Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 667

Conversations in Black Freedom Studies: Protest + Women + Performance

'Sherie Randolph + Tanisha Ford + Ruth Feldstein examine how African-American women used their voices, style, art, and law books to insist on liberation as Black women and demand justice of American society.' -- +Schomburg Center 

Wandering Kin: Review of 'Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial + Sexual Freedom' by Sarah Jane Cervenak

Wandering Kin: Review of Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom by Sarah Jane CervenakReviewed by I. Augustus Durham | @imeanswhatisays | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
It is uncanny to read a theoretical text written specifically for you, especially when the author has no inkling that is what she would accomplish. Your name does not have to be published in the “Dedication” to realize the author had you in mind in the writing moment, even as a portent for acknowledging the microaggressive act that is unchecked, excessive surveillance. That said, surveillance is real, and it is precisely “a respecter of persons”, macrocosmically and microcosmically, whether convened by the FBI, enacted in Schwanke-Kasten Jewelers, or performed by security in Duke University’s Perkins Library while one, in his capacity as an instructor, is scanning an article to post on the Sakai site for his undergraduate class! (There is no hyperlink.) This invasive procedure most often happens when one is—antecedent of, during, or subsequent to—wandering.
Sarah Jane Cervenak’s Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (Duke University Press, 2014; 220 pages) interrogates how wandering by persons of the African Diaspora concretizes the Western philosophical tradition’s necessity to discursively police what it deems liberal abandon. Akin and dissimilar to laws of Physics respectively, this proposition cements a pathway for offering a theory of cultural kinetics: if a body in motion stays in motion and a body at rest stays at rest, what kinetic potential energies exist for black flesh as the excess of Physics insofar as said flesh is in motion when resting, and/or strives for some semblance of stillness when in transit? Put another way, blackness, fleshly or embodied, and the freedom it audaciously envisions for itself through mobility, meets questioning banalities that point to the gravity of its ontology:
Who do you think you are?What do you think you are doing?Where do you think you are going?
Blackness may be a thinking (hu)man’s game . . . of wanderlust.
The opening of Wandering offers an ephemerally nostalgic reading of Gayl Jones’s Corregidora; the protagonist Ursa, while riding on a bus, “achieves some privacy, a rare occasion to wander and dream without interruption”. Citing this scene as the inspiration for her book, Cervenak asserts, “This absence of description doesn’t necessarily indicate an absence of movement. More broadly, wandering—daydreaming, mental and rhetorical ramblings—offers new pathways for the enactment of black female philosophical desire. . . . This is not to say what happens on the bus for Ursa isn’t important, but its importance is not contingent on its interpretation (or interpretative availability) as such” (2). These words in the “Introduction” forerun how Wandering “travels”, coursing through centuries, figures, locations, and epistemologies to arrive at some valence of non-contingent contingency regarding liberatory practices.
Chapter One, “Losing Their Heads: Race, Sexuality, and the Perverse Moves of the European Enlightenment”, plays on Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare’s intention to put “European Enlightenment on display” (24); the chapter takes up Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant as disfigured thinkers (25) of others’ presumed disability. A Palestinian wanderer once proffered an intriguing parable regarding deformity when he admonished that someone not worry about the speck in a friend’s eye while forgoing the log in his own. Cervenak lays bare that metaphorical circularity when parsing out the contradictory politics of freedom and desire in Rousseau’s The Social Contract, The Confessions, and Reveries of a Solitary Walker, as well as those of Kant and his “Dandy” and his “Ocean”. “Crooked Ways and Weak Pens: The Enactment of Enlightenment against Slavery”, presences “black philosophical performance”, considering its presumed absence in the Enlightenment (59), by engaging with black philosophies in the work of Harriet Jacobs, Martin Delaney, David Walker, and Sojourner Truth. This two-pronged “black enlightenment”, “formed by the interanimation of . . . an upright, straight-forward, composed, self-determined comportment (forward looking, planning, and, in some cases, walking) . . . and a wayward, inspired, divinely guided, and, for some, debilitating wandering” (61), ostensibly becomes the framework through which Cervenak crafts this second chapter.
Dedicated to Trayvon Martin, the third chapter—“Writing under a Spell: Adrienne Kennedy’s Theater”—superimposes a Truthian affect on two Kennedy plays, Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964) and The Owl Answers (1965), by reading their unpredictability in the shadow of Sojourner’s unfollowability (95). By recognizing that “Kennedy’s plays are not staged in real places but on sets that replicate her mind” (120), Cervenak makes real how dissociation in black consciousness reimagines Karla FC Holloway’s titular offering: the transformation of private thoughts into public texts. This recalibration stages the perfect segue for Chapter Four, “‘I Am an African American Novel’: Wandering as Noncompliance in Gayl Jones’s Mosquito”.
Jones’s admission that “she is a novel” reads as a counterdefense to the colonizing effort, and danger, of telling a single story (122-3). This novel concession stages the event of multiplicity that Cervenak tracks as Jones’s own encounter with (the) Truth/truth, even in the heroine Mosquito (138). A jazz aesthetic pervades the chapter as a theoretical tool for self-improvisation and -improvement. In the “Conclusion”, “‘Before I Was Straightened Out’”, Cervenak ruminates on the art and performances of William Pope.L, Adrian Piper and Carrie Mae Weems. Transnational in scope and utilizing different forms of media, these installations foster notions of data roaming.
A confession: soon after reading, resonances of mid- to late twentieth century R&B/Soul began heavily rotating in the cerebellum. Because this portion of the brain activates motor control and the maintenance of one’s sense of balance, it is more than appropriate that these recollected musicalities were in fact an exercise in regaining the muscle memory of wanderment for the compilation of a cerebral playlist. Fingers began to flip to the “Bibliography”, hoping that on page 200, between the citations for Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences and Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, there was a reference to Track 2 of Aretha Franklin’s 1972 album Young, Gifted and Black (what an ironic title for hypothetical buttressing between those two texts!), a track that posits one looking at her mind floating away, thinking of you, only to end in a whimsical fade to black.
This bibliographic dig continued as those same fingers then turned to page 204, surmising whether Marilyn Richardson’s Maria W. Stewart: America’s First Black Woman Political Writer and Joseph Roach and Janelle Reinelt’s edited collection Critical Theory and Performance made room for a line-item entry between them to print the name of Track 6 off of Minnie Riperton’s 1975 album Adventures in Paradise (double irony!). This record, in the execution of its lush and dreamy arrangement chronicling a rendezvous between strangers, could, if one is not careful, be misconstrued as a lullaby, as opposed to an open invitation, for a paramour to take a ride inside M.R.’s love as “/the whole world is turning/”.
It was then that it became increasingly clear that even if Cervenak’s text does not have musical references as works cited, this does not mean that the text does not swing, as sponsored by a summer breeze. Therefore, fully aware of the forthcoming holiday season, perhaps what the text encourages you, its muse, to do, albeit (a)religiously, is to wonder as you wander . . .
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I. Augustus Durham is a third-year doctoral candidate in English at Duke University. His work focuses on blackness, melancholy and genius. 

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