Performative
Decolonization:
Critical Performance Ethnography, Rize,
and the Battle to Articulate Race
Rachel N. Hastings
Abstract: The montage of personal and social identities displayed
in the documentary Rize indicate that there are multiple historical,
psychological, and performative responses to racialized conditions.
This essay analyzes how the body is used as an instrument of
resistance against a society that operates within and among racial
symbol systems. Drawing upon critical ethnography and race
philosophies, this essay suggests David LaChapelle’s examination
of Krump dancers is a process of performative decolonization.
To begin, Rize is articulated as a project representative of critical
performance ethnography. Next, a discussion of the genesis of race
as a political instrument of oppression is offered. In conclusion, an
analysis of the dialectal tension between the spiritual and material
realms within the documentary Rize is discussed.
It was November of 1998.
Crowds poured into the streets of New Orleans. The brassy shrills of
trumpets shouted out to beating drums as hundreds moved toward the
Super Dome.
It was my first time. Officially.
The battle of the bands introduced the neophyte steppers. Alpha men in
© Radical Philosophy Review
Volume 12, numbers 1-2 (2009) 41-60
— 42 —
Rachel N. Hastings
•••
tan suits stepped to a tune unfamiliar to these California ears. They moved
in unison, in cadence, in a rhythm that reflected a level of commitment to
excellence. They were disciplined. Free.
It was my first time, watching Black men express a sense of subjectivity
outside of the stereotypical notions of Black identity. They looked
united. Complete. Aligned on a spiritual plane that allowed them to both
entertain, as well as educate new minds to a consciousness that nurtured
an embodiment of historical realities.
It was November of 2004.
Crowds poured into the southern California pyramid. There were no
instruments. Instead vibrations full of bass and boom leaked from speaker
boxes as the lost sons of Egypt settled into quick sand.
It was almost like my first time. Minus the unity.
Braggadocio filled the space as sharp suits took the stage. Brotha’s pulling
out all the strings to maintain reign as owners of selfhood. Somewhere
along the line someone’s performance must have been misunderstood.
Maybe it was unintended, almost an aside. Maybe it was the way the blue
canes skated across the stage and added verbal bite to the steppers physical
movements. But suddenly—brawn met fist, met jaw, met bone.
Ripples of resistance to brotherhood cut across the color line. There was
only one color dressed in specially marked jackets with numbers patched on
arm sleeves like purple hearts leaking with desire to break through colonial
mentality.
In reality, the pyramid was full of spite; charged with racialized rituals
unleashed on western soil. The audience joined hands as the emcee led the
disbelieving onlookers in a prayer asking for the strength to resist violence.
But something was missing. Something spiritual.
T
hese memories of Black subjectivity in performance came rushing
forward in 2005, when David LaChapelle turned his camera lens on a
new phenomenon rising out of modern day Watts, called Krumping.
Though similar in movement and performance, unlike the above examples, the
South Central neighborhood, often articulated as ‘violent’ and ‘impoverished,’
began to challenge its history of economic exile and internalized notions of
self-hate using one simple instrument: the body. Or rather, children born into
drug infested, gang-ridden neighborhoods used their bodies as instruments to
speak back to their living conditions. As Krump dancer and resident Dragon
explained, “This is our ghetto ballet. This is how we express ourselves. This is
the only way we see fit of storytelling. This is the only way of making ourselves
Performative Decolonization
•••
— 43 —
feel like we belong.”1
I think about the difference between what I had witnessed several
years before the release of Rize and what I was witnessing in LaChapelle’s
documentary. It was the same materiality, but a different scene. LaChapelle’s
disclaimer was simple:
THE FOOTAGE IN THIS FILM HAS
NOT BEEN SPED UP IN ANY WAY.2
Krump dancers abandoned uniformity but maintained a sense of communal
unity as they flexed their muscles and confronted their material realities.
Onlookers formed circles, like ancestors chanting at the edge of the abyss.
Daughters of Ogun organized their creative will into stripper dances that
redefined movements associated with perceptions of sexual deviancy. Bucking
shoulders accompanied thrusting pelvis while arms pumped back and forth,
creating images that retold stories of everyday experiences. Unlike what I
had witnessed, these performers embraced an alternative to submitting to the
oppressive spiritual shackling of racialization, without abandoning the use of
performing violence as a mode of resistance. This was offered as a display of
what I call performative decolonization.
