates La Haine “to those Cinema, no fan of the “sociological,” smooth flow of hardcore rappers. summary story with imposed signifiers of an familiar: as are many U.S. cities, the who died while this film was being praised Kassovitz for his ability Hip-hop artists rarely feel a need Americanized, commodity culture.5 banlieues are plagued by ongoing made.” A similar title card follows to “escape naturalism,” and Le to choose between commitments of the aims police violence.7 What are called the final shot, thanking the residents Nouvel Observateur compared La to form and commitments to In both cases, La Haine’s ostentatious police bauvres (blunders) routinely of the cité (public housing project) Haine favorably with A bout de realism. “So many people can’t style poses a problem. Although the cause serious injuries and deaths in which La Haine was filmed. soufflé (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960).10 see,” the U.S. artist Jay-Z observes, of hip-hop film flouts the codes of journalistic among banlieue residents, and La As this suggests, the filmmakers Vincendeau argues that La Haine “that every great rapper is not realism, La Haine clearly shares a Haine was conceived specifically as just a documentarian but [also] a presented La Haine as an exposé deviates from the “dreary” and 13 aesthetics mission with the wave of TV exposés an indictment of both this violence on life and death in Paris’s trouble “rough” form of contemporary trickster.” As Will Higbee notes, and “sociological” films that preceded and public indifference toward its banlieues, and French audiences sociological films, and therefore, during the 1980s and early 1990s and followed its 1995 release. persistence.8 Kassovitz asserts embraced this claim to realism. should be understood as a hybrid: Kassovitz immersed himself in Its makers framed La Haine as a that he began the script in 1993, “From the ‘sociological’ films it Paris’s emerging hip-hop scenes, “message film”—a stark examination on the day that police shot and Nevertheless, La Haine’s flamboyant takes a genuine interest in the and their influence is quite evident in of contemporary life in France’s killed a 17-year-old Zairian, Makome style seems to point in other the soundtracks of his early shorts working-class suburb as setting 14 embattled banlieues, the suburbs M’Bowole, while he was handcuffed directions. Ginette Vincendeau, and topic, and from the ‘aesthetic’ and his first feature film. By 1993, that ring major cities like Paris and to a radiator in a police station for example, notes that since the films a stylistic distanciation when he began work on La Haine,

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the 26-year-old director was already never fully anywhere. It never tension, which is reinforced by the fluent in hip-hop forms and the lands. It hovers. — Eric Hayes15 voiceover joke, told by Hubert: Steadicam shots ... remain grounded in the possibilities that they offered for cinema. In sum, then, the best models La Haine’s narrative is framed by It’s the story of a guy who falls for La Haine’s complex form are a joke, told in voiceover, about a off a skyscraper. On the way proprioceptive perspectives of the embodied not to be found in the traditions of man in free-fall. The device signals down past each floor, he keeps French auteurism. A better guide is a larger truth about the narrative: it telling himself, ‘So far so good; human subject La Haine itself, which highlights hip- exists in a moment of suspension, so far so good; so far so good.’ in spaces of relative calm that are hop artistry in its content precisely Hubert repeats the joke midway pregnant with the possibilities of in order to pay homage to its most through the film, and it appears violence. The film’s story begins on important formal influence. In what a final time in voiceover during the morning after an uprising has follows, I investigate two intertwined the film’s concluding scene, after engulfed a cité in Chanteloup-les- critical aspect of La Haine’s vocation. landing differently. However, these social connections revealed as the ways that hip-hop’s formal the police have shot Vinz in the Vignes, a banlieue located northwest Like the final version of Hubert’s possibilities are not clearly conveyed three friends move through their system contributes to La Haine’s head, and as Hubert confronts his of Paris. It ends in another spasm of joke, La Haine served as a kind of through La Haine’s narration. neighborhood. Kassovitz’s choice achievements: in the kinetic beauty killer. Each time, Hubert follows violence. In between, La Haine follows alarm cry regarding France’s fracture Instead, they are most vibrantly of a densely layered soundtrack embodied by its camerawork, and in the punch line with a dénouement: 16 24 hours in the lives of three young sociale. And yet both the joke and expressed by the film’s form. also plays a role. The sonic world of its densely layered intertextuality. “But it’s not how you fall that friends from the cité: Hubert, Saïd, La Haine as a whole convey much the cité is teeming with life: dogs matters. It’s how you land.” In many interviews, Kassovitz claims Defying Gravity in the Cité and Vinz. For much of the film the more than this. The film’s brutal barking, children playing, music, that he set out to make the banlieue friends move through the wreckage portrait of the banlieue is also shot traffic, helicopters, and conversations The Steadicam allows for One of the joke’s implications, of beautiful.17 He succeeded, but it left by this violent confrontation through with exuberance, warmth, all flow around the friends as they multiple points of view while course, is a sense of inescapable is a kinetic sort of beauty—more with the police that includes burned- and humor—qualities often neglected make their way through their home. never committing to one of doom. It sketches a kind of akin to dance than photography out cars and businesses, smashed by critics, but which nevertheless But La Haine’s kinetic beauty largely its own….It can go anywhere— dangerous limbo, a freedom that or painting. It results from the windows, wrecked police and give lie to any radical pessimism. can be credited, in addition to the indeed, it’s built to be able to might feel like flight but that must fluid integration of the characters train stations. This mise-en-scène In other words, both the joke and director, to the talents of four people. go anywhere….and it’s also end in catastrophe. This sense of into their social/material world, an contributes to the film’s palpable the film raise the possibility of Three are the film’s principle actors— impending disaster is certainly a effect supported by the intricate

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all athletic young men who move can’t….They do come from a body: hitting a half dozen marks along the shot, but then something quite with an easy grace and vitality. The a person carrying a machine way, upending our expectations, unexpected happens: the camera fourth is the film’s veteran Steadicam that’s making these images, at flaunting their technical skill, and becomes unmoored, both from the operator, Jacques Monge.18 human height, usually at human conveying a vibrant energy. ground and from any particular speed, moving and turning and point of view. Instead it floats La Haine’s highly mobile camera observing….[but] the technique The Steadicam’s contributions to above the treetops, meanders out has been often remarked, but it doesn’t settle for approximating La Haine can be gauged through of the courtyard, down the street, is the particular affordances of how we move through the world; it comparison with a very different and pans to look out toward the the Steadicam that are primary; makes improvements, surpassing sequence that achieves similar horizon. This fluid, gravity-defying the cité in particular is revealed our capabilities with a precognitive results. The scene featuring DJ Cut movement suspends the narrative through a series of long and fluidity of movement.19 Killer’s performance begins with a trajectory, transforming surveillance tightly choreographed Steadicam high-angle, static camera shot into into contemplation. It also functions shots. As the three friends make The Steadicam’s contributions are a busy courtyard playground. The as a visual analogue to the poetic, their way through streets, cellars, most evident during La Haine’s camera pans and tilts as it picks out pointed, and highly skilled sonic apartments, and rooftops, Monge’s elaborately choreographed sequence different groups in the courtyard, performance by DJ Cut Killer, which camera engages them in a smooth shots—single takes that often extend eventually arriving at the window dominates the scene’s soundtrack. and intricate dance, imparting more than a full minute. (The longest in which Cut Killer is setting up his the Steadicam’s unique sense of runs for 1:54.) These shots are turntables and speakers. The effect Sampling, Intertextuality, human embodiment combined with “outrageous,” like the dance moves resembles surveillance footage—a Generosity preternatural fluidity. As Eric Hynes studied by McCarren, and for many distanced, objective point of view writes in a tribute to the form, of the same reasons. Because they quite different from the human- The major things black art are Steadicam shots, they remain scale perspectives that dominate La has to have are these: it must Steadicam shots are uncanny. grounded in the proprioceptive Haine’s cité. The film then cuts to have the ability to use found They mimic how we move and perspectives of the embodied the interior of Cut Killer’s apartment, objects, the appearance of using see, and furthermore they seem found things, and it must look Fi g u r e 2. Per fo r man ce by DJ C ut K i ller [A n o uar Ha j o u i] i n L a Hai n e (D i r ec ted by Math i eu human subject. And yet they glide and he begins his performance. to anticipate how we expect to effortless. — Toni Morrison20 K a s sovitz, 1995, Le Stu dio C anal+), fr am e g r ab . and flow and curve and bend, The film returns to an exterior be able to move and see, but

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La Haine is replete with references film indulges in: Kassovitz of used record stores, searching and sources are textually aesthetic, an entire musical form to other films and filmmakers, makes his heroes inhabit his for the rare, golden breaks that signaled (or not) varies….25 created from borrowed material. This fluid, and many critics attribute this to own cinematic and visual culture will distinguish them among their the director’s pedigree, as both a rather than theirs. Vinz talking peers. Similarly, b-boys and b-girls This applies to cinema as well. Turn- A contemporary film, also influenced second-generation filmmaker and insist that newcomers master a of-the-century hip-hop maintains by hip-hop aesthetics, offers a gravity- to himself in his bathroom mirror 27 an avowed cinephile.21 Like the imitates the 1977 hero of Taxi repertoire of canonical songs and a durable appreciation for the useful analogue. Released three earlier New Wave, Kassovitz was Driver, where a similar young dance moves. Today, forty years movies that shaped the culture at years before La Haine, the U.S. film defying praised for his innovative riffs on man in 1995 would more likely after the form’s genesis, the b-boy its birth, mostly drawn from early Juice (Ernest Dickerson, 1992) also Hollywood genre films, and many have copied Bruce Willis or canon remains grounded in a select Blaxploitation, Hong Kong cinema, focuses on a group of teenage movement noted the parallels that connect La Arnold Schwarzenegger….23 group of funk songs recorded in and Hollywood gangster films. Tupac friends from an impoverished urban Haine to U.S. filmmakers including the early 1970s. Justin Williams’s Shakur, for example—arguably the neighborhood. As in La Haine, the Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee. Vincendeau’s readings of La argument about hip-hop music world’s most influential rapper when men’s friendship is tested as one of suspends the This reading of the film is fine as Haine are generally sensitive and applies to the culture more generally: La Haine was made and released— their group becomes increasingly far as it goes, but critics also often insightful, but in this case she is shared with his peers an encyclopedic enraged, unstable, and homicidal. narrative present La Haine’s many cinematic simply wrong. A young man like Vinz [T]here exists an audience knowledge of Blaxploitation and And like La Haine’s Vinz, Juice’s 26 quotations as a claim against might well possess an exhaustive expectation that hip-hop is a vast Kung Fu films. Hip-hop culture Bishop (Tupac Shakur) manifests the film’s realism. Ruth Doughty knowledge of Taxi Driver, along intertextual network that helps always has been marked by a his instability through an extended trajectory, and Kate Griffiths, for example, with dozens of other classic films. to form and inform the generic serious and sustained search for riff on a classic cinematic anti-hero. contract between audiences and a usable past. It is just a different Finally, both films showcase the art suggest that La Haine’s viewers Hip-hop culture as a whole is marked transforming find themselves “entrap[ped] in a hip-hop groups and artists. And in past than the one that is familiar of DJ-ing, signaling the inspiration by its reverence for and homages many cases, hip-hop practitioners to most scholars writing about La for their cinematic sampling. maze of cinematic allusions, a hall of to past masters, a fact documented surveillance 22 overtly celebrate their peers, Haine. Beyond French auteurism, mirrors reflecting upon other films.” in multiple ethnographic studies.24 Despite their similarities, the two Similarly, Vincendeau remarks on ancestors, and musical pasts, therefore, it’s worth thinking about “Crate digging,” for example, is a though reasons why this is so the film’s ostentatious intertextualty films’ use of sampling differs in into an interesting slippage in several foundational skill prized by both DJs may diverge, and how references in parallel with hip-hop’s sampling one important respect, and Serge cinematic references that the and producers. Practitioners spend Lacasse’s useful distinction between hours combing through the stock “autosonic” and “allosonic” quotation contemplation.

