This article engages the possibility of a critical Black ethnography and a performative fugitivity. Drawing on the author’s ethnographic research, it examines the tension between being a racialized and gendered person and becoming an ethnographic self. This tension rises when critical Black ethnographers are visually rendered outside the domain of the ethnographer, a category forged against the template of Western White male subjects. Instead, they are interchangeable with the populations they perform research with and suspect to performances of racialized and gendered violence. This opens up an emergent politics for the possibility of a critical Black ethnographer who alters how ethnographic practice is undertaken to grapple with the realities of race and gender by the critical Black ethnographer in the field. That said, the critical Black ethnographer must reconcile being Black, becoming an ethnographer, and what it would mean to be a critical Black ethnographer. To do so, this article draws on Frantz Fanon and situates him as both a performer and a critical ethnographer to analyze how does a critical Black ethnographer engage with performance, performativity, and the performative.
This article unsettles the coloniality of the researcher, a convergence between coloniality, the researcher, and dominant representations of the human. This unsettling is necessary to call attention to, critique, and dismantle the institutional and systemic racism and its quotidian and mundane practices within Qualitative Inquiry as well as the human sciences in general. Engaging in Black Studies and the autobiographical, I first flesh out how coloniality continues to inform our notion of who does research, how one does research, and which cultural messages and knowledges are permissible. This coloniality naturalizes Man as our conception of the human and represents Black people as non-human even as we become researchers. Then, I illustrate how Black Studies approaches to Black cultural traditions and philosophies open up different possibilities in Qualitative Inquiry for the Black researcher, critical knowledge practices, and a more expansive conception of the human.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.