The montages of personal and social identities displayed in
LaChapelle’s documentary Rize indicate that there are multiple historical,
psychological, and performative responses to racialized conditions. This essay
centers the racialized body as a performative cite of reference with the purpose
of articulating Krump dancing as part of a continuum of Black performative
responses to race and racialization. The purpose of such an endeavor is to
analyze how the body is used as an instrument of anti-colonial resistance
against a society that operates within and among racial symbol systems.
My suggestion is that the project directed by LaChapelle engages in
the historical preservation of an embodied ritual of resistance, yet I extend
his preservation to include an analysis of Krump dancing as a process of
performative decolonization. To begin, I discuss Rize as a project representative
of critical performance ethnography. Next, I offer a discussion of the intellectual
location as a means of situating Krump Dancers within a continuity of Black
performative practices responding to conditions of racialization. In conclusion,
I offer a discussion of the dialectal relationship between the spiritual and
material realities of Krump dancers engaged in performative decolonization.
1. David LaChapelle, Anthony Talauega, Barry Peele, Coleen Haynes, Drew Carolan,
Rize, selections, DVD, directed by David LaChapelle (Santa Monica, CA: Lion’s Gate
Entertainment, 2005).
2. Ibid.
— 44 —
Rachel N. Hastings
•••
Performing Critically, Critical Performance: Performance, Ethnography,
and the Intellectual Location
The selection of critical performance ethnography as a theoretical lens is twofold. First, ethnographic methods were deployed not only in the making of
Rize, but also in the creation of race as a political instrument determining
social status. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze notes that “Enlightenment philosophy
was instrumental in codifying and institutionalizing both the scientific and
popular European perceptions of the human race.”3 In agreement with Eze’s
designation of paradigmatic origins, philosophers Robert Bernasconi and
Tommy Lott recognize that methodologically, “leading theorists of race of
the late eighteenth century, like Kant and Blumenbach, were dependent on
the information available to them, which was mainly supplied by travelers
in missionary activity, colonial enterprises, and trade including, of course,
the slave trade.”4 Given this, it seems only appropriate to turn to critical
performance ethnography as a method of inquiry.
From a contemporary perspective, Olorisa Omi Osun Olomo (also
known as Joni Jones), explains performance ethnography as
ethnographic research embodied by the ethnographer, the fieldwork community, an audience, or any combination of these participants. Performance ethnography rests on the idea that bodies
harbor knowledge about culture, and that performance allows for
the exchange of that knowledge across bodies.5
D. Soyini Madison offers an explanation of the critical turn that extends this
perspective in her explanation that
criticism, ethics, and performance require a level of theoretical
understanding. Theory becomes a necessity, because it guides the
meanings and the vocabulary for each of these domains. Critical
analysis is grounded in social theory, ethics is grounded in moral
philosophy, and performance is both a practice and a theory. In
accepting the significance of theoretical knowledge, it is equally
important for us to comprehend the way in which theory is at the
same time method, and at other times distinct from it.6
3. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Race and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Blackwell
Publishing, 1997), p. 5.
4. Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott, The Idea of Race (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing, 2000), p. viii.
5. Joni Jones, “Performance and Ethnography, Performing Ethnography, Performance
Ethnography,” in The Sage Handbook of Performance Studies, eds. D. Soyini Madison and
Judith Hamera (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2006), pp. 339-345, p. 339.
6. D. Soyini Madison, Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance (Thousand
Performative Decolonization
•••
— 45 —
By embodying ethnographic research through performance, researchers are
offered the unique opportunity of bridging social analysis, moral philosophy,
and cultural experiences in a manner that both preserves the beliefs and
values of the group, as well as potentially exposes a performative condition
disciplining social norms.
Second, centering the body as an epistemological factor allows for a
discussion of both the ontological and material conditions fueling the source
of Krump dancing. By honoring the Black inscribed body as an intellectual
reference point, an analysis of the intellectual location within one’s performative
condition will “force us to acknowledge our own power, privilege, and biases
just as we denounce the power structures that surround our subjects.”7
In his article “Locating the Eurocentric Assumptions about African
History,” Molefi Asante explains the “intellectual location is the psychological
and historical space occupied by an observer of phenomenon.”8 In this respect,
I am using the term intellectual location to describe the spiritual and material
realities that one performs within. Envisioning Asante’s intellectual location
as a grid, personal and familial perspectives are represented on a vertical axis
as psychological understandings that guide perceptions and ideals. These may
be memories, family members, and/or everyday experiences of self and Other.
