Abstract
Autoethnography, like the song
Autoethnography is concerned with imagining new ways of being, but perhaps, more so, it is a practice of embodied, ethical attunement, of noticing and attending to the quotidian, ordinary audaciousness of Black living. Importantly, this noticing does not presume to supersede social logics; instead, it is the work of creativity in the face of negation, such that autoethnography, like the song, “This Joy,” can be an embodied instantiation on how to be, whereas joy—the desire for, invocation of, and esthetic qualities—are but one manifestation. This essay is a portal, traveling back to my boyhood lessons on the power and work of Black performance, and forward to a moment where Black performance—sacred and unbound—is entangled in anti-Black custody.
Across this travel, I am interested in the claim to—and of—presence made by the young person in conversation with my youthful memories of the song, and in what is called forth by bearing witness to the scene of anti-Black constraint. I return to the tension of my boyhood imitations and observations by encountering the young person and the performance of the song
Scene I: I Feel it in the Atmosphere
Rocks weren’t crying [out], but they were leaping, a rolling tide registering just below the Richter, a seismic rumbling—earthquakes were usual in my world. On Sunday morning we summoned them, stepped over and into them as we glided into the sanctuary. Colors bounded from pastel to autumn tones, adorning hats, and shoulders. Greeted by sweet perfumes and woody scents, a Sunday musk harmonized from row to row. There were no assigned seats, but everybody knew their place—we sat three rows from the front, on the aisle—just in case we needed room, to exhale, to bow, to kick, to fall down in unsound sleep. Ushers stood watch—by each exit, one white-gloved hand tucked behind their back, orchestrating the rhythms of the room along with the praise team. If the earth was crumbling, we would be ready for whatever came next in our Saturday-creased trousers, finely pressed shirts, polished black wing tips, patterned skirts draped down to the ankle, and heels that could scale eternities. On those wooden pews, next to my mother, drums and thunder were spells made of the same tools, magic borne in baritone groans and songs floating free between tenor and soprano keys. Tambourines fluttered like wild butterflies with sounds just as opulent. The elders talked about “catching it,” surrendering to it…whatever it was, “I could feel it in the atmosphere,” and it was coming down the aisle.
Joy occurred openly on the finely finished oak pallets of Sunday pews and altars. It wasn’t surveilled or held captive; there was no detention or interrogation, no coercion or campaign for submission to anyone or anything; it was never neutral, or dispassionate, or objective—always clear, coherent, if only partially translatable in Western grammatical terms that stressed proper enunciations, ways of doing things like gratitude, like prayer, like praise, community, and like joy.
It, this joy, was loosened limbs and widened grins, quickened tempos, like the pitter-patter of feet on sun-baked streets; it was earth-tone groans and moans trailing in and out of harmony, stealing away, getting freer. I leaned into these expressions, rehearsing their possibilities in my boyhood; I practiced, got acquainted with its sounds and rhythms, its posture, poetics, and prose until its gestures didn’t feel so awkward, practiced, and so out of place.
Standing next to my mother—whose unencumbered tears, movements, and just-above-hum petitions seemed to be indexing an otherwise conception, an inimitable claim on life and being that I was attempting to work out with all the Black boyhood authority I could conjure—raised some early questions about formations and translations of being, of presence, of what it meant to
There was instruction here—on her face, on her body—that seemed to take her toward an elsewhere. Her doing seemed to focus less on skill and the enactment of some training, and more about what is gathered and shared; a social practice, collective exchange.
Learning to lift my arms, to respond to the chords of the Hammond B-3’s progression, then, could be—should be—more than mimicry; it could be integral to my being. I never asked my mother about her tears, or about the contents of the hums she never spoke aloud, where she went between the start of the song and its descending notes. To
This world came for my mother—and those in her orbit—on multiple occasions. It had different names: loss, death, disappointment, incurable.
There is a difference, it seems, between doing joy encased in comfort—when living is not overdetermined by loss, and death, and disappointment, and despair; when you are always safe, and outside critique, and someone or something is not threatening to take your breath away, to snatch your body, to carry it off to be disposed of—and joy as an embodied imperative, indispensable for Black living. For the former, joy is a simple idea, one constructed in refuge, sanctuary; the latter surfaces as essential, necessary.
