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Abstract
This article reads James Baldwin’s performative labor in the 1964 documentary film Take This Hammer as the staging of an engagement between Saidiya Hartman and Judith Butler’s contending approaches to Black performativity. As the film’s host, Baldwin refused the ethnographic gaze and the tendency of documentaries to approach Black people as problems. On the other hand, throughout the documentary, Baldwin exposed and commented on the ubiquitous anti-Black structure that rendered Black people structurally powerless and available to what Frank B. Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, and Steve Martinot have called gratuitous violence. The article applies Kemi Adeyemi’s reading of the queer performativity of shade and the concept of the lean as ways to theorize the ambivalent position of Baldwin’s performance.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to extend a sincere thank-you to the editorial and support staff for their patience and hard work. Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback that truly changed my whole approach and made me a believer again in the promise that academic publishing can be the sharing and joining of conversations. Special thank-you to the journal editors, Rainy Demerson and Kate Mattingly, for insistently holding down an expansive and inclusive space for things that many people don’t count as dance (studies) and for helping me to get engaged with this amazing field and journal. Beyond thanks to my partner, Danae, and my family, for sharing me with this work.
Notes
1 Take This Hammer, directed by Richard O. Moore (KQED, 1964), 44:14. https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/187041
2 Take This Hammer, 00:40.
3 Take This Hammer, 43:45.
4 James Campbell, Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 142.
5 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 89.
6 Ronald A. T. Judy, “Fanon’s Body of Black Experience,” Fanon: A Critical Reader, eds. Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renée T. White (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 60-61.
7 Ronald A. T. Judy, “Fanon’s Body of Black Experience,” 60-61.
8 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: The Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997).
9 Take This Hammer, 23:00.
10 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography” Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (2002): 15–24.
11 Ronald A. T. Judy, (Dis)Forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1.
12 The Making of Take this Hammer, directed by Caroline Dijckmeester-Bins, Mark David, and Alex Cherian (WNET, 2013), 03:50.
13 Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
14 Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference”, 15–24.
15 Bill Lyne, “God’s Black Revolutionary Mouth: James Baldwin’s Black Radicalism,” Science & Society 74, no. 1 (January 2010): 14.
16 Mario Puzo, “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone.” New York Times, June 23, 1968.
17 Geneva Abdul, “When James Baldwin Was a ‘Has-Been.’” New York Times, June 30, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/magazine/james-baldwin-interview.html.
18 Take This Hammer, 00:30.
19 Take This Hammer, 11:30.
20 Trinh T. Minh-Ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural
Politics (New York: Routledge), 68.
21 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Random House, 1992), 8.
22 Kemi Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°: The Angularities of Black/Queer/Women/Lean,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 29, no. 1 (2019): 18.
23 Butler, Excitable Speech, 100.
24 Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 7.
25 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 7-8.
26 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 95-96.
27 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech, 141.
28 Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech, 141.
29 Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech, 147.
30 Danielle McGuire, At The Dark End of The Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance––a New History of the Civil Rights Movement From Rosa Parks to The Rise of Black Power (New York: Knopf, 2011), xviii-xix: “In later years, historians would paint Parks as a sweet and reticent old woman, whose tired feet caused her to defy Jim Crow on Montgomery’s city buses. Her solitary and spontaneous act, the story goes, sparked the 1955 bus boycott and gave birth to the civil rights movement. But Rosa Parks was a militant race woman, a sharp detective, and an antirape activist long before she became the patron saint of the bus boycott. After meeting with Recy Taylor [a Black woman who had been kidnapped, tortured, and raped by a group of white men in Abbeville, Alabama, in 1944], Rosa Parks helped form the Committee for Equal Justice. With support from local people, she ‘helped organize what the Chicago Defender called the “strongest campaign for equal justice to be seen in a decade.’ Eleven years later this group of homegrown leaders would become better known as the Montgomery Improvement Association. The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, often heralded as the opening scene of the civil rights movement, was in many ways the last act of a decades-long struggle to protect Black women, like Taylor, from sexualized violence and rape. ‘The kidnapping and rape of Recy Taylor was not unusual in the segregated South. The sexual exploitation of black women by white men had its roots in slavery and continued throughout the better part of the twentieth century.’”
