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Abstract
This article examines the work of black feminist performance artist and scholar Gabrielle Civil as a mode of transhistorical historiography. By working from Civil’s artistic aim to open up space and her commitment to breaking the frames of identity, history, and art, the paper explores how textual and temporal slippages cultivate an embodied polyphonic practice responding to individual and collective histories and senses of belonging. With specific regard for transnational and diasporic identities and experiences, Civil’s work addresses three different relationships between oneself and others: familial, (re)imagined familial, and ancestral bloodlines. The resulting dynamic enacts a “collaborative timeslip” as a means with which to address racist and patriarchal histographies and transgenerational trauma and memories. This approach allows for layering asynchronistic local and global perspectives to elicit calls for and demonstrations of protest and joy. Drawing from interdisciplinary, performance, and African diaspora scholars such as Avery F. Gordon, Long Le-Khac, Kara Keeling, Tina M. Campt, Nadège T. Clitandre, and Jack Isaac Pryor, the article primarily examines Civil’s Fugue (Da Montréal) (2014) performance and debut full-length collection Swallow the Fish (2017). Extending beyond medium and genre, the collaborative timeslip perpetually enacts an oscillation of Civil’s experiments: truth telling, creating, inviting someone in, documenting, and repeating.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 The previously cited text and this quoted material are all from the same performance writing.
2 “Transnational” is used to encompass the expansive multiethnic and transhistorical range of Civil's work and the people and events she draws upon. “Diaspora” is primarily used with respect to Civil's specific biographical background and details regarding artistic aims. As Civil thinks about the “hauntedness of ancestry” expansively within the context of Haitian diasporic bloodline alongside a larger engagement with the middle passage and histories of the black female body, the term “transnational” in this article subsequently reflects the specific geographic and nation-state relationships associated with Civil's broad understandings of “bloodline” and “ancestry” (Civil Citation2021a).
3 Gabrielle Civil, “Remedios: Breaking the Frame: Dreaming into the Urgent Now,” Aster(ix) Journal, January 13 2017, https://asterixjournal.com/remedios-breaking-the-frame/; Score also later included in Gabrielle Civil's Experiments in Joy (New York: The Accomplices, Citation2019a), 231-33.
4 “Ancestral” is used in alignment with Civil’s broad use of the term to denote relationships to individuals and communities that inform her work. This can range from biological family members to community-related folks, such as artists ascribing to black diasporic tradition and whose work addresses historical trauma. This community ranges from black contemporary visual artists, like Nona Faustine and Dread Scott, to a large base of women of color artists, like Korean poet and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982) and Cuban artist Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) – all seeming to inform Civil’s work in a similar, deep manner as “ancestors.” Reviewers such as Allison Noelle Conner have described these ancestral references – i.e., “countless other women named and forgotten” – as indicative of Civil being “generous with her inspirations and guardians, giving equal space to the preceding and contemporary voices in conversation with her own process” (Conner Citation2017); More commentary on this perspective and approach by Gabrielle Civil were shared in Zoom lectures, including “Séances,” hosted by the State University of New York – University at Buffalo’s UB Art Galleries on January 15, 2021, and “(ghost gestures),” hosted by Macalester College.
5 This phrasing alludes to Civil’s second full-length collection, Experiments in Joy, though CitationCivil has been discussing this concept for years, e.g. her “Experiments in Joy: Black Feminist Performance Art (in) Practice” Lecture at The Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities, Brooklyn College, Brooklyn NY, March 30, Citation2015.
6 This is noted within the context of sociological study.
7 “Spatial” is used to connote the various geographic regions, histories, and communities that Civil takes up in her work. By doing so, I primarily read Civil’s work within a broad understanding of diaspora and histories of displacement to generously grapple with the temporal slippages and the resulting pointed care for oneself and one’s community/familial relationships. This is also with consideration for Civil’s artistic aim – to open up space – understanding space expansively in contexts of physical, metaphorical, and affective senses. As a result, the term “spatial” is used generally and distinct from such focused studies as Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographic Struggle, where “Black women’s histories, lives, and spaces must be understood as enmeshing with traditional geographic arrangements in order to identify a different way of knowing and writing the social world to expand how the production of space is achieved across terrains of domination” (Citation2016, xiv).
