Hovering in the Impasse: Reza Abdoh and the Uses of Blackness

From the coffle and the auction block to the whipping post, the lynching tree, or nightly news looping the moving images of Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, or Stephon Clark approaching death, the United States is consumed by consuming the scene of antiblack violence.¹ After the mass circulation of a 1991 video of white Los Angeles police officers brutally beating Rodney King (an unarmed black man), writer and poet Elizabeth Alexander asked: “Can you be BLACK and look at this?”² She drew the text from Patricia Ward Williams’s mixed-media installation Accused/Blowtorch/Padlock, where the phrase appears in relation to a photo-document of a lynching. As race, class, gender, and sexuality radically shape a viewer’s perspective on and experience of the world, the question of who is watching such violence and what they see remains of critical importance.

This question hangs in the air when confronted with the work of theater, performance, and film artist Reza Abdoh. The artist is celebrated for his immersive, visually striking work, as much as for his anti-cathartic, violent, disturbing, and dark visions of the catastrophe of millennial life. He was part of a large Persian diaspora cast adrift after the Iranian revolution of the late 1970s. His career as a director began in the performance-rich context of Los Angeles during the 1980s, before he moved to New York where he died of AIDS at 32 in 1995.

 

His work appropriated the high formalism of the postdramatic theatrical avant-garde, fusing a visually stunning theatrical vocabulary with the stories and aesthetics of queers and people of color. The results are visceral interrogations of race, sex, gender, sexuality, pleasure, power, death, violence, and domination at the end of the millennium. However, in the critical tradition approaching his work (largely the work of white male critics and curators) the question of race and the presence of blackness—which he centered in often disturbing ways—is avoided, subdued, or simply declared to be unproblematic.³ Here I push back against this critical myopia to explore the crucial and disturbing place of blackness on Abdoh’s stages.

Though his intention clearly seems to the contrary, his work often offers less a cogent critique of antiblack racism than a frantic, exhausted, hopeless, and fleshy rearticulation of it.

In a review of the 1991 production of Abdoh’s Bogeyman, for example, critic Charles Markowitz described the piece as reflecting “a drug-addled, plague-ridden, crime-infested society that nightly reports the murders and atrocities of a civilization going down the tubes.”⁴ Markowitz invokes a series of crises commonly associated with black people, as well as queer and trans people of color: the “drug-addled” (the crack epidemic), “plague-ridden” (the AIDS pandemic), and “crime-infested” (longstanding stereotypes of black criminality). Indeed, Abdoh’s work routinely invited audiences to forge such associations, illustrating a dark vision of a dying world through the onstage utilization of blackness and the violent treatment of the black and blackened body.

The Hip Hop Waltz of Eurydice (1991) centers on the torturous lives of two white, gender nonconforming figures, Orpheus (Juliana Francis) and Eurydice (Tom Fitzpatrick). Black bodies appear throughout as fleshy symbols of denigration, exclusion, and powerlessness. The only two apparently African-descended performers (Borracha and Joselito Amen Santo) have few lines when compared with their loquacious white counterparts. Their bodies are usually displayed in silent and fetishized undress, commonly featuring collars and chains around their necks. Referred to as “The Hounds,” they lack the proper names individuating the white characters. Interchangeable and animalistic, they are routinely positioned on the outside looking in (often through windows) as howling and darkness closes in on the play’s white genderqueer protagonists.

From Picasso’s primitivism to the comics of Robert Crumb, the instrumentalization, utilization, and commonly stereotypical representation of black and brown life,

death, and corporeality has long functioned as means for both the European and US avant-garde to explore the existential limits of white life. Within white supremacist imaginaries, blackness is also commonly put to work and used as a symbol of powerlessness, social decline, and the perceived dwindling of white power, in particular. From the Willie Horton campaign advertisement in George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential run to Donald Trump’s dog-whistle invocations of gun violence in Chicago during the 2016 presidential campaign, blackness, black life, and the often radically decontextualized forms of violence experienced within black lifeworlds routinely surface as the paradigmatic example of social and cultural collapse for white audiences. Blackness, in such instances, is made a symbol for white society’s bottom. In turn, white audiences may take no end of pleasure in consuming (and yet disavowing) the recurrent spectacle of domination and the violent denigration of black people and the black body.⁵

But here we might also think of literary theorist Leo Bersani’s influential essay, “Is the Rectum a Grave.” In the essay Bersani theorizes the destruction of queer life during the first wave of the AIDS crisis by describing heterosexual patriarchy’s fundamental disavowal of queer sex (bottoming in particular). He then proposes the penetrated, ego-shattering, and queer powers of powerlessness experienced by the bottom as an ethical alternative to the dominating brutality of impenetrable patriarchal masculinity. Like Abdoh, Bersani uses blackness as a metaphor for the bottom, which is apparent in a shockingly antiblack turn early in the essay where he paints a bleak, stereotypical, and profoundly ignorant portrait of the poverty of black life in the US.⁶ Bersani does so

less to mount a critique of white supremacy than to illustrate his regrettable conclusion that gay men in the era of AIDS are being treated like black people. Blackened by their homophobic treatment, gay men are somehow more disenfranchised than black people: “In short, a few blacks will always be saved from the appalling fate of most blacks in America, whereas there is no political need to save or protect any homosexuals at all.”⁷ Bersani, like many of the white queer theorists of his generation, did not seriously entertain the possibility that one might be black and queer at the same time. Nor could he see what scholar Robert Reid-Pharr brings into focus: the use of blackness (and especially black queerness) as metaphors for the social bottom contributes to the (re)production of black queer people as disposable and violently degradable social scapegoats.⁸

