Trans-Scripts 3 (2013)

Fred Hampton’s Murder and the Coming Revolution

Sampada Aranke*

“I don’t believe I’m going to die slipping on a piece of ice…I believe that I will be able to die as a revolutionary in the inter- national Revolutionary proletarian struggle.” - Fred Hampton, 1969

“I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.” - Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1967

Pools of blood stain the contours of a once-white mattress. Newspapers, records, and clothing litter the floor. Natural light seeps in, illuminating pockets of space while simultaneously creating dark shadows in the corners of the room. We can only see the well-lit parts. On the mattress, spattered with blood, rests The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He was probably reading this the night before. Maybe the book was dragged alongside his body and left on the mattress for later. Tucked underneath a stack of pamphlets, we can make out the name of another book. The Wretched of the Earth. The author’s name is covered, but we know who it is: Frantz Fanon. This text is iconic. It is a treatise on black insurrection and revolution, and mandatory reading for a revolutionary curriculum. The curator finally gives us a name: “Chairman Fred”— the blood soaking the mattress in the scene described above belongs to Black Panther Party (BPP) Chairman, Fred Hampton.

Like the well-known Oakland Black Panther Chapter, Hampton instituted Fanon’s texts as mandatory for membership in the Chicago BPP, as well as for the youth education programs conducted throughout the city. In all of his works, Fanon gives us both a psychoanalytic and material history of blackness. In other words, he offers a material history of blackness, as well as insights into how that material history structures both the black psyche and (therefore) body. Though in Wretched of the Earth Fanon specifically addresses the world of the colonized subject, it was not ______

* Sampada Aranke is a PhD Candidate in Performance Studies at University of California at Davis. Her research interests include contemporary Black aesthetics and the intersection of corpses and corporeality in contemporary Black life.

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uncommon for black radicals in the U.S., including members of the BPP, to express solidarity and kinship with Third World struggles for liberation1. Especially because the condition of colonized subjects, as detailed by Fanon, so closely reflected the violent reality of being black in America. Fanon’s text also calls for self- determination as it encourages those who are colonized to engage in militant warfare against their oppressors. The Black Panther Party for Self Defense viscerally identified with this kind of radical black self-determination. So much so that the BPP adopted Fanon’s text nationally as mandatory reading for membership in the organization. If read as an early prototypic Performance Studies text, Fanon’s theorizations of black life — both in Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks — are given to us in the form of photographic snapshots: a kind of photo essay that weds the narrative and the visual towards a more cohesive understanding of black life. He freezes experiential moments of terror, anxiety, confusion, and anger in order to make sense of the structures that produce these affects. These photographic narrative moments — at the train station platform, sitting alone in transit, waiting patiently for a film to start, speaking with colleagues — make visible the palpable tensions that produce blackness.

In this paper, I primarily deploy Black Skin, White Masks as a model for thinking through the structural implications of blackness. I suggest that bringing Fanon into the canon might bring us closer to a kind of Performance Studies that negotiates how blackness (as a structural position) founds the conditions of invisibility, absence, and fixity that foreground any generative investments in performance.

Unraveling Performance Studies: Performance Theories and Race

Many Performance Studies scholars have worked to critique the inherent whiteness in the field; when we do talk about race, it always happens in a preliminary or cursory way — calling attention to a particular ethnic performance’s inclusion or exclusion based on racial identity. My concern is that this impulse-philosophy of “the more representations, the better” tends to participate in the capital-based logic of accumulation. Or, to adopt and reconstruct a notable intervention by Peggy Phelan, thinking of race purely as identity is “compatible with capitalism’s relentless appetite for new markets and with the most self-satisfying ideologies of the United States” (11). This is the same logic that foregrounds “white” as the measure to which all other performance is legitimated, recognized, or even spoken about. This logic of

1 For more information on the relationship between black liberation struggles, black radical organizations, and anticolonial or “Third World Liberation” movements, refer to: Bloom, Joshua, Waldo Martin, and Waldo E. Martin Jr. Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Univ of California Press, 2013 and Muntaqim, Jalil. On the Black Liberation Army. Abraham Guillen Press & Arm the Spirit, 2002.

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accumulation, a particular brand of liberal identity politics, is a confining and dangerous place to be for those of us who are interested in race, not as identity, but rather as a political structural formation. In Frank B. Wilderson’s terms, to focus on the “myriad of identities” would “be fine if the work led us back to a critique of the paradigm; but most of it does not” precisely because it is “hardly fashionable anymore to think the vagaries of power through the generic positions within a structure of power relations”— in other words, how race structures antagonistic relations. (Wilderson 6). To talk about race in terms of its structural implications — in this case, absence, negation, and fixity — would give us quite a different understanding of ‘how’ or ‘why’ we should be talking about race in the first place. In the following section, I interrogate the works of two foundational Performance Studies scholars, Peggy Phelan and Joseph Roach, whose works give us insight into how “performance” is an object of inquiry that requires innovative methodologies to trace the conceptual and material affects of the body. Performance Studies provides a variety of theoretical methodologies that enable critical frameworks for making sense of Hampton’s corpse in relation to black radical politics and the structural antiblackness that conditioned his death.

