Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared

Abstract

In Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left, Malik Gaines argues that black performers across 1960s music, theatre, cinema, and experimental art harnessed the decade's energies of "excess" (3) to radically destabilize gendered, racialized, and capitalist systems of dominance. These acts of disruption were as revolutionary as they were provisional. The performances of sonic affect, antistate critique, queer sexual dissent, and gendered spectacle that Gaines traces did not programmatically reorder social relations; they instead left ambivalent and ephemeral imprints that Gaines limns with care. Constellating Nina Simone's defiant performance personae, Ghanaian black feminist theatre by Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo, the cinematic collaborations of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Günther Kaufmann, and the queer communal life-world of the San Francisco Cockettes into a genealogy of possibility, Gaines contributes a rich archive and an original approach to black performance and its temporal, political, and representational dimensions.