8 Le-Khac foregrounds the study by explaining the short story series form itself “has roots in regionalist fiction and traditionally emphasizes local community and region,” likening the contemporary project to earlier regionalist texts such as Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919).
9 The term “queered” is used in specific relation to previous writing by Civil as well as this article’s upcoming application of Jack Isaac Pryor’s queer performance and trauma studies research and, later, Kara Keeling’s work. With the former, I refer to the third step listed in Civil’s collaborative performance score with Stephen Houldsworth, “Breaking the Frame,” which asserts that to “Queer the Frame / Play = > DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT (tone * medium * materials).” The use of “queered” here, which is not directly linked to queer and trans studies, is intended to further contextualize Civil’s practice and reveal how “breaking the frame” can also involve a “queering,” a deviation from the normative or the expected by doing “something different” as political acts of survival and preservation of selfhood (Civil Citation2019b, 233).
10 The issue of the novel narrating the nation is also taken up by Civil in her 2000 dissertation on black women’s poetry, arguing: “In projects of nationalist canon-building and the elaboration of tradition, notions of “unity” and “thematic coherence” are pivotal; therefore, the linguistic dissidence of poetry indeed does “pose a problem” and becomes an unwelcome threat.” With these stakes, Civil goes on to reference Audre Lorde’s seminal poem “Poetry is not a Luxury” to explain how “the ineffability of poetry, its sacred magic, its ability to change our lives … propels us to recognize the connections between poetry, inner consciousness, magic and real women’s lives” (Citation2000, 15, 22). I read these critical moments as an arguably early call by CitationCivil for the urgency and power behind “breaking the frame” with regard for black feminist methodologies that reflect a transhistorical approach to the intersections of identity, history, and art. Though this article focuses on Civil’s more recent work, this particular example in her dissertation demonstrates how relationships between textuality and familial, (re)imagined, and ancestral figures have routinely been taken up by CitationCivil as discussions of “sacred magic” and “magic women’s lives” alongside one’s inner consciousness, real women’s lives, and poetry.
11 Reviewer Allison Noelle Conner describes Civil’s hybrid-memoir Swallow the Fish (2017) as a collection of “intimate vignettes,” where “CitationCivil traces and retraces her own conscious-waking into a life of words, creativity, and art” (Citation2017).
12 The former – Haitian heritage and culture – Civil describes as being a “kind of deep secret, a deep source for other ways of Blackness that were largely contained in my house” (Sloan Citation2020). Though not explored extensively in this article, Civil’s particular understanding of Haitian culture as a “secret source of Blackness, an under-recognized center, [that] epitomizes [her] idea of the Black Midwest” potentially supports the mystical qualities of works that both explore and interrogate relationships to ancestors and places, such as in the later described Fugue (Da, Montréal) and her book Tourist Art (2012) made in collaboration with Haitian-American artist Vladimir Cybil Charlier (Sloan Citation2020).
13 A “shero” is generally used to refer to women one admires for their accomplishments or innovations in a particular field or historical moment. An example of Civil’s usage is when she describes the late-20th-century U.S.-based Korean artist and poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha as “a shero of mine”; Email to author, March 2019.
14 The concluding section of Swallow the Fish entitled “THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPS: production notes, books, and peeps” is arguably a nod to Zong! and similar experimental texts exploring questions of narrativity, historical trauma, and identity. Other indications include CitationCivil titling the bibliography a “Library List,” which I contend encourages audience engagement and extensions beyond the published text, as well as her final note, which precedes the List: “This book is a performance. This book is an archive. A product of its time, this book was written over many years. It is the result of my own memory and experience. Others may have a different account. Some names have been changed” (2017c, 303).