On an intersecting, horizontal axis, the historical reveals collective, grouporiented perspectives contributing to the production of cultural, political, and/
or ideological narratives about a people.
Re-imagining intellect by placing it within psychological and historical
space allows for a joining with critical ethnographer Dwight Conquergood’s
articulation of location “imagined as an itinerary instead of a fixed point.
Our understanding of the ‘local context’ expands to encompass the historical,
dynamic, often traumatic, movements of people, ideas, images, commodities,
and capital.”9 It is my suggestion that because one axis appears to be spiritually
driven, the other materially, the intellectual location, marking where one is
positioned between the psychological and historical planes, is fluid and always
in a process of traveling through performative situations conditioned by a
system of power.
To reflect the Afrocentric position offered by Asante and Olaniyan’s
projection of the performative as “a self-critical model that conceives identity
as open, interculturally negotiable, and always in the making—a process,”10 I am
Oaks: Sage Publications, 2005), p. 12.
7. Ibid., p. 14.
8. Molefi Asante, “Locating the Eurocentric Assumptions about African History,” in
Egypt vs. Greece and the American Academy, eds. Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama
(Chicago: African American Images, 2002), pp. 7-24, p. 8.
9. Dwight Conquergood, “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research”
The Drama Review, 46 (2002), pp. 145-56, p. 145.
10. Tejumola Olaniyan, Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance (New York: Oxford
— 46 —
Rachel N. Hastings
•••
using the term performative condition to conceptualize the power structures and
historical patterns that conditioned the responses of Black American artists.
As Asante asserts, “we have not solved our problems until we can explain how
certain structural constraints exist in the world of the culturally oppressed and
psychologically dominated, and how intellectual discourse is hierarchal.”11
Performance is central to a recognition of the performative condition
Black artists, and in this case Black dancers, function within because, as E.
Patrick Johnson notes, the “epistemological moment of race manifests itself
in and through performance in that performance facilitates self- and cultural
reflexivity—a knowing made manifest by a ‘doing’.”12 Recently, many
performance scholars, particularly in the methodological areas of critical
and performance ethnography, have invested in co-creating more humanistic
performance situations. In this way, Performance Studies has struggled “to
open the space between analysis and action, and to pull the pin on the binary
opposition between theory and practice. This embrace of different ways of
knowing is radical because it cuts to the root of how knowledge is organized
in the academy.”13
Conversations across the construct of race reveal a difference in
interpreting historical moments, aesthetic agendas, as well as methodological
approaches, which have been shaped by experiences of color. Perhaps this is
because, as Conquergood notes, “subjugated knowledges” are “illegible; they
exist, by and large, as active bodies of meaning, outside of books, eluding the
forces of inscription that would make them legible, and thereby legitimate.”14
Or perhaps it is that “the same racist practices of exclusion, omission, or
derision in the past only provided a fertile ground for the perpetuation of those
same practices today.”15 Dialogue between scholars interested in combating
hegemonies rooted in performances of race and racism, tend to occur between
the theoretical body of White Studies and an experience of Blackness as
expressed by performance scholars of Black and/or African (American)
descent.16
University Press, 1995), p. 4.
11. Molefi Asante, The Afrocentric Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998),
p. 33.
12. E. Patrick. Johnson, “Black Performance Studies: Genealogies, Politics, Futures,”
in The Sage Handbook, pp. 446-463, p. 446.
13. Conquergood, “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research,” p. 146.
14. Ibid., p. 146.
15. E. Patrick. Johnson, “Black Performance Studies: Genealogies, Politics, Futures,”
p. 448.
