There’s a riot goin’ on

ABSTRACT

In this paper we take up the concept of the ‘chorus’ as explored by Saidiya Hartman in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. In that book, Hartman imagines the chorus as a collective expression of resistance and survival – the sound of many voices speaking out and speaking up. We argue that the concept of the chorus can be understood in Marxist terms as an expression of surplus population, and as such, is always provoking crisis. We consider surplus populations in relation to three historic moments of upheaval and resistance, and the representation of these events (or lack thereof): the riot of Black girls at the Bedford Hills Reformatory in 1919; cafeteria riots led by trans, queer, and gender non-conforming people in the 1950s and 1960s in California; and the 2004 Palm Island riot that irrupted in the wake of the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee. In each case, the riots (and their expression in the form of a chorus) responded directly to aggressive policing and the violence of the state. These riots are not merely about responding to the violence of policing but also about defending that irreducible and generative excess that might variously be described as Blackness, queerness, and Indigeneity.

KEYWORDS:

• Riot
• crisis
• revolution
• policing
• noise
• resistance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Brooks

Andrew Brooks is a writer, artist, and teacher who lives on unceded Wangal land. He lectures in Media Studies in the School of Arts and Media, UNSW. His research proposes strategies for reading and listening to contemporary media events, systems, and infrastructures, paying attention to the politics of noise and listening; infrastructural inequalities; and the politics of race and embodiment in media culture. An ongoing research collaboration with Dr Astrid Lorange interrogates the way that infrastructures of discipline and control – such as laws, fines, contracts, paperwork, prisons, and predictive systems – contribute to the naturalization of settler colonialism. He is a founding member of the Infrastructural Inequalities research network and one half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate.

Astrid Lorange

Astrid Lorange is a writer, editor and artist who lives on unceded Wangal land. She lectures in writing and theory at UNSW Art and Design. Current projects include Endless Study, Infinite Debt, an ongoing interdisciplinary effort at knowledge production in times of extended crisis, and a collaboration with Dr Andrew Brooks which interrogates the way that infrastructures of discipline and control – such as laws, fines, contracts, paperwork, prisons, and predictive systems – contribute to the naturalization of settler colonialism. She is the author of several books of poetry including Labour and Other Poems (Cordite Books, 2020). She is a founding member of the Infrastructural Inequalities research network and one half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate.