The significance of dance improvisation in the black radical tradition has yet to receive close attention within the fields of performance, black studies and dance—especially as a youth culture based in California. This dissertation contributes to building a new archive of vernacular styles, innovated in the greater Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay Areas between 1965-1985 and foundational to hip hop’s widely cited emergence in New York. At the height of black power, funk music and gay liberation movements, these dances were generally prohibited from formal study within the protected institutional space of private dance studios and concert stages, giving rise to the umbrella term “street dance.” Street dancers studied street movements, experimenting with dance in non-studio spaces—city streets, neighborhood house parties, playgrounds, parks, school gyms, private and underground social clubs. I argue that street dance draws theoretical force from this informal status that challenges assumptions of where and how the study of dance happens, retaining in its practices and politics an alliance with a discourse of the street. I theorize the relation of aesthetics and politics through kinesthesia, the body’s “sixth” sense of motion historically devalued by Cartesian dualism, to argue that key principles of street dance break down conceptual divisions of collective/individual, innovation/tradition, sound/movement, and choreography/improvisation. I use the idea of (kin) aesthetic politics to ask how street dance might imagine alternative modes of relating that define performances of being connected and dislocated, belonging and dispossession, escape and capture. I create a vocabulary for the theoretical study of street dance, using oral history and performance ethnography to draw on the discourse and lived practices of street dancers and informed by my own experiences as a street dancer since the early 1990s.

The primary purpose of this dissertation is to talk to and with others like myself with race, class, and/or academic privileges who wish to practice solidarity in the name of collective liberation. I respond to Black feminist thinkers such as Toni Morrison, who called for White people to look at their own complexes in the equation of racism, and Fannie Lou Hamer who proclaimed that “nobody’s free until everybody’s free” by demonstrating the spiritual harms of racial capitalism to people who materially benefit from it, and what can be done to heal from these harms. Treating the Poverty Scholars of POOR Magazine in East Oakland as primary theorists of solidarity to analyze four spaces of learning—across race and/or class difference, within sameness, and in mixed company—I practice Poverty Scholarship’s emphasis to share from self-observation, or “I Journalism,” by including stories and observations from people with race, class, and/or academic privilege practicing solidarity. A major contribution of this dissertation is its use of performance theory to address solidarity as an everyday performance that can be practiced and improved, towards our healing and collective liberation. Ultimately this dissertation offers examples of embodied study for people with race, class, and/or academic privilege to divest from racial capitalism’s extractive and spiritually harmful structures towards evolving and ongoing practices of solidarity, ethical relationality, and collective liberation.

How the Black Body Bends: Sensorial Distortions in Black Contemporary Art, 1970s to 2016 foregrounds the predominant use of distortion within the work of and much scholarship on black contemporary artists from the late 1970s to 2016. I inquire what non-visual representations of blackness surface in the work of black female artists when refracted through the lens of distortion and how these non-visual representations allude to alternative epistemologies of “seeing” both blackness and the visual realm. I contend that the black feminist artists of my project enact material, formal, and figurative distortions to expose the relationship between the visual realm and other senses; and by so doing, they reveal, and often subvert, important non-visual tactics of racial and gendered objectification. In other words, my theoretical explication of distortion inaugurates new approaches for evincing themes, forms, and artistic strategies otherwise overshadowed by ocularcentric paradigms of the visual realm. Over the course of my five chapters, I imbricate the rigorous, object-based analysis of art historical research with the methods of black studies, which centers an alertness to the social and cultural histories that underline creative production, viewership, and display.

In my first chapter, I theoretically situate the historical juncture of blackness, the sensorial, and distortion within foundational texts in black studies and art history. Chapter two turns to video installations by Simone Leigh (b. 1967) and Wangechi Mutu (b. 1972) to explore prominent moments of sonic occlusion within their work. Veiling aural resonances of the black womxn on screen, Leigh and Mutu draw attention to how racialized and gendered soundscapes—such as the breath and scream—are deployed as objects for the production of other human subjects. I argue both artists distort the boundaries between the visual and the sonic to inquire how black womxn index themselves in dominant visual culture. In chapter three, I turn to proprioception and argue that this unanticipated sensory modality—responsible for understanding the body in space—structures the visual realm despite its reduced consideration in scholarship on visuality. Examining the ink drawings of Senam Okudzeto (b. 1972) and the sculptural installations of Maren Hassinger (b. 1947) I name specific signifiers of proprioception—(im)balance, a localization of bodily parts, and an attentiveness to embodied sensation— to demonstrate how visual-spatial distortions double as embodied experiences of place-making, recontextualizing themes of placelessness in black diasporic art. In my final chapter I turn to the interoceptive system, the second unanticipated sensory register of my dissertation, which discerns the state of internal organs. In this chapter, I look at the paintings of Christina Quarles (b. 1985) and Tschabalala Self (b. 1990) to explore how both artists use acrylic paint to erase the internal bodies of their figures and distort the perspectival planes of their paintings, thereby producing a unique figurative abstraction that recast restrictive historical and social politics of the body.

