How might we begin to make sense of the paradoxical vibrance of a form of life endangered, or even erased, by efforts at documentation and representation? What do we do with feelings that resist retrospective vindication? In this book, I am interested in answering such questions through a critical and fabulative archiving of a world that was "never meant to survive," as Audre Lorde memorably put it—and a world that, I would add, was perhaps also never meant to appear.3 The persistent reappearance of that which was never meant to appear, but was instead meant to be kept outside or below representation forms the first sense in which this book will mobilize the term "afro-fabulation." I don't mean by this that the fabulist is a storyteller in any straightforward sense of that familiar term, still less that she is a liar. More nearly, fabulation engages the philosophical position, identified by Henri Bergson among other modern theorists, that the irreversibility of the flow of time is the paradoxical source of freedom. 4 Fabulation points to the deconstructive relation between story and plot, a topic more frequently studied in literature than, as I shall attempt here, in relation to visual and perfor- mance art. When LaBeija abjures and, in the next breath, solicits the recording apparatus of the camera, she enacts this paradox of fabula- tion vividly. When we consider our own transgression of her interdic- tion of that gaze, we can see that blackness grasps us even as we seek to grasp it. In the chapters that follow, I track key moments of fabulation in contemporary black art and performance, honing in on moments in which black subversions of sexual and gender conformity prove excessive, disorderly, or simply unintelligible to an external gaze. Contesting a historical and political sequence that is by now familiar—a sequence in which gay rights follows upon civil rights in progressive lock-step, and the queer theory of the 1990s builds upon the feminist, black, and anti- colonial writings of the 1960s and 1970s—I instead look to the ways the study of blackness can rearrange our perceptions of chronology, time, and temporality. My aim is to speculate on the manner in which the "changing same" of black aesthetics and expressivity may have always 5 already been queer. Performing for and against the Camera Acts of afro-fabulation such as LaBeija's epic read, I will argue in this book, operate as a queer hack of the codes of an anti-black world, and rely for their success on a vernacular awareness of, and confrontation with, the manner in which gender and sexual norms operate to repro- duce systems of racial hierarchy. While critical analysis and traditions of protest have cultivated theoretical and methodological priorities among race, gender, sexuality, and class, at the intersection where LaBeija engages the camera (and, through it, the entire cinematic apparatus of capture), the black fabulative subject must perform with her whole self, albeit a self iterated to another power. 6 Recognizing the mythmaking function of the camera to speak to what Gilles Deleuze terms a "people who are missing," LaBeija races against time to preserve and, in fact, to invent the splendor of her competitive performance.7 Knowing how the rules and codes are stacked against them, competitive black subjects like LaBeija perfect the skill of back chat, shade, reading, and other hacks of the color line, which, when they work successfully, reveal the beauty of a terrible (and to some, terrifying) joy. The terrible joy of LaBeija's queer performance, which throws shade and color upon a whitewashed pageant, is not shuckin' or jivin', but their opposite. Bound to appear, she takes refuge in a performative agency that is derived specifically from the multiplicity of her sisters, both sisters present with her and those who stayed home. 8 She addresses us, here in the future, without being able to know how she has changed us. This book's account of afro-fabulation is thus before anything else a theory of the event. There are of course many theories of the event, and also, as we shall see, theories of the "nonevent." 9 In most respects the incident captured on camera would almost assuredly be termed a nonevent. A belated and ineffective protest, it is shut down within the narrative logic of the film itself.10 And either a win or a loss at a drag ball that is itself in breach of the law against cross-dressing can hardly be as- similated to any grand narrative of history. Rather than looking to this moment of performing for and against the camera as a decisive act of agency, then, I look instead to theories of the ordinary and the everyday as the texture out of which the eventfulness of fabulation arises. If one of the most common assertions of performance studies is that performance is everywhere, Afro-Fabulations looks to that nondescript character, that quality of in media res, and attends especially to those moments and lo- cations where a change in the surround that is blackness seems to come out of nowhere. My claim in this book is that afro-fabulation is a theory and practice of black time and temporality, and the following pages lay out the scope of this claim as it pertains to both the study of performance and the theory of performativity. Both art and literature are impacted by afro-fabulation as trans-disciplinary study. Cutting across disciplinary ap- proaches affords me a method of doing work that apprehends the black artist in a range of media. Within the contemporary social and politi- cal movements to which my own scholarly labors are indebted, such breadth seeks to work against being disciplined by the academy through a scholarly protocol of divide and conquer. A second danger, which I also consider, is the risk of communicating and rendering overly explicit that which ought more tactically remain camouflaged. In order better to apprehend the general antagonism within the specific contradiction of our present conjuncture, then, I outline these preliminary remarks by way of afro-fabulation as a trans-disciplinary method. Although I am interested in the everydayness of black performance, one ordinary and commonsense usage of "fabulation" must be clarified at the outset. A fabulist in my parlance is nothing like a liar. More nearly, fabulation exposes the relation between truth and lying in an other-than- moral sense, to paraphrase Nietzsche. My interest in fabulationality—the entangled and angular socialities generated by fabulation—is of course also inspired by the "poetics of relation" pioneered by Edouard Glissant. 