This essay uses two musicians, Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton and Richard "Little Richard" Penniman, to add a focus on queerness and the sociopolitical climate of the Cold War to the historiography on race, politics, and rock 'n' roll music. Thornton and Penniman were gender-nonconforming black musicians who began their recording careers in the South in the early 1950s. Both demonstrate how queerness was an indelible part of the early rhythm and blues performances that influenced the development of rock 'n' roll. The backlash against queerness during the Cold War and the related focus on respectability during the civil rights movement, however, increasingly affected the ways that black artists could express gender nonconformity. While frank discussions of queerness had appeared in blues music of the 1920s and 1930s, the racialized sexual politics of the fifties led to backlash a generation later. Nevertheless, Thornton and Penniman found ways to subvert normative ideas about gender. These queer black musicians' gender nonconformity helped establish the rebellious nature of rock 'n' roll, which shows how black southern queer performance influenced the genre in the 1950s and beyond.

The Shape of Poetics to Come:On Taking Up the Task of Criticism Tiana Reid (bio) And: Phenomenology of the End. By Franco "Bifo" Berardi. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2015. 352 pages. $17.95 (paper). The Argonauts. By Maggie Nelson. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015. 160 pages. $23.00 (hardcover). Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic. By Samantha Pinto. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 281 pages. $89.00 (cloth). $27.00 (paper). Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing. By Anthony Reed. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2014. 262 pages. $44.95 (hardcover). $24.95 (paper). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. By Christina Sharpe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. 192 pages. $79.95 (cloth). $22.95 (paper). She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. By M. NourbeSe Philip. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015. 110 pages. $15.95 (paper). "I would die for Poetry" —Bob Kaufman It is revealing—of past social traces and present political desires—that when we think of Karl Marx, we do not also think of poetics. His well-known Capital: A Critique of Political Economy was a study of abstractions (an analysis of capital on its way to capitalism) in which he was invested in the literary importance of the unverifiable.1 To set the stage for his working-class reader, Marx employed [End Page 139] the usual suspects of literature: storytelling, metaphors, imagery, personifications, and allusions. And when writing about the vicious repetitions of world-historical events in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Marx engaged a range of theater metaphors to drive home his point about the instrumentality of the lumpenproletariat in the making of a so-called bourgeois revolution in nineteenth-century France. Among other tropes, he relied on the performative work of tragedy, stages, roles, and costumes. The first of seven sections of his noted historical study also brings us to another aesthetic category at the heart of not only revolution but also criticism: poetry. Marx writes in an oft-quoted passage in The Eighteenth Brumaire that "the social [soziale] revolution of the nineteenth century can only draw its poetry from the future, not from the past."2 Where will the social revolution of the twenty-first century, if it comes, if it is not already here, draw its poetry? Marx urged that poetry itself is embedded in the language and history of future revolutions. In mapping out contemporary social, political, and economic urgencies, will the difference between past, present, and future revolutions come down to the work of poetics, that delicate mix of chance, relation, and criticism? To riff on Ornette Coleman's vision of sonically configured futures in his 1959 jazz album, what is the shape of poetics to come?3 While considering the kind of criticism that might be up to the task of identifying and responding to contemporary contradictions, Fredric Jameson recently described current criticism as being a very "free form," consisting of a range of methodologies, approaches, and differences.4 Not settling for the bipartition implied in a term like hybrid form, free form has been a way to describe aesthetic categories absented of fixed structures—such as jazz and free verse poetry. There is yet another way to think about this free form, however, in terms of one of the most important developments in American literary studies in the late twentieth century, which has been arguing for the importance of the relation between what occurs on the so-called outside of the text (human experience, atrocities of war, local politics, etc.) to questions of rhythm, diction, imagery, metaphor, parataxis, tropes, symbols, and other formal literary techniques. In this light, criticism can reinvigorate itself through a kind of free form, by organizing different ways that questions and answers are formulated. And yet this insistence on a political and social critique, not only of but through literature, and one without guarantees, has plausibly been waning in English departments in the United States, where many have settled for descriptive, surface, or distant reading—in a word, neutrality over a sketch of the stakes of socio-historical-political specificities.5 [End Page 140] Recent...

