Fred Hampton's Murder and the Coming Revolution

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. 116 Sampada Aranke 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. 117 Sampada Aranke 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. 118 Sampada Aranke 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

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