There is a difference, it seems, between taking on joy and the performance of joy, between presence as privilege and presence as ontological possibility. My mother and I were participating in two different experiences—what I was imitating was something that my mother had been living (through), practicing joy until it no longer needed concentration; it was its own presence. I offer this scene as an entry point into the work of Black performance—the ways Black feminist autoethnography can illuminate presence. In the next scene, I time travel to this contempered moment, and stage Black performance as an affront to anti-Black enclosure.
Scene II: Coming Forth to Carry Me Home
In my boyhood, when “it,” had my mother, and was coming for everyone in our row, there was a sense that I didn’t need to fear it. Inside the walls, I’d watched as ushers gently—conscientious and kind—caught, and carried our loved ones to a resting place, home. Once there, on the floor, bent or folded over, the ushers would tarry—an act of care. This, what they are doing…what we are watching, is not care. They are holding her; she is not safe; she is not going home. This is not gentle; this is not kind. One ought to be afraid of this, the “it,”—the thing that haunts—outside, coming for her, for us. This is the afterlife, and, yet something glitters. Against the dusty, dark gloves, a flicker. Golden. Melodious. Mild. Something did not die; “it” exceeds death and enclosure—walls, doors, guards, custody, holds.
In the rhythmic cadence of Black Pentecostal vernacular, a young person lifted their voice to sing, “This joy that I have, the world didn’t give it to me, this joy that I have, the world didn’t give it to me… The world didn’t give it, the world can’t take it away” (Dubal, 2024). The words are clear and pronounced. There is a certainty in the pattern of speech that speaks to repetition—a close, long, and intimate relationship with the words. The young person is singing in what might be understood as a non-singing posture—a singing posture that allows for maximum breath (ing) is one in which the singing individual is unstrained and able to hold their chest, maintain a long spine, keep their shoulders down or back, and keep their stomach firm and expansive. This posture enables the singing individual to control their stomach muscles, allowing them to inhale and exhale without too much conscious effort. To close one’s eyes and listen to the young person sing in the video brings forth memories of collectives gathered together in jubilation and worship, moments of aspiration and care, instances of resilience and hope. To open one’s eyes to the scene, however, reveals an instance devoid of hopefulness. The young person appears to be a Person of Color, namely, a Black individual; they are singing alone, far away from a gathering of united voices.
The scene is harrowing as the young person is being forcefully removed from a protest site. They do not have their legs under them, nor are they able to stand with an elongated spine; rather, their back is deeply arched, their legs are in the air, each held by an armed, militarized officer, and their arms are being held and dispatched in the same way. There are four officers; the young person is being removed, perhaps arrested, for standing in solidarity with other pro-Palestinian individuals, and yet, they sing. In the absence of space, conditions, and perfect posture, the song “This Joy,” birthed in the Black gospel tradition, echoes with urgency across the scene. While it may be tempting to read the scene as one of hopefulness and resilience amid anti-Black conditions, it is instead an instance of material violence enacted by a militarized police unit acting out anti-Black historical patterns.
Black Creative Activities as Methods of Being
Methodologically, researchers are generally expected to conform to normative methods to blend in with Western empiricism (Bochner & Ellis, 2016; Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Goodall, 2000; Holman Jones et al., 2013; Pelias, 2019), reducing variation and muting the distinctiveness of Blackness knowledge production. If knowledge, theory, and method are dominated by frameworks that confine, overdetermine, and impose constraints, then Black creativity and Black creative intellectuals disrupt these normative standards by harnessing embodied registers that reveal liberating and emancipatory dimensions (Callier, 2020; Hill, 2014; Johnson, 2006; Spillers, 2003; McKittrick, 2021; Wynter, n d). The assertion here is that Black liveliness and living transcend Western epistemological and methodological boundaries, necessitating an alternative form of engagement to fully comprehend their richness (Okello, 2024b).