11 It exposes the difference in every repetition, as exemplified by a writer like Gayl Jones, in particular in her novel Mosquito, in which her gar- rulous narrator promises to distinguish between "communicating" and "camouflage." 12 Incredibly detailed and specific one minute, the narrator of this epic novel of the American Southwest turns reticent and guarded the next. She is not an "untrustworthy" narrator, however. Her reticence commands respect and produces trust. When she "confabulates," she ad- mits she may be confused on a point or two. But these points of incoherence in her subjective memory are not a sign of dissemblance; they are, instead, sites of what I will describe as incompossibility. We see that the sanctuary work Jones's protagonist engages in tethers together worlds that can and cannot be, and is thus a necessary step toward investigating possibilities outside our present terms of order. This is an incompossibility, rather than a contradiction, and her slogan might be: "Another world is incompossible." Afro-fabulation, in Jones, is thus also en route toward the "critical fabulation" that black feminist historian Saidiya Hartman has proposed, and gestures to the "speculative fabulation" proposed by 13 feminist science theorist Donna Haraway. Such black feminist and posthumanist acts of speculation are never simply a matter of inventing tall tales from whole cloth. More nearly, they are the tactical fictionalizing of a world that is, from the point of view of black social life, already false. It is an insurgent movement—in the face of an intransigent and ever-mutating anti-blackness—toward something else, something other, something more. While moments of afro-fabulation are indeed often ephemeral and fleeting—as with La- Beija's performance—they may also be as monumental and enduring as Jones's novels. Though neither may transform the conditions under which they appear, they live on through performative and narrative strategies and tactics that draw out of a black feminist and queer reposi- tory of counter-conduct, finding in collective memory an ever-renewing series of stratagems for aesthetic oppositionality.14 The work of Saidiya Hartman in imagining and enacting "critical fabulation" is crucial here because of the way it throws into crisis the progressive teleology from bondage to freedom, and thus calls upon us to examine more carefully the afterlives of slavery.15 The short essay "Venus in Two Acts," in which Hartman outlines a series of questions leading toward a critical speculative poetics of fabulation, has been a touchstone for my thinking, even as I look to a seemingly different set of archives and questions. How might critical fabulation, I ask, be brought to bear in these other contexts? In particular, I seek in these chapters to take a set of questions that emerged at the nexus of history and literary stud- ies and bring them to bear upon performance, cinema, art, music, and digital technology. Chapter 2, for instance, is grounded in traditional questions of archival recovery, whereas chapter 4 looks to the mnemonic and memorializing function of performance and public art, and chap- ter 8 turns our focus on techno-scientific projects aiming to escape the all-consuming racial past. Afro-fabulation as I intend it here demands interdisciplinary modes of investigation. Put another way, the phenomena of fabulation that I pursue here— across a range of aesthetic instances—is tethered to the classic paradox of fiction: the matter of why and how it is that a story we know to be untrue can nonetheless inspire belief, emotion, and attachment. 16 Fictions, a theory of fabulation can tell us, do not simply attach themselves to moments of idle fantasy, play, instruction, or other socially acceptable occasions for storytelling. Fictions instead arise out of the indeterminacy and flux of living and dying, with life being perhaps the greatest fiction of all. "There is fiction in the space between," Tracy Chapman 17 sings, "the lines of your page of memories. If the paradox of fiction threatens to untether both history and memory fro ds of veridiction, these powers of the false are not so much to be enthusiastically embraced as they are to be critically interrogated. Black art and performance can aid this process of critical fabulation in a variety of ways I will explore over the course of this book, but especially insofar as they bring into co-presence a sense of the incompossible, mingling what was with what might have been. We can see this co-presence at work in performance and video artist Wu Tsang's 2012 film for how we perceived a life (Take 3), which revis- its and re-performs LaBeija's audacious moment of backchat from The Queen.18 The short video begins with five performers in a huddle, who emerge to enact short sequences that combine elements from the dia- logue of both Paris Is Burning and The Queen, into which the artist has also interpolated dialogue from subsequent interviews a' well as archi- val footage she recovered from the UCLA Film & Television Archives. Serving the children shade and color, Tsang's ensemble moves as a living reenactment of the cinematic apparatus, which they manage to bring to an abrupt and stuttering series of halts. If documentary cinema imposes sequential, periodizing, "time-stamped" time upon the everyday, the trans-aesthetic of queer of color performance here moves in and through the cut, accumulating temporal vignettes in a layered and folded manner that suspends historicity. 19 Yet even though it is grounded in both archi- val research and oral history, for how we perceived a life is nothing like an earnest historical reconstruction. It is instead a performed fabulation, construed here through a technique the artist has called "full body quo- tation." Through quoting and re-performing decontextualized fragments from these germinal films, for how we perceived a life explores the need of the black and brown feminist, queer, and transgender participants in the ballroom scene to be seen, heard, and felt, while resisting the temp- tation to accept visibility under dominative constraints as the fulfillment of that wish.20 The implicit theory of the archive in Tsang's term, "full body quotation," is telling.21 Through it, Tsang seeks to locate new aims for past goals, finding in the historical record a set of fabulous resources and stratagems. Turning the gaze back upon the filmmakers, quoting from archival footage of Jennie Livingstone (who is mostly unseen and unheard in Paris Is Burning), and citing LaBeija's protest of The Queen, for how we perceived a life implicitly raises questions about its own status as a fiction.