However insidiously, most of the early foundational texts in Performance Studies reflect this critical investment in whiteness2. For example, in her iconic work Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Peggy Phelan claims that the “ephemerality of performance” characterizes its generative quality. She suggests that the “disappearance of the object is fundamental to performance” precisely because this disappearance “rehearses and repeats the disappearance of the subject who longs always to be remembered” (Phelan 147). Through Phelan’s logic, the disappearance of the object rehearses the eventual disappearance of the subject, assumed to have the capacity of loss and remembrance. If a performance is predicated on a rehearsed and repetitive disappearance, then all we have left is memory and re-membering, both of which take on particular qualities in relation to how Phelan differentiates between performance and representation.

2 Many of the foundational figures in the field were invested in performance as it opened up the potential for either describing or consoling interests of white performers or audiences. For example, Phelan’s insistence that the ephemerality of performance provides rupture for those privileged enough to be assured that the production of erasure in performance does not dismantle their material power in everyday life. Or, even the anthropological investment in “writing other cultures” depends on the white academic writing those otherwise under erasure into the disciplinary canon. Joseph Roach certainly interrupts my theory, but I believe is able to do so precisely because he writes about histories of performance. Writing history allows him to make particular claims about the stakes of performance in relation to racial formation in the U.S.

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Representation and performance can be differentiated by how both deal with the entanglements of presence. Phelan writes:

The pleasure of resemblance and repetition produces both psychic assurance and political fetishization. Representation reproduces the Other as the Same. Performance, insofar as it can be defined as representation without reproduction, can be seen as a model for another representational economy, one in which the reproduction of the Other as Same is not assured (3).

Bracketing her use of the psychoanalytic terms “Other” and “Same” for the purposes of this article, for Phelan, performance is a process of rehearsal that defies the lure of reproduction because it resists and elides the project of turning difference into homogeneity. In this way, Phelan makes clear the potential in performance for suspending the time between performance and representation — a time in which the representational economy that performance enables is critically reviewed before it slips into an economy of representational homogeneity, predictability, and simplification. During this time, the subtleties of live-performance preserve the complexities of “difference” without disavowing these nuances for the “ideology of the visible” — within which Foucault’s panopticon rears its ugly head (1). In this world, constant surveillance and disciplinary mechanisms determine the paradigm of performance. This interplay between surveillance and discipline, however insidious, is unfortunately the condition in which performance makes sense.

The kind of representation that Phelan articulates is one that has two essential qualities: “it always conveys more than it intends; and it is never totalizing” (2). These qualities point to an inevitable excess in meaning—one that produces multiple and variant deployments and receptions. Bridging representation and performance, excess is the same motivating principle in which performance “saves nothing; it only spends”; in doing so, this excessive expenditure has repercussions on seeing, which becomes subsumed in the spilling over of too many things to visibly consume (148). Paradoxically, because of these two forms of excess, “performance marks the body itself as a loss” (152). This complex nexus of excess and expense paradoxically threaten to void the body of meaning, so much so that loss is the only means through which the body remains. In many ways, “excess” is the closest Phelan comes to articulating what she means by affect. Affect, in Phelan’s work, is the ambivalent play between the excess of meaning (representation) and the body’s complete expenditure towards loss (performance). Affect resists captivity because it “conveys more than it intends”, while also captivating those who experience it by saving nothing and excessively spending (148). Strikingly, the role of seeing is constructed and destroyed by excess. There is too much to look at. There is too much to process. The body, through excessive meaning and depleting expulsion of that excess, loses itself in order to remain. Though Phelan’s investment in performance is afforded

119 Sampada Aranke only to those (white) bodies that can afford to (at least conceptually) lose their bodies, her theories of excess and visibility provide openings for thinking through the implications of race and performance. By turning to Joseph Roach’s work, we may be able to work through how race and violence complicate Phelan’s notion of excessive expenditure.

I find Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead to be increasingly useful in its articulation of the intricacies of performance and violence—precisely because Roach makes the striking accusation that affect and race are constituted by violence. In order to arrive at this argument, Roach locates the relationship between memory and forgetting as co-constitutive: each constitutes the history of Circum-Atlantic performance. “Circum-Atlantic” intervenes in the way in which history is traditionally recorded (30). Circum-Atlantic is a re-routing of history that envisions history as a cycle of contact, triangulated as opposed to bifurcated. In this triangulated vision, history is archived in the route between, in this case, three places: New Orleans, London, and the black Caribbean. Somewhere within this route, history and memory lose totality and re-emerge as fragments. This historical work demystifies the glory of a present moment by insisting that presence depends on an active forgetting. This active forgetting is the process by which memory and history determine precisely which routes we take to “now”.

For Roach, Circum-Atlantic performance mobilizes the simultaneous enactment of memory and forgetting, which narrate history through performance—what Roach calls the “displaced transmission” that re-members the past in order to both enact and imagine a future praxis (28). One particular modality of displaced transmission is surrogation: the process through which excess is contained and narrativized through forgetting and substitution so that multiple bodies can take it up (2). In its most basic form, we can think of surrogation as a requirement to any performance: an embodied subject (actor, amateur, ritual practitioner, trained dancer, etc.) who takes up the formal qualities of a performance brings that performance into subjective, partial, fragmented being. If surrogation requires the forced containment of excess in order to enable its performance, then the messy entanglements of affect, Phelan’s “excess of representation”, are purposely forgotten in order to narrate history. This process of selective memory narrates history. For Roach, this might mean that performance (surrogation) is merely representation (a ‘plural’ embodied narrative of history) without affect (excess). Because “collective memory works selectively, imaginatively, and often perversely,” surrogation inevitably fails because the person who takes up the performance can only account for fragments (2). If we think of failure as a generative and useful epistemological starting point, then the role of surrogation as both performance and selective memory becomes an interesting theoretical tool.