Run with Whatever You Can Carry":Cross-Platform Materials and Methods in Performance Studies–Meets–Digital Humanities T. L. Cowan (bio) Remember to Surface This essay is structured by my remix of "Instructions," a 1996 song by Veda Hille, a Vancouver-based songwriter, musician, and performer.1 Each heading is an instruction from her song, which I returned to recently as I moved back to Canada after several years of living and working in the United States. It always struck me as a survival guide for the absurdity and brink-of-apocalypse quality of contemporary life. The absurdity (understatement) continues; today's apocalypse, as always, targets some more than others. And many people have already experienced the/an apocalypse many times over. The song was a favorite of mine when I was an undergraduate dropout and emerging performer in Vancouver in the late 1990s. This was, significantly, also around the time that I got my first laptop computer and my first email account, so it also marks my belated entry into a digital existence. The perspective I bring to this AQ forum on methods is shaped by my cross-border, decentered understanding of performance studies and digital humanities, in the context of American/Americas studies more broadly. It is also shaped by what I see as the co-emergence and co-divergence of performance studies and digital humanities as newly articulated scholarly activities. Endeavour to Dive This essay reflects the thinking that I am doing as a scholar and practitioner who moves between performance studies and digital humanities, and digital media studies, all refracted through a kaleidoscopic critical lens that focuses and multiplies my understandings, priorities, and accountabilities toward work that is anti-colonial, trans- feminist and queer'ing, crip'ing, and anti-racist. [End Page 649] Indeed, like the people with whom I am in conversation, we do this work across these and other disciplines, using whatever field, space, or platform we can get our hands on within and beyond the academy. That's the first method. Don't Let Them Shrivel on the Vine The question of what methods the intradiscipline of performance studies brings to the intradiscipline of digital humanities bears considerable attention if we accept that these are two intradisciplines with distinct genealogies, protocols, methods, approaches, critical orientations, and commitments. But first let's trouble that a bit. Don't Think of It as Reasonable, Think of It as Terrifying I am reminded of Linda Tuhiwai Smith's clarification in Decolonizing Methodologies that "academic knowledges are organized around the idea of disciplines and fields of knowledge. These are deeply implicated in each other and share genealogical foundations in various classical and Enlightenment philosophies."2 She notes that disciplines are "also isolated from each other through the maintenance of … disciplinary boundaries," and that they are "not simply … a way of organizing systems of knowledge, but also … a way of organizing people or bodies."3 Performance studies: you go in this building and study these things in these ways. Digital humanities: you go in this building and study these things in these ways. Both of you: demonstrate unique observations of new objects of study and analysis that dutifully learn from—but correct, expose, and reveal—the research and analysis of earlier scholars, and provide compelling evidence of your claims. Collect things and keep them (encrypted). Best if you discover something. Best if you are a pioneer on—or, better yet, break through—the frontier, wherever that is. When You Hear a Mechanical Instrument, Think of a Child Shrieking So, in any case, let's agree that we're talking about performance studies and digital humanities in the context of the in-bed-edness of university financial, social, and intellectual power with imperialism, genocide, mass enslavement, and settler colonialism in the United States and Canada and—in various manifestations—across the Americas. And in the context of the exploitation of workers within—and the poisoning of the land, water, and atmosphere that absorb the excesses of—the industries that fuel our scholarly disciplines and [End Page 650] the technological mobilities that we must keep up in order to keep going in them. As Safiya Noble writes, these are "hidden...