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can add precision to this discussion. 28 Scenes from White Heat then fill in ways that signify on the meanings Travis Bickle. Scorsese’s version Most hip-hop sampling is autosonic: the movie screen, complete with of the original. A contemporary already plays with the homology a producer digitally captures a artifacts signaling its televisual example is Tupac Shakur’s 1992 between mirror and cinematic screen. discrete section from a previously reproduction, akin to the “crunchy” “Changes,” which borrows chorus Kassovitz does him one better, and recorded song (e.g., a single drum vinyl artifacts prized by hip-hop and melody from “The Way It Is,” the scene’s blocking reinforces this beat, a melodic line, an extended producers. As they do in music, a multi-platinum single by Bruce effect, creating a play-within-a- riff) and then combines this with these media artifacts add a sense Hornsby and the Range. Both play-within-a-play that shatters the other elements to create a new of dimension—of temporal and songs are about the possibility film’s fourth wall. Cassel-as-Vinz, composition. Often these quotations cultural depth—to the film. It is also of racial and social progress, ostensibly practicing the lines in retain no explicit connection to their in this scene that Bishop first “acts and Shakur uses the sample to front of a bathroom mirror, stares original contexts, though many are out” White Heat—demonstrating challenge Hornsby’s facile optimism. in direct address at the camera. quite recognizable. Most within the his passionate identification with As Shakur’s chorus insistently As Vinz threatens his (imaginary) community certainly will recognize, the film’s psychopathic protagonist, repeats, “I see no changes.” interlocutor—“You looking at me, for example, the 8-bar drum solo played by James Cagney. motherfucker?”—the audience is La Haine uses a parallel technique, from James Brown’s 1970 single pulled through an unstable series of in the form of a disturbing, hilarious “Funky Drummer,” a sample used in Unlike autosonic borrowing, an subject positions: we are interlocutor, riff on Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, dozens of subsequent hip-hop songs. allosonic quotation does not directly cinephile, camera, mirror, and Vinz 1976) that erupts at an early moment incorporate previously recorded himself. The effect implicates the Juice uses a form of autosonic in the film (Figure 3). Rather than material. Instead, it borrows from an film’s characters, the filmmakers, and sampling, weaving footage from autosonic quotation (e.g., a film earlier work by commissioning a new its audiences in a web of relationships the classic gangster film White Heat 29 poster or television broadcast performance of it. Producers often that signify in multiple directions. (Raoul Walsh, 1949) directly into the use this technique to explicitly signal inserted into the mise-en-scène), the newer film’s fabric. This integration the borrowed element’s original film re-stages one of Taxi Driver ’s What this playful sampling of is motivated by an establishing shot context, as in parody or homage. key scenes. Vincent Cassel, playing Scorsese does not do, however, is that shows the principle characters Further, producers often modify Vinz, rehearses dialogue spoken undercut La Haine’s sociological Fi g u r e 3. Vi nz r eh e ars es li n es fro m Ta xi D r i v er (Marti n S co rs es e, 1977) i n L a Ha i n e (D i r ec ted by watching the earlier film on television. lyrics, arrangement, and/or contexts originally by Robert De Niro playing mission. Instead, by shattering the Math i eu K a s sovitz, 1995, Le Stu dio C anal+), fr am e g r ab .

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fourth wall’s protective barrier, the poster “The world is yours;” I put “the world” only to those able to than once. Illmatic includes its own performance jerks spectators into that in because in the cités they finance expensive beach vacations. extended riff on Scarface, a track unexpected relationships. Vinz/ all know De Palma’s Scarface by titled “The World is Yours.” With Cassel’s aggressive performance heart. You speak to them about As the quote above suggests, an insistent refrain—“Whose world is so unhinged that it reads as cinema and they tell you: “Yeah! Kassovitz was aware of the motif’s is this? The world is yours!”—Nas parody, but it is also literally in our like Scarface!” and they don’t origins in the 1932 Hawks film. boldly appropriates the message of faces. We may laugh, but we do so know the original, of course.31 However, it is worth emphasizing the Scarface’s fictional advertisement. to cover an atavistic discomfort. quote’s central point: “I put that in It is worth attending, therefore, Whatever its provenance, La Haine’s because in the cités they all know to the particular uses that Nas

“The World is Ours” incorporation of “The World is De Palma’s Scarface by heart.” In makes of his borrowed material. Yours” is inspired. Like both versions fact, it is likely that “The World is But perhaps the motif that hip-hop of Scarface, La Haine focuses on Yours” was in the air during the Scarface’s 1983 protagonist, Tony sampling can best illuminate is a an immigrant community whose four months that the filmmakers Montana, reacts to the forces billboard that La Haine’s protagonists inhabitants are pushed to the margins lived and worked on location in arrayed against him with a paranoid encounter twice while in Paris. of their society. In all three films, Chanteloup-les-Vignes. In April and predatory individualism. Nas Dominated by a photorealistic the protagonists are positioned to 1994—five months before principle takes this model and bends it. As image of a globe, its tagline reads, “overhear” this advertising pitch, shooting began—the European James Braxton Peterson observes, “The World is Yours” (Figure 4). which in each case is attributed to a branch of Columbia Records released “What immediately distinguishes This is a direct reference to two corporation engaged in international Illmatic, the debut album by the Nas’s world from De Palma’s is earlier films: Scarface (Howard business and tourism. In other words, U.S. rapper Nas. Embraced by the that the motif functions in hip-hop Hawks, 1932) and the remake, all three advertisements are targeted hip-hop cognoscenti on both sides discourse as a call and response Scarface (Brian De Palma, at members of the dominant class, of the Atlantic, the album is now rather than as the one-sided text 1983).30 In an interview, Kassovitz the beneficiaries of increasingly routinely cited as one of the most messages in the film. This is a signal says this about the motif: globalized capital. In La Haine, for influential of all time.32 During their distinction.”33 The song recasts the Fi g u r e 4. B i llboar d r efer en ce to Sc a r fac e (B rian D e Palma , 1983). G r affiti writer Saï d chan g es example, the billboard advertises time in Chanteloup-les-Vignes, the motif as a question, “Whose world vo us to nous, r en d eri n g th e tag li n e, “Th e Wo r ld is O u rs” i n L a Ha i n e (D i r ec ted by Math i eu There are lots of references in the a resort in Morocco; it promises filmmakers probably heard Nas more is this?” and then offers multiple K a s sovitz, 1995, Le Stu dio C anal+), fr am e g r ab . film. Hawks’s Scarface with the

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answers in multiple voices, including spray paint to change the billboard’s then, La Haine combines harsh overlooked by outsiders familiar “It’s mine!” and “The world is vous to nous, transforming the realism with a playful, generous, and only with the more individualistic yours!” Nas even name-checks his commercial come-on into a defiant endlessly surprising form. And like concerns of commercial rap music. neighbors, moving from his home “The World is Ours” (Figure 4). Illmatic, La Haine’s ironic humor and Nevertheless, the pattern is also base outward through New York’s vitality can help to illuminate hip- evident in La Haine, a story that many struggling neighborhoods: And, as it happens, Nas’s move hop’s appeal among the dispossessed turns, after all, on the pleasures also parallels the turn that La Haine in many parts of the globe. and responsibilities of friendship. To everybody in Queens, the makes with Taxi Driver. Scorsese’s foundation (It’s yours!) Travis Bickle is the prototypical “lone Conclusion In sum, hip-hop provides La Haine The world is yours gunman;” he lives an isolated, solitary with far more than just flashy In the quote that opens this essay, To everybody uptown, yo, the existence. Vinz, on the other hand, production numbers and a modish, Felicia McCarren writes that the world is yours (It’s yours!) is immersed within and supported subcultural style. Its influence is discipline called le hip hop demands The world is yours by his community. He lives with his both thoroughgoing and formal, “dancing that is not only for oneself To everybody in Brooklyn noisy family and spends most of the and the aesthetics of b-boying but also for others.” The b-girl Y’all know the world is film in the company of a wide range and sampling undergird the performs for the greater glory of yours (It’s yours!)34 of friends, including Saïd and Hubert, film’s most fundamental, forceful herself and her crew. Moreover, his closest mates. The three friends themes. In form as well as content, This restructuring of “The World is she dances paradigmatically within tease and bicker, play pranks, and tell La Haine is a hip-hop film. Yours” into call-and-response, or the “cipher,” or circle, formed by jokes. They back each other during “antiphonal” form, renders it both the larger community, and it is this ■ multiple scraps, Vinz cuts Saïd’s hair, multivocal and communal. The community that affirms or discounts and Hubert works hard to save Vinz change opens Nas’s claims “to all her expressive claims. It provides from his corrosive, homicidal rage. It of his listeners and by extension an space for individual achievement, is the depth of these friendships that entire generation of black and brown but only within the context of allows Vinz’s death to rise to the level people living in oppressive urban group solidarity. This structure is of tragedy, unlike the blank nihilism Fi g u r e 5. A n oth er echo o f Na s: H u b ert fr am ed by g r affiti r e adi n g “Th e Futu r e is Us ." i n L a Ha i n e conditions.”35 This is precisely the fundamental to multiple forms of that marks Taxi Driver. Like Illmatic, (D i r ec ted by Math i eu K a s sovitz, 1995, Le Stu dio C anal+), fr am e g r ab . move made by Saïd, when he uses hip-hop culture, but this is often

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Endnotes 2005, a particularly widespread and intense series of uprisings sparked a nationwide reckoning. On the uprisings and their aftermath, see Tshimanga, Gondola, and Bloom, eds., Frenchness and the African Diaspora. 1. Felicia McCarren, French Moves: The Cultural Politics of Le Hip Hop (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), xxxvii. 9. Ginette Vincendeau, La Haine, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 20. 2. For Anglophone readers, the best introduction to French hip-hop remains Alain-Philippe Durand, ed. Black, Blanc, Beur: Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World (Lanham, MD, 2002). 10. Cited in Ibid, 88. 3. McCarren, xx. For more on Africanist elements in hip-hop practice, see Halifu Osumare, The Africanist Aesthetic in 11. Vincendeau, “Designs on the Banlieue,” in Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau French Film: Texts and Contexts 2nd Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). ed. (London: Routledge, 2000), 313. 4. McCarren, xvii. 12. Ibid, 316. 5. Although the film garnered generally excellent reviews, there were notable exceptions, including Karen Alexander, “La 13. Jay-Z, Decoded (New York: Spiegel & Grau), 55.

Haine,” Vertigo 1, no. 5 (Autumn/Winter 1995), https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/volume-1-issue-5- 14. autumn-winter-1995/the-children-of-godard-and-90s-tv/. Will Higbee, Mathieu Kassovitz (New York: Manchester University Press), 32. Higbee’s book remains the most thorough discussion of hip-hop’s importance within Kassovitz’s early films. 6. In recent decades, immigration from the former colonies to the metropole has dramatically altered France’s 15. demographic makeup. However, long-standing federal laws prohibit the French census from asking questions about Eric Hynes, “Center of Gravity,” Film Comment (November-December 2016), 29. racial or ethnic identity, and as a result the precise makeup of France’s population is unknown. Because the state is 16. On first appearance, the joke describes a falling homme [man]. By the film’s end, the figure falling has become une officially “color-blind,” French authorities use euphemisms like “visible minorities” to discuss the country’s Black and société. Brown immigrants and citizens. People with roots in the Mehgrebi countries of Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Libya are 17. widely thought to make up France’s largest minority. Crystal Marie Fleming, Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and Claire Vassé, “La Haine, un regard metisse,” Positif 412 (June): 6–7. White Supremacy in France (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017), 9-11. 18. Monge was a pioneer Steadicam operator, trained by the rig’s inventor, Garrett Brown. After Monge’s death in 2017, 7. On recent activism challenging past and present racism in France, see Fleming, Ibid., and Charles Tshimanga, Didier Brown and many other prominent camera operators contributed eulogies to a professional tribute. “The International Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom, eds. Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France Community pays its respects to Jacques Monge,” French Association of Directors of Photography. http://www.afcinema. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). com/The-International-Community-pays-its-respects-to-Jacques-Monge.html. 19. 8. Police bauvres have become a political flashpoint, and new incidents often trigger demonstrations and violence. In Eric Hynes, “Center of Gravity,” Film Comment (November-December 2016): 29.

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20. Paul Gilroy, “Living Memory: An Interview with Toni Morrison,” in Paul Gilroy, Small Acts (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993), 30. For a good reading of this motif see Higbee, Mathieu Kassovitz, 50. 175–182. 31. The interview originally appeared in Positif (1995), by Thomas Bourguignon and Yann Tobin, 412 (June): 4–13. Translation 21. See, for example, Higbee, Mathieu Kassovitz, 7–11. by Higbee, Mathieu Kassovitz, 77. 22. Ruth Doughty and Kate Griffiths, “Racial Reflection: La Haine and the Art of Borrowing,” Studies in European Cinema 3, 32. Regarding Illmatic’s impact in France, see Brice Miclet, “Pourquoi Illmatic de Nas est l'album de rap le plus commémoré no. 2 (2006): 122–23. de l'histoire,” Slate, 06.08.2014. http://www.slate.fr/story/90467/illmatic-nas-album-rap-anniversaire. 23. Vincendeau, La Haine, 74. 33. James Braxton Peterson, “It’s Yours,” in Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas’s Illmatic, eds. Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai (New York: Basic Civitas, 2010). 24. Excellent ethnographic studies include Joseph G. Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample Based Hip-Hop (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 2004); Joseph G. Schoss, Foundation: B-boys, B-girls, and Hip-hop Culture in New York 34. Nas, Illmatic, Columbia CK 57684, 1994, CD.

