In Loving Memory: Performance of Black Mourning Through Adornment

What does it mean to perform mourning through clothing? More specific to my interests in this paper, what is engendered when considering how clothing is used as an analytic to think through Black death, which is interminably visited upon Black people? In this paper, I aim to explore how reorienting a lens toward adornment in scholarly, personal and political discourses on death, grief, mourning and memorialization for racialized subjects might be informed by the field of Performance Studies, Visual Studies and African American Studies.

In this paper, I am inviting us to consider what an archive of the aesthetic performances of Black mourning might look like. I am interested in what clothing does for Black people who are living as they adorn themselves with the materials of the dead – materials that might remind them that their mourning is interminable, and their deaths are premature based on their race. To offer an introduction to this nascent project, I will use the popularization of R.I.P. T-shirts in Black and Latinx working-class communities as my case study. I will use these articles to think through the rehearsals, scripts and choreography of Black mourning between Black subjects and the state. I will then turn to Christina Sharpe’s theory of “wake work” to think through how it might inform a study such as this. I will conclude with further considerations for this project, which include a pivot toward considering how Black contemporary artists' works gesture toward performances of grief, mourning and memorialization.