Absurdism and Black Laughter

Inayah Bashir

Dance as Return to Memory 

For so long, Black history in the western canon has consisted of detailing the horrors of slavery. In many ways, Black people have transformed this history into art, music, and creations that illustrate our resilience and strength. Yet, so often our activism and successes have been grounded in this darkness in a never-ending fight to push beyond the evil that has been casted onto our skin. In many ways, the world is enamored with the capability of Black people to transmute this energy into joy, celebration, and creation. This transmutation is the power and spirituality that exists in our movement, our bodies, our minds, our thoughts, our art…. For so long, we have been isolated from the intentional practices that restore and empower us to maintain this power of transmutation. While some of these spiritual practices have been able to find their way into our daily lives, there is a resurgence of intentionally understanding the traditions that fed our ancestors (prior, during, and after our horrific encounters with white people). These traditions are steeped in concepts of honoring play, joy, creation. 

This essay is a combination of analytical and creative work. I will be discussing the power of joy and the erotic in Black spiritual traditions while also examining the ways that entertainment and media has transformed our understanding of these practices. Throughout the essay, I will turn to the works of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and my own poetry to incorporate the healing narratives of creative fiction. I am currently in the process of transforming this essay into a visual essay.

Troizel xx

group décollage: collective absurdism, (dis)agreement, and imaginative play in Mark Bradford’s Super 8 Movies

In “group décollage: collective absurdism, (dis)agreement, and imaginative play in Mark Bradford’s Super 8 Movies,” I read Bradford’s description of his coming-to-art as a child alongside the performance of group play demonstrated in the film work. Bradford’s work is a montage of home videos that he created as a child with his lifelong friends. While discussing the film, he describes their attempt to create and project it onto the clouds. His friends believed with him that this could happen because he “was the wizard.” After spending time filming and gathering materials, the projection does not work. Their surprise at the failure reads absurd, but in the agreement of their collective response, they critique notions of realism as they govern belief practices. They agree to formally and collectively disagree about reality as a rehearsal for removing the realist stench from imagination and play. This (dis)agreement is the natal space for Bradford’s contemporary aesthetic practice in décollage. Bradford remarks that they all thought “it should have happened” and that the only reason it did not was because “something had gone wrong up there.” The failure was external, material and technological, but never once did it become a collective identity. For this paper, I am interested in the ways that this collective of play agree to disagree with the limits of possibility. It so happens that décollage, translates to “lift-off,” such that what Bradford and company rehearse, up in the clouds, is flight away from the constricting plane of (im)possibility.

Hakimah Abdul-Fattah

This paper attempts to build a theoretical foundation for an ongoing portraiture collection, (Dis)placement. The photographs explore kinship, loss, and citizenship, as it pertains to my own maternal relatives together with displacement in the contexts of settler-slaver states of the United States (Princeton, New Jersey in particular) and Antigua. By thinking through a limited visual family archive, I expose how it in many ways mimics the silences in larger state and colonial records of Black communities. On the other hand, in experimenting with visual and time-based mediums, the project makes traces of their presence legible, contends with a past that is not past, and explores different ways of knowing and healing. Embedded within this project are elements of loss, not solely for a person or persons but in connection to other tangible and intangible materials like place/space, landscapes, and built structures

The photographic project further tackles the concept of “play” through the disruption of colonial leisure in the archives of Antigua and the USA (Princeton, New Jersey).“Play” is activated in subverting tourist, colonial, and White suburban imagery of both locations. Image distortion and overlap speak to the histories of migration and resettlement for various Black and/or Indigenous communities that have been erased from the visual landscapes of Princeton and parts of Antigua. I use state archives like social security applications, housing and property records, and the cemetery to activate quotidian Black narratives and unsettle chronicles of colonial leisure that connect these two locations.

Through this paper, I further ask how family archives can be both protected and animated when engaging with the state. How might “play” and opacity alleviate further burden placed on the deceased when attempting to piece together their stories in ethnographic work?

Additionally, how might academic work, specifically anthropology, take seriously engagement in artistic practices of portrait making and family archiving as ethnographic work?

Bios

Inayah Bashir is a Masters Candidate at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Inayah has always been an educational advocate and she has used much of her career to support the re-education of Black people, especially in regards to the mistruths of American history. During her time in undergrad, Inayah expanded her skills by developing curriculum as a summer intern for Ascend Public Charter Schools and The Whittle School & Studios. This sparked an interest in utilizing storytelling as a way to re-imagine our present and implement a better future. Inayah continues to explore her enthusiasm for education by searching for innovative ways to promote student-centered, culturally specific educational programming that can inspire future leaders, innovators, and disrupters. Her particular focus of research is global storytelling, wellness, and spirituality throughout the African diaspora. 

@troizel (they/troizel) troizel xx is black + alive and the queerness of this fact means more than these words can express. a thinker + doer, they spend their time finishing their phd in performance studies at new york university, thinking too much, making playlists, reading tarot, and conjuring performance (con) art. they serve as managing editor of women & performance: a journal of feminist theory.

Hakimah Abdul-Fattah is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a visual artist and researcher with a professional background in museums and arts organizations. She is interested broadly in the moments in which material objects are put to work in national projects of repair, specifically with respect to how they might address the historical injustices of new world slavery and colonization. Hakimah holds a BA in Anthropology and French from Bates College and a MA in Museum Anthropology from Columbia University.


Home / Conference / Absurdism and Black Laughter