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Joe Austin, Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in 35. New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Peterson, "It's Yours," 78. 25. Justin A. Williams, “Theoretical Approaches to Quotation in Hip-Hop Recordings,” Contemporary Music Review 33, no. 2 (2014): 203. 26. BaadAsssss Cinema, directed by Isaac Julien (2002; Los Angeles: Docurama, 2003), DVD. 27. I am indebted to my students Kiralfy Kennion and Terrell Barlow for pointing out this parallel. 28. Serge Lacasse, “Intertextuality and Hypertextuality in Recorded Popular Music,” ed. Michael Talbot, The Musical Work: Reality or Invention? (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), 35–58. 29. Producers often label this technique “interpellation.”

114 liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven 115 Mary S i ban d e, Th e A d m i r atio n o f th e P u r p l e Figu r e, 2013, D i g ital A rch ival Pri nt 150x110 cm / 59.1x43.3 i n . Gallery M o m o/ Licen s ed by Gallery M o m o, C ape Town , S o uth A fric a . The carte-de-visite is perhaps the cartes-de-visite present a counter freed black to own their labor let Truth sells her likeness and precisely truest historical record we have representation of Truth and reveal alone their bodies, Truth’s caption where black embodiment struggles the burden of Aesthetic that Sojourner Truth left behind.1 historical interpretation as neither suggests an understanding of the through illicit criminality, that The carte-de-visite assisted in utterly objective nor transparent. importance of controlling her visual blackness re-writes subjecthood the real and making portraits less expensive These historical narratives of presentation and performance. and the human through strategies Deception and reproducible. Combined with black women often suggest that By selling her likeness, to support of aesthetic deception. Through the wet-plate negative technology it they are not afforded the right the substance—the body that suggestive connotations of ‘liquid the fictive was possible to produce multiple to be strategic and unconscious was located elsewhere from the blackness,’ whereby suspension in Selling prints from one negative. Through curators of their own image or put image—Truth holds in suspension grapples with the ethics, aesthetics, ... becomes the use of this new technology, differently, aesthetically deceptive blackness as an ontological position timespace and forms blackness Nell Irvin Painter notes, “Truth in the development of subjectivity.4 that sutures modern capitalism, may take, I understand aesthetic capable of the Shadow established what few nineteenth- This article meditates on the burden while simultaneously disrupting its deception to be a re/invention, century black women were able to of the real and the fictive as it logic of surveillance of blackness. both strategic and unconscious, prove: that she was present in her becomes capable of producing Taking a nod from Truth, Selling conventional and outside of producing Sarah Stefana time. Her success in distributing aesthetic modes of suspension. the Shadow grapples with this convention, of blackness itself. We her portraits plays no small role in juxtaposition between blackness, might think of deception as a set of aesthetic Smith her place in historical memory.”2 Selling the Shadow, exhibited aesthetics, and capital. The exhibition practices that utilize illicit subject While appearing unmediated these at Gallery Momo in Cape Town, offers several considerations on formation, in time; is subversive and photographs were strategically and South Africa (2017), takes its name the politics of deception through ruptures normative logics of deviant modes of carefully staged. Juxtaposing the from Truth’s practice of selling the works of a diasporic collection blackness; and conjures pause careful staging of these cartes-de- photographs to finance her livelihood of artists while holding in space where the very terms of blackness suspension visite with Truth’s publicized oratory as a traveling preacher and activist. Truth’s influence on black visuality.5 befuddle and frustrate pathology. practice and a speech in Akron, Ohio Captioned with, “I sell the shadow, on May 29, 1851—widely known as to support the substance,” the “I” in In this article, I argue, much like Aesthetic deception is to invade Ar’n’t I a Woman—is to negotiate the this phrase warrants further scrutiny. the contexts and interpretive and trespass on anti-blackness. terms of aesthetic deception.3 The Given the inability of the slave or enmeshments in which Sojourner Yet, deception is not without the

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messy figuration of Truth to tease “historical impossibility” of Truth’s strategies and thick description out two modalities of deception: Southern dialect—that bring us to to describe Truth’s likeness and archetypical embodiments and two instances of aesthetic deception: speaking voice as a force to reckon Ultimately Truth’s true and “multiple meanings timespace. The latter half of this embodiment and timespace.9 Firstly, with the problem of race.10 However, article turns to specific examples the use of the body through gestures, Gage’s account—written in 1863, that perform aesthetic deception: adornment, and speech are evoked several years after the convention— cannot be reconciled the work of South African artist to project the knowable subject starkly contrasts with journalist Mary Sibande’s Sophie series and onto the body. Because subject Marcus Robinson’s measured account African American artist Torkwase formation is a precarious site for of the convention. Robinson depicts Dyson’s The Fugitive Project. black bodies, deception repurposes Truth’s words through standard the constraints of blackness and English with little reference to her Shadow Seller utilizes subterfuge to mark a different bodily gesture.11 Both accounts render burden of neoliberalism’s moral a reading practice that responds to fugitive flights to conjure black truth. Secondly, I use the concept of Truth as the strategic embodiment compass of “common sense,” which TransAtlantic slavery, colonialism, and life as possibility, I particularly pay It is to the cultural symbol of timespace to engage with geography of slavery’s problem and present understands deception as criminal, imperialism, I understand deception attention to the racialized gender Sojourner Truth’s oratory and visual (space) and futurity in the here and her as a symbolic figure with which illicit, and the propagation of beliefs as strategic, useful, productive, dimensions of Jillian Hernandez’s practices that I turn to think through now (time) as a corollary process to rally support for the abolitionist/ and ideas that are not true. This and at times a discombobulating uses of the politics of fakery and deception. The 1851 Woman’s Rights that marks black life despite the feminist cause. However, as Painter iteration of deception assumes mode of aesthetic practice. Because excess in contemporary Black and Convention in Akron, Ohio and logics of black death. The mode of notes, this Southern dialect starkly a relationship to race, gender, systems of oppression mark Latina women’s sexual aesthetics the lack of corroboration on how deception at play here exposes ways contrasts with a historical record of class, nation, and sexuality that racialized, gendered, and classed and find it informative for my use of Sojourner Truth performed this blackness is both precarious and slaves in rural New York, where Truth mobilizes white supremacy, to mark bodies continually as illicit, criminal, aesthetic deception in this article.7 I speech make legible the complication exceeds an always looming death. was born. Slaves from this region a universal subject as the barometer and in excess of a universal subject; take seriously fakery and strategic of historical interpretation and its 8 commonly lived on farms with Dutch of subjectivity, and relies on the aesthetic deception re-writes these manipulation as the battleground contemporary neoliberal convention. Gage renders Truth’s speech as a families and likely spoke Dutch as over-determination of what is truth, experiences against the normative in which blackness makes room It is through differing depictions of grand performance of Southern their first language.12 These accounts real, and authentic.6 Thus, much subject. While aesthetic deception for pause and undermines its her speech—recorded by Frances dialect, brands the speech, Ar’n’t remind us that what is known of Truth like Mirzoeff’s counter-visuality, as draws on the black fantastic and pathology. I begin by utilizing the Dana Gage and Marcus Robinson as I a Woman, and utilizes rhetorical well as what Nell Painter calls the is filtered through secondary sources

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that are fraught. Ultimately Truth’s objects, down to the lace and book the imaginative, the conventional Antebellum United States. Drawing both embodied and located in time true and “multiple meanings cannot in her hands evoking a respectable and the non-conventional of Truth’s on McMillan, I understand Truth’s and space as well as how deception deception is be reconciled.”13 Both accounts and literate subject (despite her figuration compels the following embodiment to be “an elastic means is wielded as both a means of reflect an entrenched white racism inability to read) that would strike questions: what can we bear to to create new racial and gendered survival and subject formation. I that relied on particular stereotypical a chord in those that encountered acknowledge about blackness? What epistemologies” that interfere with now turn to two examples within wielded as modes of illiteracy and regional her. Truth understood the symbolism cannot be tolerated in imagining the very anti-blackness that creates the exhibition Selling the Shadow symbols of slavery to be legible to of the carte-de-visite as a new blackness, black gender, and the will the contours of her existence.17 where the historical traces of both a means such an audience at the convention.14 technology that represented a sign of deception? How can deception Truth and strategies of deception Like the slave narrative, speech- of mobility and what Grigsby notes veer and travel into unpredicted My recounting of the above historical makes space for blackness’s of survival making, as a reputable form, required as “the fragile phantom substitute for directions? Truth’s embodiment and traces of Sojourner Truth are not multiple subject formations. “the former slave-cum-writer to the presence of persons exercising it disorientation to a real, true, and to generate a provable record properly execute generic conventions their freedom of movement.”16 authentic subjectivity reveal other nor to ignore the climate in which Aesthetic Deception: and subject and utilize a form already familiar orientations to blackness that are Truth lived as a factor in managing Archetypal Embodiment to readers” and simultaneously The juxtaposition of how Truth’s here rather than in the background her presence, but to arrive at two and in Plain/Plane Sight formation navigate the conventions of white Akron speech is conjured and the waiting to emerge. Truth’s aesthetic important points. Firstly, Truth’s strategic craft of her carte-de-visite performative and visual depictions Embodiment as aesthetic deception racism, even within the context deception through embodiment is exemplified in the work of South of abolitionist practices.15 disturbs notions of racial authenticity disturbs notions of racial authenticity (imagined and otherwise) contribute and simultaneously adheres to to her legibility as an abolitionist African artist Mary Sibande. Sibande (particularly prevalent in the hero uses sculpture and photography The rhetoric of the visual does conventions of racial and sexual narrative) and simultaneously adheres and activist. Secondly, this legibility not escape such deception. As I respectability. Deception whereby relies on aspects of imagination and to comment on the intersections to iterations of sexual respectability of race, gender, class, and nation. previously suggested, the carte- the symbolic imagination of Truth (e.g. grandmother figure in the carte- contradiction within the biographical de-visite might be the only real as an embodied subject and one details that we know of Truth. To Drawing on an alter-ego figure de-visite) that continue to reinforce named Sophie, Sibande develops document of Truth bearing an explicit located in timespace rather than the hierarchies of race and gender. These take seriously these juxtapositions mark of her self-crafting. Of this historical provability of her figuration (e.g. Truth’s Northern upbringing the character of a domestic worker embodiments are undergirded by that draws on the historicity of four representation, Painter notes Truth’s make this disruption possible. This racialized and sexualized concepts against a Southern dialect) is to very clear and strategic placement of vacillation between the provable and firmly grapple with deception as generations of women in the artist’s of personhood laid bare in the family.18 As the figure of Sophie