Blackness, in Bersani’s hands, became a metaphor for the struggles of an unmarked, white queer vanguard. In Trump’s case it symbolizes the problem that white men must struggle against. For Abdoh, it is a sympathetic signifier for what one no longer wants to be. Blackness, when reduced to being a symbol or metaphor within white power struggles, can be used in both the service of a defensively reconstructed white national identity (Trump), a subversive but no less blindly empowered white queer masculinity (Bersani), or even a well-intended multicultural queerness (Abdoh).

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  Reza Abdoh’s The Law of Remains. Peter Jacobs (left, as Warhol) and Juliana Francis (right, as Mother), presented at Freight House, Minneapolis, October 21–25, 1992. Photo courtesy the Walker Art Center Archives
  
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  Reza Abdoh’s The Law of Remains. Pictured are members of the Dar a Luz ensemble, presented at Freight House, Minneapolis, October 21–25, 1992. Photo courtesy the Walker Art Center Archives
  
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  Reza Abdoh’s The Law of Remains. Pictured are members of the Dar a Luz ensemble, presented at Freight House, Minneapolis, October 21–25, 1992. Photo courtesy the Walker Art Center Archives
  

Take Abdoh’s Law of Remains (1991), which was first mounted in the dilapidated rooms of the Diplomat Hotel in New York before touring to another warehouse space for a performance at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis. It is a frenetic, disturbing fever dream in which Andy Warhol (portrayed by Peter Jacobs) directs a film about the Jeffrey Dahmer murders. In brief, passing moments, Law of Remains reminds its audiences that the murder victims were overwhelmingly men of color. Of Dahmer’s seventeen victims, nine were black and five were Asian, indigenous, or Latinx, but in the performance these racialized deaths largely function as a metaphor for white queer death in the era of AIDS.

Law of Remains can’t

escape the centering of whiteness. It featured a predominantly white cast, though blackness is an absent presence clinging to the margins. At one point Warhol is asked, “Mr. Warhol, why are there no African-Americans in this movie?,” to which he tellingly replies, “I don’t know.”⁹ Rapid-fire scenes are interrupted by what stage directions describe as “African dance break[s]” awkwardly embodied by the white cast.¹⁰ Twinky white performer Brendan Doyle does the primary work of portraying Dahmer’s victims. His undressed body is subject to all forms of abuse, including a sequence where he lays on the ground in front of the audience as Tom Pearl’s Dahmer chews enthusiastically at bloody entrails strewn across his flesh. Representing the black and brown victims of Dahmer’s consumptive violence with a white performer, the sequence allows for the displacement of the racialized victims of Dahmer’s crimes onto Doyle’s bloody white, queer body. Indeed, Doyle insists that the violence done to him throughout the play is misdirected precisely because he is not black, declaring at four different points, “Don’t stab me. I’m no chocolate baby.”¹¹ As in Bersani’s essay, the degradation and consumption of racialized flesh functions as a metric for revealing the destruction of white queer life in the era of AIDS.

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  Program for Reza Abdoh’s The Law of Remains, presented at Freight House, Minneapolis, October 21–25, 1992. Ephemera courtesy of the Walker Art Center Archives.
  
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The largely fleeting recurrent appearances of Asian American actor Ariel Herrera as one of Dahmer’s victims draws an onstage parallel with Dahmer’s Laotian victim, Konerak Sinthasomphone, but race functions in a distressing fashion during these sequences as well.

Sinthasomphone was a fourteen-year-old boy who escaped Dahmer, before being returned to his murderer by the police after he was found intoxicated, bruised, bloody, disoriented, and naked in the street. One of the performers recounts the police response, highlighting the racism and homophobia at play in the disposal of the boy’s life: “They said, quote, ‘intoxicated Asian, naked male was returned to his boyfriend.’ There was laughter on the tape.”¹² Yet the voice of a black woman calling 911 (a woman who was later dismissed and threatened by police when she demanded they save the boy) is twisted into little more than racial spectacle. A white actor (Pearl) vocalizes her pleas via the racialized sounds of minstrel dialect, when he does not simply abstract her attempts at saving the boy into hyperbolic and stereotypical approximations of gospel singing. In short, the voice of a black woman who is trying desperately to save the life of an Asian child is made into a punchline—one that seems intended to be spectacularly entertaining by way of a white man’s embodiment of hyperbolic, gendered blackness.

One danger of such uses of blackness—whether it be performed by the white supremacist president, the avant-garde Persian-American theater director, or the white queer theorist—is that it mistakes and misuses the dense and dark queer powers of blackness.