16. See Shannon Jackson, “White Noises: On Performing White, On Writing
Performance,” The Drama Review, Vol. 42 (1998), 49-65; Spry, Tami. “From Goldilocks
to Dreadlocks: Hair-Raising Tales of Racializing Bodies,” in The Green Window:
Proceedings of the Giant City Conference on Performative Writing, eds. Lynn Miller and
Performative Decolonization
•••
— 47 —
While the artistic statements of Black aestheticians forward multifaceted interpretations of what constitutes the Black experience, a vast
majority of those responding to questions of Blackness by offering historical
understandings of the origin of the idea of race, its relationship to color (or
racialization), and the ways it has contributed to shaping the Black American
artists’ agenda, have been intellectually repressed. The significance of
this missing element is reflected in how the epistemological value of Black
American performance is reduced to a question of representation that is often
defined outside of Black consciousness. This limits cross-cultural conversation
concerning the cultural imperative of particular aesthetics and confines
dialogue to a legitimization of the value of an African-centered paradigm of
public performance. From this perspective, the lack of projected understanding
surrounding the political instrument of race and its relationship to color has
created an atmosphere where a particular paradigm of performance becomes
the standard of assessment, thus a racialized performative condition. As
opposed to creating space for various ethno-cultural values to be staged, an
amalgamation of cultural practices gets reduced to a policy of universal human
allegiance, as expressed through a Eurocentric system of logic. What becomes
apparent in the genealogical and generational structure of race as a political
invention is a conflict between performative situations, where performers
gather to offer sound critiques concerning power and social relationships, and
the racialized performative condition, where institutionalized power patterns
perpetuate ideological positions that prevent adjusting institutional structures.
The Performative Condition: Race-ing Roots, Rooting Race
One component influencing this tension between performative situations and
the racialized performative condition is the repression of Black perspectives
dedicated to exploring, explaining, and even embracing a history of discursive
and semantic meanings of race. Several Black intellectuals held fast to the
use of color and race philosophies as a means of expressing their intellectual
location. This group seeks to establish a relationship between the idea of
Ronald Pelias (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), pp. 52-65;
Warren, John. Performing Purity: Whiteness, Pedagogy, and the Reconstitution of Power (New
York: Peter Lang, 2003); D. Soyini Madison, “‘That Was My Oral Occupation’: Oral
Narrative, Performance, and Black Feminist Thought,” Text and Performance Quarterly,
Vol. 13 (1993), pp. 213-32; E. Patrick Johnson, “Performing Blackness Down Under:
The Café of the Gate of Salvation,” Text and Performance Quarterly, Vol. 22 (2002), pp.
99-119; E. Patrick Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About
Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother,” Text and Performance Quarterly,
Vol. 21 (2001), pp. 1-25; Bryant K. Alexander, “Racializing Identity: Performance,
Pedagogy, and Regret,” Cultural Studies ßà Critical Methodologies, Vol. 4 (2004), pp.
12-27.
— 48 —
Rachel N. Hastings
•••
race as a social contract enacted by Eurocentric policies and the performative
response of Black Americans to better understand the intellectual location of
Krump dancers participating in a process of performative decolonization. My
examination is not meant to exhaust the extensive writings related to the theme
of race; rather it functions to establish clarity concerning the use-value of race
as a means of understanding the performative strategies used to resituate Black
subjectivity into a more appropriate intellectual canon.
While African and Asiatic spiritualities articulated an interconnected
dependency between humans and nature, Hegel explained that Europeans
lived in conflict with the Other. He proposed that the European’s interest in the
world
is to make this Other confronting him his own, to bring to view the
genus, law, universal, thought, the inner rationality, in particular
forms of the world. As in the theoretical, so too in the practical
sphere, the European mind strives to make manifest the unity between itself and the outer world. It subdues the outer world to its
ends with an energy which has ensured for it the mastery of the
world. The individual here, in his particular actions proceeds from
fixed general principles; and in Europe the State, by its rational
institutions, exhibits more or less the development and realization
of freedom unimpeded by the caprice of a despot.17
To grasp the meaning of Hegel’s influence in the adoption of race as a
social contract enacted against the Other, a brief summary of the Western
conception of race is necessary. In 1684, Francois Bernier suggested the
term ‘race’ identify geographical designations of people based on physical
features, environmental conditions, and beauty. Immanuel Kant developed
the observations of the Natural Sciences into a scientific definition, drawing
on metaphysical methodologies to discern the purpose of specific groups of
people. From this scientific definition, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, drawing
on Linnaeus, shifted the geometrical design of peoples into a hierarchy of
aesthetic beauty, which also led to symbolic identification between color and
temperament. Hegel then extends Blumenbach’s hierarchal design of the
idea of race beyond geography, physical aesthetics, color, and temperament
to the realm of spirituality as expressed through an organization of mental
capabilities. He draws on geography as a reference point for measuring
rationality from a nationalistic viewpoint, contributing to how Europe defined
the Kantian notion of the “highest good.” By using “race” as the unifying
thread between the variables of physical features, spiritual and sexual practices,
mental capabilities, and geographical locale, the white Western imagination
17. G.W.F. Hegel, “Anthropology,” in The Idea of Race, pp. 28-44, p. 43.
Performative Decolonization
•••
— 49 —
produced an embodied aesthetic ethic that expressed a set of values and beliefs
embedded in the construction of Western civilization. The result of these
philosophical theories concerning the idea of race was the establishment of
“an instrument for determining who should have power, authority, prestige,
agency, and independence.”18
The suggestion here is the idea of race, birthed in the white Western
imagination, is the “white thing,” Larry Neal addresses in his article “The
Black Arts Movement.”19 It is my contention that a close analysis of the
philosophies of three canonical Black intellects will reveal a two-fold purpose
of first, destroying internalized values of Westernized ideas as a revolutionary
act of cultural departure, and then, to construct from this rubble, an image
of the Black subject intellectually located in historical, social, political, and
cultural realities that resonates with the experience of Black Americans in the
United States, resulting in a form of performative decolonization.
The discursive strategies deployed by Black American political artists
addressed the state-sanctioned discourse of race in a variety of ways. With the
color-line continuing to be a source of conflict, W.E.B. Du Bois proposed the
use of race as a means of unifying and organizing the efforts of black folks.
He offered his definition of race as “a vast family of human beings, generally
of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and
impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the
accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life.”20 Du
Bois explained that their destiny was “not absorption by the white Americans.”21
In the aesthetic realm, Langston Hughes continues this point in his
articulation of the ‘racial mountain’ that Black artists face. In his 1926 article
“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes explains,
One of the most promising of the Negro poets said to me once, ‘I
want to be a poet—not a Negro poet,’ meaning, I believe, ‘I want
to write like a white poet’; meaning subconsciously, ‘I would like
to be a white poet’; meaning behind that, ‘I would like to be white.’
And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever
been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a
great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true
Negro art in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness,
18. Asante, “Locating the Eurocentric Assumptions about African History,” p. 10.
19. Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” in Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts
Movement Writings, ed. Larry Neal (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989), pp.
62-78.
20. W.E.B. Du Bois “The Conservation of Races,” in The Idea of Race, pp. 108-117, p.
110.
21. Ibid., p. 112.
— 50 —
Rachel N. Hastings
•••
the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American
standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American
as possible.22
Hughes, as one of the premiere poets of the Harlem Renaissance, recognized
how the “Negro artist works against an undertow of sharp criticism and
misunderstanding from his own group and unintentional bribes from
whites.”23 The unintentional bribery instilled in white approval was at the cost
of the artist’s racialized reality. This is directly tied to the upward mobility
of the Black community, who, according to Hughes’ critique, encouraged an
erasure of racial components for an easy assimilation into standardized white
American culture. For Hughes, then, “the duty of the young Negro artist, if he
accepts any duty at all from outsiders, [is] to change through the force of his art
that old whispering ‘I want to be white,’ hidden in the aspirations of his people,
to ‘Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro—and beautiful!”24 Hughes’
analysis is not simply a call for recognizing and resisting acculturation; it also
functions as a methodological manifesto, staking claim in the value and depth
of material available within the culture of Black folk.
In her 1934 article, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” Zora Neal
Hurston implements ideas forwarded by Du Bois and Hughes, by choosing to
record the linguistic and communicative (dis)continuities between all Black
communities and dominant society. This action not only supports Hughes’ call
for Black artists (and in this case, researchers) to use the depth of their cultural
and personal experiences as a creative source of knowledge, it also exposes the
use of performance as a pedagogical tool within Black culture. Hurston argues
that the “Negro’s universal mimicry is not so much a thing in itself as an
evidence of something that permeates his entire self. And that thing is drama.
