![BLACK PORTRAITURE[S] VII: PLAY & PERFORMANCE](https://www.blackportraitures.info/bp7/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2022/02/bp7-logo-black.svg){kind=logo}
- Date: February 18, 2022
- Time: 10:00 am—11:30 am
- Location: Lecture Hall
Speakers
- Jonathan W. Gray, Associate Professor of English – CUNY Graduate Center
- Kavita Kulkarni, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Digital Humanities – Princeton University
- Elias Rodriques, Assistant Professor of African American Literature – Sarah Lawrence
The Meaning of Marcus Rashford:
The Politics of Play Hospitality and Defacement in Black Britain
Jonathan W. Grey
In November of 2020 the street artist Akse P19 honored the British soccer player Marcus Rashford’s efforts to address food insecurity among children during the UK’s COVID lockdown with a mural (below) located in a working class neighborhood in Rashford’s native Manchester. In this Akse was hardly alone. After Rashford spearheaded a campaign that raised £20 million to feed 400,000 children in the northwest of England, an embarrassed Prime Minister Boris Johnson changed government policy to provide greater food assistance throughout Britain. This led the Cabinet Office, in consultation with the Royal Family, to name the then twenty-two year old a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), whereupon Rashford successfully pushed Johnson’s conservative government to allocate even more funds to ameliorate poverty in the UK. While British athletes are regularly granted MBE and even knighthoods for their play, Rashford has broken ground as a sportsman celebrated in England as much for shaping public policy as for his athletic achievements.
Rashford’s success was poised to reach a crescendo when England’s national team reached the final of the European Championship in 2021. With the match tied after extra time, Rashford stepped up to take a penalty kick. When he missed his kick and England went on to lose, reactionaries in the media blamed his activism for his loss of focus while outraged fans of the national team that Rashford had purportedly let down defaced his mural. Despite his excellence and his advocacy, these episodes show that for some acceptance of Rashford still depends on his play, his ability to transcend racial and class differences by pushing his body to perform for the betterment of the team and the nation. Rashford’s unique position within British society—where some have jokingly called for the Labor Party to increase turnout in the next Parliamentary election by promising to appoint him Prime Minister should they win enough seats to depose Johnson—allows for an investigation into the process by which play permits an expansion of notions of hospitality and inclusion. A descendent of the Windrush generation that migrated to the UK from the Caribbean after WWII, Rashford’s leadership and popularity threatens the still ascendant Oxbridge cohort that has dominated politics in post-Cold War England. In this context, Rashford is guilty of not knowing his place, of stepping outside of the narrow realm of sports in order to shape popular discourse to the benefit of communities of color in ways still unfamiliar in the UK. By engaging with Black British thinkers like Stuart Hall, Ben Carrington and others I hope to show how Rashford’s engagement with a politics of identity that simultaneously invokes class, race and place clears the way for new understandings of Britishness. Indeed, through his advocacy and his play, Rashford places Black Britishness at the center of the struggle for a new concept of the English subject after the debacle of Brexit.
Que(e)r(y)ing Representation: Fugitive Mediascapes in the Work of Nina Chanel Abney
Kavita Kulkarni
Play as subterfuge is a central conceit in the work of visual artist Nina Chanel Abney (b. 1982). On her large-scale canvases steeped with visual information and bold, unmodulated colors that recall the aesthetic economy of comics, cartoons, and streetwear culture—or, in her more recent venture into toy and game design, including an official Mattel UNO deck — the world-as-play is picked up as subject, form, and function in Abney’s work. Likewise, Abney’s paintings stylistically and conceptually enunciate the world as irreducibly mediated, gesturing at the disordered visual and sonic ephemera that accumulate by way of our screen-saturated environments. Building on a recitation of Black compositional thought—an aesthetic theory developed in the work of philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva and, separately, artist Torkwase Dyson—this paper offers a Black queer feminist reading of Abney’s recent work as fugitive media practice. I argue that one can read the playfulness of Abney’s creative gestures as an affective trace of our contemporary media ecology, wherein the chaotic scenes depicted are not in fact scenes or representations of scenes reorganized, but rather fractal, serial, and improvisational re-compositions that undermine the narrative economy of racial liberalism. Simultaneously reflecting and refracting the already fractured, glitchy effects of the commercial media surround and of the human psyche, Nina Chanel Abney’s work renders fugitive mediascapes that disrupt the complicity of the screen and of screen culture in a hyper-productive, hyper-consumptive, information-loaded, but immanently meaningless world.
Playing in the Wash with Jonathan Lyndon Chase
Elias Rodriques
In his 2021 installation at the Fabric Workshop Museum, “Big Wash,” Black Philadelphia-based visual artist Jonathan Lyndon Chase calls attention to a space most of us would rather forget: The laundromat. Taking up one full floor of the museum, the installation recreates the checkered tiled floors of the laundromat, the metal carts used to transport clothing, and washing machines as a means of reimagining the space of care work—the laundromat—into a space of intimacy. The boxers hanging from clotheslines across the rooms and the portraits of queer Black lovers in various states of undress lining the walls work to assert the importance of laundromats to kinship (as a place where parents without access to laundry machines bring their otherwise unsupervised young when cleaning while doing the labor that is necessary to care for their kin) and to romance (as a place where people clean the very clothes they put on and take off in courtship). Central to Chase’s efforts, I will argue, is play. The art style itself, especially in the faux-graffiti on the laundry machines, centers play in its mimicry of childlike painting styles. This formal play coalesces with the piece’s content: In Chase’s installation, the laundromat, as the space in which poor Black queer people clean their clothes, becomes the site that enables the subversion of gender norms through roleplay. As I will argue first through an overview of Chase’s earlier work and then through an extended analysis of “The Big Wash,” this installation in particular and Chase’s oeuvre more generally remind that Black play has the potential to transform infrastructures of predation and profit into sites that enable the kinds of alternative sociality that prefigure a world free from such marginalization and oppression.