The persistent reappearance of that which was never meant to appear, but was instead meant to be kept outside or below representation forms the first sense in which this book will mobilize the term "afro-fabulation." fabulation engages the philosophical position, identified by Henri Bergson among other modern theorists, that the irreversibility of the flow of time is the paradoxical source of freedom Fabulation points to the deconstructive relation between story and plot blackness grasps us even as we seek to grasp it. black subversions of sexual and gender conformity prove excessive, disorderly, or simply unintelligible to an external gaze. I instead look to the ways the study of blackness can rearrange our perceptions of chronology, time, and temporality. My aim is to speculate on the manner in which the "changing same" of black aesthetics and expressivity may have always 5 already been queer. Performing for and against the Camera Acts of afro-fabulation operate as a queer hack of the codes of an anti-black world, and rely for their success on a vernacular awareness of, and confrontation with, the manner in which gender and sexual norms operate to repro- duce systems of racial hierarchy. the black fabulative subject must perform with her whole self, albeit a self iterated to another power LaBeija races against time to preserve and, in fact, to invent the splendor of her competitive performance Knowing how the rules and codes are stacked against them, competitive black subjects like LaBeija perfect the skill of back chat, shade, reading, and other hacks of the color line, which, when they work successfully, reveal the beauty of a terrible (and to some, terrifying) joy. The terrible joy of LaBeija's queer performance, which throws shade and color upon a whitewashed pageant, is not shuckin' or jivin', but their opposite she takes refuge in a performative agency This book's account of afro-fabulation is thus before anything else a theory of the event. Rather than looking to this moment of performing for and against the camera as a decisive act of agency, then, I look instead to theories of the ordinary and the everyday as the texture out of which the eventfulness of fabulation arises performance is everywhere, Afro-Fabulations looks to that nondescript character, that quality of in media res, and attends especially to those moments and lo- cations where a change in the surround that is blackness seems to come out of nowhere. afro-fabulation is a theory and practice of black time and temporality Both art and literature are impacted by afro-fabulation as trans-disciplinary study. Cutting across disciplinary ap- proaches affords me a method of doing work that apprehends the black artist in a range of media. Within the contemporary social and politi- cal movements to which my own scholarly labors are indebted, such breadth seeks to work against being disciplined by the academy through a scholarly protocol of divide and conquer afro-fabulation as a trans-disciplinary method A fabulist in my parlance is nothing like a liar fabulation exposes the relation between truth and lying in an other-than- moral sense the entangled and angular socialities generated by fabulation It exposes the difference in every repetition When she "confabulates," she ad- mits she may be confused on a point or two. But these points of incoherence in her subjective memory are not a sign of dissemblance; they are, instead, sites of what I will describe as incompossibility that is thus a necessary step toward investigating possibilities outside our present terms of order. This is an incompossibility Such black feminist and posthumanist acts of speculation are never simply a matter of inventing tall tales from whole cloth. More nearly, they are the tactical fictionalizing of a world that is, from the point of view of black social life, already false. It is an insurgent movement—in the face of an intransigent and ever-mutating anti-blackness—toward something else, something other, something more hey live on through performative and narrative strategies and tactics that draw out of a black feminist and queer reposi- tory of counter-conduct, finding in collective memory an ever-renewing series of stratagems for aesthetic oppositionality. imagining and enacting "critical fabulation" is crucial here because of the way it throws into crisis the progressive teleology from bondage to freedom, and thus calls upon us to examine more carefully the afterlives of slavery Afro-fabulation as I intend it here demands interdisciplinary modes of investigation the phenomena of fabulation that I pursue here— across a range of aesthetic instances—is tethered to the classic paradox of fiction: the matter of why and how it is that a story we know to be untrue can nonetheless inspire belief, emotion, and attachment. Fictions instead arise out of the indeterminacy and flux of living and dying, with life being perhaps the greatest fiction of all. There is fiction in the space between these powers of the false are not so much to be enthusiastically embraced as they are to be critically interrogated Black art and performance can aid this process of critical fabulation in a variety of ways insofar as they bring into co-presence a sense of the incompossible, mingling what was with what might have been. Through quoting and re-performing decontextualized fragments from these germinal films, for how we perceived a life explores the need of the black and brown feminist, queer, and transgender participants in the ballroom scene to be seen, heard, and felt, while resisting the temp- tation to accept visibility under dominative constraints as the fulfillment of that wish Turning the gaze back upon the filmmakers, quoting from archival footage of Jennie Livingstone (who is mostly unseen and unheard in Paris Is Burning), and citing LaBeija's protest of The Queen, for how we perceived a life implicitly raises questions about its own status as a fiction.