4DH + 1 Black Code / Black Femme Forms of Knowledge and Practice Jessica Marie Johnson (bio) my name is felicityi live inside the cityi am telling onlyas much as you can bear —Brenda Marie Osbey, "Madhouses" In the wake of my aunt's death, I've been thinking about black femme history, testimony, faces, and feeling. It meant something beyond words, text or archive, to see my face in her face, to bask in the black diaspora humming beneath her skin. Every day, I searched for myself in her mouth wide open with laughter, the cut of her eyes across a room, her lips narrowed around Puerto Rican Spanish or English, usually both. Today, missing her, I mine my archive of photographs, digital and digitized, for her image, savoring the irreverence of her grin or the sacred mischief beneath hands she placed on her hips. Searching for her in bits and bytes is a practice of mourning. It is also a practice of sorting and seeking out ghosts while indexing myself and her along a continuum of Black femme diasporic history.1 In "Controlled Images and Cultural Reassembly: Material Black Girls Living in an Avatar World," Joan Morgan argues that contemporary black female identity exists "in an avatar world where fragmenting, exhibited by both black female cultural producers and consumers is often deliberate, strategic and, generative to pleasure and self-authored erotics."2 As scholars of black women in performance, digital media, and art have described, the black femme is silent and overexposed in the North Atlantic academy, in Western philosophy and art, and in the digital.3 Kalia Story, offering a generous sampling of black femme theorizations from across time and space, notes that "it is only racism and heteronormative conceptions of the feminine and of the queer that prevent outsiders from seeing a Black femme identity for what it truly is: a Black and queer sexual identity and gendered performance rooted in embodying a resistive femininity."4 In the absence of a world without racism or heteropatriarchal structures—in other words, living the only flesh and blood life we can under this sun, on planet [End Page 665] Earth, following Gregorian time-space continuum—black women and femmes dissemble, dismantle, seek fragments of ourselves in kinfolk's faces, and create new worlds even in the shadows cast by digital products. My encounter with kinship material in a Kodak photo scanned into a JPEG and mediated through various devices, applications, metadata, and social networks of lurkers, followers, "likers," and commenters is a genre of black code work. It is a practice, to riff on Tara Conley's formulation, of black femme haunting as becoming.5 In 2017, at the "Race, Memory, and the Digital Humanities" conference hosted by the Equality Lab and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, I argued that digital work comes in at least four forms (4DH): "DHDH," or the digital humanities in its most structural form as articulated by global academic institutions; "DHdh," or digital humanities as humanistic inquiry using digital tools; "DHDM," or digital media as material and messaging created in digital form or using digital tools; and "DHdp" or digital practice as using the digital to live in the world. DHDH (with its support from research institutions) and DHDM (buttressed by multi-million-dollar publishing companies and corporate funding from digital design firms) hold the largest megaphones, often structuring through grants, awards, paid advertising, and professional networks what kind of digital work is seen as innovative or intellectual and how that work enters the public sphere. As a DHdp or digital practice, my meditations are not necessarily seen as intellectual work, much less intellectual work worthy of note. And yet creating methodologies for witnessing and mourning in a world seeped in black death is precisely the intellectual and kinship work black women and femmes have engaged in across time and space. At our kitchen tables and at our altars, we receive ghosts. Marisa Parham noted, "pleasurable or painful," haunting "marks the return of something at once foreign and familiar" and excavates multiple sites/sights/cites of memory.6 Or, as Bianca Laureano, at the conclusion of her #femmeinmourning...

Generative Tensions:Building a Digital Project on Early African American Race Film Miriam Posner (bio) and Marika Cifor (bio) In February 2016 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences came under intense scrutiny because of its failure to nominate any actors of color for any of the top four award categories. The controversy, which became known as #OscarsSoWhite, was a topic of conversation for students at the University of California, Los Angeles, too, since we tend to be very aware of our proximity to Hollywood.1 Students in the Digital Humanities program wondered whether a digital project might offer a productive intervention in the conversation. It struck us that most of the conversations about race and Hollywood framed the Academy's failure to acknowledge actors of color as a kind of inability to see the vibrant work being done by actors and other film workers of color. But we knew that the story was actually longer, and more disturbing than that: a vibrant, viable, discrete, and artistically innovative community of Black filmmakers had existed for about fifty years in the United States. Its economic annihilation, and its subsequent expulsion from popular memory, were the result not of Hollywood's failure to see filmmakers of color but of a deliberate campaign of suppression by Hollywood studios.2 We were aware of this sphere of activity, often called the "race film industry," because the University of California, Los Angeles, holds in its Library Special Collections an extraordinarily valuable set of documents called the George P. Johnson Negro Film Collection.3 Johnson was a writer, producer, and distributor for the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, one of the most active and influential production companies in the race film industry. He documented his own work as well as the work of other film companies, films, and actors from 1916 until his death in 1977.4 When a group of students and faculty gathered in spring 2016 to formulate a digital humanities capstone project, we knew that we wanted to use the Johnson collection to expose for a wider audience the films and artistic contributions of this group of actors and filmmakers. [End Page 709] In developing Early African American Film: Reconstructing the History of Silent Race Films, 1909–1930, a database about early American race film, we, a research team composed of undergraduates, a graduate student, and a faculty member, wrestled with a host of problems. Some are familiar to any scholar who grapples with questions of race, and some are particular to the problem of translating complex, multifaceted historical identities into "data." Anyone who has led discussions about race with undergraduate students will be familiar with the line of questioning: if race is, as the professor claims, a social invention, then why are we reifying it as a category by designating such areas as African American history or a Black studies department? The answer, of course, is that discursive categories such as race, whether or not they are based in fact, have wide-ranging, deeply experienced, and historically critical implications. But our students are right to wonder how a historian can acknowledge the diversity and variation of human experience while being explicit about how these experiences are affected by structures of power such as race, gender, nationality, or ability. The scholar's dilemma—of honoring individual experience, on the one hand, and acknowledging structure, on the other—is magnified when working with data, which often tolerate less nuance than one might wish. One can write about race film, a term historians have applied to films made for African American audiences in the twentieth century, with a great deal of subtlety, acknowledging that a film can be simultaneously a race film and not be a race film: not all race films, for example, were made by Black people, or seen by Black audiences, or traveled in the Black theatrical circuit.5 Not all Black actors or producers were Black throughout their careers, or necessarily Black in the same way, since colorism was rife within the race film industry. But a data set must either include a film or person within its ambit or disclude it or them; there is no room for half-measures. Here...

In this essay I explore how the hashtag injunction #staywoke associated with Black Lives Matter challenges digital engagement and literacies in American studies antiracist pedagogy. This phrase calls for an awakening into a sustained awareness of intersectional social justice focused on antiblackness through social media: I discuss my pedagogical experiments in teaching a course on Black American and Asian American comparative racialization, where #staywoke was the guiding principle for fostering a democratizing antiracist critical consciousness for students and myself as an educator. Following Amy E. Earhart and Toniesha L. Taylor's dispersal model for digital humanities projects, I offer pedagogical strategies and models in the project of training critical thinking and unsettling the boundaries between the classroom and the world toward a potentially transformative politics despite the pressures of neoliberal higher education. Against the tendency for digital humanities pedagogy to revolve around centralized, major projects, my methodology focuses on the development of a holistic series of assignments building digital literacies and "minor" student-led and personalized digital humanities projects. In closing, I gesture toward the implications for the limits of digital humanities pedagogy as a practice in the university and profession vulnerable to problems identified by existing critiques of public scholarship and the digital humanities.

This essay unpacks the narrative of Detroit as "America's great comeback story" by suggesting that the narration of the city as an authentically American frontier of opportunity is rooted in what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls "the white possessive." In so doing, the essay emerges from and extends work that poses whiteness and property as co-constructions within the settler colonial state. I argue that tourism narratives of exploration and discovery, in which a majority black city is imagined as open, empty, and ready for exploration and settlement by adventurous explorers and urban pioneers, represent the possessive logics of whiteness. By analyzing the ways in which Detroit has been chronicled in travel narratives of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries such as the chronicles of urban explorers and the state-funded "Pure Michigan" tourism campaign, I show how the mythology of the frontier and its reliance on white possession as the defining narrative of place is redeployed in the attempt to (re)claim Detroit by the State of Michigan, corporate elites, and creative class workers.

Tracing Historical Specificity:Race and the Colonial Politics of (In)Capacity J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (bio) In October 2016 I attended a lecture by Frank B. Wilderson III sponsored by Wesleyan's Center for the Humanities. I had read his book Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms, along with select articles and interviews—but had yet to hear him present his work. The talk was titled "Afro-Pessimism and the Ruse of Analogy." I went in already critical given my familiarity with Afro-Pessimist thought—not only through his work, but that of Jared Sexton and other scholars.1 As Wilderson himself explains, Afro-Pessimism is an "unflinching paradigmatic analysis on the structures of modernity produced by slavery and genocide." Drawing on the works of Orlando Patterson, Saidiya Hartman, and Hortense Spillers (among others), Afro-Pessimists theorize blackness as a position of accumulation and fungibility, that is, as a condition—or relation—of ontological death.2 In Red, White & Black, Wilderson theorizes the structural relation between Blacks and Humanity as an antagonism (an irreconcilable encounter) as opposed to a (reconcilable) conflict. He, along with other Afro-Pessimists, theorizes the workings of civil society as contiguous with slavery and claims the "inability of the slave to translate space into place and time into event."3 Wilderson's insistence of absolute negativity destroys the possibility for coalitional politics because it frames the Black Body as something that will always stand in an antagonistic position to the world.4 At Wilderson's talk I took careful notes, and by the end of the lecture I was so perturbed, I figured I had better attend the faculty seminar the next morning to further engage. There, I mustered up the wherewithal to ask Wilderson about his argument the night before—and in his work at large—that there is no institutional capacity in which Blacks can assert leverage over anyone; that they are only instruments, not agents. I cited the case of Bacon's Rebellion—an armed revolt in 1676 led by Nathaniel Bacon against the rule of the Virginia colonial governor William Berkeley—and asked Wilderson how he could reconcile his position in light of a tough example of black agency in uniting with indentured and other poor Europeans in committing genocidal violence [End Page 257] against Indian tribes. He responded by asking me why I would "privilege Blacks participating in genocide over the role of whites." I did not (and do not)—so I simply reiterated that I wanted to understand how he reconciled his argument with that particular history. He replied by asking me why I didn't instead look to the horses they rode and the bullets they used, provided by the whites that made the Blacks mere "instruments" of their project. I noted that this was during the period prior to the hardening categories that created racially based chattel slavery in the region and that there was variation among African individuals there at that time in terms of their social and legal status. I also added that the question seemed especially pertinent given his assertions in Red, Black & White, in which much of the argument depends on his reading of Indian genocide, since he critiques "the Red Ontologist" for privileging indigenous sovereignty when genocide is essential to the ontology of the Indian.5 But this didn't get us any farther. He pointedly told me, "We are not going to agree on this." Given this AQ forum on Patrick Wolfe's Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (2016), I want to take up his work to examine Afro-Pessimism in relation to issues raised by the exchange recounted above. I take up the question of Afro-Pessimism in this context, since Wolfe repeatedly states (and deftly demonstrates), "race is not a static ontology."6 He notes, "As its name suggests, [race] is an ongoing, ever-shifting contest."7 Among many other interventions, Traces of History challenges the understanding that blackness was or is transcendent. To assert blackness as ontological is to recapitulate colonizing thought, to take colonial ideology as truth. However, Wolfe went beyond merely stating that race is a social construct. As Ben Silverstein...