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Whereas Phelan insists that performance is excessive expenditure that “saves nothing”, for Roach, this excessive expenditure is not the nature of performance, but in fact the nature of violence. He insists that “violence is the performance of waste”— excessive, “because to be fully demonstrative, to make its point, it must spend things”. This spending is “never senseless but always meaningful” (41). At first glance, it is almost as if Roach replaced Phelan’s definition of “performance” with the word “violence”; but the theoretical implications of Roach’s argument leads us to new understandings of how race and affect are produced by violence. If we take that which is excessive as constitutive of how we conceptualize both performance and violence, then the indication that some subjects come into being precisely through violent acts has striking theoretical implications, especially for black subjects, which is of main concern for both Roach’s analysis and mine. Both aesthetics and violence “exist as forms of cultural expression” wherein the question of blackness is the auction block of the world (41).

This is where Roach’s definition of race occurs at a structural level, rather than that of identity. For Phelan, identity is marked by and through performance. Whether in their ephemerality or their repetition, representational strategies (performance’s excessive expenditure) charge affect in the service of performatively engaging bodies. This affective charge mobilizes that which is not fully redeemable, understandable, legible, or visible as an indication of how bodies are marked through performance. What I find most generative in Roach’s work is his insistence that some bodies — in his case and in mine, black bodies — are not marked, they are structurally positioned as that which is always already saturated with violent meaning. Affect, here, takes an unprecedented turn away from that which has potential for either hegemonic or performative rupture, toward a more striking accusation: that affect is structured by that very antiblack violence that forecloses the recuperative possibility of performing identities and instead circulates performance as violent affirmation of the structural captivity of blackness.

In sum, these readings of Phelan and Roach move us towards an understanding of performance’s affective work as always already conditioned by (anti)blackness. In other words, affect, what Phelan calls excess (of a body meaning too much and spending all that meaning), exercises itself so thoroughly during performance, that it actively depletes the body towards the desired end-goal of loss. Loss, or the “disappearance of the subject,” becomes the generative way for the body to remain, and in doing so the body becomes marked (148). We can also see how both the capacity and desire for loss are markers of privileged (white) bodies, whose loss would be recognized and remembered, historically, conceptually, and materially. In Contrast, Roach theorizes violence as the ongoing performance of excess wherein

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affect is always already structured against black bodies. In Roach’s formulation, violence always spends — think here of Phelan’s definition of performance as that which “saves nothing; it only spends” — and in that spending structures black bodies (Phelan 148). The structural conditions of violence which enable Phelan’s notion of performance render the act of both containing excess and performing towards loss as dependent on antiblackness. It is against this conceptual backdrop that “excess,” “expenditure,” “loss,” and “surrogation” absorb meaning in relation to Fred Hampton’s murder scene, in which his “body” was re-purposed through objects left in his wake.

Violent Affirmation: Blackness and Performance

Blackness as structural positionality is a way of thinking about the implications of race as paradigmatic, or rather, as a structuring force. As Frank Wilderson notes in his seminal text, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, blackness clarifies how “structures of ontological suffering stand in antagonistic, rather than conflictual, relation to one another” (5). In other words, “black” is a structuring force that clarifies the paradigmatic implications of race. In this rendition of how blackness conditions the world, Wilderson goes on to note:

The race of Humanism (White, Asian, South Asian, and Arab) could not have produced itself without the simultaneous production of that walking destruction which became known as the Black. Put another way, through chattel slavery, the world gave birth and coherence to both its joys of domesticity and to its struggles of political discontent; and with these joys and struggles the Human was born, but not before it murdered the Black, forging a symbiosis between the political ontology of Humanity and the social death of Blacks (20).

Wilderson positions blackness in an antagonistic relationship to other racial formations. For him, slavery made the modern world, and in doing so positioned blackness as negation—the flesh against which subjects formed. This notion of blackness as object has opened up two conflicting theoretical responses: 1) the making of black as object affirms the social death of blacks; and 2) the making of black as object opens up the possibility of the resistance of the object3. Both positions agree that thinking through the figure of the black as a structuring force of

3 These two conceptual positions reflect the Afro-pessimist and Black Optimist debate vis-à- vis the black body. While I represent these two theoretical positions as conflicting, it is important to note that scholars like Jared Sexton have emphasized the compatibility of these two seemingly different ways of thinking about the structural positions of blackness. (See Jared Sexton’s article, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism”, published by InTensions in their Fall/Winter 2011 volume.)

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the world leads to a paradigmatic analysis of race, thereby abandoning naïve gestures towards identity in favor of a more productive way of thinking about how blackness indicts the modern world.

