Table Of ContentBlack Performance on the
Outskirts of the Left
SEXUAL CULTURES
General Editors: Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyong’o, and Joshua Chambers- Letson
Founding Editors: José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini
Titles in the series include:
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
Samuel R. Delany
Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism
Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV
Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces
Juana María Rodríguez
Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance
Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini
Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture
Frances Négron- Muntaner
Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era
Marlon Ross
In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives
Judith Halberstam
Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality
Dwight A. McBride
God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence
Michael Cobb
Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual
Robert Reid- Pharr
The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory
Lázaro Lima
Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth- Century America
Dana Luciano
Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
José Esteban Muñoz
Another Country: Queer Anti- Urbanism
Scott Herring
Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American
Literary Imagination
Darieck Scott
Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries
Karen Tongson
Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading
Martin Joseph Ponce
Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled
Michael Cobb
Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias
Eng- Beng Lim
Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law
Isaac West
The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US
Slave Culture
Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride
Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings
Juana María Rodríguez
Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism
Amber Jamilla Musser
The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and
Posthuman Ecologies
Rachel C. Lee
Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men
Jane Ward
Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance
Uri McMillan
A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire
Hiram Pérez
Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality
Katherine Franke
Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post- Humanist Critique
Robert F. Reid- Pharr
Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible
Malik Gaines
For a complete list of books in the series, see www.nyupress.org.
Black Performance on the
Outskirts of the Left
A History of the Impossible
Malik Gaines
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
www.nyupress.org
© 2017 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the
author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or
changed since the manuscript was prepared.
ISBN: 978-1-4798-3703-8 (hardback)
ISBN: 978-1-4798-0430-6 (paperback)
For Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data, please contact the
Library of Congress.
New York University Press books are printed on acid- free paper, and their binding materials
are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppli-
ers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Also available as an ebook
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: A Legacy of Radical Differences 1
1. Nina Simone’s Quadruple Consciousness 21
2. Efua Sutherland, Ama Ata Aidoo, the State, and the Stage 55
3. The Radical Ambivalence of Günther Kaufmann 95
4. The Cockettes, Sylvester, and Performance as Life 135
Afterword: A History of Impossible Progress 179
Notes 203
Bibliography 213
Index 223
About the Author 233
vii
Acknowledgments
This writing has been accomplished with the insistent support of many
tremendous people to whom I wish to express my gratitude.
I started discussing this book with José Esteban Muñoz, who bril-
liantly and generously organized the field this publication enters. I am
grateful for the extra life Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyong’o, and Joshua
Chambers- Letson granted this project. Nyong’o has been a generous
advisor, offering important mentorship, even though I am a little older
than he. Jennifer Doyle and Francesca Royster gave fantastic feedback
and welcome encouragement, and thanks to Eric Zinner and Alicia
Nadkarni for their support. Great jobs and inspiring colleagues in the
Department of Performance Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts
and Hunter College’s Department of Art and Art History have made it
possible for me to get to this acknowledgment.
Sue-E llen Case advised the research from which this book was de-
veloped. Her rigor, clarity, and years of attention kept the train on track,
and her own scholarship has served as a queer inspiration. I was fortu-
nate to work with a number of consequential professors during my time
at UCLA, including Susan Leigh Foster, Steven Nelson, Janet O’Shea,
Joseph Roach, Carol Sorgenfrei, Frank Wilderson III, and Haiping Yan,
who each helped me think. Before that, while I was studying writing
at CalArts, Mady Schutzman planted several seeds that bore colorful
fruits. In this list of instructors, I am compelled to mention my high
school German teacher, Dorena Kehaulani Koopman, who taught me a
lot about order and ambivalence.
Alexandro Segade, gifted facilitator and interrogator, boyfriend par
excellence, has much to do with anything that is produced from that
which might be construed as my “self” and cannot be thanked enough.
Along with Alex and our collaborator Jade Gordon, as the group My
Barbarian, I have been able to pose in performance the questions of rep-
resentation, action, collaboration, influence, and location that instigated
ix
x | Acknowledgments
this study. I remember once leaving a graduate seminar on transnational
theory in Los Angeles, flying to Munich, taking a train through the Ital-
ian Alps, arriving at an old castle, performing a short musical adapta-
tion of Titus Andronicus that asked the audience to decide whether or
not a black baby could be the emperor of all of Italy, then taking a train
back to Munich, flying back to L.A., and going to a graduate seminar on
theories of representation. While scholarship and practice are different,
they have plenty to say to each other.
In what follows, I describe the year I was born as the end of the ex-
cessive sixties, and in some sense, this book interrogates that primal
scene. My parents, Barbara Gaines and Charles Gaines, with their vari-
ous boldnesses, are behind the pages of this labor. My in-l aws Gustavo
Segade and Irina Kaplan Segade add their own influence to the politics
and unstable raciality through which I emerged. And much support has
come my way from Joseph Rosato and Roxana Landaverde.
The diversity of these chapters reflects very different archives. Special
help negotiating these came from Rumi Missabu, Daniel Nicoletta, Pam
Tent, David Weissman, Irwin Swirnoff, Lawrence Helman, Joseph Zac-
carella, Emory Douglas, Sam Durant, Wenzel Bilger, Christina MacMa-
hon and the University of California African Studies Research Group,
Emeka Ogboh, Alicia Hall Moran, Jason Moran, Isaac Julien, Mark Nash,
Thomas Lax, and David DeWitt. Thanks to Yasmeen Chism, J. M. De-
Leon, and Ethan Philbrick for their assistance in the final stretch. Much
of chapter 1 appeared as the article “The Quadruple-C onsciousness of
Nina Simone” in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory,
July 2013, and elicited excellent feedback in that process.
This project began with the artists who are the subjects of these chap-
ters. I have only met one in person, the gracious, witty writer Ama Ata
Aidoo; the rest are deceased by the time of this acknowledgment, which
is perhaps telling. Their enduring works, in a certain parlance, give life
still. One must only consider the present ubiquity of Nina Simone’s
music to think of generation in a generative way. Despite her lifetime of
difficulties, I hear her songs played regularly these days, in all sorts of
settings. On a trip to the Middle East, I heard recordings of Simone in
cafés in both Ramallah and Jerusalem, and as I hummed along I thought
this must be an instance of transnational imagination, in all of its pos-
sibility and impossibility.