Home Is the Crucible of Struggle Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (bio) Creating home, or what may also be described as a struggle to belong, has always been political in the United States. In a country founded on the extermination of its indigenous population, whose wealth was derived from the forced labor of the enslaved, and for whom that wealth was multiplied a trillion times over through the violent expropriation of waves upon waves of immigrant labor—to stay or belong has been brutally contested and valiantly fought to achieve. In other words, we share a history of repression and resistance in the elemental, human struggle to belong, to be home. Those various battles over land rights and citizenship; the right to work and housing; the right to vote, speak, and organize have all been in an effort to reshape or reform the injustice and oppression that shapes the daily lives of most people in this country. In this persistent quest, we now enter into a period of both certainty and uncertainty. We can be certain that the administration of Donald Trump will pursue policies that will make the lives of ordinary people substantially harder. We can be certain that his administration will attack immigrants. He has promised to restore law and order, which appears to be an invitation for the police to continue their assaults on Black and Brown communities. Trump has bragged about sexually assaulting women while decrying their rights to reproductive freedom. Trump and his cohort have all but declared war on Muslims in the United States and beyond. We have seen a revival of the white supremacist Right and an unleashing of open racial animus. In the month after the election of Trump, over one thousand hate crimes across the country were reported. Since he has taken office, Jewish cemeteries have been desecrated; mosques have been burned; and swastikas have been brandished in acts of vandalism and intimidation. What is uncertain is the extent to which Trump will be able to follow through on his threats against a variety of communities. This uncertainty is not with Trump's intention to inflict as much pain and harm on the most vulnerable people in the United States; rather, it is based on a calculation that our ability to organize and build movements will complicate, blunt, and, in some cases, thwart the Trump agenda. [End Page 229] The challenge is in using the spaces we occupy in the academy to approach this task. There will be many different kinds of organizing spaces developed in the coming years, but there is a particular role we can play in this moment. This organizing possibility exists only when we recognize the academy, itself, as a site of politics and struggle. Those who ignore that reality do so because they have the luxury to or because they are so constrained by compartmentalization that they ignore the very world they are living in. In the last two years we have seen the flowering of campus struggles against racism, rape, and sexual violence, amid campaigns for union recognition and the right of faculty to control the atmosphere of their classrooms. Whether or not we on campus see them as political spaces, the right wing certainly does. They have raged against "safe spaces" and what they refer to as "political correctness." While reasonable people may debate the merits and meaning of concepts like safe spaces, we should not confuse those discussions with an attack from the right that is intended to create "unsafe spaces" where racial antagonism, sexual predation, and homophobia are considered rites of passage or, as the new president describes as it, "locker room" behavior. These, unfortunately, are only smaller battles happening within the larger transformation of colleges and universities into the leading edge of various neoliberal practices, from the growing use of "contingent labor" to the proliferation of online education, to certificate and master's programs that are only intended to increase the coffers while adding little to nothing to the intellect or critical thinking capacities of its participants. Robin Kelley reminds us that universities will "never be engines for social transformation," but they are places that often reflect, and in some situations magnify, the...

The martial artist and film star Bruce Lee embodied the multidirectional, transpacific interflows of people, cultures, aesthetics, and ideologies between China and the United States. Tracing his transoceanic crossings reveals how colonialism and militarism contributed to his martial arts evolution, which intermixed influences from China, Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, and the United States; how he melded bodily aesthetics and their gendered meanings from Italy, China, and the United States; and how he connected struggles against racism in the United States with anticolonialism in Asia. Rooted in the emerging theoretical framework of transpacific studies, and committed to deimperializing the production of knowledge about both Asia and the United States, this essay uses Bruce Lee as method by which to focus the circulating currents of power and resistance that have contributed to the mutual construction of China and the United States.