Saidiya Hartman clarifies how affect circulates in performances of antiblackness as violent affirmation. This distinction between race-as-identity and blackness-as- structural-positionality is similar to Hartman’s definition of blackness. She defines blackness “in terms of social relationality rather than identity,” thus highlighting the “social relationship of dominance” wherein blackness is a “contested figure at the very center of social struggle” (57). In her theorization, the “performance of blackness is inseparable form the brute force that brands, rapes, and tears open the flesh in the racial inscription of the body” (58). Unlike other kinds of identities that can, in effect, be performed free of violence as their primary referent, performances of blackness — by both black bodies and nonblack subjects — are captively defined within the register of antiblack violence. In this way, although affect runs alongside the performative event, it is not completely exonerated from its structural entanglements. It is important to note that affective meaning is not necessarily foreclosed or subsumed by the power of hegemony, but that affect’s excessive nature (as detailed by Phelan) is sealed in violence’s excessive nature (as detailed by Roach).

Whether or not affect can be recuperated is not for my project to determine. Affect is a central tenet in thinking about the efficacy or generative potential of performance. Often, scholars imagine affect as the “work” that performance produces. Affect offers some kind of knowable or unknowable (portable) afterlife to a given performance’s audience. Affect is a way of engaging the productive capacity of performance. This productive performative capacity exists within a fundamentally antiblack paradigm. In this paper, I want to think about the circulation of affect as it traffics both blackness and violence, enabled by an uncanny politics of looking conditioned and haunted by antiblack violence.

This kind of “spilling over” of meaning might gain clarity when thinking about the differences between the circulation of representation and the circulation of affect. On the one hand, the circulation of representation constitutes, however partial, a particular certainty of the image or performance. Representation is often a familiar archive of images, subjectivities, narratives, or performances. The circulation of representation all too often mobilizes its full force of meaning within structures of hegemony and/or ideology. Representation often speaks to models of legibility, intelligibility, visibility, or recognition. Representation (and its circulation) – the canon of familiar and legible media representations – conceal rather than reveal the operations of power. More precisely, representations are often naturalized precisely because of how they are deployed by the regimes of visibility and legibility. This

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naturalization conceals the ways in which power — which is enabled and secured by antiblack violence — provides narrative or visual closure to the particular representation in question.

Performance theories may enable a breach in the visual language of representation. This is why I turn to Performance Studies, but in the way that scholars like Fred Moten or Saidiya Hartman imagine it. Though these two scholars are often situated on different sides of what is called the Afro-pessimist debate4, they both give us a sense of the intimate historical life of performance and blackness. Or, as Moten notes:

It is also the question of whether performance in general is ever outside the economy of reproduction…Hartman’s considerable, formidable, and rare brilliance is present in the space she leaves for the ongoing (re)production of that perform- ance in all its guises and for a critical awareness of how each of those guises is always already present in and disruptive of the supposed originarity of that primal scene (4).

Departing from Phelan in favor of Hartman, Moten offers a notion of performance that is grounded in that initial reckoning of the violence of slavery. He asks if the reproduction of violence through its repetition as performance (and representation) might lead us closer to a notion of black radical aesthetic—a kind of aesthetic that thinks through the historicity of performance while maintaining the centrality of race. In this manifestation of performance, the object of inquiry collides with the history of the black body as object. For Moten, this collision is “(Black) performance” (263). In this formulation, the “concept of the object in performance studies is [in] practice precisely at the convergence of the surplus…and the aesthetic” (263). The object is always insurgent—resistance is always the performance. Excess meets aesthetic, which is where blackness as object makes itself visible. The spilling over of meaning that performance enables crashes into the lived object-hood that antiblackness paradigmatically produces. Moten responds to Performance Studies by

4 Afro-pessimism refers to a particular strand of black political thought invested in the affective, material, and theoretical implications of antiblack violence. Afro-pessimist thought relies on the following foundational assumptive logics: 1) The advent of slavery was predicated on making the modern world against and with the labor of the black body; 2) Black social life is, in actuality, black social death; 3) Notions of the self, the human, autonomy, self-determination, and economy are foregrounded against the black body. Some foundational thinkers that are often attributed with Afro-pessmism include Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Orlando Patterson, Frank B. Wilderson III, and Jared Sexton. Fred Moten is a contentious figure within the Afro-pessimist debate as his theorizations often raise generative contradictions within Afro-pessimism.

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inching closer towards the determinant quality of (anti)blackness within any and all manifestation of performance.

Phelan’s excessive expenditure of affect; Roach’s repetition of forgetting and substitution; Hartman’s insistence that antiblack violence is the originary performance of captivity; and Moten’s quest for radical black aesthetics bring us closer to Hampton. What does his gruesome murder tell us about performance theories of looking? My argument tries to reconcile the object of Performance Studies (the body) with death, or rather the spectacular nature of death and dying in black radical politics. In doing so, I suggest that the spectacular power of death in black radical life reveals the force of absence, negation, and fixity.

“You can murder a liberator, but you can’t murder liberation”: Murder, Curation, and Politicized Looking

In 1969, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Chicago was one of the most radical community organizations in the country. Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old Chairman of the Black Panther Chicago chapter, offered disciplined and militant leadership in a city that was devastated by unbearable systemic poverty that disproportionately affected blacks. Under Hampton’s leadership, the Chicago Panthers implemented five different free breakfast programs, a free medical clinic, and an emergency heat program during the winter season, which pressured landlords to repair their poor black tenants’ heaters (Newton 48). The Chicago Panthers thrived under Hampton’s leadership and gained national recognition from radical black organizers primarily because of their success building autonomous structures in a city notorious for its corruption and police brutality.