His very words are action words.”25
Hurston’s exposure of particular linguistic and non-verbal
communicative patterns unveils structural and epistemic components
rooted in communities of common Black folk. Hurston’s findings reveal the
connection between form and content as interdependent aspects of Black
reality. The form (in this case, the body) is called into being in the recognition
of enfleshed symbols of social discourse (race), while the content is reflected
in the acceptance, resistance, or negotiation of such discourse in every day
life (or drama). This is especially apparent in Hurston’s analysis of drama and
22. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in African American
Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Winston Napier (New York: New York University Press,
2000), pp. 27-30, p. 26.
23. Ibid., p. 29.
24. Ibid., p. 30.
25. Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” in African American
Literary Theory: A Reader, pp. 31-44, p. 31.
Performative Decolonization
•••
— 51 —
language. Hurston explained that drama was central to Black life.
Every phase of Negro life is highly dramatized. No matter how
joyful or how sad the case there is sufficient poise for drama. Everything is acted out. Unconsciously for the most part of course.
There is an impromptu ceremony always ready for every hour of
life. No little moment passes unadorned.26
Hurston’s connection between everyday life and drama is found in the
embodiment of language. Speech serves a purpose by denoting enacted images
embedded within words. Hurston marks the distance between language and
ideas in the dominant culture by explaining “people with highly developed
languages have words for detached ideas. That is legal tender. “‘That-whichwe-squat-on’ has become ‘chair.’ ‘Groan-causer’ has evolved into ‘spear,’ and
so on.”27 She uses this as a comparative reference to the
primitive man [who] exchanges descriptive words. His terms are all
close-fitting. Frequently the Negro, even with detached words in
his vocabulary—not evolved in him but transplanted on his tongue
by contact—must add action to it to make it do. So we have “chopaxe,” “sitting-chair,” “cook-pot,” and the like because the speaker
has in his mind the picture of the object in use. Action. Everything
illustrated. So we can say the white man thinks in a written language and the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics.28
Identifying the use of metaphor, simile, double descriptives, and verbal nouns
embedded in language, Hurston reveals how Black people use speech as a
pedagogical tool where Black “interpretation of the English language is in
terms of pictures. One act described in terms of another.”29
The recognition of language as action is epistemically compelling both
in performances of everyday life, and in the staging of the Black experience.
Hurston draws on dance as a description of the dialectical relationship between
spectator and performer. In her description of Negro dancing as “dynamic
suggestion,” where “no matter how violent it may appear to the beholder, every
posture gives the impression that the dancer will do much more,” Hurston
situates the dancer as a non-verbal expression of Black language.30 Yet the
“spectator himself adds the picture of ferocious assault…He is participating
26. Ibid., p. 31.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., p. 32.
29. Ibid., p. 31.
30. Ibid., p. 35.
— 52 —
Rachel N. Hastings
•••
in the performance himself—carrying out the suggestions of the performer.”31
While the action expresses a particular understanding through movement and
image, it is the cultural perception of the performer’s body that reveals much
about the reader of that performance. As Hurston explained, “the Negro is
restrained, but succeeds in gripping the beholder by forcing him to finish the
action the performer suggests.”32 It is in how one interprets the suggested action
that produces knowledge of self and other.
Hurston’s identification of characteristics specific to Black peoples
helps to highlight cycles of linguistic originality under a performative condition
of racial domination. Her definition of originality as “the modification of
ideas…treatment of borrowed material,” breathes life into her claim that the
“Negro is a very original being. While he lives and moves in the midst of a
white civilization, everything that he touches is reinterpreted for his own use.
He has modified the language, mode of food preparation, practice of medicine,
and most certainly the religion of his new country.”33
Du Bois, Hughes, and Hurston represent a highly honored, yet
marginalized faction of Black American cultural workers who recognized
the racialized relationship between art and politics, aesthetics, and ethics.
Their research of Black communicative practices, performative expressions,
and continued belief in the legitimacy of Black intellect, constitute a unique
Black performative tradition laying the groundwork for a departure from
internalized Western values and beliefs. By analyzing LaChapelle’s Rize, a
clearer understanding of the intertextual nature of art and politics as a moral
imperative within a continuum of Black performative practices may be reached.
