In her groundbreaking Bodies in Dissent (2006), Daphne Brooks examines the rich work of Black American performers from the mid-nineteenth through the early-twentieth centuries to highlight the “spectacular opacity” arising from the tension between the “performer's will” and “the hostile spectator's epistemological resistance” (8). At the heart of Brooks’s theorization is a sense that Black performers of the era made liberatory art through the intentional defiance of audience understanding. This panel, drawing on Brooks but also the writings of Saidiya Hartman, Cathy J. Cohen, and others, takes up the many ways in which contemporary Black musicians, writers, and citizens insist on the visibility of Black life through rhetoric and art of defiance. As Brooks affirms, “In the performances of dissent, everything is in play” (10).

The panel begins with Sonya Donaldson’s “‘I wish I could find words to tell you...’: Black Women’s Politics of Deviance and the Failure of Civic Discourse,” in which she examines Black women’s embodied practices that alert us to deviance as a mode of resistance portending possibility. This deviance of resistance is Erica Garner staging “die-ins” on a sidewalk in Staten Island after the killing of her father, Eric Garner. It is Sheila Hines-Brim, after her niece Wakiesha Wilson died in police custody, hurling the ashes at LA police chief Charlie Beck in a Police Commission meeting, declaring: “That is Wakiesha. And she’s going to stay with you.” And it is Mary Prince’s mother, who calls out Miss Betsey to witness the wreckage of her family through the sale of her children. These acts are part of a long history of Black women’s embodied rhetorical practices, what Cathy J. Cohen (2004) frames as “conscious acts of resistance that serve as the basis for a mobilized ‘politics of deviance.’” These rhetorical practices call us to contend with the limits of “civic/civil” discourse and the ways Black women transform the public sphere by refusing to “act right.”

Next, in “The (In)Visibility of Claudia Rankine's and Donald Glover's Public Responses to the 2015 Charleston Shooting,” Nicole Lowman considers the force of satirical spectacle in Black public performance to implicate the viewer in anti-Black violence. On June 22, 2015, five days after a white supremacist terrorist killed nine Black Americans at Bible Study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Claudia Rankine's "The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning" appeared in the New York Times Magazine. There Rankine responds not only to the massacre but also to a long history to white supremacist and often state-sanctioned violence against Black Americans, grappling with that violence's (in)visibility. Three years later, in May 2018, Donald Glover, under his stage name Childish Gambino, released "This Is America,” a song and video that explicitly attend to the same (in)visible anti-Black violence, but through satire. Drawing on the work of Danielle Fuentes Morgan (2020) and Saidiya Hartman (1997), Lowman argues the hypervisibility of Glover's performances creates avenues for wider public engagement in the ongoing Black freedom struggle, despite Rankine's haunting, highbrow condemnation.

In closing, Janelle Poe considers how pregnancy troubles narratives concerning sexual appeal, desire, conquest, and possession of women in the spotlight with “Mics Up, Bellies Out: Re-Envisioning MC Motherhood and Hip Hop.” Actors and some musical performers may be able to plan performances around their expanding bellies, take several months or even years away to birth and raise children, or take on roles written for pregnant women. Hip Hop, notes Poe, ain’t the same. In a fiercely competitive manscape, the very few women need to maintain their looks and warrior stance. Historically, pregnant Hip Hop artists have been shamed and brutally advised to either sit down or have an abortion. Yet the first televised Hip Hop performance on Saturday Night Live in 1981 included an invisibly pregnant MC Sha-Rock in the Funky Four + 1, and one of the most important female emcees, Lauryn Hill, offers a beautiful clapback to violent sexism in “Zion.” Today’s emcees, like Cardi B and Sexxy Red, have performed with full bellies and accentuating clothes. Poe asks, what can we learn from this progression of pregnant performers about the evolution of Hip Hop and the impact on Black society and the world?

This panel will consist of three 15-18 minute presentations followed by Q&A. With regard to incorporating a diversity of voices, the presenters are a graduate student and two assistant professors, and two are scholars of color.