Haunted Traffic: Blackness, Geography, and Performances of Infrastructural Violence in Ferguson investigates the racial politics of infrastructural violence in Ferguson, Missouri from the antebellum period to the present. The project resituates the tragic 2014 police killing of Michael Brown, Jr. in a broader history of antiblackness and spatial enclosure, demonstrating how transit and media infrastructures bolster violent infrastructural and spatial imaginaries, representational logics, and embodied sensibilities of race that haunt the movement of Black bodies through physical and digital space across time. The study is organized around two overarching concepts: haunted traffic and pedestrian acts. I introduce “traffic” to name the cumulative social, historical, organizational, and distributional power of physical and media infrastructures to disperse, emplace, endanger, and violate Black life. The qualifier “haunted” signals the palimpsestic and recursive character of this violence, or its spectral persistence across time and geographic scales. “Pedestrian acts” names how everyday Black subjects impede networks of infrastructural violence, or how they stop traffic. These are provisional practices of infrastructural interference, counter-narration, and political insurgency directed at physical and digital infrastructures that effect contraventions of the dominant racial, gendered, and spatial order. I explore these conceptual pillars in three different infrastructural modalities, each receiving its own chapter.

The first, “Rail,” is a historical analysis of Ferguson before its formal incorporation (between 1838 and 1894) and investigates how the development of railway infrastructure intersected with the institution of slavery in the region. Interrogating the city’s beginning as a train station called “Ferguson Station” on the North Missouri Railroad and a settlement for slaveholding farmers, I examine the material and symbolic links between the local train depot and the plantation of Thomas T. January, a director of the North Missouri Railroad and the wealthiest landowner and slaveholder in the region. A pond on January’s plantation, likely constructed with slave labor, was used to provide water to inbound steam locomotives at Ferguson Station, making January’s slave-managed farm indispensable to the fundamental operability of the Ferguson depot that anchored the town. I engage the railroad as a key infrastructural site, examining how the North Missouri Railway system, in particular, mediated local ideas and ambient experiences of modernity, racial subjectivity, mobility, and freedom in antebellum Ferguson and greater St. Louis. I explore how the railroad and the discursive imaginaries around communicated new visions of race, space, and property. Through analyses of photographs, company reports, historical newspapers, contracts, and letters, I demonstrate how the railroad was imagined as a modernizing force that necessitated the transformation and ultimate destruction of Indigenous topographies, as well as the capture of enslaved labor in St. Louis County. Ultimately, the chapter theorizes the concept of “right-of-way,” arguing that railroad rights-of-way and other kinds of deeds did not only function as legal instruments to authorize the installation of iron rails across the stolen Indigenous lands of St. Louis County, Missouri. Rights-of-way also function as social prerogatives, or exercises of racial precedence, deployed by municipalities and individual white subjects, to secure white modern sensibility by violating the bodily and spatial sovereignty of Black and Indigenous life. The key argument of this chapter is that the junction between chattel slavery, property, railway infrastructure, and modern mobility—the haunted traffic—at the center of Ferguson’s antebellum origins catalyzed enduring social relations between race, geography, and infrastructure that retain a haunting presence in the suburban landscape.