15 Not explicitly taken up in this article is the work of other seminal scholars like Fred Moten, who has spoken of the “temporal condensation” and “animative materiality” of black performances, and Paul Gilroy, who has extensively discussed polyphonic qualities of black cultural expression and the overflow of genre/generic conventions within the context of tensions between nation-state boundaries, one’s relationship to the nation-state, and black artistic expression (Moten Citation2003, 7; Gilroy Citation1993, 32-40).
16 As noted in an end note in Time Slips, Pryor is building off of gender and sexuality studies scholar Carolyn Dimshaw with “touch.”
17 The compound noun form is being used to emphasize the context of Pryor’s second definition, i.e., a somewhat singular temporal condition that embodies multiple temporal configurations and their associated histories.
18 With the use of “impossibility,” I also allude to Pryor’s clarification of “straight time” as contradictorily involving negating a trauma survivor’s lived experience of past events and reproducing the logic of capitalism (in their working from Jack Halberstam’s research) (Citation2017, 4).
19 This phrasing is intended to touch on the larger theme of ‘breaking the frame' throughout Civil’s oeuvre while also highlighting the aforementioned third step to Civil’s collaborative performance score “Breaking the Frame,” which is to “Queer the Frame / Play => DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT (tone * medium * materials).” Though the third step seems to emphasize material components, the fourth step—“Discover Something / CREATE SOMETHING PROACTIVE”—evokes a temporal component, a futurity outside of current systems of oppression, with the suggestions of discovery and proactivity, which, I believe, complement the material queering and inventiveness advocated for in step three (2019, 233).
20 Arguably the most explicit example of Civil’s spirit of inviting others in and breaking the frame is Call and Response, a symposium of black women and performance at Antioch College in July and August 2014 featuring CitationCivil and six other artists, which is well-documented in Experiments in Joy, 182–213.
21 Though this section focuses on the Fugue trilogy and its response to the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Civil’s expansive considerations for bloodline extend to varied materials and stories, such as happenstance encounters with older photographs. One example is Miss Lily, a photographed black woman featured in a wealthy white family’s home, where she was “employed” two generations ago. In a reflective letter addressed to Miss Lily, which introduces a book section on “Breaking the Frame,” CitationCivil describes being struck by the photograph, having a cheeky desire to claim her and be claimed by her, and concludes: “We may say some ancestors are given and others are chosen, but sometimes ancestors choose you … How you hold the space, remind me of mysteries and radiate a gorgeous blackness, a new moon, an eclipse to block out the omnipotence of the sun” (2019, 219). The expansive ancestral and spiritual elements central to much of Civil’s practice illustrates a specific kind of inclusive audience engagement vital to such powerful demonstrations of and calls for protest and joy (i.e., breaking the frame individually and collectively).
22 Performed as a part of ArtQuake, 5 Miles Gallery, Brooklyn NY, December 2011, by invitation of the Haiti Cultural Exchange.
23 Performed at Yari Yari Ntoaso, Ghana, May 2013.
24 Performed at the Hemispheric Institute, Phi Centre, Montréal Canada, June 2014.
25 This assertion is informed by personal communication with the artist regarding inclusion of Fugue (Da Montréal) in an exhibition on intertextuality and identity: Being In-Between / In-Between Being, UB Art Galleries, State University of New York – University at Buffalo, Buffalo NY, December 15, 2020 – January 15, 2021, https://arts-sciences.buffalo.edu/art/research/lower-art-gallery/lower-art-gallery-exhibitions/being-in-between.html.
26 Sharpe’s project is specific to the unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery, where wake work is “a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives” (2016, 15, emphasis in text).
27 Language of the un/known is an allusion to the Bakongo cosmogram, a West African cosmological spiritual system that shows movements from birth to death, ancestors and back, which is referenced in Civil’s Keynote Address at Claremont Colleges’ April 2017 conference on Black Intersections: Resistance, Pride, & Liberation. Entitled “Experiments in Joy: Intersecting Blackness,” Civil references the cosmogram after discussing truth and how we come to know things, which I see related to earlier portions of the article discussing Civil’s attention to expectations versus reality.
28 All stills are included with permission from the artist and the videographer, Victor Bautista, with the Hemispheric Institute.