31 Charles E. Cobb Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (New York: Basic Books, 2014). Akinyele Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2013). Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
32 Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton, “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy,” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (2003): 175.
33 Martinot and Sexton, “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy” 175.
34 McGuire, At The Dark End of The Street, xviii-xix.
35 Loïc Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘Race Question’ in the US,” New Left Review 13 (January – February 2002): 41-60.
36 Martinot and Sexton, “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy” 175.
37 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Race and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 79-82.
38 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1982), 17-34.
39 Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 95-96.
40 Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 95-96.
41 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 17-34.
42 Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration,” 41.
43 Jaye Austin Williams, “Radical Black Drama-as-Theory: The Black Feminist Dramatic on the Protracted Event-Horizon,” Theory & Event 21, no. 1 (Winter 2018): 193.
44 Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 55. Wilderson continues: “Simultaneously, it renders the ontological status of Humanity (life itself) wholly dependent on civil society’s repetition compulsion: the frenzied and fragmented machinations through which civil society reenacts gratuitous violence on the Black—that civil society might know itself as the domain of Humans—generation after generation.”
45 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Race and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 217n20.
46 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 78.
47 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 60.
48 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 53.
49 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 56.
50 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 54-55.
51 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 54.
52 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 56. Hartman asks, [D]oes redemption rather than repetition become the privileged figure of the performative? How might it be possible to dislodge performance and performativity from these closures and reevaluate performance in terms of the claims made against power, the interruption and undermining of the regulatory norms of racial slavery, as a way of operating under duress and constraint and as an articulation of utopian and transformative impulses?
53 Frank B. Wilderson III, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007, 500.
54 James Bernauer and David Rasmussen, eds., The Final Foucault (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 12, 18. Quoted in Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 217n17.
55 Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 8.
56 Jaye Austin Williams, “Radical Black Drama-as-Theory: The Black Feminist Dramatic on the Protracted Event-Horizon,” Theory & Event 21, no. 1 (Winter 2018): 193.
57 Trinh, When the Moon Waxes Red, 68.
58 Trinh, When the Moon Waxes Red, 67.
59 Trinh, When the Moon Waxes Red, 72-73.
60 James Baldwin, Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 528.
61 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 11.
62 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 11.
63 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 16.
64 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 16.
65 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 19.
66 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 16.
67 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 16.
68 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 16.
69 Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 58.
70 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 16.
71 George C. Wolfe, The Colored Museum (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 16.
72 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 18.
73 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 19.
74 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 20.
75 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 19-20.
76 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 20.
77 George Yancy, Look, a White!: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 5-6.
78 Take This Hammer, 00:40.
79 Take This Hammer, 07:40.
80 Take This Hammer, 23:00.
81 Take This Hammer, 35:15.
82 Campbell, Talking at the Gates, 142.
83 Take This Hammer, 40:00.
84 Take This Hammer, 40:00.
85 Take This Hammer, 40:30.
86 Take This Hammer, 40:30.
87 Take This Hammer, 40:30.
88 Take This Hammer, 40:30.
89 Nanook of the North, directed by Robert J. Flaherty (Pathé Exchange, 1922), 79:00.
90 Cinéma Vérité: Defining the Moment, directed by Peter Wintonick (National Film Board of Canada, 1999), 1:42:00. https://www.nfb.ca/film/cinema_verite_defining_the_moment/
91 Mike Wayne, Theorising Video Practice (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 205. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 63.
92 Take This Hammer, 41:00.
93 Ronald A. T. Judy, (Dis)Forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1.
94 Take This Hammer, 41:30.
95 Take This Hammer, 41:30.
96 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 18-19.
97 Take This Hammer, 41:00.
98 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 18-19.
