“Hell You Talmbout?” Sighting confusion in the performance of Black Revolt

Abstract

This essay considers how “confusion” shapes narrative strategies and understandings of the 1811 Uprising in Louisiana and how artistic practice, performance, and amateur documentation differently refract public memory-making of the uprising and its brutal response. Here confusion also maps the relations between reenactment, the reenactors, and the practice and politics of abolitionist imagination.

Keywords:

• 1811 Revolt
• abolition
• maroons
• reenactment

Notes

1 One of the most pressing questions for scholars of the Black radical tradition and Black performance is borne from a confusion about the prepositional distinction between performances of or for freedom. See e.g., Hartman (1997); Brooks (2006); Tavia N’yongo (2009); Moten (2018).

2 It is not lost on us that the use of “body cameras” and “cell phone footage” in and around the SRR procession mirrors or is haunted by the way these particular technologies show up in contemporary discourses surrounding surveillance, police brutality and police reform.

3 Speaking of Steve McQueen’s film End Credits (2012), Sharpe describes how “so much of Black intramural life and social and political work is redacted, made invisible to the present and future, subtended by plantation logics, detached optics, and brutal architectures.” As we attend to in greater depth later in this essay, surveillance works through the logic of hypervisibility—a way of making invisible some things by spectacularizing others (2016, 114).

4 As Simone Browne writes, “I use the term ‘dark sousveillance’ as a way to situate the tactics employed to render one’s self out of sight, and strategies used in the flight to freedom from slavery as necessarily ones of undersight … I plot sousveillance as an imaginative plane from which to mobilize a critique of racializing surveillance, a critique that takes the form in antisurveillance, countersurveillance, and other freedom practices. Dark sousveillance, then, plots imaginaries that are oppositional and that are hopeful for another way of being” (2015, 21).

5 Brown refers here to the language of Olaudah Equiano.

6 As Sharpe argues, “to be in the wake is to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding” (2016, 14).

7 For an excellent discussion of Congo’s relationship to this longer history see, Dawdy (2006).

8 “Republica” is another example in this tradition that Robinson describes as “is a multi-modal arts project reimagining the past, present and future of the Gulf Coast region of North America. Inspired by early revolts in the Louisiana Colony such as the 1729 Natchez/Bambara revolt, the 1795 plot at Pointe Coupee and the 1811 German Coast Uprising.” Robinson, “Republica: Temple of Color and Sound,” n.d.

9 “The Dirge of St. Malo” was published in Cable (1959, 418–419).

10 Din seeks to deem the song inaccurate in his disagreement with another historian of the period, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. His analysis of the poem continues to make many presumptions about community memory: “The poem’s numerous errors convincingly suggest that it was not composed until after the execution of the Point Coupée conspirators—long after the details of San Malo’s capture and execution had become fuzzy in the minds of most people … The poem’s many mistakes reveal that its author(s) neither witnessed the 1784 execution nor saw San Malo” (1999, 114–115).

11 As Harriett Jacobs writes, “But even those large, venomous snakes were less dreadful to my imagination than the white men in that community called civilized” (1861, 171–172).

12 “The Case for Abolition” June 19, 2019, The Marshall Project: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/06/19/the-case-for-abolition.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ra Malika Imhotep

Ra Malika Imhotep is a PhD candidate in African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

SJ Zhang

SJ Zhang is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Johnson is currently writing a book called Going Maroon and Other Forms of Freedom.

C. Riley Snorton

C. Riley Snorton is Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Chicago. Snorton is the author of Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017).