Hampton’s work in Chicago was part of a broader radical political praxis that was invested in the complete overhaul of U.S. capitalism, imperialism, and racism. Hampton called for revolution as often as most liberal politicians call for reform. In fact, the global consensus among radicals was that revolution was indeed just around the corner. His militancy was fueled by the seemingly global consensus that revolution was the logical end to the ongoing radicalization of a people5. The question for Hampton, and other militants, was not if the revolution would happen, but when. This consensus signals the political urgency of this particular historical moment, while also centralizing the politics of the 1960s. The state identified radical organizations like the Panthers as a serious indictment of both the U.S. and

5 For more on the question of revolution, particularly with regards to 1968 (the year of global insurrection) refer to Katsiaficas, G.N. The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968. Cambridge: South End Press, 1987. Print.

125 Sampada Aranke capitalism. The practice of and towards revolution threatened the sanctity of U.S. power.

In response to the threat these radical social movements posed, the U.S. government implemented a severe campaign to restore “law and order” premised on the brutal repression of radicals.6 However, barring the obvious police violence, surveillance, and harassment that took place everyday, radicals and radical organizations in the 1960s had little documented proof at the time that the state was invested in the short-term repression and long-term eradication of these political movements. In order for the state to execute these goals, radicals suspected they were consistently being policed, surveilled, incarcerated, or killed7. Though many radical organizations across racial, gender, and class lines were affected by state repression, the Black Panther Party (and most subsequent black radical organizations) was disproportionately impacted by repressive government programs8.

6 The most notorious call for “law and order” took place during Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, in which he promised a restored notion of civility and a “tough on crime” platform that specifically targeted leadership within radical social movements. For more on the implications of Nixon’s 1968 campaign in relation to the then-burgeoning prison industrial complex, refer to Gilmore, R.W. "Globalisation and US prison growth: From military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian Militarism." (1999). Print.

7 Ward Churchill brilliantly documents state repression of radical social movements in his 2002 book Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. In his account of Hampton’s death, Churchill affirms then- suspected accusations that the state was out to kill, imprison, or at the very least, repress radical social movements and their leaders. The most infamous government program to spearheaded this repression was the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which effectively destroyed radical social movements by engaging in a series of tactics, including infiltration, sabotage, arrest, false imprisonment, and, in some cases, murder. Churchill’s study catalogs each of these tactics as they played out in the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement.

8 For more information on how black radical organizations were disproportionately affected (and eventually dismantled) by COINTELPRO and other repressive government programs please refer to: Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall. Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Classics Edition). Vol. 7. South End Press, 2001; James, Joy, ed. Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy. Duke University Press Books, 2007; Rodriguez, Dylan. Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

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Hampton, like most black radicals at the time, understood and often publicly articulated the inevitability of his death at the hands of the state. On December 4, 1969, that prediction provided little solace to Hampton’s comrades. They knew before it was made official that the FBI, in conjunction with the Chicago Police Department, killed Fred Hampton. In fact, the predictions of his own death marked the shocking and spectacular nature of his murder as an unwelcome, but too real condition of a black radical who posed a threat to the state. Hampton was one of many examples. Hampton’s murder was one of many ways to commit the crime.

The 1971 documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton, produced by The Film Group, a white anti-racist film collective based in Chicago, makes visible the horrors of Hampton’s untimely, and at once all too timely death. Howard Alk and Mike Gray, two members of the progressive filmmaking collective, initially intended to make a film about Fred Hampton’s political leadership in the Chicago Black Panther Party. The original 1968 project about Hampton’s life took a turn after his murder in 1969. The Film Group then sought out another kind of filmic political education: they created a film that sequenced how the Chicago Police Department, in conjunction with other national forces, summarily executed Hampton. The film they produced between 1969 and 1971 took seriously the consensus among radicals at the time that the police and other state officials infiltrated and destroyed radical organizations that posed a threat to the status quo.

Immediately following his murder, the Chicago Panther Party decided to open up Hampton’s home to local community members in an attempt to bring to light the conditions of his gruesome execution. Blood then fresh on the mattress, bullet holes, and the stark cold Chicago winter all afforded a bitter scene—what one exhibit- attendee infamously called “nothing but a northern lynching” (Haas 91). In many ways, Hampton’s murder registers within a particular history of lynching in the United States9, a history that in many ways determines how looking is conditioned by antiblack violence. Lynching effectively communicated to the black community that black bodies were expendable. Like forced captivity, lynching was motivated by antiblack violence—a kind of violence that structures permissible black killing at the hands of white civil society. Lynching often took place in public spaces, where white community members could participate in the spectacle by foraging for singed

9 Leigh Raiford’s 2011 book Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle offers interesting insights into the relationship between lynching and Black Power as they share a particular genealogy in terms of visibility and photography. In her project, she offers a radical genealogy that links anti-lynching activism to the newly-emerging black radical politics of the 1960s and 70s. This work develops the role of photography as it provides a “shadow archive” of the black condition that black radical practitioners actively repurposed towards black liberation struggles.