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Within one figural embodiment, Sibande ruptures this context, Krotoa’s ability to Sibande first introduces Sophie of the domestic-madam relation, function as a go-between among (2008) through a life-size cast of her which is literally stitched into the settler and indigenous populations body wearing a domestic’s uniform overlapping forms of blue maid the dichotomy of maid-madam, constructing a represents the fraught and intimate with a collar and apron rimmed in uniform and blue gown (Figure 1). terrain of domesticity, power, and Brodeirie Anglaise, which originated The bellowing tulle skirt and cuff, subtle, albeit pernicious subterfuge of the tropes racial and sexual aesthetics that in 16th century Europe and is widely parasol, scarf and apron visualize Truth embodied. Furthermore, used in the apron and collar details the entanglements of entitlement of domesticity this ability to code-switch as an of contemporary South African and service, opulence and labor that interlocutor between different domestic workers.23 The nod to the figure into the domestic-madam populations disfigures normative Victorian era is present in much of relation, while the facial gestures values of sexual and aesthetic truth her work through stylization and it present an opaque comportment. while maintaining an attentiveness to historicizes South Africa’s colonial This installation is deceptive. Sophie grows larger over time, the work Linking Sojourner Truth’s iconicity broker in the colonial contact zone colonial conquest as an intimate and past/present, where Britain has not intertwines stereotypical symbols; blurs the boundaries of domestic to Sibande and the productive uses and…one of the most significant go- disciplinary site of culture comingling. only consolidated its empire but the uniform of a working-class maid laborer and madam, fusing and of deception might be better made betweens of the period.”20 Further, also expanded its colonial reach.24 and the attire of a bourgeois madam disrupting a binary formation of these through the regional specificity of Baderoon identifies Krotoa as a Mary Sibande’s sculpture uses This approach presents a similar “…are fantastically stitched together embodiments while acknowledging the Khoisan woman, Krotoa/Eva—an significant symbol of the ambiguity the human form and ephemeral thread as the Nigerian-British artist, around the idea of a single persona, their violent relation. Sibande’s indigenous woman who moved from of domestic service by black women embodiments to explore the Yinka Shonibare, who takes up disrupting the entrenched and potential to agitate visual codes of Khoisan society into the Dutch colony in white households, whereby “ideas construction of identity in a the colonial and post-colonial era highly politicized dichotomy that has race, gender, class, and nation is not of the Cape after its founding in 1652. about domesticity were frequently postcolonial South African context, as filtered through globalization tended to govern popular depictions a result of unmediated agency, but Although Krotoa’s primary position used as a weapon in the colonial while critiquing stereotypical while utilizing Victorian costuming of the maid and madam.”25 Within rather presents an attentiveness to was as a domestic worker, she later power struggles between and among depictions of women, particularly to visualize such encounters. one figural embodiment, Sibande the aesthetic and political work that became a translator between the Europeans and Africans.”21 Domestic 22 black women. Crafted from ruptures the dichotomy of maid- is performed through the complex Khoisan and European settlers.19 labor in present day South Africa fiberglass and silicone casts of her In I’m a Lady (2009), deception is madam, constructing a subtle, albeit signification of her sculptures. Distiller and Samuelson note that continues to be a major source of own body, Sibande uses the body as visible through the physical and pernicious subterfuge of the tropes Krotoa was “the first female cultural work done by black women. Given the site of vision and transformation. epistemological intimacy of violence of domesticity. These embodiments

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Fi g u r e 1. Mary S i ban de, I’m a L a dy, 2009, D i g ital A rch ival pri nt, o n evade dichotomies of domesticity whiteness. Aesthetic deception is affect of absolute dominion over the emerge from the ground to envelop, cot to n r ag mat te paper , 90x60 cm / while visualizing its violent intimacy. domestic space. Here, the sphere of undeniably linked to the libidinal and shroud, and surround Sophie. On 35.43x 23.62 i n . Gallery M o m o/ domestic labor is juxtaposed within structural implications of managing closer investigation, Sophie appears Mary Corrigall (2015) understands Licen s ed by Gallery M o m o, C ape a nuanced gendered and sexual blackness in spaces of colonial and to clasp the harness that puts the juxtaposition of attire as Town , S o uth A fric a . matrix of domestic labor, and it racial dominance. Subsequently, it these creatures at bay. The dark satirical excess, in which Sibande depicts the libidinal twist of labor is this relational play of power and background mimics a turbulence, uses exaggerated style codes to and dominance that lurks under the domination, and despite deception perhaps foreshadowing something liberate the domestic worker.26 Yet fray. Jillian Hernandez uses sexual- and its illicit burden, that deception brewing in the distance; yet the these modes of self-fashioning are aesthetic excess to mark the way also serves blackness by befuddling bright radiation of light gestures to deployed within the terms of sexual modes of dress and comportment its very systems of subjugation. a growing dominance of the purple politics that negotiate a fraught are framed as too much, and figure. Under the left-most arm, the relationship between domestic Aesthetic deception is further consolidates sexual deviancy with bright part of the image vibrates. (blackness) and madam (whiteness). made visible in how Sophie, over sexual impropriety.27 These modes of Above the figure in purple, another This connection is perhaps more time, grows in scale—signaling an sexual impropriety often articulate set of cylindrical beings circle at the explicitly made through the work aesthetics of excess that consumes themselves through fakery in which head with a crown. Through both the of a contemporary of Sibande, its site of domination. The Admiration questions of authenticity and juxtaposition and blur of domestic Zanele Muholi, particularly her of the Purple Figure (2013), which proper performance are couched labor and Victorian opulence and piece Massa and Mina(h) II (2009). appears in Selling the Shadow, in hierarchies of racial, gendered, a gradient radiance between light The photograph depicts Muholi depicts a figure in the center of the and sexual codes of conduct. While and dark, Admiration holds these as a domestic worker scrubbing photograph (Figure on page 117). I’m a Lady mobilizes both satirical contradictions, these dialectics as the floor of the living room. The Sophie is wearing Victorian regalia excess and sexual-aesthetic excess, a collective persona whereby the viewer can see the domestic from where an opening can be seen at the I also believe deception is mapped very line of demarcation between the perspective of the fashionable bases of the gown. The deep purple onto the Sophie figure through domestication and control are legs of the madam. The madam is against the smoky black background the signification of femininity and obscured and blurred. The viewer, disembodied as her upper body engenders an apocalyptic sentiment ladylike-ness, the criminalization in this instance, might be left with is not visible. This gives way to an whereby the cylindrical figures of blackness, and the purity of the question: Do these creatures

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grow from within the purple figure that utilize the built and architectural illusions—and light as a way of seeing Sophie, over or are they parasitic, representing environment, to comment on the hidden histories in architectural the underbelly of relation? If ways place and space circulate space.”29 The flat black materials Sojourner Truth’s oratory practice discourses of inclusion and negation. that Dyson uses create a stark time, grows and photographic likeness disrupt a Using the geometrical form as a contrast against the architectural catharsis of capital and pathological site of abstraction, Dyson “uses the white of the gallery, forming a in scale blackness through the performative language of architecture to produce visible juxtaposition between the — of a figuration, Sibande’s use of a visual grammar that rescales and uses of negative and positive space. signaling an the domestic-madam relation renders legible dominant systems Returning to Truth’s management mobilizes the deception of the of population control and social of her photographic likeness, we madam-domestic troupe to call engineering.”28 It is these geometrical are reminded that the carte-de- aesthetics of into question subjectivity reflected abstractions and the stories they tell visite as a technology required the in Krotoa the interlocutor. that lead to a productive contribution management of exposure on light to a theory of aesthetic deception. (highlights) and dark (shadow) to excess that The spatial dynamics of aesthetic render a representation legible. It deception are apparent in the work Anthony Burns (In Plane Site: is here that Truth, through selling of others presented in Selling the Fugitive) visualizes the story of the consumes the shadow, utilized “the fragile Shadow. Drawing on the relationship slave who was known to have hid phantom substitute for the presence between spatial and geographical in the hull of a ship to escape to its site of of persons exercising their freedom technologies of management (space) freedom (Figure 2). Anthony Burns of movement” in the photographic and the overlaying of the geometry was captured a year later under the plane.30 Truth utilizes the mechanics domination of the future (time), Torkwase Dyson’s Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Using of the carte-de-visite to undermine contribution to Selling the Shadow acrylic, wire, graphite, and plexi- the very logics of photographic depicts black survival as aesthetic glass, Dyson notes, “This work asks form, which, in the parlance of Darcy, excess. Dyson is most known for viewers to experience geometric further mobilized race by making paintings, drawings, and sculptures forms—lines, grids, curves, optical Fi g u r e 2. To r kwa s e D yso n , A n tho n y B u r ns (In P l a n e Site : Fu giti v e), 2016, Acry lic , the chemical process of exposing wi r e, ple xi , g r aph ite o n gallery wall , 360 x114 i n ch es . Gallery M o m o, C ape Town / Licen s ed by Gallery M o m o, C ape Town , S o uth A fric a .

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the negative for darker skin tones the success of Burns’s escape requires the a challenge.31 Through a practice of aesthetic deception through timespace, we might read Dyson’s mobilization of the geographical landscape of installation as a mobilization of the tenants of design through light and the Antebellum South (space) and the measure dark, negative and positive space, and shape and form to render the illicit and criminal impossibility of time, illegible and thus legible, for such an of an escaped fugitive, Anthony Burns, a tangible possibility. Put escape to be made possible differently, the success of Burns's escape requires the mobilization garret, crate). It is no surprise that of the surrounding landscape of fugitive movements through the of the geographical landscape Dyson utilizes the historical figures suggest the haunting of Burns? geographical scaffolding of the box, of the Antebellum South (space) of Harriet Jacobs and Henry “Box” Unlike Glenn Ligon’s To Disembark crate, garret and its negotiation and the measure of time, illegible Brown, two other slaves that escaped (1993) series of crate sculptures, to with the built environment. The use and thus legible, for such an from captivity by hiding in plain sight. express Henry Brown’s experience of of architectural techniques renders escape to be made possible.32 Upon closer interrogation of Anthony shipping himself from the captivity these objects into abstraction, Burns one might notice that the flat of Richmond to Philadelphia, Dyson’s whereby the viewer literally The installation mimics the folded black spatiality of the installation is rendition of the hull is a figure on the encounters the holding space, as a contours of a shipping crate, a slaver a combination of tonal blacks and two-dimensional plane. Suspending flat plane in time. No longer able to hull, a garret that is flattened into its openings that conjoin around a line normative strategies of sight, hold the object that hides within its two-dimensional plane. If assembled drawing (Figure 3). Is this set of lines Brown crafts a worm-hole into the confines, these installations use slight at the conjoining joints and flaps, the figuration of Burns in the hull? scaffolding of economic production, of the eye, illusion, the not-quite- the viewer can manage an imagined Do the reflective surfaces of the where the object literally steals the true, to formulate a mode of survival 33 Fi g u r e 3. To r kwa s e D yso n , (D e tai l Vi e w) A n tho n y B u r ns (In P l a n e Site : Fu giti v e), three-dimensional form (e.g. hull, plexi-glass that pick up components self. Dyson’s work tells these stories and liberation. Holding in suspension 2016. Acry lic , wi r e, ple xi , g r aph ite o n gallery wall , 360 x114 i n ch es . Gallery M o m o C ape Town / Licen s ed by Gallery M o m o, C ape Town , S o uth A fric a .

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To defy the temporal-spatial landscapes Aesthetic manages black death and how black manipulated, and revealed. Aesthetic lives exceed its management. deception presents a modality that of captivity is to participate in deception, might hold in suspension the space deception Conclusion: Befuddlements of pause with which to apprehend whereby the figure of the slave illicitly Selling the Shadow utilizes the likes the management of the visual presents a of a range of artists in the African and its aesthetic counteraction. steals the body, takes the body, unmoors and Black diasporas to arrive at I argue, much like the context in modality that some of the fundamental questions which Truth sells her likeness and implied in Sojourner Truth’s strategic precisely where black embodiment the body, on the way to freedom. development of her persona and struggles through illicit criminality might hold in visual likeness. While I have only (e.g. stealing the body, selling the touched upon two of the works in body), that we might envision liminal suspension the even in the absolute dominion of participate in deception, whereby black subjects—particularly women— spaces where blackness re-writes American slavery, this relationship the figure of the slave illicitly steals construct alternative futures (or the show, I would like to suggest we might think of Truth as a diaspora subject-hood and the figure of between captivity and enslavement, the body, takes the body, unmoors futures that are always already here, the human. Such a liminal space space of pause Dyson uses strategies of architectural the body, on the way to freedom. rather than on the verge of occurring) figure and symbol that puts to use aesthetic deception in formulating a might better be understood as the drawing, floor and building plans, within current timespace. Mary suspended alterity where blackness with which to to render captivity and freedom This fusion of libidinal and hyper- Sibande’s Sophie studies present persona-figure through her speech visible timespace outlines not only and visual orientation. Much like the baffles and throws into disarray as contradiction, negation, and us with archetypes of domesticity, an understanding of aesthetics. I deception. These liminal spaces a transitional and illusive state, but purities of whiteness, and the contexts and enmeshments where apprehend the also mediates between the terms Sojourner Truth sells her likeness, am less concerned with creating a between freedom and captivity that management of black woman’s grand narrative of the way in which are located on top of one another of what is a reliable and unreliable labor alongside the emancipatory Krotoa similarly helps visualize the management of trace, with which strictures of tenuousness of historical embodiment Truth’s legacy might be applied to hold in suspension and defy the politics of the imagination, while places outside of the Americas than temporal and spatial landscapes racial management and violence Dyson’s work turns to aesthetic and its relationship to criminality function. Aesthetic deception that simultaneously rewrites the with thinking about some of the the visual and of captivity. To defy the temporal- deception through abstraction questions her very figure brings forth spatial landscapes of captivity is to suspends normative logics of sight and how the built environment logics of subject formation through and visualizes the sites with which that which is delayed, strategically and what those questions might suggest for other locations. its aesthetic ■ counteraction