Black Feminist Futurity: A Theoretical Framework
Campt (2017) discussed Black futurity as “a grammar of possibility” that is not only, or simply, an expression of what will happen in the future (p. 17). Instead, Black futurity is concerned with the conditions that must take place for that future to be realized: The grammar of black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn't yet happened but must... [i]t is the power to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is not, but must be. It's a politics of prefiguration that involves living the future now—as imperative rather than subjunctive as a striving for the future you want to see, right now, in the present (Campt, 2017, p. 17).
This study takes up the grammar of Black futurity, the radical provocation that seeing Blackness differently creates the conditions of possibility for presence “not in the future, but now” (Campt, 2022, p. 24). Said differently, Black feminist futurity as a theoretical tool can give name to and speak back to the myriad lived and yearned-for experiences of minoritized folks and assist in actualizing new movements and formations toward otherwise life-affirming and sustaining ways of being in the world. Black feminist futurity is an orientation toward performance, convening the symbolic, ritualistic, political, and material strands of Black living. Performance as a way of being in and against an anti-Black world allows us, as artists, researchers, and witnesses, to engage the precarity of Black living in ways that might honor the complexity and messiness, insight, and revelation that modes of presence offer. In so doing, presence as an embodied and performance practice of Black feminist futurity can offer insight on navigating anti-Black conditions as it envisions possibilities for living in excess of the normative modes of representation, in and beyond research. In concert with epistemologies of performance (Hamera & Conquergood, 2006; Johnson, 2006), Black feminist futurity is consistent with what Hartman (2008) discussed as critical fabulation, particularly as an opportunity to play and rearrange the official record through representation. That is, this tense of futurity displaces the received account to imagine possibilities for what may have been said or done.
Black Feminist Autoethnography: A Methodological Approach
Black feminist autoethnography is a critical approach that engages the self, body, and one’s experiences as sites of possibility (Durham, 2014; McKittrick, 2006). More than an analytic tool, I understand it as a “political project” committed to lifting minoritized knowledge systems and transforming understandings of what it means to be in Western hierarchies of being (Durham, 2014, p. 61). As a critical reflective practice, it “calls us to attend to the tracks that led us to a particular place, what our presence tracks over” and what we carry forward (Alexander, 2005, p. xviii). Engaging autoethnography, in this register, can be understood as “the passage from unity to multiplicity” (Diawara, 2011), wherein a performance becomes a testament to the many, to the possible, located within and in a singular entity (Quashie, 2021). Furthermore, Black feminist autoethnography lifts the potentialities of vulnerability by centering the self as a site of critique (Boylorn, 2013). Importantly, singularity here is not akin to individuality, nor is the prefix “auto” indicative of a singular voice; rather, “auto” or “singular” in Black feminist autoethnography infers oneness, as that which belongs to and is from the one who is Black (Quashie, 2021). Or, as an approach, Black feminist performance autoethnography inhabits a first-person expansiveness that constitutes “instances of beholding the immanence and transcendence of being” (Quashie, 2021, p. 32).
Intellectual and corporeal performance, along with the dispersal of affect through the aestheticized movements of Black bodies (James, 1999), critiques anti-Blackness while expressing a desire to engage more expansively in life, even within contexts of subjection (Hartman, 1997). Returning to the body through performance makes recorded histories and lived realities palpable.
This approach generates narratives about Black being in the world that are competing with violent histories and the structural manifestations of them, and the various expressions and incarnations of life and existence amid gratuitous violence and violation. As Jones (1997) posits, examining the body in performance addresses the embedded question of every performance: What are the theoretical implications of doing life in the wake? This inquiry is rooted in the belief that each performance is distinct, representing a new arrival rather than a mere repetition of sounds and movements.
Ethically Accounting for Black Life
Whereas Black music emerged, partially, in response to dehumanizing conditions, and in so doing, offers insights on being in the world, I attempt to listen differently, to attune to the embodied—historical, spiritual, intellectual, and cosmological—domain in the young person’s rendering of “This Joy.” I am particularly interested in the ways this rendering becomes one manner of naming the quotidian effort to live, make, and imagine beyond anti-Black colonial logics. Even as I do so, I hold that this is but one reading—partial and incomplete—as it does not engage the litany of critical questions that filter into and across these scenes: What complicity do we, the viewers of the post, and the one recording the scene, bear? What responsibility do witnesses in and to the scene hold to the young person being detained? These questions, among others, sit at the nexus of what it means to ethically account for and engage Black life. My hope in this essay is to model a care practice that does more than view Black people as objects of analysis. Instead, I aim to come alongside them as narrative authors, theorizing how to be.