Chapter two, “Street,” focuses on roadway infrastructure as the setting for intensive struggles over race, space, and power in Ferguson during the postwar period (1950-1980) and in the immediate aftermath of Michael Brown Jr.’s tragic killing. The section begins by chronicling the necessity of street networks and automobiles to the fashioning of white suburban enclaves following World War II and showcases how suburban roads organized Ferguson’s housing stock, cultural centers, civic institutions, and commercial spaces into a coherent geographic formation for mobile, white-nuclear families. Accordingly, the chapter suggests that the regulation and management of streets became key practices to sustain white suburban insularity. These practices manifested most visibly in postwar attempts to curtail Black presence in Ferguson and North St. Louis County through the erection of road barricades, especially in the 1960s and 1970s when federal statutes outlawed various forms of racial discrimination in housing. I engage historical newspaper media from the period to analyze debates over street obstructions and the emergent racial discourse of “traffic safety” that anxious white homeowners often used to support them. I argue that this racial discourse of traffic safety constructed the mobilities of Black motorists and pedestrians as spatial problems and legitimated modes of geographic containment in Ferguson’s built environment. I contend further that these postwar spatial and discursive relations, with their adverse and material effects on Black mobility and spatial sovereignty, persisted as specters in the city’s gratuitous policing and criminalization of Black physical movement in the years leading up to Michael Brown Jr.’s death. The chapter closes with readings of protest images, namely street and highway demonstrations aimed at objecting to Michael Brown, Jr.’s death. It claims that these provisional and political performances of infrastructural disruption—pedestrian acts—contest illusory discourses of traffic safety, interrupt historical geographies of social marginality, and impede the entrenched cultural mandate throughout the region that Black subjects “yield” (as in defer; as in output or produce capital/value for) to infrastructural violence and municipal power.

The third and final substantive chapter, “Wave and Wire” shifts its focus toward broadcast and digital media infrastructure and examines how Ferguson—both as physical place and as mediated environment (#Ferguson)—persistently shapes visual, public, and online political discourses about the racial politics of policing, rebellion, and justice in the United States. The chapter opens with an exploration of the extant racialized affective landscapes forged in late November 2014 as the country awaited the St. Louis County grand jury’s decision on whether to indict officer Darren Wilson for his fatal shooting of Michael Brown, Jr. More pointedly, it reveals the connections a fraught, divided, and anxious national public made between the looming threat of revolt in 2014 Ferguson and the memory of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. Following the controversial announcement that Wilson would not be charged on any count, digitally-coordinated and mediated demonstrations erupted in Ferguson and quickly spread to dozens of major cities across the nation. The chapter suggests that the turbulent visual, social, political, and geographic crises incited by the murder of Michael Brown, Jr. and subsequent nonindictment of Wilson crystallized affective and political geographies online and offline that continue to haunt popular imagery, public debates, and competing understandings of Black radicalism. To explore this claim, the chapter spotlights one image in particular, primarily because of its global reach and recurrence across temporal and political contexts, 2014 and 2020 respectively. The photograph, while not taken in Ferguson proper, was captured at a Ferguson solidarity rally in Portland, Oregon on November 25, 2014, the day after the St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict Darren Wilson. The image was captured by freelance photographer Johnny Nguyen and depicted a brief embrace between a Black child named Devonte Hart and a white police sergeant named Bret Barnum. Like Rodney King’s famous televised press conference in 1992, the picture, for many, offered a vision of optimism in a nation beset by racialized struggles between demonstrators and militarized police. The photograph circulated widely through media networks and garnered widespread acclaim, becoming an iconic visual in the mediated environment of #Ferguson. This chapter performs a close reading of the popular image, tracing its rapid spread in late 2014 following the nonindictment of Wilson, the image’s disappearance in 2018 after Devonte and his siblings were tragically murdered by his adoptive parents, and the picture’s reappearance in social media discourse during the racial uprisings in summer of 2020. I argue that the staying power of the hug photo, perpetually haunted by Michael Brown, Jr.’s death and the ensuing rebellion in Ferguson, is shaped by a persistent political desire for Black political acquiescence in (sub)urban landscapes and recurs over time to ameliorate white angst. The photograph, in short, functions as a visual strategy of racial and spatial containment—a technology of traffic control that seeks to arrest the visibility and practice of Black social movement across physical and digital arenas.

By examining the recursive violence of traffic and the emancipatory potential of pedestrian acts at various sites of infrastructure, Haunted Traffic shows where and how Black subjects experience infrastructures as technologies of historical spatial trauma and engage them as vehicles of radical self-determination. While the study is grounded in the historical specificities of Ferguson, its conceptual offerings aim to broaden our understanding of the intimacies between infrastructure and Black subjectivity by clarifying how infrastructures bolster layered economies of violence and unjust spatial arrangements that marginalize Black life across geographic and time scales. Furthermore, the project contributes to scholarship in Black Studies, Critical Infrastructure Studies, Digital Humanities, and Human Geography by theorizing infrastructural violence across physical and digital contexts as essential to the fashioning and effacement of Black subjectivities from the antebellum period to the present. It adds to the academic literature by illustrating how the layering of infrastructure (e.g., city roads built atop an abandoned railway line) in urban environments represents aggregations of social, organizational, and distributional power to disperse and emplace Black life.