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Endnotes 5. The artists included in Selling the Shadow are Coby Kennedy, Cosmo Whyte, Dread Scott, Elizabeth Colomba, Torkwase Dyson, Maurice Mbikayi, Joël Mpah Dooh, and Mary Sibande. 1. The carte-de-visite, a form of portraiture developed by French inventor André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri in the mid-1850s, utilized a camera with multiple lenses that exposed different portions of a large glass plate. 6. I am drawing on Kara Keeling’s use of “common sense” in the context in which black femininities in the cinematic landscape disrupt normative modes of knowing. See The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image 2. Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 199. of Common Sense. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 3. Painter reminds us there is no clear idea of what Truth said in Akron, particularly because every record and document 7. Richard Iton’s use of the fantastic draws on the subversive elements of blackness in modernity and provides the of the speech comes through a secondary source with a relationship to Truth. Marius Robinson (1851) provided a juxtaposition of the underground in which the Other engages the dominant order. Fugitive movement (e.g. stealing straightforward report, however Frances Dana Marker Gage in 1863 published a different version of Truth’s speech. away and unconscious resistance) is where Fred Moten makes a case for blackness as conjuring moments in and out The latter has become more widely available while Robinson’s account might be more reliable to historians. For more of the frame of external “imposed social logic—a moment of escape, the stealth of the stolen that can be said, since it information, see Painter (1996) 174-175. Additionally, my use of deception is specific and intentional. While I later draw inheres in every closed circle, to break every enclosure”. Iton and Moten present the necessary paradoxes of blackness on its ramifications for a gendered body through Jillian Hernandez, these insights are informed by genealogies of Black and subjugation that make clear deception. Hernandez’s contemporary formulations fold into discourses of the fantastic Study (Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten and Sylvia Wynter) that have previously argued blackness must rewrite the terms and the illicit fugitive, strategic and unconscious modes of resistance and curation by navigating claims to the rational of criminality in its varying formations at the very moment of the act of maneuvering the body into a self. The very act and respectable gendered subject. See Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and of self-curation or self-fashioning, in the logics of white supremacy, requires that the black object/subject participate in the Arts 50, no. 2 (2008): 179; Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post- acts that are criminal to the absolute dominion of racial slavery to curate and fashion a self, even a mere idea of the self. Civil Rights Era (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3; Jillian Hernandez, “Carnal Teachings: Raunch Deception as it pertains to visual and performative likeness takes stock of this lineage and conjures the implied criminal Aesthetics as Queer Feminist Pedagogies in Yo! Majesty’s Hip Hop Practice,” Women and Performance: A Journal of and illicit modes of “stealing the body” and “fugitive flights” as a significant site of subject formation to the ontology of Feminist Theory 24, no. 1 (2014): 88–106; Ibid. blackness. For more see: Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black 8. I am thinking about the ways Sojourner Truth is made legible as a formative figure in Black and feminist study. I am Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/ particularly interested in how contemporary investments in certain depiction of Truth often rely on an overdetermined Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation — An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial set of characteristics. This is visible in the contradiction of Ar’n’t I a Woman. Frances Dana Gage’s interpretation of Review 3, no. 3 (March 4, 2003): 257–337. Truth’s speech marks this juxtaposition between the performative conventions of abolitionist rhetoric and entrenched white racism that illuminates how a historical record is documented and remembered. 4. I would like to thank Anya Michelle Wallace for her insightful thoughts that have helped me tease out the uses of Truth’s photographic image and the inability of black women to utilize fakery or aesthetic deception in strategic ways and to 9. Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol, 164. their own means.

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10. Nell Painter, “Sojourner Truth in Life and Memory: Writing the Biography of an American Exotic” in Gender & History 2, 19. Gabeba Baderoon, “The Ghost in the House: Women, Race, and Domesticity in South Africa,” Cambridge Journal of no. 1 (1990). Painter notes how Southern speech pattern was used to symbolically align with the stronghold of American Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 1, no. 2 (2014): 175–76. slavery in the Southern states and with the prerogatives of white abolitionists. 20. Natasha Distiller and Meg Samuelson, “Denying the Coloured Mother’: Race and Gender in South Africa,” L’Homme: 11. Ibid., 128. Eurpoean Review of Feminist History 16, no. 2 (2005): 31. 12. Gage’s rendition of Truth’s speech is consistently taken up and reproduced in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies 21. Ibid., 177-178. These methods found their way in apartheid regimes that sought to divide black households by creating classrooms and texts as a formative example of the intersectional approaches of feminist praxis. I take issue with Gage’s systems of migrant labor, creating single sex townships through dormitory enclaves, and destroying rural economies. rendition, which is held as true, often without distinguishing the nuances of Truth as symbol. See also Elizabeth Elbourne, “Domesticity and Dispossession: British Ideologies of ‘Home’ and the Primitive at Work in the Early Nineteenth-Century Cape,” Deep Histories: Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa, eds. Wendy Woodward, 13. Ibid., 129. Patricia Hayes, and Gary Minkley (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 27-54, 27-28. 14. Nell Irvin Painter notes Gage’s interest in presenting a more true and riveting version of Sojourner Truth after reading 22. See “Mary Sibande South African Born 1982,” www.gallerymomo.com. “The Libyan Sibyl” by Harriet Beecher Stowe. See Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol, 164. 23. Dodd, Alexandra, “Dressed to Thrill: the Victorian Postmodern and Counter-Archival Imaginings in the Work of Mary 15. Uri McMillan, “Mammy-Memory: Staging Joice Heth, or the Curious Phenomenon of the ‘Ancient Negress,’” Women & Sibande,” Critical Arts: A South-North Journal of Cultural & Media Studies 24, no. 3 (2010): 467-474, 468. Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 22 (2012): 32; Laura Browder, Slippery Characters : Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities, Cultural Studies of the United States (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 24. Ibid., 467-474, 471. 20–21. 25. Ibid., 470. 16. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Negative Positive Truths,” Representations 113 (2011): 16–38, 20. 26. Mary Corrigall, “Sartorial Excess in Mary Sibande’s ‘Sophie,’” Critical Arts: A South-North Journal of Cultural & Media 17. Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: New York University Studies 29, no. 2 (2015): 146. Press, 2015), 6. 27. Jillian Hernandez, “The Power of Sexual Aesthetics: Women and Girls Crafting Bodies” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 18. The Sophie series was first developed for a solo exhibition in 2009 titled “Long Live the Dead Queen” (2009) about 2013), 1-340, 5.

her grandmother, but the character quickly evolved, appearing in different outfits and poses for installations and 28. photographs at exhibitions and art fairs. In 2013, some of the works were displayed on billboards in Johannesburg. See, Torkwase Dyson. “About.” https://www.torkwasedyson.com/about1. 29. See, Torkwase Dyson. “Installation.” https://www.torkwasedyson.com/installation.

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30. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Negative Positive Truths,” Representations 113 (2011): 20. 31. Ibid., 22–23. Grigsby offers a substantial argument on the way photography, as a rather rudimentary set of chemical reactions, sacrifices background detail when creating the shadows that are required to make darker skin legible. This points to considerable labor on the part of photographers when producing cartes-de-visite that could even render the skin tone of an African American woman. 32. Dyson also draws on the fugitive movements of Harriet Jacobs and Henry Brown to craft her Fugitive series. Each story further iterates the subterfuge of time and space, whereby Jacob “hides in plain sight” in the garret of her grandmother’s slave quarters for seven years and Brown ships himself to freedom in a packing crate. 33. This line of thinking is indebted to Fred Moten’s concept of stealing the self, through the notion of fugitive movements. See Fred Moten, “Black Op,” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 123, no. 5 (2008); Moten, In the Break.

138 liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven 139 "U nti l th e Q u i e t C o m es” (D i r ec ted by K ah li l J os eph , 2013, WHAT MATTERS MOST/P u l s e Fi lm s), fr am e g r ab . Kahlil Joseph’s “Until the Quiet leaning to the right, the camera its oppositional spatiotemporal Comes” is a short film about a series pans to an ambulance parked on the organizations. As a result, it of miraculous and catastrophic street. It is possible the emergency visualizes the aesthetic possibilities Icons of events. The camera moves gracefully vehicle arrived in response to the of “holding blackness in suspension.” through a dreamy Los Angeles dancer’s wounds, but now its red Suspension presents a provocative Catastrophe: sunset as black children play and, flashing lights illuminate the entire set of aesthetic possibilities because as if it were predestined, die. Then, neighborhood with a warning signal. allowing blackness to float means without warning, bodies begin to Even as the film fades to black—the unmooring it from the histories, move gracefully in reverse while editing transition and color that policies, and technologies that cohere the world around them continues has become cinema’s definitive the notion of blackness, most notably Diagramming to move forward. Finally, in the last word—this discontinuous in the realm of representation. Thus, dramatic conclusion of the film, a narrative about black bodies remains seeing suspension is admittedly man bleeding from bullet wounds incomplete and in suspension. complicated. Perhaps fitting of its Blackness in Until on the ground miraculously rises contradictory style and content, the and begins to dance. He removes The central conceit of “Until the way “Until the Quiet Comes” renders his bloodstained shirt and, evidently, Quiet Comes” is contradiction. The a seemingly weightless image of the Quiet Comes the finality of death. Then, he enters film subjects viewers to violence blackness is by becoming denser, a car and drives off into the night. that is horrific yet beautifully surreal diagraming blackness’s many forms Lauren M. The film moves effortlessly between and to an unending cycle of death of expression simultaneously and different settings and times, without and vibrancy. Similarly, we see consequently redistributing the Cramer blackness through the contradictory giving viewers a sense of direction, forms of knowledge that rely on Fi g u r e 1. “U nti l th e Q u i e t C o m es” (D i r ec ted by K ah li l J os eph , 2013, WHAT MATTERS MOST/ forces that shape it, boundless but this stunning possibility for blackness to establish the humanity, P u l s e Fi lm s), fr am e g r ab . change (and even reanimation) possibility and crushing confinement. freedom, and value of others. As does not feel like a traditional Instead of coming apart at these a result, the suspended aesthetics happy ending. In fact, as the dancer formal and thematic fault lines, of Joseph’s film not only critique rides away in a lowrider playfully Joseph’s film finds balance between the specious task of representing

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between the visual effect of his film style and the established we see blackness through the contradictory suspension (hovering and lightness) meanings of blackness in visual seeing and the process that creates culture. In each case, regardless suspension (force and pressure). of the appropriateness of their forces that shape it: boundless possibility and Thus, seeing blackness being held in combination, joints are the points blackness suspension in “Until the Quiet Comes” of articulation that bring together crushing confinement begins with identifying the points of black bodies and “black cultural being held in tension within the whole, including traffic” that sustains race relations in the places where blackness, which the image.1 For instance, the editing suspension ... will always exceed the frame, and the and narrative in Joseph’s film is not representational image, which aspires traditionally continuous; instead to absolute visibility, come together. of utilizing traditional cinematic begins with blackness, they disrupt the cultural colloquial and technical definitions and serene and this small addition techniques to mask its style or even logics that are sustained—literally are placed side by side. For example, to the frame is a reminder that the Fortunately, hip-hop provides a the cut, the film actually draws grounded—by blackness. the film opens underwater with only reason a body feels weightless identifying vocabulary for these potential places attention to transitions between shots of bubbles effortlessly gliding underwater is because, technically, for suspension because it has been The idea of suspension is evoked shots and settings using expressive to the surface. Like the film’s suspension occurs when a mass is referring to oppositional points the points in “Until the Quiet Comes” in cinematography, semi-diegetic cinematography, the shots of bubbles disbursed through the bulk of a fluid. as “joints” for decades. Used to multiple ways; the term aptly inserts, and jump cuts. Yet, “Until the are dreamy, ethereal, boundless, There is actually nothing weightless describe a good song (which likely describes Matthew J. Lloyd’s gliding Quiet Comes” still manages a kind of of tension and almost immaterial. However, or immaterial about suspension; in includes sampling), a popular place, cinematography and literally refers to connectedness by drawing parallels in the next shot red fabric swirls fact, water and gravity are exerting prison, or a marijuana cigarette, the motif of water and floating that between the film’s real spaces and underwater and slowly it becomes pressure against each other and the joints refer to the sites where varied provides a thematic connection to times and those created by the film’s clear that it is clothing that belongs position of the body is a result of things and people come together. the discontinuous narrative. These style. The story takes place in the to a submerged body. Despite being caught in the middle of this Similarly, Spike Lee refers to his two kinds of suspension are not Nickerson Gardens housing projects the possibility that the person has tension. This distinction is important films as “joints,” which is an accurate contradictory, but they explicate the in the Watts neighborhood of Los drowned, the shot still feels quiet because it signals the difference description of the tension between complexity of suspension when its Angeles and the film translates