Performative Decolonization: Spiritual Possession and the Battle to
Articulate Oppression
Molefi Asante reflects in The Afrocentric Idea
Often ignorant of African philosophy and culture, commentators have imposed Western constructs and values on material that
grows out of coherent, albeit different, traditions. The result has
been a failure to understand or value that material as well as an
inability to recognize or correct that failure.34
LaChapelle’s film Rize does not escape Asante’s concerns, as
responses to the movie reveal the dominant culture’s inability to read the Black
experience as articulated through the Black body. This is partially due to the
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., p. 35-36.
33. Ibid., p. 37.
34. Asante, The Afrocentric Idea, p 25.
Performative Decolonization
•••
— 53 —
over-saturation of Western perspectives in our society, as well as LaChapelle’s
lack of any attempt to articulate this experience, choosing instead to allow the
personal narratives of Krump dancers to stand on their own. In some ways,
this approach is rightfully interpreted as a “confluence of racism, violence, and
poverty in the neighborhood visibly wear[ing] upon the teenagers, krumping
becoming their means of escape and expression.”35 Others such as Harrington
choose to articulate Krumping as “a mix of underground street fighting,
moshing, and holiness church spirit possession.”36 But more often than not,
the embodied engagement with racial realities is viewed, as Trebay explains,
a form of “demonic possession,”37 rather than as a manifestation of the Black
performative response to racial conditions. The recognition of the spiritual
and material components of Krump dancing indicates a dialogue occurring
between ontological and material modes of being where dance becomes a
language expressing one’s intellectual location. This section examines spiritual
possession as a method of performative decolonization within the Battle Zone,
an abysmal space of confrontation.
Tejumola Olaniyan’s discussion of Black aestheticians suggests
the performative as an articulation of cultural identity, as opposed to an
acceptance of subjugating discourses. Olaniyan reflects upon how “Identity
as ‘articulation’ is enabling, but this is hardly all. Articulation is not simply
a complex structure but a structured complex structure, that is, a structure
of elements in relations of dominance and subordination.”38 This can be
interpreted to mean that placement within power relations during particular
historical eras produces alternative expressions of selfhood. While those in
power engage in exploitation, oppressed communities continue to invent
strategies of articulation and revolutionary struggle.
The Battle Zone becomes a space where the dancers are filled with
the spirit; their bodies used as vehicles of expression confronting the original
severance from the source of their communal existence. The dancers in Rize
move in graceful destruction, like Oya, joining Shango in his electrifying battles
calling for swift, systemic change. The dancers move because they know they
will be
redeemed only by action…To act, the promethean instinct of rebellion, channels anguish into a creative purpose which releases
man from a totally destructive despair, releasing from within him
35. Clare Croft, “‘Rize’ Steps Lively in Tracing South Central’s ‘Krump’ Craze,” The
Washington Post, June 2005.
36. Richard Harrington, “Moving ‘Rize’ Has Legs,” The Washington Post, June 2005.
37. Guy Trebay, “The Clowning, Rump-Shaking, Wilding-Out Battle Dancers of
South Central L.A.,” The New York Times, June 2005, 28.
38. Ibid., p. 37.
— 54 —
Rachel N. Hastings
•••
the most energetic, deeply combative inventions… Only the battle
of the will is thus primally creative; from its spiritual stress springs
the soul’s despairing cry which proves its own solace…39
For Tommy the Clown, the alternative to selling dope and living as a modern
day slave behind bars, was to get krunk. What he needed was a means of
economic stability. So he traded white powder for white make-up. His afro
went from black to rainbow. But the unfortunate truth is Rize reveals how the
conditions of his every day reality remained consistent, marking the truth in
Olaniyan’s suggestion that “performative identity is proposed here not as ready
solution but as more a useful way to negotiate the minefield of identity and
difference.”40
Olaniyan openly acknowledges that
a performative identity is not inherently and automatically insurgent or anti-imperialist, though effective forms of these struggles
are hardly conceivable without it. The performative notion enables
a conception of society and culture in which more productive resistant, insurgent identities could be thought and fashioned.41
Viewers of Rize, such as Trebay, internalize the fluctuation of identities on the
screen, and describe them as falling “under the rubric of what could be termed
the Romance of the permanent Underclass. According to the genre’s unvarying
conventions, characters must scale rope ladders of unlikely opportunity to
escape their destinies.”42 Yet there is nothing romantic about the permanence
of being marked as underclass, particularly since permanence indicates the
inescapability of racial symbolism sedimented in the superstructure of the
social system.
