Bringing together new work by younger scholars from varying geographic and institutional locations, this panel takes up the implications of noncompliance for reading performance across economies of racialized capture—namely the colonial archive, the Fordist culture industry, and the contemporary art museum. Each panelist will offer a 15 minute presentation. Our respondent Summer Kim Lee, whose work has considered the problematic of minoritarian critique and the uses of aggression and hostility in Asian American cultural production, will then offer brief comments and pose questions to the panelists, opening up the conversation to the attendees for discussion.

We will begin with “Scammers and Welfare Queens: Reading East African Women's Misperformance Across the Long Twentieth Century,” presented by Maandeeq Mohamed on behalf of herself and co-author Dr. Muna-Udbi Abdulkadir Ali. Examining the traces left by East African women in institutional archives ranging from Arthur Rimbaud’s biographical ephemera to the treatment of Somali refugee women in governmental and media discourses in the Americas, Mohamed and Ali read the archive for the ungovernable excesses of colonial discourse. From Rimbaud's "duplicitous mistress” Mariam to the figure of the welfare queen, they argue that these women persist in the colonial imaginary as examples of misperformance. Wherein East African women are often elided with categories like trickery, scam, connivance, dishonesty, and duplicity, their archival misperformances offer experiments with/in language than can help us approach cracks in empire’s knowledge about what is called Africa.

We then turn to Vanessa Holyoak’s paper, “Relational Illegibility: ‘Another Beautiful Country,’ ‘Scratching at the Moon,’ and an Asian American Aesthetics of Opacity.” Holyoak considers strategies of withholding, opacity, and relational praxis in two landmark group exhibitions focusing on Asian American artists in the Los Angeles area—at the USC Pacific Asia Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art—which are among the first focused surveys of contemporary Asian American artists presented in the region's museums. Drawing on the liberatory critical interventions of two French-Martiniquan scholars, Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant, Holyoak explores how performance-driven works in both exhibitions deploy tactics of Fanonian illegibility and a Glissantian poetics of relation to resist the hegemony of the visible rendered as fixed identity, instead embracing the opacity and slippery mutability of Asian American identity. Attending to performance works by Patty Chang, Raina Ho, Na Mira, and Michelle Lopez, Holyoak posits that their contributions reclaim the racist stereotype of the inscrutable Asian by foregrounding the agential capacities of withholding.

We close with Andrew J. Smyth’s “Black Vernacularity, Racial Orthography, and Nonperformative Utterance: On Will Rawls’s Uncle Rebus.” Smyth situates choreographer Will Rawls’s 2018 performance work which transforms Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories into an enigmatic lexical process involving dancers who manipulate a set of removable letters. Problematizing Harris’s distorted “transcription” of the Brer Rabbit tales, Smyth considers how appearances of black vernacularity are persistently configured by a racial orthography that functions as a matrix of ownership and enjoyment. In turn, he argues Rawls’s poetic refractions present us with a mode of cryptographic nonperformance, proceeding toward a theory of “nonperformative utterance” adequate to the work’s dissolutions of grammaticality.

Studying the inoperative edges and dissimulative verges of the archives, performances, and exhibitions they consider, these papers invite performance studies to respond to the challenge of negativity in its consideration of minoritarian performance. Taken together, they propose a politics of indecipherability and withdrawal that reworks the racially gendered scripts of aesthetic production and circulation.