The intellectual field of Black Studies has historically served as an organ of critique against western normativity. Additionally, the work of black studies has been an opportunity to examine intraracial concerns and debates impacting the black scholarly community and the everyday lives of black folks. My scholarship on Black Camp emerges from these practices and concerns. Camp is a queer aesthetic and cultural practice utilizing incongruity, exaggeration, theatricality, spectacle, and satirical humor to challenge western overinvestment in the stability of gender categories, objects, and behavioral practices. Black Camp extends this practice to unsettle western investment in the idea of race, specifically racial blackness, as a fixed category of distinction. By doing this Black camp disrupts the assumption that camp is a primarily European and Gay male cultural practice; while also addressing silences in black uplift discourse concerning the utility of Clack camp for creating social alternatives– or Otherwise Worlds– for black culture workers seeking to queer normative expectations of blackness

The eighteenth century American popular art-form known as blackface minstrelsy was an often severely reductive or wholly fabricated rendering of black American life. The absence of representational complexity in the related blackface visual iconography was also appalling. Many black cultural workers or "black uplift" advocates countered the discursive violence of blackface minstrelsy through producing "positive" representations of black people. In the post-civil rights era the archetypes of blackface minstrelsy continue to implicitly shape perceptions of black people despite the significant cultural and political gains of the recent past. However, the politics of black uplift and the racist

imaginary have been unlikely partners in attempting to permanently fix the meanings and representations of blackness. Counter to anti-racist commonsense, I argue that black performances of minstrel iconography might present a sardonic challenge to both hermeneutic projects. Specifically, this study examines the art of Kara Walker and the literature of Darius James as two examples of black cultural workers that utilize performance as an analytic vehicle to challenge the essentialist politics of black uplift and the racist/racialist imaginary.