Here I mean to reference the long history of black power and empowerment from Nat Turner’s uprising and the Haitian revolution to the Black Panther Party and Black Lives Matter. But I am also invoking a tradition of black study that theorizes blackness, black feminism, and black queer and trans life to be grounds of power, insurgency, world-making, and transformation.¹³ These black powers are the matter of black life too dense to be sensed in the uses of blackness.

 

To put pressure on the use of blackness in Abdoh’s work is not meant to discredit his aesthetics of nihilism, which was itself rooted in and deeply reflective of the wholesale destruction of queer, black, and brown lifeworlds during his radically shortened lifetime. Rather, it is to look for some fragment of possibility and power. Abdoh’s nihilism was not absolute. There are brief and shimmering moments when the dense and dark possibilities of blackness break into the performance space. There is the genius of the black performers with whom he collaborated (especially Royston Scott, Randi Pannell, and Jacqueline Gregg), whose talents embody blackness in myriad nuanced ways. I am shook, in particular, by ephemeral moments in Tight White Right (an ill-advised 1993 adaptation of the Blaxploitation film Mandingo) where black cast members dance to and sing with the prophetic sounds of Nina Simone and Anita Baker. The black feminist interventions of Simone and Baker shatter the play’s ocean of white noise to guide us towards lines of flight rich with possibility beyond the minstrel show in which Abdoh otherwise traps us.

These moments are resonant with choreographer Ligia Lewis’s minor matters, a choreographic exploration

of blackness. minor matters is carried out by Lewis and two other dancers, and in its final moment she crawls and is perched precariously atop her crew as she reaches out, shouting, “Black!” The room plunges into darkness. This conclusion is in fact a beginning, for as performance studies scholar Mlondi Zondi writes, minor matters’s “audience is invited to meditate on the materiality of blackness and the mattering of darkness.”¹⁴ Darkness here is not merely negation and foreclosure. Rather, it is actual matter: the matter of black life mattering. minor matters concludes in a blackened space akin to the darkness of Abdoh’s dramatic imaginary, insofar as it is full with risk and danger. But it is also rich with the possibilities that cohere in blackness. Following Zondi, minor matters “invents a new kind of viewer who is disoriented, shaken, hovering in the impasse.”¹⁵ Such a blackened viewer might see beyond the nihilistic trap of envisioning blackness merely as a symbol of negation, domination, or powerlessness in order to bring into focus the ancient powers and queer new possibilities that have always emerged from and lived within the black.

Notes

¹ See Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (NY/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Koritha Mitchell, Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011); Joshua Chambers-Letson, “12 Notes on Ferguson: Black Performance and Police Power,” in Law and Performance, eds. Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merill Umphrey (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018): 207–237.

² Elizabeth Alexander, “Can you be BLACK and look at this?: Reading the Rodney King Video(s)” in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ed. Thelma Golden (NY: Whitney Museum of Art, 1994): 91-110.

³ See the dossier on Abdoh’s work in a special issue of TDR: The Drama Review: Vol. 39, Issue 4; Daniel Mufson, ed. Reza Abdoh (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Ehren Fordyce, “This is Home, This Isn’t Home: Reza Abdoh’s Tight Right White,” Modern Drama 47, no. 2 (2004): 219–236.

⁴ Charles Markowitz, “Los Angeles in Review: Bogeyman,” in Reza Abdoh, ed. Daniel Mufson (Baltimore, MD: The John’s Hopkins Press, 1999 (1991)): 99–101, 99.

⁵ I use the metaphor of the bottom both to gesture to the queerness of Abdoh’s work (which was deeply interested in the pleasures and pains of queer sex, anality, sodomy, and bottoming), while underlining the power relations that cohere within the scene of sexual bottoming. The top may use the bottom as a source for pleasure at the precise moment when the bottom is experiencing any range of sensations from pleasure and power, to pleasure-in-powerlessness, but also pain. Sometimes excruciating, terrible, unforgiving pain. The top’s power is both benevolent and dangerous insofar as the top is in a position to ameliorate this pain, but they may also increase it, even taking pleasure in its production. On the racialization of bottoming and anality, see Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (NY: NYU Press, 2010); Tan Hoang Nguyen, A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Jennifer C. Nash, “Black Anality,” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 20, no. 4 (2014): 439–460.

⁶ Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” October 43, Winter (1987): 197–222, 203-205.

⁷ Ibid, 204.

⁸ Robert Reid-Pharr, “Tearing the Goat’s Flesh,” in Black Gay Man: Essays (NY: NYU Press, 2001): 91–134.

⁹ Reza Abdoh, “Law of Remains,” in Plays for the End of the Century, ed. Bonnie Marranca (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996): 9–94, 57.

¹⁰ Ibid, 11, 18, 23, 32, 64, 80, 81.

¹¹ Ibid, 35, 40, 45, 83.

¹² Ibid, 34.

¹³ For example, see Scott and Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis, MN/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Ezili’s Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

¹⁴ Zondi, Mlondi, “On minor matters,” in Minor Matters program, minor matters presented at Roy and Edna Disney Cal Art’s Theater, Los Angeles, CA: January 12–14, 2018.

¹⁵ Ibid.

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