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the spatial concerns of the heavily an architectural practice called not only affects the floating object, shifting attention away from the surveilled housing project that diagramming. The film briefly tells but also the laws of the world beautiful and violent imagery in “Until limits black bodies’ options for the story of two black people, a child around it. Because mass is actually a the Quiet Comes” to the beauty and mobility aesthetically through the and a man, who face the restraining measure of an object’s gravitational violence in its construction. The use of formal techniques like tight forces of both literal and figurative force, when a weighty architecture former, a representational reading of framing and discontinuous editing racialized architectures and the is suspended it can become “light” the film’s transgressive moments, like that similarly deny characters question of suspension asks how because it is technically not subject the dancer’s reanimation, returns us space. The result is a story about these characters, their blackness, and to the singular pull of gravity. to familiar concerns about imaging blackness as a particular (restricted) the blackness of the film can float Architecture is therefore offering black life on screen (Is this film spatial arrangement. The fact between the meanings that attempt suspension as a way to defy gravity. too violent? Does it represent the that a close-up or a change in to fix them. Architectural diagrams Something similar happens when black experience?). For example, screen directions cannot be are similarly seeking detachment and suspension is introduced in the image the dancer’s “survival” affirms the exclusively linked to blackness other modes of existence; diagrams because our world, that is made value of black lives and is a welcome affirms the value of attending to are renderings that visualize all of the knowable through the image and is respite from images of black death; the joints, especially those that possible arrangements of a structure, fundamentally ordered around anti- on the other, as we have seen in are already overdetermined like considering how its joints could be blackness, would be radically—even other films about black strength and the mediated history of Watts, alternatively arranged. Of course, catastrophically—reorganized by resilience, the conclusion could be as the key to understanding borrowing from architectural theory images of blackness that float. used to reinforce racist claims about the apparent blackness that and practice means acknowledging the black body’s ability to endure Before proceeding, it may be is the sum of these parts. its unique terminology and that pain or to attest to the strength of helpful to speak directly to this includes the architectural definition white bodies. Suspension disrupts the The approach this essay is offering essay’s methodological intentions. of suspension, which is the technique existing order (racial violence), but to understand blackness being There is a clear disciplinary divide Fi g u r e 2. Th e São Pau lo M us eu m o f A rt (Li na B o Bar di , 1968). of distributing a mass across multiple the joints formed in its wake can be suspended across the film’s diegetic between visual culture studies and grounding points. As I have already liberating (pro-black) or devastating and non-diegetic spaces through architectural theory that I hope to suggested about holding blackness in (anti-blackness); it should be noted close reading of the joints mirrors bridge for the specific reason of suspension, architectural suspension that the results are unsettling in

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from fine art and popular culture around in these structures; thus, together to make the new appear old, shifting attention away from the beautiful and to make meaningful alterations to “Until the Quiet Comes” expresses are not always stable. These joints familiar forms. For example, his the logic of racializing assemblages, can be disarticulated so that the stylized documentary Wildcat (2013) which Alexander Weheliye explains representational weight of Joseph’s violent imagery in “Until the Quiet Comes” to the is an all-black Western. Often, he “represent, among other things, stylistic and thematic allusions can creates these juxtapositions by the visual modalities in which be rearranged into a black structure beauty and violence in its construction combining under-theorized genres dehumanization is practiced and that is not brutalizing to black bodies. with iconic imagery. The same is true lived.”2 Like the repeated deployment of “Until the Quiet Comes,” which of certain cinematic forms, the Suspension is not an effect of is a critically acclaimed work and racializing assemblage is responsible a change in material or social the Special Jury Award for Short for making events appear natural, conditions but in methodology, Film from the prestigious Sundance commonsensical, and even lovely. so when “Until the Quiet Comes” more than one way. Diagramming is articulations that the filmmaker textures, and moody cinematography Film Festival at the same time it Watts is not only a geographical utilizes the same technologies and a kind of close reading not unlike the borrows from other racialized have appeared in vastly different is a music video for an album of location, it is a visual culture of visual styles as other short films and methodologies used in visual culture, architectures; then it will consider cultural spaces: on concert stages the same title by Flying Lotus that striking images of broken windows videos, those that have traditionally but because the diagram is an what it means to use diagrammatic for thousands of fans at Kendrick features the familiar iconography of and black bodies silhouetted in front grounded blackness in the visual abstract expression of a structure’s analysis to open up these joints Lamar/Kanye West concerts, in hip-hop videos including dancing, of a backdrop of flames. As a result, realm, it is an example of the effect internal relations and clears space and find alternative pressure points advertisements for the designer inner-city streets, and violence. a shot of a streetlight illuminating of the film’s diagrammatic process. for alternative possibilities, it does to initiate suspension; finally, it will fashion label Kenzo, at both the the edges of the dancer’s bloodied The diagram is a tool that maps a the non-representational and conclude with a close reading that Sundance and Toronto International Joseph’s genre-play is important, body in “Until the Quiet Comes” fits structure’s joints, identifying and speculative work of suspension considers the potentially catastrophic Film festivals, Los Angeles’s Museum because invoking familiar imagery perfectly and logically into an image superimposing all of the places while anticipating all of the other results of placing blackness in of Contemporary Art, and on MTV. is one way “Until the Quiet Comes” repertoire that precedes it by a half it could be alternatively oriented (liberating or dangerous) ways the suspension, or creating an image of These varied outlets are examples builds a distinctly black architecture. century and is inextricable from the while remaining intact. Architect joints could be formed. This essay anti-gravitational blackness. of the way the filmmaker and his The film brings black bodies together history of American photojournalism and theorist Peter Eisenman, who will begin by exploring the joints in work move between filmic genres in a historically dangerous place has likely contributed more to Kahlil Joseph is a Los Angeles-based and television. However, these joints, Joseph’s film, particularly the visual and use unexpected influences and dictates their ability to move the theorization of the diagram filmmaker whose surreal imagery, rich where familiar formal markers come

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than any other architect, explains interesting for two reasons: first, it disarticulation of blackness in are internally “motivated” because Suspension is the function of the diagram is is an image of what blackness has the world that devalues it must they have a material and structural synthesizing the structure’s past, yet to build and second, because be initiated from the inside. For relationship to their signified.7 For present, and possible future to reveal revealing the anti-black forces that example, the film’s diagrammatic example, a column is an architectural not an effect its “interiority,” which explains the operate as the interiority of our world nonlinear chronology shows us black form that is aligned with its function, design’s fundamental consistencies, could cause irreparable harm to a people enjoying life after we have so it must literally bear the weight of a change its capacity to change, and its structure that is (externally) ordered seen their deaths; unfortunately, of a building.8 The diagram needs material limitations. At any singular around principles like universal that reorientation is incapable of to be the catalyst for un-motivating in material point in time and space it would freedom and equality. Blackness ending the debate about whether the sign. Of course, the diagram be impossible to see all of these is the “absented presence” in the or not black lives matter because cannot eliminate the column, as the things and appreciate their common world, meaning it is not simply diagrams do not destroy the structure will topple over. Instead, or social denominator; thus, interiority is excluded, it serves its function structures they analyze, but that the diagram need to perform the necessarily unrepresentable.3 in the world by being radically diagram does reveal the interior somewhat contradictory work of conditions “Until the Quiet Comes” mimics outside of it.4 As a result, censuring fraudulence of the response “all lives un-building, by allowing architects these processes using Lloyd’s fluid images of black exclusion, absence, matter” to a culture that presumes to rework existing designs and cinematography to alternatively map and pain is not a radical or even to be built on that promise. establish spatial relationships that but in the diegetic space while the nonlinear counter-visual strategy because remain vague and open to change.9 editing creates the diagram’s dispossessed blackness is the The chaos caused by the diagram is Thus, a diagrammatic methodology methodology complicated temporality that flattens status quo. Diagramming, like black an example of suspension because, is clearing a path to suspending the many times into one image. studies, makes a commitment to the as Eisenman explains, the diagram historically overdetermined image of absent figure.5 In lieu of traditional hovers in the space between figure/ blackness by rendering all possible As a diagrammatic film, “Until the techniques that resist visibility or ground, form/function, and sign/ iterations of blackness across space 6 Quiet Comes” is a combination of legibility, the diagrammatic film signified. Unlike linguistic signs that and time. Thus, it aids the challenge hip-hop’s adaptive style and an confronts the representational have an arbitrary relationship to their of conceiving, let alone visualizing, architectural practice. The notion image by demanding it shows signified, making it easier to imagine the ontology of blackness outside of of a hip-hop diagram is particularly more, suggesting the possible remixing language, architectural signs the conditions of slavery. As Frank

Figure 3. Diagram Concept Images of Staten Island Institute for Arts and Sciences (Peter Eisenman, 1997-98).

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continuous surface,” meaning holding burden it. The imagination of black result, maintaining the current order Blackness is the “absented presence” in the world, a paper with two hands and gently visual culture seems available for a becomes untenable and the results applying pressure towards the center methodology that seeks catastrophe are catastrophic until there is a return constitutes a (mini) catastrophe.13 because, as James Baldwin explains, to the status quo. For example, meaning it not simply excluded, it serves its Eventually, the paper will create black people can consider these consider the distress and the struggle a ripple, a “cusp,” but it will not possibilities because they “never to regain power/order in historical function in the world by being radically outside tear. Diagramming proliferates had anything to lose.”14 At every moments when the de jure and de potential architectural joints that scale, anti-black architectures pull facto definitions of blackness were of it are like the mounting pressure apart the structural joints that value momentarily held in suspension like applied a piece of paper that and support black bodies, from the during Reconstruction in the U.S. The represents a spatiotemporal plane; family to diasporic identity. Yet, the function of diagramming structures thus, the process of diagramming violence does not stop there; it is like “Until the Quiet Comes” is to Wilderson III explains, “the onus is not Diagramming is a repeating cycle mathematician René Thom developed is inherently catastrophic and, formalized in the new dehumanizing stop making the subjugation of black on the one who posits the Master/ of generation and degeneration catastrophe theory to predict and not surprisingly, catastrophes structures. This is no different from bodies feel familiar by making it clear Slave dichotomy, but on the one who because every un-motivated interpret the places where mounting are visualized via diagrams. the diagrammatic practice being that violence is not an unintended argues there is a distinction between architectural joint will produce pressure results in overturnings and offered in this essay, but Joseph’s film side-effect, but a structural necessity Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, another point of articulation; as a the beginning of new systems. If To summarize: a diagrammatic attempts to orient that same violence in the formation and deformation and where did such a split occur?”10 result, diagrams exist in a feedback suspension is catastrophic to the process brings a joint’s many toward those anti-black architectures of anti-black architectures. Yet, The diagram makes that split visible. loop with themselves, paradoxically existing structure, catastrophe theory spatiotemporal organizations onto and suspend it by refusing to be the return to equilibrium always Moreover, in the process of rendering instigating their own destruction.11 helps us identify the point when the same page and attempts to subsumed by a new rule of law. threatens to reveal what Saidiya a mobile and flexible image of Simply, the diagram is “an icon of enough equal pressure is created for maintain this catastrophic chaos as Specifically, diagramming performs Hartman soberly refers to as blackness, the diagram un-motivates catastrophe.”12 Yet, as the column flotation. For instance, how much long as possible before conditions its disruptive function by creating a “the limits of emancipation.”15 blackness from every structure it example explains, a diagrammatic can a dead man dance before the return to equilibrium; in this case, spatiotemporal crisis. Diagramming supports. The structure may remain catastrophe that un-motivates and meaning of death must change? At the result is disbursing blackness’s produces an excess of forms from The loosely constructed narrative in erect, but the joints are changed. un-builds the architectural form is any scale, catastrophes “represent mass across these different joints and alternative times and spaces and “Until the Quiet Comes” addresses not actually destructive. Indeed, abrupt transformation across a suspending it above the things that allows them to exist at once. As a catastrophic violence against black