Fleshing Presence as an Imperative
Holding tightly to Black feminist futurity’s imperative for a future in the now, I understand my boyhood observations as curiosities, an attunement to and about the work of interior registers beyond performance—registers that could leap and live forward as an embodied self. Black feminist autoethnography, then, is a vessel capable of carrying us across time, to make use of historical experiences and future imaginings, to inform and illuminate the now. An analysis of the second scene, in conversation with the opening scene of my boyhood and theorized through Black feminist futurity, yields several ethical insights into the potential of autoethnographic claims to presence. First, claims to presence are instantiations of desire—where desire functions as a call to ongoing struggle within scenes of subjection. Second, presence is an invocation of memory. That the song surfaces in this moment may suggest that what was once imitation or rehearsal—an effort to work out presence in their bodies—offers commentary not only on the violent repetition that threatens Black sociality but also on the enduring possibility of Black interiority. Finally, presence here is concerned with refusal, not rejection, where the latter suggests an ability to eclipse social logics. The relational “I” appended next to the signifying “This joy” refuses terms of being as determined by Western sociality, opening witnesses to a world of intimacy known and shared in Black relationality.
Calling Forth: A Note on Desire
The soundscape and visual sphere are fleshed with anti-Black assumptions, parameters for what constitutes acceptable, welcomed, and useful sounds in the social imaginary. More generally, Enlightenment logics have functioned to solidify these assumptions as normal and necessary, while Black people, as noise-producing figures, are routinely understood as antagonists to social order, objects to avoid. In this way, Black people are expected to mute, apprehend, and police their sound-making to align with the larger carceral project. The young, embodied expression, is an eruption of this epistemic order, fueled by what can be understood as an inexpressible desire to mark one’s presence in the world. Even as she is forcefully (re)moved, she pursues an otherwise place and reading of the moment; her voice, and the song it carries, direct the listener toward an elsewhere. Her embodied performance is a provocation—a proposal to consider the how of liberation as sutured to desire. In the aisles of Sunday pews, I was introduced to lessons on making embodied claims. I was, following Fanon (1952), “asking to be considered” (p. 218). Furthermore, Fanon discussed the consequence—benefit, motivation, effect—of one’s expressed desire, suggesting that the will to be noticed, or to have one’s presence accounted for, was in pursuit of “something other than life” (Fanon, 1952, p. 218). Instead, it was a warring toward an otherwise world. In the future real conditional tense, calling forth futures not yet, desire must indeed do battle with the architectural realities of the world. Desire, thus, is unencumbered by context and time. The young person is asking to be considered in the future, as now. This claim to the future, an expression of desire, marks an undoing. To be enraptured in carceral logics is its own type of imprisonment. To experience the material effects of carceral repression is another. The scene is one of detainment, a will to constrain, constrict, and restrict undesirable behaviors and actions. Concerning detainment, there is a will to repress undesired actions and, thus, the undesired. It follows, then, that by deploying detaining logics, the unstated belief suggests that the oppositional, threatening behavior would cease. In effect, the actions and that to which the actions are attached are transformed into objects, things.
At the very moment that the state attempts to transform one’s presence, and its attendant livingness, into an object, a performance of living—presence—enters the soundscape and frustrates the historically made-present attempt to rehearse Blackness as object. There is a difference, it seems, between doing joy encased in comfort and joy as an embodied imperative. This young person—perhaps having previously witnessed the song enunciated through the body—was, like my mother, who too was contending with anti-Black scripts, living out that witness. Said otherwise, the body remembers the song as an expression of prior witnessing, a performance of desire summoned to meet the imperative of the moment. Conjuring the song differently compels the soundscape to reckon with her presence—and, by extension, with those she is in relation to and with. As the song lingers, it disrupts the familiar mapping of Blackness as subject to state control. That which opposes Black being is thrust into an elongated struggle. The labor to sing, thus, reflects aspiration—a longing for an otherwise—desire—augmented by tools unavailable to the order of knowledge.
