What political knowledge becomes legible when we understand artistic production as an intellectual practice, and whose knowledge does this allow us to HEAR?

First Manuscript Title: Bridging Art & Politics: Miriam Makeba, Victoria Santa Cruz, Josephine Baker, and the Making of a “Black Feminist Performance Grammar”

Bridging Art & Politics… develops— what I refer to as— a Black feminist performance grammar for apprehending how embodied vocal and temporal practices can be read as producing forms of political thought across transnational performance archives. Regarding the scholarly genealogy of this work, ultimately, my project contributes to conversations that challenge constrictive analyses of the Black female body by developing methodological strategies for interpreting the embodied political practices of Black women’s performance that have remained difficult to apprehend— or more simply, to notice— through existing critical methods. 

In doing so, it enters into conversation with scholars including Daphne A. Brooks, whose works in Africana studies rethinks Black women's intellectual and sonic labor; André Lepecki, whose performance-based theorization of temporal duration provides a framework for understanding the explicit relationship between performance and politics; and Hortense Spillers, whose revelatory concept of “American Grammar” offers a crucial literary foundation for theorizing performance as a site of Black feminist political thought.