UC Riverside

The Love of Things to Come: Rehearsing Blackness in the Theatre of (Non) Being is concerned with black artists and artists of color who engage with blackness and the racialized history of spectatorship in the United States. The primary aim of this project is to understand how, through this engagement, Lorraine Hansberry, Yiyun Li, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Young Jean Lee, and Adrian Piper deconstruct performances of race and gender, revise established theatrical tropes, and alter the viewing frameworks that ground our experiences of performance and the (racialized, gendered, and sexualized) self. To do so, I theorize rehearsal as a transitional space and time that hasn’t settled into the finality of performance, following the incorporation of D.W. Winnicott’s theory of “transitional phenomena” in the work of performance studies scholars studying the relation between psychoanalysis and performance. Attempting to forge a non-psychogistic approach to transitional phenomena grounded in Black Studies, rehearsal thus comes to name a methodological approach which asks scholars to reconsider the social dynamics of critique, reorient our relationship to art and performance as viewers, and initiate an ethical shift in our relationship to artists themselves as sites of creative activity.

I am interested, therefore, in cultural producers for whom performance functions as an invitation to collectively return to the “rehearsal space.” I argue that this invitation is borne out by practices of autobiographical (de)composition and para-performance: formal and modal interventions that foreground representational aporias in hopes of re-animating and redirecting the relation between race, gender, sexuality, and collective desires for social transformation. Over the course of this project, then, I perform readings of a variety of twentieth and twenty-first-century texts and performances that serve as exemplary instances of how these theories are practically engaged. I consider Lorraine Hansberry’s posthumously produced Les Blancs (1970) in order to rethink the relation between the discourse surrounding her archive and public acknowledgments of her sexuality; between a prefiguration of contemporary discourses regarding gender non-conformity in Les Blancs and Hansberry’s anti-colonial and feminist politics. I also read Yiyun Li’s memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life (2018) both with and against Frank Chin’s formative and controversial interventions in Asian American studies. I propose autobiographical (de)composition as a non-comparative method for reading the haunt of slavery and colonialism in colonial languages, following the work of Lisa Lowe and Sora Han. Finally, I consider Young Jean Lee’s experimental take on black identity in The Shipment (2009) alongside Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview (2018), a play which refracts and intensifies the formal interventions Lee introduces through para-performative practices. A reflection on Adrian Piper’s Funk Lessons (1983) alongside her retrospective study of “unsynthesized intuitions” in her conceptual and performance art then serves as a coda to this dissertation.