99 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 11.
100 Bill Lyne, “God’s Black Revolutionary Mouth: James Baldwin’s Black Radicalism,” Science & Society 74, no. 1 (January 2010): 14.
101 Take This Hammer, 41:50.
102 Take This Hammer, 42:30.
103 Take This Hammer, 42:50.
104 Take This Hammer, 40:20.
105 Take This Hammer, 40:20.
106 Take This Hammer, 42:30.
107 Take This Hammer, 43:00.
108 Take This Hammer, 43:00.
109 Take This Hammer, 43:00.
110 Daphne Brooks, “Nina Simone’s Triple Play,” Callaloo 34, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 176-197.
111 Take This Hammer, 43:00.
112 Trinh, When the Moon Waxes Red, 72.
113 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 8.
114 Take This Hammer, 43:00.
115 Take This Hammer, 41:00.
116 Butler, Excitable Speech, 100.
117 Take This Hammer, 23:00.
118 Ronald A. T. Judy, “On the Question of Nigga Authenticity,” boundary 2 21, no. 3 (1994): 222-225.
119 Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and
Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 206.
120 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf, 531: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.”
121 Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “Waking Nightmares: On David Marriott” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17, nos. 2–3 (2011): 359.
122 Baldwin, Collected Essays, 371.
123 Take This Hammer, 20:30.
124 Take This Hammer, 21:00.
125 Take This Hammer, 16:10.
126 Take This Hammer, 15:45.
127 Take This Hammer, 21:00.
128 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 9–24.
129 Jared Sexton, “Ante-Anti-Blackness: Afterthoughts” Lateral 1 no. 1 (2012): https://csalateral.org/issue/1/ante-anti-blackness-afterthoughts-sexton/
130 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 223.
131 Baldwin Collected Essays, 371.
132 Agamben, Profanations, 69.
133 Take This Hammer, 16:00.
134 Carrie Noland, “Ethics, Staged.” Performance Philosophy 3, no. 1 (2017): 69.
135 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 20.
136 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1992).
137 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 18-19.
138 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 18-19.
139 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 18-19.
140 Take This Hammer, 23:00.
141 Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 101.
142 Jared Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery” Social Text 28, no. 2 (103, 2010): 36–37. Emphasis in original.
143 Take This Hammer, 42:30.
144 Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 18-19.
145 “A Conversation With James Baldwin,” American Archive of Public Broadcasting, June 24, 1963. http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-9m03xx2p
146 “A Conversation With James Baldwin.”
147 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 92.
148 Ezra David Romero, “For These Black Bayview-Hunters Point Residents, Reparations Include Safeguarding Against Rising, Toxic Contamination.” KQED, July 5, 2022.
1 Throughout, I elect not to spell out the so-called “n-word,” even when quoting others (like Baldwin) who did use the word.
2 I will use the term “normatively white audience” throughout. Baldwin would not have used the word “n****r” against a largely Black audience. I believe that Baldwin thought the normative audience for this documentary, the audience whom it hailed and to whose epistemological position it was accountable, was disproportionately white. I think Baldwin knew that Black people knew and lived many of the realities on which he was reporting in Take This Hammer and that nothing in the documentary would be particularly revelatory to Black audiences. I also think Baldwin knew how insulting it would be to white people to say to them “you’re the n****r,” the thing that every Black person is called every day, usually in deed but sometimes in word too. Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection contains a epigraph to this effect: “There are certain words which are so universally considered injurious to a person in his social or business relations if spoken of him that the courts have held that the speaker of such words is liable to an action for slander, and damages are recoverable–even though the one of whom the words were spoken does not prove that he suffered any special damage from the words having been spoken of him… . From early times, it has been held to be slander, actionable per se, to say of a white man that he is a Negro or akin to a Negro.” Gilbert Thomas Stephenson, Race Distinctions in American Law (1910), quoted in Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 164.
3 It is clear that Baldwin regarded the ghetto as a necropolitical technology of the racist society. In Take This Hammer, he refers in several places to ghettos as structures that are formulated to kill. “What marked all the survivors” of the streets of Harlem, Baldwin says, “was a certain ruthlessness which was absolutely indispensable if one was going to survive” (8:45). In other words, “home” and “community” are places to be survived, not necessarily sites of refuge. And, a few months before his visit to San Francisco, he had published The Fire Next Time, in which he shared a letter he wrote to his nephew, saying, “This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.” James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 293.
4 Historically, white men arrogated to themselves that upright 90° stance in relation to the ground as their sole and rightful domain, the vantage point from which they alone could commune with “the god-head” (religion) or the cosmos (science), manage the books, oversee the people they enslaved, and stand over those whom they had killed in genocidal-imperialist wars. “As Man/whiteness is instituted by and valorized as 90° verticality,” writes Adeyemi, “black life has been forcibly staged in its surrounding angles,” to either be in the supine 0° or 180° position (being raped on the ground, lying dead in the street) or hunched over in 20° to 50° postures of backbreaking labor, say on plantations, and in housekeeping service or cobalt and coltan mines today. Black people approximating the 90° posture have risked being called “uppity,” a common rationalization for lynching us. The 90° position came to be identified with Reason, authority, and even proper participation in the public sphere and civility in opposition to positions assumed by protestors, like kneeling football players protesting the ongoing police murders of Black people. Adeyemi, “Beyond 90°” 11-16.
5 Dance theorist Carrie Noland reads Agamben to say, “That which in each act of expression remains unexpressed is gesture,” the essence of which is “a medium that exposes itself as such” (Noland, “Ethics, Staged,” 69). The gesture, for Agamben, opens the possibility of the ethical. This does not mean that all gestures are ethical in the prescriptive sense that their content is necessarily “good” or “ought to be done,” but rather in the more descriptive sense that, whatever the specific content of the category “the ethical” for a given ethical subject, the ethical act is animated by an excess that is left when language has been exhausted. Hence, the ethical is animated by that which absolutely resists oppressive structures’ attempts to lock everything into a commodity, even though it is a means without ends. See Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 55; Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 72; Carrie Noland, “Ethics, Staged” Performance Philosophy 3 no. 1 (2017): 69; Deborah Levitt, “Gesture” in Alex Murray, Agamben Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 79-82.
6 For Agamben, gesture is what makes ethics possible. Deborah Levitt reads Agamben’s idea of gesture in the following way:
Ethics emerges precisely because of the absence of ontological ground or telos; gesture names an a-ontological figure that traverses this open space and catalyzes events, differences, and constellations within it. (Levitt, “Gesture,” 81)
Agamben, ever-critical of the ways capitalism and modern society make commodities of everything, points out that gesture, which is fluid and dynamic, is in tension with and cannot be contained in things like image, which is frozen and static: “Every image, in fact, is animated by an antinomic polarity: on the one hand images are the reification and obliteration of a gesture… on the other hand, they preserve the dynamis intact….” (Agamben, Means without End, 54). In other words, frozen or fixed images can, on the one hand, preserve some of the in-between-ness or motion of a gesture and, on the other hand, quilt the dynamism of a gesture, rendering it available to be turned into a very predictable product in service of capital, regardless of its intentionality. For this reason, Agamben links gesture to the ethical possibilities of cinema: “Because cinema has its center in the gesture and not in the image, it belongs essentially to the realm of ethics and politics (and not simply to that of aesthetics)” (55). Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
7 Within a thought framework that attends rigorously and unflinchingly to structures of dominance, neither the location of a white person’s birth nor their preconscious identity (how they refer to themselves through conscious speech) have ever been essential to them being structurally positioned as a settler-colonizer. At the level of preconscious speech, they might protest, “I’m no settler, I was born here” or “I’m too settled to think of myself as a settler,” but that does not stop violent power structures from collaborating to hold space for them within the structural position of the settler-colonizer (Wilderson 80). This is why Wilderson, utilizing Jacques Lacan’s tripartite registers of subjectivity (preconscious interest, unconscious identification, structural position), locates the settler as a structural position, not in the imaginary identities one might consciously speak of oneself (28). See Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 80.
