WHOSE political knowledge becomes legible when we understand "artistic production" as an intellectual practicE?

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

My dissertation participates in a transnational Black feminist effort to expand what counts as politically and archivally legible. My specific contribution is to ask what happens when performance itself becomes one of the documents through which Black feminist political thought is read. Stated differently, other feminist scholars have already asked us to expand what counts as an archive. My dissertation asks what happens when we extend that challenge specifically to performance.

On a transnational scale, I aim to be in conversation with other scholars committed to conducting research drawing on postcolonial and Black feminist scholarship. That is, researchers, activists, and artists who have contributed an unprecedented amount of scholarship attuned to the African diaspora and specifically, its feminist agendas. Scholarly communities like "Feminist Africa,” a publication led by the Institute of African Studies and the University of Ghana. 

Such scholars are committed to embedding the following questions into each phase of their research: “How might we engage with feminists’ documents that have different careers outside the ‘work of the state’ and are therefore not deemed archivable?” They also ask, “What about the ‘non-secular’ and the invisible, the ephemeral and the affective that have shaped the lives of these feminists yet remain outside the stories we tell and treat as common-sense about what happened after formal independence?”

Specifically, my dissertation project, 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.