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bodies in very clear terms, but comes about a minute earlier. These forward to reveal a child standing this (cinematic) world-building and, the film’s form is responsible for moments are like plots on a graph in the pool, staring off into the like the column example, removing un-motivating that violence. It is that correspond to the catastrophic distance. Then the camera cuts to his death would pull the film apart. certainly feasible that diagrammatic fold—before, during, and after—and a low angle shot of the boy and the Similarly, what appeared to be a analysis could be performed on each of these segments presents camera slowly rises as if to prepare non-diegetic insert of floating red any film by identifying the joints its own formal possibilities. for his next move, slowly raising fabric in the opening now makes and superimposing the alternative his hand in the shape of a gun and visual sense through its graphic configurations, but Joseph’s film The first section of “Until the Quiet firing his imaginary weapon. The similarity to the bloody, wet red is interesting because a case can Comes” is about “diagrammatic camera cuts to the reverse shot and, curve. Visually, the death justifies be made that the film does this inevitability,” the parameters inexplicably, an imaginary bullet the film’s prelude so that, even work itself by both representing established by an architecture’s ricochets off of the curved sides of retroactively, this film’s discontinuities and annotating. In other words, interiority that determine its potential the pool, hitting four walls before gain coherence via the death of the this essay’s close reading is simply for change. In the case of the film, a hitting the child. The scene ends child. The opening section maps following along. It is easy to observe world that relies on (aestheticized) with a shot of the boy lying on the the deterministic architecture of the sudden shift in the equilibrium in violence against black bodies limits 16 concrete as a massive amount of the racialized assemblage where Joseph’s film, in which a miraculous the possibilities for black life. blood pours in a graphic curve out violence against a black body can reversal from the constraints of time The film opens underwater with of his body and stains the ground. be anticipated. The irony is that the and space allows a dead man and disorienting shots of floating bubbles child cannot participate entirely in bodies in an infamous ghetto to and a tangle of red fabric, so not The architecture of this early scene this world—he does not even have a move freely forward and backward in until the first scene where viewers requires the boy’s death. Not until real gun. Yet, any violence visualized time. Catastrophes are rarely subtle. have some sense of time and space this scene does the film incorporate Fi g u r e 4. “U nti l th e Q u i e t C o m es” (D i r ec ted by K ah li l J os eph , 2013, WHAT MATTERS MOST/ in the process of building this world However, the film’s diagrammatic does the film begin to make note of continuity editing, like the way the always lands on the black body, so P u l s e Fi lm s), fr am e g r ab . analysis of its own joints, which are the alternatives. The first scene in trigger of the gun triggers the reverse that he becomes its (literal) ground. primarily performed by the gliding the film begins with a long shot of shots of the pool’s walls surrounding cinematography, indicate the tipping an empty concrete pool surrounded the child. Thus, the death of the The beginning of “Until the Quiet point that creates this upheaval by palm trees. The camera tracks black child is a motivated sign in Comes” is distinctly “graphic;”

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seeing a child die alone on the hard violence that is constitutive cannot a striking example of the pernicious any violence and barren concrete of an empty be considered damage. The purpose nature of this architectural joint man-made pool that is slowly being of un-motivating the black body is because, as perhaps Coppola failed surrounded by red blood in saturated removing it from the architectural to realize, the suffering of slaves is visualized in color is boundary pushing even in function that requires its subjection. the backdrop of the erotics of the hip-hop visual culture.17 The only genre regardless of their absence True to Joseph’s referential style, elided event in the opening is the on screen. Sexual pleasure creates the process the specific way the horror of the actual force of the bullet penetrating the space for rapture away from the child’s death and the beauty of the the black “flesh.” Thus, this part of actual cruelty of transforming a black of building setting are combined to disavow the the filmic diagram makes it clear that body into flesh.20 The pornotrope brutality of the moment is a well- even the possible ways black death is therefore the perfect example of worn racial trope that has existed this world can be imagined are constrained an architectural joint. Diagramming in visual culture since slavery called and determined by the architectures this hinge visualizes the spatial the pornotrope. Borne out of the that death supports. Saidiya V. relationship between blackness’s always lands physical and sexual domination of Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson form (violation) and function slavery, the pornotrope is an anti- explain the impossibility of rendering (white delight and affirmation). black architectural joint that uses on the black violence against the black body in Moreover, the pornotrope is part erotic imagery to modulate violence the architecture of the Human as “the of the process of constituting the against the black body. Consider body, so that position of the unthought.”18 To be boundary between bodies and the aesthetics of the plantation clear, this moment of bloodshed is flesh; thus, the pornotrope has a film that incorporates slaves into not impossible to visualize because “motivated” relationship to Human he becomes the architecture of grand homes it is too horrific, rather it cannot architecture. However, a diagram and their lush landscapes. Sofia Fi g u r e 5. “U nti l th e Q u i e t C o m es” (D i r ec ted by K ah li l J os eph , 2013, WHAT MATTERS MOST/ be expressed as violence because that superimposes the pornotrope’s Coppola’s recent decision to remake P u l s e Fi lm s), fr am e g r ab . its (literal) “blackness disarticulates the notion contradictory impulses reveals the Southern gothic The Beguiled of consent.”19 A body that is defined its precarious arrangement. (Siegel, 1971) without any slaves is ground. as violable cannot be a victim and

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The aerial shot of the boy and the impossible amount of blood functions assemblage and the latter finally gave black “is” and “ain’t,” what this essay deep-red curve around him is a as a taboo sexual climax. There is way. This détournement expresses has called suspension.23 The first pivotal point in the film that begins simply no rapture or available space the need for an insurgent black shot after the cusp, follows a police the cusp section because it is an to travel away from that unnatural architecture working on the inside. helicopter flying overhead while avowed image of the pornotroping conflation. Like the example of the When blackness is suspended at the the words “Nickerson Gardens, Los joint, a spectacular flattened image pressure applied to a sheet of paper, joint between form (eroticization) Angeles” appear across the bottom of black pain and white pleasure.21 at any point that flatness that is and function (dehumanization), of the screen. After the catastrophe, Typically, the pornotrope operates moving in two different directions other architectural configurations the boy who died in the opening like a cinematic cutaway, containing will succumb to a catastrophic becomes conceivable—specifically, of the film is alive. Thus, the first the horror of black dehumanization in ripple. Yet, the paper will not tear. a world where black bodies are not evidence of the upended world of the narrow space between shots, but inextricably linked to the structural the film not only brings the child Lloyd opts to let the camera linger As if to purposely emphasize the function of being whiteness’s back to life, it positions the police and slowly glide past the action.22 durability of racializing architecture, oppositional ground. More simply, as the beginning of violence, not Unlike other avant-garde techniques the final section of the film following the unspeakable catastrophe in the as a response to it. Consequently, that self-consciously interrupt, glitch, the cusp reveals a cinematic space film is not (exclusively) the repeating surveillance and housing projects and otherwise trouble form, he uses that feels largely intact as the film image of black death. Instead, are un-motivated, meaning they the camera to lay the joint bare and continues to reference real life the film stages a catastrophe by are no longer framed as essential, give equal attention to the horror spaces captured on 35mm film. removing blackness from the anti- unchangeable support structures. and beauty. Articulating this point Ultimately, the history of black visual black architectures that order the They could in fact operate differently. creates an unmanageable affective culture will not be jettisoned so world and allowing blackness to In the next shot, two children, surplus because this violent eroticism easily. The appearance of a curve emphatically exist on the other including the boy, are playing on a exceeds the boundaries of “normal” painted in the blood of a black side of the catastrophic cusp. football field. Then the camera tracks Fi g u r e 6. “U nti l th e Q u i e t C o m es” (D i r ec ted by K ah li l J os eph , 2013, WHAT MATTERS MOST/ sexuality. The shot’s rich, painterly child visualizes the joint where past more lighthearted moments: a P u l s e Fi lm s), fr am e g r ab . appearance makes visible the folding the violent interiority of anti-black The cusp of “Until the Quiet Comes” man cleaning a car; another young of black pain into the aestheticization architecture pushed against the visualizes a space that black artists man offering the previously dead of the image and, ultimately, the seamless surface of the racialized and thinkers often muse about, where child a snack; and, poignantly, a

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group of boys with boards strapped who we see lying on the ground formal potentialities. The sequence that diagramming is still a material lot, and finally contorts his body to to their backs pretending to fly. The in the housing projects’ courtyard begins with the dancer’s character concern. The different disciplinary fit through the window of a waiting Lloyd ... uses seemingly uneventful moments in and later submerged in the water. lying on the ground. Suddenly, the traditions that inform this essay have car that rides off into the night. the middle of the film are clearly Then there is a different body lying body slowly begins to move to the repeated this point: physics and Again, viewers should be reluctant distinct from the deterministic in the courtyard, performed by the beat of the music. He rises from architecture tell us that suspension to read the end of the film as an the camera to violence that appears normal in the dancer Storyboard P. He wears a the ground and starts to dance in does not eliminate an object’s mass; escape. Instead, segmenting the opening. Thus, the mundane events, black shirt and, like the man in red, a style that combines fluid, balletic Eisenman distinguishes between un- film as this close reading has done lay the joint when black bodies are safe, are we have seen him before giving the motion and the inhuman postures of motiviating and demolishing; Thom’s shows that even with a catastrophe tragically evidence of suspension. young boy a snack and mingling with a dance style known as “animation.” catastrophic diagrams always return in the middle, the death of the child bare and neighbors. In fact, his prone body Animation, both a hip-hop dance to equilibrium; and, in clearest terms, and the death of the dancer are Using frequent images of water and appeared even earlier in the film in style and the work of cartoonists, Hartman warns there are limits to mirror images. Thus, the car waiting floating and its fluid cinematography, a very quick graphic match after are examples of diagramming. emancipation. Thus, when Storyboard to give an un-dead friend a ride is give equal the final portion of “Until the the boy was struck by the imaginary The architect and theorist Mark P maintains the bodily posture he had a vehicle for the film’s circularity. Quiet Comes” uses thematic and bullet. At this point the film has Rakatansky argues American when he was a corpse throughout aesthetic suspension to express the attention to included three bodies and folded illustrator Chuck Jones, best known the dance, by keeping his eyes The restraint of the film’s conclusion malleability of blackness once it is them into multiple temporal ripples for his contributions to the Looney closed and leading with his chest does not mitigate its significance. suspended across the film’s complex as if the film momentarily folded in Tunes, created diagrammatic so that his limbs follow but his body The dancer may not be alive, but the horror spatiotemporal organization. The on itself. As a result, the reoccurring characters capable of incredible appears only loosely connected, he he can dance after death and those last time we see the boy he is alive, images are like diagrammatic transformation organized around is transforming while expressing his implications are far reaching. First, and beauty proudly walking home after playing, superimpositions that bring a form’s the character’s specific interiority. character’s interiority. The effect the postmortem performance but after this point the film quickly past and future into close proximity. For example, even when Bugs Bunny of Storyboard P’s performance is occurs without the help of any accumulates more dead bodies. impersonates his adversaries, he does actually of a dead man dancing, not cinematographic tricks or digital It is important that the film ends Storyboard P’s character performs so with his own distinct spatiality. a man coming back to life. In the final tools. As a result, operating this way because all catastrophic the most dramatic visualization of 24 This digression is important in moments of Joseph’s film, the dead beyond the diegesis, the dance diagrams return to equilibrium. the new black architecture formed the context of Storyboard P’s man dances away from the courtyard, reorganizes the analog film’s claims There is a man wearing a red jacket in the wake of catastrophe and its performance because it is a reminder where he laid dying, to the parking to indexicality. Second, at stake in

