“Imbedded” Belonging and Black Being: A Critical Analysis of Blackness in Kendrick Lamar’s 2016 Grammy Awards Performance

This article argues that in a space of artistic performance Black people can fully imbed themselves in the space, despite the temporality of the performance itself. Therefore, in the act of performing, Black people are able to fully be recognized as a human whole. The goal of this article is to think of a Hip Hop beingness that fuses the temporal/body, consciousness/beyond the body, and the ancestral connections of orality and genetic memory. I do so by looking at how black performance disrupts dominant narratives of black bodies as being just flesh. This article brings together, Hip Hop studies, Africana philosophy and performance theory to argue that the space of performativity moves beyond the notion of blackness as void and does not solely focus on the constraints of corporeal blackness. Instead, the black body imbeds the space it occupies. In doing so, it disrupts and reconfigures space, time, and narratives of belonging

The Polemical as Non-Violent Protest: James Baldwin and the “Gendered” Black Body

This essay is to invite a new form of theorizing Baldwin’s intellectual archive beyond a work of protest or as being contributory to Queer writing. I argue that Baldwin’s thought often in the form of the polemic is a form of non-violent resistance. Baldwin’s contestation against whiteness and the methods of Black erasure in general and Black male annihilation in particular is why he is challenging the complexity of protest. In pushing against traditional or what has become traditional ways of analyzing Black thought, my essay highlights why figures like Baldwin are read in fragmentation. Hence, my insistence on Baldwin being categorized as a Gender/Genre theorist more so than a Queer theorist. Because his writings are on the erasure of Black Male existence within and outside of heteronormative spaces

Jostling Place and Non-Place

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