29 Transcript provided by Civil to the author on 22 March 2020.
30 Emphasis on pronunciation is the author’s; CitationCivil records this expression as “O DY-AS-PO-RA.”
31 Originally, a film was intended to be playing on the television and connected to the red power cord/bloodline, which would have displayed a conversation between CitationCivil and her grandmother. However, improvisation prompted by inclement weather involved foregoing the running film and literal use of the power cord, which inspired some of the earlier movements in the performance, where CitationCivil sometimes plugs the end of the cord into the conch shell and herself, i.e., “Trying to find that beating heart.” Subsequently, some aspects of the performance and bloodline remain inaccessible or illegible, which arguably contributes to the tensions of accessibility and legibility behind Civil’s transhistorical methodology (Citation2021b).
32 Civil’s language (2021b). The recorded text is from Haitian writer Dany Laferrière’s L’odeur du café/An Aroma of Coffee (1991; English translation by David Homel, 1993)
33 I use term “intimacy” in thinking of Lisa Lowe’s work on the colonial division of intimacy, which she argues “charts the historically differentiated access to the domains of liberal personhood from interiority and individual will, to the possession of property and domesticity” (Citation2015, 18).
34 These considerations for ritual and keeping the dead “alive” reoccur extensively across Civil’s oeuvre, including her Say My Name (an action for 270 abducted Nigerian girls) performance, which was debuted the same year as Fugue (Da Montréal).
35 Not discussed in this article explicitly are Civil’s other considerations for intuition, epigenetics, and ancestral memory – questioning how truth becomes defined, how knowledge of truth grows, how one makes sense of unknowns, and how one approaches aspects that they know but are not able to explain how they know them (Civil 2019, 202). I see these spiritual and ephemeral qualities to be a part of the histories of transgenerational trauma and uses of collaborative timeslips. I see this consideration in conversation with my previous discussion of Civil’s concern for and inquiry into “what is expected” versus what is “actually.”
36 The language of “authenticity” is used in thinking of the question-and-answer period of a 2021 Zoom lecture, where Civil addresses the question of in/genuine practice in the context of recent commercializing of alters and ritual practices. She explains that, in regards to her own experience with Haitian hoodoo and familial relationships, “there”s a kind of precision or authenticity that is actually a product of a kind of perfectionism that’s related to white supremacy or “Western thinking” – quickly discounting such colonial constraints that are counterintuitive to spiritual and artistic practice. She clarifies and maintains: “I’m definitely interested in invoking and honoring my ancestors, but I don’t want to be only confined to a story about what my own kind of … what my own spirits are” (Citation2021b).
37 In this section and several others, CitationCivil “connects” vignettes, phrases, lists, instructions, etc. using the symbol “+++,” and this arguably acts as a minor, yet constant, refusal of linear temporality and narrativity, as the symbols infer both perpetual continuity with the addition sign (+) and multiple temporalities with multiple signs (+++). As Pryor explains linear straight time negates a trauma survivor’s lived experience and reproduces the logic of capitalism, I read these section breaks as “sutures” that reinscribe the vital polyphonic qualities of Civil’s work and her transhistorical methodology.
38 In more recent talks, CitationCivil has explicitly shared: “I feel like I want to be able to claim Ana Mendieta as an ancestor for me, and honor her, even though we don’t necessarily share the same racial and ethnic bloodlines, but we share another kind of bloodline, which is an ancestral artistic bloodline” (2021b).
39 As she goes on to discuss the temporal frameworks of the select films that deploy a politics of visibility to make intelligible their queer subjects, Keeling describes two impulses of contemporary thought about temporality: one is pragmatic and constructive, where the past is ordered and revealed in relation to present interests and desires, and the other is pedagogical and critical, allowing for the operations of history to reveal itself and highlight the exclusionary construction of any invocation of the past (2009, 569–570).
40 For example, CitationCivil has explained: “What I want to do is slow down and have more conversation and deeply engage and complicate some of the questions, and also think about our own possibilities, and also our own frailties in places where we need to be schooled to … I want to open it up” (Citation2021b).