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clothing or bones and by taking photographs with the victims’ corpses, which the state offered as commodified objects for public consumption (Wood 4). Indeed, lynching photographs invited white spectators to record their participation in these public executions. And, because the vigilante white violence of lynching was never prosecuted or prohibited by the state, lynching communicated that the state and white civil society shared antiblack investments. Though Hampton’s murder shares a political genealogy with those black bodies lynched in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the visual document of his murder manifested quite a different political visibility. In the case of Hampton — unlike in lynching photographs — there was no body left to decipher. What was visible in Hampton’s wake was only the violent traces of a murder, the remnants of which demand a radical negotiation for those looking.

Opening up Hampton’s home as an exhibition, the Panthers curated and narrated the bloody scene as a document of antiblack violence. As the film visualizes, this act of curation presents quite a radical political articulation. Refusing to rely on the state’s narrative of Hampton’s murder, and preempting state repression of narratives to the contrary, the Panthers invited community members to come look for themselves. This kind of live-curatorial practice was further enhanced and archived when the Panthers invited The Film Group to document the exhibition.

The footage from the exhibit shows a line of people awaiting entrance into 2337 Monroe Street and the voice of a Panther-curator asking visitors not to touch or disturb the objects in the home. “Everything is just how it was,” he assures. Then, we are taken to the room in which Hampton was killed, followed by a thick description of the logical fallacies behind the logistic and forensic claims made by the Chicago Police Department. The camera lens is focused on the wall though which the Panthers allegedly shot the police, coupled with the Panther-curator’s explanation of the forensic impossibility of the official police report. Finally, the camera focuses on the Panther previously known only by his voice. He stands in front of a wall tagged with the famous Panther slogan “All Power To The People,” [Figure 1], reminding the viewers that they are in a curated exhibit space intended to invite them to look.

Perhaps the most startling narrative turn in the documentary occurs when we are introduced to Skip Andrews, an attorney for the People’s Law Office (PLO) and the Chicago Panther chapter, as he enters a blood soaked room. We are quickly given the remnants of a murder. Andrews slowly raises a previously white, now blood-red scrap of cloth [Figure 2]. We see a bare mattress covered with pools of blood [Figure 3]. On the ground, lie broken records, books, and posters in tracks of blood [Figure 4]. And finally, as the camera moves up, we see dozens of bullet holes. Each bullet

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hole has a plastic tube protruding out of the hole, measuring the projectile’s entrance and exit [Figure 5].

The still-images described above allow us to slow down the process of spectatorial consumption in order to locate the unnerving violence of this scene. What do these images tell us about a body without the body present? Unlike other filmic moments of narrative coherence in The Murder of Fred Hampton, these particularly unnerving images account for what Kara Keeling calls “the interval”10— that fleeting moment of redirection, a possible emergency that locates meaning within and without narrative determination. This slowing down might enable us to better understand how absence qualifies the political life of objects that are Hampton’s body. Somewhere, in the interval, we might locate the generative power of death in a scene marked by the absence of Hampton’s flesh. In that moment of redirection, Hampton’s absence charges affect towards the things that remain.

These images, throughout the film, offer an ongoing tension: What are we looking at? Keeling leads us back to Frantz Fanon as a possible guide for strategies of looking. Fanon’s most poignant encounter with blackness occurs at a train station where a young child freezes him in sheer negation. At this moment, when the “glances of the other fixed [him] there,” Fanon’s body “suddenly abraded into nonbeing” until his body was repackaged for him as an object “sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day” (Fanon 140). The child calls Fanon’s blackness into visibility, which in turn proceeds to offer Fanon a snapshot of himself through white eyes. In other words, Fanon’s blackness is handed back to him within the realm of the visual. The visual here operates prefiguratively— it is the visual that conditions Fanon’s blackness even before he is made to recognize it as nonbeing, distorted, fixed. Fanon, without recourse, goes to the film writhing with anticipation: “I cannot go to a film without seeing myself. I wait for me. In the interval, just before the film starts, I wait for me” (140). And as he waits, Fanon’s unnerving anxiety fixes him into his chair. This kind of fixity is rooted in the knowledge that the black subject that appears on the screen is only understood vis-à- vis negation. Any potential black subjectivity that is yet to be seen on the screen

10 In her mediations on Frantz Fanon, Keeling notes, “Fanon describes himself as ‘one who waits.’ …Fanon continues his description of himself: ‘I investigate my surroundings, I interpret everything in terms of what I discover, I become sensitive’ (B, 120). While Fanon’s investigative and interpretation of his surroundings proceed according to the sensory-motor processes of his body, the temporal configurations Fanon describes is that of an interval before an anticipated event and after an event that has precipitated the waiting. Under such circumstances, to exist as ‘one who waits,’ then, is to exist in an interval” (105-106). See Keeling, Kara. “‘In the Interval’: Frantz Fanon and the ‘Problems’ of Visual Representation”. Qui Parle, Vol. 13 No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2003), pp. 91-117.

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constructs a deep sense of absence—both within and without the frame. Fanon’s own blackness is haunted by the historical in order to make sense of his present and his presence. In many ways, this haunting activates his blackness. The ontological work of haunting might give us insight into how looking structures Hampton’s murder.

In Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters, she suggests that “if haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence” then the ghost is not ”simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure” (8). This social figure acts by way of haunting—and “being haunted draws us affectively…into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition” (8). Certainly, this kind of transformative recognition is a process through which the ghost reactivates knowledges that would otherwise seem fantastical, irrelevant, and hysterical. This is exactly the uncertain-certainty we glean from the absence of Fred Hampton – or, dare we say, his ghost – in the scenes described above. In addition, the inevitability of Hampton’s death haunts the images of his political life. Gordon’s work on ghosts allows us to understand Hampton’s premonition of his spectacularly violent murder as ghosting the scene. In other words, we hear the resonance of his voice, reminding us of his imminent death—not “slipping on ice” or “of a bad heart”, but rather Hampton knew he would die “for the things [he] was born for”, “high off the people”, and as a “revolutionary in the international revolutionary proletarian struggle” (The Murder of Fred Hampton, 1971).

Scholars of Performance Studies might ask: is it a body we see in these stills? There are several arguments in favor of viewing Hampton’s body in these images. To be sure, the substances left behind by his body — namely, his blood — mark the scene. In addition, external objects like records, books, and pamphlets — all intimate remnants of political self-worth — are also very much a part of Hampton’s body, if not his body itself. It is the body that is constituted for him by the conditions in which he was born: conditions of anti-blackness. These artifacts blur the boundaries between inside and outside. Hampton’s dead body is a body composed of objects because it is an object. As Fanon famously notes, the black man is an “object in the midst of other objects” (Fanon, Black Skins 109). The fact of Hampton’s (objectified) blackness is intensified and made visible for us by the political life of the objects left in his wake. One might ask: How is it that though we are given several scenes of Hampton’s political life in the film, The Murder of Fred Hampton, his murder scene tells us more about his politics (and politicization) than the other scenes do? The murder scene is littered with revolutionary propaganda, including political posters, manifestos, organizing flyers, pamphlets, and albums. It is a scene of the political life of objects—both sentient and not. These objects somehow simulate and substitute Hampton’s body in relation to his blackness. By simulate, I am speaking to how the

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objects rest in place of Hampton’s rest. These objects record and grant stimulus as Hampton’s body would.

To briefly return to Joseph Roach, we can think of the objects left in Hampton’s wake as the remnants of memory and forgetting in which substitution conditions the uptake of political life. Foundational to Roach’s notion of surrogation is the role of substitution—the ways in which memory and forgetting re-activate performance. One way we can make sense of Hampton’s murder is through the objects that simulate and substitute his body. If surrogation implies selective memory, then the ‘work’ these objects perform reveals to us how power operates in relation to blackness. Because surrogation requires a process that contains and narrativizes excess through forgetting and substitution, these objects visually contain the violent excess of antiblack violence while also making sense of it (Roach 2). Which is to say, these objects narrate how antiblack violence is a structuring force, while also making claims to the generative production of radical self-worth. Both of these qualities are products of antiblack violence. The objects left in Hampton’s wake act as surrogates for his body and force us to centralize the politics that are foundational to Hampton’s being.

Not unlike Phelan’s notion of performance as a kind of excessive expenditure— “it saves nothing”— Roach’s understanding of violence as excess finds resonance in the stills of Fred Hampton’s murder (Phelan 148). As I have argued, the excessive nature of Hampton’s murder finds its history in the antiblack lynching practices of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The image of Hampton’s murder scene forces us to engage in a politics of memory and forgetting as we activate a familiar history. It allows us to conclude that antiblack violence conditions black life with intellectual precision. It is the objects left in Hampton’s wake that add to the already-present terror of Hampton’s bloody remains. Left as legacies and remainders of the excessive violence that haunts the scene, Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and Malcolm X’s 1965 revolutionary memoir, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (which catalogues his radical Black Nationalist political transformation) are both objects whose contents narrate the ongoing structuring force of antiblack violence. Stated another way, the exhibition of Hampton’s home provided a narrative sequence that undeniably makes sense of Hampton’s murder precisely because it contextualizes it within a history of antiblack violence. Even further, the political life of the objects left for us (as Hampton’s body) alert us to the living and viable threat radical black practitioners posed to the sanctity of state power.

In this way, Wretched and The Autobiography of Malcolm X – as well the 1971 documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton – are lasting objects. These objects remain as a kind of political afterlife as they outlive Hampton, and continue to theorize and

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inspire black radical resistance. These objects have the potential to threaten and destabilize state power precisely because they are revolutionary in form and content, and can therefore spark black revolutionary praxis in any given historical moment. The scene of Hampton’s murder registers precisely because the objects make clear Hampton’s absence, and because the audience is asked to perform the spectatorial practice of what I call politicized looking. This invitation is a critical evaluation: politicized looking invites the viewer to slow down the process of image-consumption in order to see the conditions through which life, and in this case death, occurs at an uneven, disjunctive, and violent rate against black bodies. These images lead the politicized looker to reach the conclusion: you can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill the revolution.

Politicized looking clarifies how antiblack violence is at once gratuitous and mundane. The spectacular nature of Hampton’s murder rests on the imperative placed on the visitor to look for themselves, and to reach their own conclusions about the conditions of Hampton’s murder. Politicized looking understands the sequence of the exhibition and narrative within the document provided — in this case, the document is the home, specifically the bedroom in which Hampton was murdered — as necessarily incomplete. This incomplete document is a generative failure because it is the trace of a historical event. Politicized looking is a practice that destabilizes the clean division between presence and absence, memory and forgetting in order to clarify how state-sanctioned murder is merely one technology of antiblack violence. The exhibition space curated by the Panthers enables and invites politicized looking as a means of contextualizing Hampton’s death, thus engaging in political practice.