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this pessimistic reading is ensuring part of a diagrammatic practice create a catastrophic joint, which Instead, as Debord suggests, they that the unrepresentable violence means maintaining suspension, we know now was a mundane traffic were catastrophic to the racist logic that is the structure’s architectural even between negative outcomes. stop, but these diagrams visualize that aligns black bodies and things. interiority is not recouped to prove Other objects of black visual the mounting pressure that began the violability of the black body or culture that proclaim the beauty of as early as the migration of black After the riots the joints that to buttress “white flights of fantasy,” black bodies and spaces but fail to Americans to the West Coast previously connected the black the belief that the dancer’s capacity reorient the structures that rely on decades before. The purpose of community through violence and for survival guarantees full-Humans’ devaluing blackness illustrate the tracing the diagrammatic analysis systematic discrimination became ability to escape death or any other expressions of the creativity of problem of lifting up blackness and of violence in “Until the Quiet 28 obstacle.25 In other words, precisely forgetting to attend to the joints. Comes” is to consider what it means black power. Los Angeles’s because the dancer is still dead when the events of that summer artistic community was vibrant his dance cannot be used to affirm The diagram leads toward are described as catastrophic by in the decades before the riots anyone else’s life. Finally, because abstraction, but before concluding asking what that insurgent action and the focus on community the balletic and tragic dance is yet it is impossible to discuss Watts was catastrophic to. Guy Debord action manifested itself in another example of the pornotrope and catastrophe theory without argues riots occur when people need aesthetic practices and forms that laid bare, it does not function considering the events that occurred to distance themselves from their emphasized the ensemble. Perhaps traditionally. In this case, the dancer almost a half century earlier in the status as commodities. Specifically, the most famous examples of this is the one who has the opportunity same place Joseph’s film takes “people who destroy commodities architectural assemblage are the for rapture and by simply leaving place. In fact, catastrophe theory show their human superiority over Watts Towers. The construction he inverts his “impotentiality.” As has been used to describe the social commodities.”27 In other words, of the Watts Towers preceded Weheliye explains, “impotentiality, tensions that lead to upheavals just anti-black architecture pulls black the riots; they were built between once actualized, kindles the originary like the Watts Riots and later the bodies and commodities into the 1921 and 1955 by Simon Rodia, an Fi g u r e 7. “U nti l th e Q u i e t C o m es” (D i r ec ted by K ah li l J os eph , 2013, WHAT MATTERS MOST/ potentiality that rests in the slave L.A. Riots. A catastrophic diagram same commensurable plane so that it immigrant from Italy. However, the P u l s e Fi lm s), fr am e g r ab . thing, which is nothing other than ‘a could not anticipate when the force would be too simplistic to claim the three towers covered in tiles, glass, potential for pornotroping.’”26 This of violent encounters between the Watt riots were catastrophic because and other debris have become an suggests an important, and ethical, black community and police would of the destruction of property. important expression of black Los

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Other objects of black visual culture that proclaim the beauty of black bodies and spaces but fail to reorient the structures that rely on devaluing blackness illustrate the problem of lifting up blackness and forgetting to attend to the joints. Angeles and the arts movement.29 is therefore not surprising that the making direct reference to the Watts Chronologically, the towers cannot Watts Towers can then, retroactively, Riots, “Until the Quiet Comes” is a be a response to the riots, but piled become a symbol of L.A.’s black mediation on violence that can be high, the towers superimpose the expressive culture. The purpose “hard to look at,” and although that items’ past and future and, through of thinking about the looting of remains true throughout the film, an Rodia’s improvisational style, the electronics by people who did not architectural sleight of hand shifts structures are non-deterministic have working electricity and the that unrepresentable violence from and non-narrative.30 As a result, junk art practice emerging in Los black bodies to anti-blackness. Fi g u r e 8. Th e Wat ts Towers (S i m o n Ro dia , they do effectively diagram the Angeles in the years surrounding ■ 1921-55). racial resonance and internal spatial the riots alongside a hip-hip film relations of a community likened like “Until the Quiet Comes” is to to junk and thus the catastrophic note the repeated diagrammatic events that occur when those people impulses that reject the inevitability demand their value and humanity. It of black subjection through the rearticulation of black joints. By

Fi g u r e 9. Th e Wat ts Towers (S i m o n Ro dia , 1921-55).

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Endnotes 11. Eisenman, “Diagram: An Original Scene of Writing.” 1. Harry Justin Elam and Kennell A. Jackson, Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture 12. Anthony Vidler, “What Is a Diagram Anyway?,” in Peter Eisenman: Feints, ed. Silvio Cassarà and Peter Eisenman (Milano: (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). Skira, 2006), 26. 2. Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human 13. Lynn, Folds, Bodies & Blobs, 125. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 6. 14. James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, Reissue edition (New York: Vintage, 1992), 217. It would be remiss to not 3. Peter Eisenman, Diagram Diaries (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999). mention that then-candidate Donald J. Trump, in a surprising display of Afro-pessimism, asked black voters “what the hell do you have to lose?” during a rally in the Spring of 2016. 4. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis, Minn.: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxv. 15. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997), 6. 5. McKittrick, Demonic Grounds; Huey Copeland, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Christina Sharpe, “Black Studies: In the Wake,” The Black Scholar 16. Eugenie Brinkema, “Violence and the Diagram; Or, The Human Centipede,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social 44, no. 2 (2014): 59–69, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00064246.2014.11413688. Sciences 24, no. 2 (2016): 91. 6. Eisenman, Diagram Diaries; Peter Eisenman, “Diagram: An Original Scene of Writing,” in Diagram Diaries (New York, NY: 17. Ibid., 87. Universe, 1999), 27–35. 18. Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson, “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle 13, no. 2 (2003): 183–201. 7. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 186. 8. Eisenman, “Diagrams of Interiority,” 50. 20. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64, 9. Greg Lynn, Folds, Bodies & Blobs: Collected Essays, Books-by-Architects (Bruxelles: La Lettre volée, 1998), 41; Anthony doi:10.2307/464747; Alexander G. Weheliye, “Pornotropes,” Journal of Visual Culture 7, no. 1 (April 1, 2008): 65–81, Vidler, “Diagrams of Diagrams: Architectural Abstraction and Modern Representation,” Representations, no. 72 (2000): doi:10.1177/1470412907087202. 11. 21. Weheliye, “Pornotropes,” 71. Spillers uses this term to describe the sexual component of black dehumanization that she 10. Frank B. Wilderson, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, understands in gendered terms, but when Alexander Weheliye adopts the term he argues it is not necessarily erotic. He 2010). expands the concept to describe the simultaneous and opposing tension of subjugation and rapture, which describes

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pleasure or, in spatial terms, deliverance. 22. Weheliye, “Pornotropes.” 23. Marlon Riggs, Black Is... Black Ain’t (Independent Television Service (ITVS), 1994). 24. Mark Rakatansky, “Motivations of Animation,” ed. Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, ANY Magazine, Diagram Work: Data Mechanics for a Topological Age, 23 (June 1998): 53. 25. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 22. 26. Weheliye, “Pornotropes,” 77. 27. Guy Debord, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” Internationale Situationniste, no. 10 (March 1966), http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/decline.html. 28. Daniel Widener, “Writing Watts Budd Schulberg, Black Poetry, and the Cultural War on Poverty,” Journal of Urban History 34, no. 4 (May 1, 2008): 665–87, doi:10.1177/0096144207313677. Also see Kellie Jones, ed., Now Dig This!: Art & Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980, 1st ed (Los Angeles : Munich ; New York: Hammer Museum : University of California ; DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2011). 29. Daniel Widener, Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 30. Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert, eds., “To See with the Mind and Think through the Eye: Deleuze, Folding Architecture, and Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers,” in Deleuze and Space, transf. to digit. pr, Deleuze Connections (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2008), 53.

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Alessandra Raengo is Associate Professor Daren Fowler is a Ph.D. Student in Moving Arzu Karaduman is a Ph.D. candidate in Nettrice Gaskins received a Ph.D. in Digital of Moving Image Studies at Georgia Image Studies at Georgia State University Moving Image Studies at Georgia State Media from the Georgia Institute of Technology State University and coordinator of liquid in Atlanta. His research focuses on queer University in Atlanta. She is currently in 2014. Her model for ‘techno-vernacular blackness, a research project on blackness materialism to consider the contemporary writing her dissertation titled "Anasonicity: creativity’ is an area of practice that investigates and aesthetics. She is the author of On the possibilities for a queer aesthetic politics. Daren Echoes of Derrida in Sounds in Cinema". Her the characteristics of this production and its Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value is also the Managing Editor for liquid blackness. research interests focus on film philosophy, application in STEAM (Science, Technology, (Dartmouth College Press, 2013) and Critical theories of (a)visuality, asonority/anasonicity, Engineering, Art and Mathematics). She Race Theory and Bamboozled (Bloomsbury psychoanalytic theory, and questions of blogs for Art21, served as the producer of Press, October 2016). Her work has appeared gender and sexuality in global art cinemas. the Peabody award-winning PBS series, in Camera Obscura, Discourse, Adaptation, Art in the Twenty-First Century, and has The World Picture Journal, Black Camera, published in Ghost Nature. Her essays are also The Black Scholar, and several anthologies. found in Meet Me at the Fair: A World's Fair Reader (ETC Press), Future Texts: Subversive Performance and Feminist Bodies (Parlor Press) and Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro- Blackness. She is currently the director of the STEAM Lab at Boston Arts Academy.

170 liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven 171 Steve Spence is Professor of Media Studies Sarah Stefana Smith is a visual artist, scholar, Lauren M. Cramer is Assistant Professor of at Clayton State University, on the south and postdoctoral fellow with the African Film and Screen Studies at Pace University in side of Atlanta. He is at work on a book American Studies department and the Africana New York City. Her current research project, manuscript, Digitizing the Freedom Struggle: Research Center at the Pennsylvania State “A Hip-Hop Joint: Thinking Architecturally New Media, Civil Rights, Black Power. Sections University. She received a Ph.D. in Social Justice about Blackness,” considers Blackness as from the book project have appeared in Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies the architectonic logic that coheres hip- the journal Public Culture (23.3) and in in Education at the University of Toronto, and hop’s increasingly diverse output. Lauren is volume two of the anthology Cinephilia holds an MFA from Goddard College (2010). a founding member of liquid blackness and in the Age of Digital Reproduction. Her research examines the intersections of currently serves on its Editorial Board. Her visuality, queerness, and affect in Black diaspora writing has appeared in Black Camera, Film art and culture. Her publications include Criticism, liquid blackness, and InMediaRes “Composite Fields (2015) on ‘Nothingness’ and Mu” in Drain Journal and “Appetites: Destabilizing the Notion of Normalcy and Deviance Through the Work of Wangechi Mutu and Octavia Butler” published in Ruptures: Anti- colonial and Anti-Racist Feminist Theorizing.

172 liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven liquid blackness : volume four, issue seven 173 Our Supporters:

Acknowledgements Matthew Bernstein Nedda Ahmed, Wade Weast, Chair, Department of Film and Arts Librarian, Dean, College of the Arts,

Media Studies Georgia State Universit y Georgia State Universit y This research project on aesthetics of suspension, The Symposium was supported by: Emory Universit y which will continue beyond this issue (look at www. liquidblackness.com for updates) began with the screening and symposium “Holding Blackness in CENCIA, The Center for Collaborative and International Arts Suspension: The Films of Kahlil Joseph” which took Georgia State Universit y David Cheshier Kevin Sipp Jennifer Barker place on October 6-7, 2016. The event began with an Director, Creative Media Industries Coordinator, Gallery 72, Associate Professor of Moving Image intense and widely attended artist talk by Kahlil Joseph CMII, The Creative Media Industries Institute Institute Cit y of Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Cultural Studies moderated by Lauren M. Cramer and Alessandra Raengo Georgia State Universit y Georgia State Universit y Affairs Georgia State Universit y on Thursday October 6, 2016 and continued the next day with a Symposium featuring talks by Regina Bradley The College of the Arts (Armstrong State University), Derek Conrad Murray Georgia State Universit y Pearl McHaney and Annie Latta Christina Humphrey, Angelo Restivo (University of California, Santa Cruz), Lauren M. Cramer Former Director and Program Manager, Former Senior Programmer, Associate Professor of

(Pace University), Gregory Zinman (Georgia Institute of Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts CENCIA Atlanta Film Festival Moving Image Studies

Technology) and Kara Keeling (University of Southern Georgia Institute of Technology Georgia State Universit y Georgia State Universit y California), facilitated by Jenny Gunn and Daren Fowler. It concluded with a show of two video installations by Film and Media Studies Department

Shady Patterson summarizing part of the intellectual Emory Universit y Louis Ruprecht Juliet Peters, Daniel Robin history of the liquid blackness group at Gallery 72 and a William M. Suttles Chair and Culinary Instructor, Levy Restaurants Associate Professor of Film and screening of her documentary on the 2015 Symposium Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs Director of Hellenic Studies, Mercedes-Benz Stadium Digital Media Production on “The Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble.” The Cit y of Atlanta Georgia State Universit y Georgia State Universit y

The call for papers for this issue was written with The Atlanta Film Festival contributions from Lauren M. Cramer, Jenny Gunn, Daren Fowler, Charleen Wilcox, Shady Patterson, and John The William M. Suttles Foundation Roberts and the event was organized thanks to the additional hard work of Brooke Sonenreich and Cameron Institute for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Hubbard. Georgia State Universit y

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