Invoking Otherwise Worlds
The visual sphere, in some ways, functions to arrest sense- and meaning-making such that the social world and the various ways it is presented construct what we know, and moreover, how we know. There is no denying the constant threat of anti-Black logics that circulate, constrain, destroy, and asphyxiate as the normal reality of violence. The permanence of these conditions has rightly been documented, and yet, what the young person demonstrates is the incompleteness of those projects as they relate to matters of interiority, that “errant force that corresponds to the depths of a human being” (Quashie, 2021, p. 23). The embodied enunciation of “This Joy” is both an accounting of liveliness and a provocation to attend to future-making. In this way, the young person is detailing a process toward presencing as routed through invocation. Here, even as the young person is being detained, which codifies the scene as one of disciplining by larger forces of oppression, the lyrics are ushering in an otherwise that might serve the collective beyond the moment. The embodied performance is pointed and determined, telling of a joy that, despite the controlling narrative, are not absolute, proffering a critique of the anti-Black forces that work to enact the geographic and epistemological as complete and total.
The body becomes the frame for explicating one’s being, one’s livingness; it is the vehicle for “a poetic force, kept alive within us” (Glissant, 1992, p. 89) against the realities of violence that ensnare and distance one from living into their vibrant matter. The body is an invocation—a petition, a summoning, a calling forth—of otherwise worlds that one might inhabit. My mother’s movements become clearer as I encounter this scene; she was situated within and taking on a history of Black people claiming joy where joy did not exist. The fullness of Black existence cannot humanely exist in this world—and my witness to her doing was preparation for moments when I, and the young person I am now observing, would need something more than our present thoughts, feelings, or emotions could summon. The body, then, as an ark, is always carrying us toward an elsewhere—an alternative plane where we might gather and share tools necessary to war with the world on our own terms. That plane, where one might be able to collect and gather to equip themselves, is not of this world and will not be found in familiar places. I understand invocation, and thus, presencing, as partially the inclination to imagine outside and beyond the cohesive myths of Black objecthood. An invocation is an invitation to turn back and toward. Invocation is the solicitation of a space where a sustaining joy might exist adamantly against the world and its normative logics. In this way, presencing is open, dynamic, and capacious enough to hold myriad ways of being. On these terms, witnesses of this carceral event are reminded of the long and urgent need that resistance movements have had to conjure enduring habits that move them, if not physically, then spiritually and emotionally, to another habitat of being. On this plane, the practicing habit it brings into view—invokes—an otherwise habitat. One might understand the young person’s embodied petition—vocalization and breath—as the continuance of that habitat, sustained above and alongside the methods of capture.
Aestheticizing Presence
The embodied enunciations of the young person, my mother, and my boyhood imitations of them, were recitations that link us to larger and longer communities of struggle. It is possible to hear and observe the young person, and to consider the ways the lyrics intend to affirm her sense of self. Indeed, the lyrics themselves are instructive and dynamic, and hold the capacity to encourage. Such a reading, however, eschews the aesthetics of the song and its enunciations of being and presence. Here, I am particularly drawn to the world-making intensities of verbs in the lyrics as claims to the definitive, present, and presencing. Whereas the singing, as discussed, is an expression of desire and an invocation of otherworldliness, we might notice the temporalities (see Quashie, 2021) of the verbs
The verbs transport the young person to a past-not-past where she is/was able to take hold of an archived, shared joy; she then travels back into the present to demonstrate the uses and effects of those treasures. The notion of “have” alludes to ownership, something that one is in possession of, apprehended prior to a moment of reveal or sharing. Ensuring witnesses understand that her coming into joy was, to be sure, outside the bounds of the current moment and its antagonisms, the young person makes clear, with the word “give,” that she belongs to an elsewhere and other relationships (Okello, 2024). Concerning relationality, the intensity of
The verb
Presence as Doing Project
An analysis of the scene, theorized through Black feminist futurity, invites readers to consider how the song
Presencing Time
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