For Kara Keeling, the act of looking is political because “liberation, if there is such a thing, is possible in the interval as a present impossibility, an expansion that explodes even the interval in which we wait” (39). The viewer witnesses this impossibility in Hampton’s murder scene. The gruesome excretions from Hampton’s flesh collide with the political life of the objects in the scene. Politicized looking actively negotiates the present impossibility of the black condition, wherein “waiting happens without protection, exposed to the examination and expectations of others” (40). On the one hand, the viewer of The Murder of Fred Hampton is invited to look in a way that exposes him or her to the structural forces of (anti)blackness that mobilize constraint, fixity, negation. On the other hand, politicized looking activates the interval in order to begin a process of looking for rather than simply looking.

In these images, the objects become the life of the screen. They occupy the space to which Hampton alerts us to: the space of absence. These objects make all too clear the alarm of absence. When there is nothing there, what are we looking for?

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Precisely that. We look for the substitutes. We look for the objects that become Hampton’s body. To repeat an earlier point, antiblack violence seals Hampton into Fanon’s world as an “object in the midst of other objects” (Fanon, Black Skins 109). Perhaps, the object-position that black radicals like Hampton occupy brings us closer to how the “resistance of the object” lives (Moten 1). In The Murder of Fred Hampton, objects leak into the frame of Hampton’s murder scene as the body to look for because Hampton’s flesh is nowhere to be found. The centrality of these ‘things’ intensifies the spectacle of Hampton’s murder.

The camera asks us to consider what kind of threat Hampton posed to the U.S. government to warrant the degree of gratuitous violence inflicted on him. To that end, the film frames the message as two-fold: Hampton’s murder signals fear and alarm for anyone who might pose a threat to the status quo, including activists in the gender and class-based civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The gruesome document of his murder affirms that the state will go to great lengths to make an example of anyone who threatens its cohesion. It is also important to note, however, that the objects that leak into the frame offer another, more promising reading: for those engaged in politicized looking, these objects remind us that, with or without Hampton, the Revolution is alive. The Revolution is on the brink. The Revolution lives within these invisible-visible things.

Disciplinary Returns

Performance Studies aims to give us a framework for understanding — or at least centralizing — the body as a primary site of meaning-making. The body becomes the central locus for the narration, sensibility, ephemerality, and articulation of the psyche. The problem, however, in most of these theorizations is that they fail to account for the historical difference between bodies. So even if and when identity is foregrounded in accounts of the body, we relegate these differences as being made in a particular performance’s real-time. Though the work of Performance Studies relies on a centrality of epistemological difference (i.e., the way knowledge is made differently via performance) little attention has been paid to black bodies—bodies that exist, in their first ontological existence, as objects.

It occurred to Fanon on a train ride one day that he existed ‘triply’, when he noticed that white passengers settled to find their seats but intentionally left several seats between themselves and Fanon open. For him, this move marked the clear and present reality of black life: that the black man had to exist for himself, for the white Other, and for all of history (Fanon, Black Skins 92). This life – the life of an object among objects – is the uncertain-certainty of the black subject qua object. It is precisely this uncertain-certainty of blackness that allows Hampton to understand the

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relationship between dying and living vis-à-vis the black body. In a 1969 speech delivered at a rally in Chicago, Hampton effectively articulates death as “hope”: “I hope that each one of you will be able to die in the international proletarian revolutionary struggle or you’ll be able to live in it” (The Murder of Fred Hampton, 1971). The ease with which Hampton is able to hope that his audience will be able to die or live in the revolution is no simple matter. The uncertain terrains of revolutionary struggle promise some certainty for Hampton: that death and revolution are inevitable for black radicals. The significance of death in Hampton’s formulation marks the historical difference between bodies. It is this astute way of knowing that makes Hampton’s declaration both shocking and mundane. His “hope” is for a more meaningful death—a death on one’s own terms, a fully embodied black radical death that will propel us towards a more radical future.

So perhaps Fanon, as Hampton, Moten, Wilderson, Hartman, and other scholars of the black radical tradition use and understand him, is where Performance Studies might begin again. Fanon offers us scenes of his life through the visual realm not to foreground the experiential qualities of black life, but rather to attend to the paradigmatic antagonism blackness reveals: in this case, the fixity and negation of blackness. In every scene — from the train station (where he sits alone) to the movie theater (where he awaits a vision of himself) — Fanon centralizes the fact of blackness in the world of performance.

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Works Cited

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Print.

______. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2005. Print.

Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Haas, Jeffrey. The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2011. Print.

Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth- Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Print.

Keeling, Kara. The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2007. Print.

Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Print.

Newton, Huey. War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America. New York: Harlem River Press, 1996. Print.

Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.

Raiford, Leigh. Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Print.

Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Print.

The Murder of Fred Hampton. Dir. Howard Alk and Mike Gray. Featuring Fred Hampton, Bobby Rush, Edward Hanrahan. 1971. DVD. Chicago: Facets Multimedia, 2008.

Wilderson III, Frank B. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Print.

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Wood, A.L. Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Print.

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FILM STILLS The Murder of Fred Hampton. Directed by Howard Alk and Mike Grey, 1971.

The film stills are printed here with generous permission from filmmaker Mike Gray. The Murder of Fred Hampton is distributed by Facets Multimedia and can be purchased through their website.

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