The Cockettes, Sylvester, and Performance as Life

San Francisco’s Cockettes troupe staged radical anti-disciplinary spectacles onstage, in short films, in public, and in their domestic spaces. They hyperbolized the leftist political programs that informed both the liberation movements and the communal living practices in which they were ensconced. Through elaborate gender-defying combinations of drag and nudity, the Cockettes used their bodies as sites of social transformation. Sylvester, who later became a recording star, was perhaps the best-known Cockette. Using a repertoire of black virtuoso diva techniques, including a proficient singing voice, attention to black musical forms, and articulate modes of dress, Sylvester perfected a black expressive originality constructed from historically black signs. The difference between his radical virtuosity and the transgressive drop-out aesthetic of the predominantly white Cockettes troupe reveals a lack of organic unity in this revolutionary space and a racial cleavage in the project of liberation.

Efua Sutherland, Ama Ata Aidoo, the State, and the Stage

Shortly after its independence from Britain, Ghana became a transnational center for emerging political projects of black liberation. Its president, Kwame Nkrumah, sought to integrate a Marxist ideology with local knowledge in the context of the new nation-state, and proposed cultural initiatives that would support this synthesis. The plays of Efua Sutherland, a leading member of Ghana’s independence-era cultural elite, and Ama Ata Aidoo, who has come to be seen as an important figure of African post-colonial writing, reveal the ambitions and the difficulties of African modernity. Both writers situate a colonial legacy against Ghanaian cultural life and a black transnational influence. While fulfilling a state mandate for original productions, their plays (in particular, Sutherland’s Edufa and Foriwa, and Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost) complicate the statist ideology with an emergent African feminism that disallows synthesis, and shows the critical power of difference.

Nina Simone’s Quadruple Consciousness

The musical performances of Nina Simone are situated in her activist context, influenced by the civil rights movement and her friends, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Simone’s relationship to leftist performance is explored through her uses of materials authored by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, and the differences between her approach and Brecht’s proposed techniques underscore Simone’s black expressive mode and illustrate modernity’s reliance on blackness. Attention to Simone’s uses of voice, piano, dress, and presence construct a sense of a radically politicized performance mode. Using the song “Four Women” and the legacy of Du Boisian double consciousness, Simone enacts a kind of quadruple consciousness that uses excess to multiply, rather than resolve, the alienations and displacements of black subjectivity in an agile and mobile performance of difference.

The Radical Ambivalence of Günther Kaufmann

Within the oeuvre of German film, theater, and television director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the actor Günther Kaufmann typically played roles that radicalized his Afro-German body. The development of Fassbinder’s style through a history of political theater and the generational perspective of the late sixties helped construct a deeply critical presentation of difference, complicated by class, gender, race, sexuality, and provincial location, that unsettled the representation of a post-war West German order and its capitalist successes. Kaufmann problematized representation in a series of Fassbinder’s early productions, often through sexualized, violent, and campy portrayals that exceed both the Marxist and psychoanalytic readings often applied to Fassbinder’s work. Kaufmann’s unresolvable presence articulates a radical ambivalence that is critically effective if politically untidy.

Introduction

Blackness, the sixties, and the transnational left are three overlapping registers through which this book traces the radical possibilities of performance. Defining each of these and their collusions, the introduction outlines the ways each of these conditions pressures the others, and ways to understand their coordination as a site of excessive, transgressive action. Attention is paid to both Marxist histories and the travels of W.E.B. Du Bois and Josephine Baker as innovators of a black transnational sphere. The subjects of the following chapters are introduced in relation to this legacy.

Afterword

This concluding section uses art works and performances included in the 2015 Venice Biennial to identify a legacy of Marx and the black political left in the present of this writing. While the revolutionary possibility is understood as more remote than it may have been in the sixties, the resistant energies articulated in this tradition may still be used to deploy a radical criticality that unsettles disciplinary forms and the capitalist priorities that support them. Particular attention is paid to instances of sound and music that exceed the ordering powers of visuality that accompany this prestigious visual art exhibition. Works by artists including Emeka Ogboh, Isaac Julien, Julius Eastman, Glenn Ligon, and Alicia Hall Moran and Jason Moran offer resonant echoes of a political past that are part of the material of black political life’s current crises.