8 In so many words, the question of “who is ‘the n****r?’” is a shorthand way of expressing the central foundational question of modernity. Political theorist Achille Mbembe shows that the first question of many forms of modern sovereignty is not “who should live and how?” but “who must die?” Another way of saying this is that modern political subjectivity presupposes a prior determination of who is not and never will be a subject. Or as Baldwin says the same thing, “Who is ‘the n****r’?” See Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
9 Baldwin’s embodied presence exceeded the typical bounds of the role he was expected to play and threatened to open up meanings that would be difficult to foreclose on. And so it was partially censored by the KQED Board of Directors, and there were some Board members who wanted to cancel the film altogether without having seen it. See James Day, The Vanishing Vision (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 52.
10 At around 14:00 in, the director’s cut of Take This Hammer shows how this moment continued. After the soft-spoken young Black man says the “police serve a purpose” and have “never really bothered” him, even though they harassed him and his wife, the documentary as it aired in 1964 cuts away from this moment. In the director’s cut, however, this moment continued with Baldwin dialoguing with the youth until the youth says, “when a Negro becomes a policeman, he thinks like a white man.” This priceless moment modeling knowledge production was edited out of the version that was released in 1964, along with emphatic statements Baldwin made comparing the now-dead U.S. president John F. Kennedy with white supremacist police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor and some statements by youths promoting Black Muslim philosophy and positions. Take This Hammer: The Director’s Cut (directed by Richard Moore, 1963), 59:13.
11 The convention of documentary hosts up until this time had generally been to serve as “talking heads,” positioned very intentionally before a stationary camera on a tripod, their range of vocal inflection and physical gestures bounded tightly within the physical frame and the performative frame of positivist reportage of “just the facts.” Such positioning would entail standing in what Adeyemi calls the upright 90° position that was connotatively linked with authoritativeness, a central tenet in the project of “Reason” that documentaries were formulated to advance. The change in film technology, the increasing availability of 16mm handheld film cameras and portable synchronized sound recording equipment, enabled a sudden and drastic change in the documentary form in order to achieve the desired “authenticity” that could no longer be associated with the upright 90° staged talking-head documentaries (which had by then become tightly linked with official-looking news and propaganda films). The technological change and the reification of this new form of cinéma vérité changed the expectation of how the physical presence of “authority” manifested in a documentary. Cinéma Vérité: Defining the Moment, directed by Peter Wintonick (National Film Board of Canada, 1999), 1:42:00. https://www.nfb.ca/film/cinema_verite_defining_the_moment/
12 The author, for Agamben, is an ethical figure of gesture who embraces the struggle [“hand-to-hand confrontation”(Agamben, Profanations, 72)] of putting herself on the cutting edge where no moral rulebook can provide a roadmap for a kind of becoming that is in rebellion against the apparatuses of modern capitalist society. In “The Author as Gesture,” Agamben writes, “Life is ethical not when it simply submits to moral laws but when it accepts putting itself into play in its gestures, irrevocably and without reserve––even at the risk that its happiness or its disgrace will be decided once and for all” (69). Through this struggle, Agamben writes, “a subjectivity is produced” (72). Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007).
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Omar Benton Ricks
OMAR RICKS is an independent scholar, writer, teacher, performing artist, and worker. He has a PhD in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in New Media from UC-Berkeley, an MFA in Drama (Performance) from UC-Irvine, an MA in US History from University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, and a BA in History with a Minor in African American Studies from Johnson C. Smith University. He has previously published in Dance Chronicle, TDR: The Drama Review, Slingshot, ASTR Online, ERIC Digest, and The Feminist Wire. His academic writing brings together radical Black thought, subjectivity, and network theory to trace various modes of performance and performativity in Black leadership.