The failure of Trebay’s underdeveloped analysis of Rize as a
romanticized perspective of the permanent underclass is that it continues to
focus on individual narratives of struggle, resistance, and oppression, rather
than highlight the performative condition that allows for such stories to be told.
To offer such a perspective is to tokenize a few ghetto superstar realities in a
‘fifteen minutes of fame’ manner. This perspective is supported in Harrington’s
assertion that Rize reveals how in “disenfranchised communities beset by
multiple blights of poverty, drugs and gang violence, there have always been
39. Wole Soyinka, “The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of
Yoruba Tragedy,” in African American Philosophy: A Reader, ed. Emmanuel Chukwudi
Eze (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), pp. 438-446, p. 440.
40. Ibid., p. 37
41. Olaniyan, Tejumola, Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance, (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995), pp. 36-37.
42. Trebay, “The Clowning, Rump-Shaking, Wilding-Out Battle Dancers of South
Central L.A.,” June 2005.
Performative Decolonization
•••
— 55 —
stubborn, heroic artistic responses. This is simply one of the most dramatic
and one of the most inspiring.”43
LaChapelle’s choice to center the embodied voices of Krump
dancers, as opposed to offering a deeper systemic connection to metaphysical
understandings, opens the door for viewers to read Krump dancing as
‘demonic,’ ‘evangelical,’ ‘violent’ forms of self-expression, rather than as a
manifestation of Black performative principles present in a long tradition of
Black race theory. The spoken language of racial anguish and racial love reenergizes performance and the body as an epistemic resource. By aligning the
performative to an act of decolonization the possibilities of empowerment
expressed through performances of decolonization is revealed.
As Frantz Fanon explained “Decolonization, which sets out to change
the order of the world, is, obviously a program of complete disorder. But it
cannot come as a result of magical practices, not of a natural shock, nor of a
friendly understanding.”44 Decolonization is radical process, in that it aims for
a “complete calling in question of the colonial situation.”45 This calling into
question is a confrontation between the (post)colonized and (post)colonizer.
“Decolonization is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their
very nature…Their first encounter was marked by violence.”46 A complete
embodiment of decolonization recognizes Fanon’s assertion that
You do not turn any society, however primitive it may be, upside
down with such a program if you have not decided from the very
beginning, that is to say from the actual formulation of that program, to overcome all the obstacles that you will come across in
so doing. The native who decides to put the program into practice,
and to become its moving force, is ready for violence at all times.47
LaChapelle’s choice to intersplice African forms of dancing is no accident.
As Dragon expressed, “This is not a just a bunch of people acting wild. This
art form is just as valid as your ballet, as your waltz, your tap dance. Except
we didn’t have to go to school for this. Because it was already implanted in us.
Since birth.”48
Yet the transcontinental connection between the African tribal
dancers and Black American Krump dancers falls short of honoring the
often unrecognized metaphysical continuities preserved throughout the
43. Harrington, “Moving ‘Rize’ Has Legs,” June 2005.
44. Frantz Fanon, “Concerning Violence,” in African American Philosophy: A Reader, ed.
Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), pp. 142-5, p. 142.
45. Ibid., p. 142
46. Ibid., p. 37
47. Ibid.
48. LaChapelle, Rize.
— 56 —
Rachel N. Hastings
•••
African diaspora. As Croft comments, “Only in an extended dance sequence
spliced with footage of traditional African dance done in a village setting
does LaChapelle’s thoughtful eye go astray. The footage appears without
acknowledgement of tribe or accession, not receiving the same respect for its
surroundings and artistic detail afforded krumping.”49
The lack of specified explanation reflects how LaChapelle reaches
back through time for a connection without thought as to how contemporary
African dancers continue to perform the same movements and forms of
expression. The result is to situate the Black experience within traditional
contexts, trapping African performance forms within an indigenous, (perhaps,
primitive by Western standards), historical era.
Yet the narratives of Krump dancers reveal how Africans mark
time through seasons and experiences. In the same vein as traditional and
contemporary African philosophers, Dragon reflects how during a Krump
session, there is a “spirit that’s there. There’s a spirit in the…in the midst of
krumpness, there is a spirit there. You know? A lot of people think it’s just, you
know, ‘oh, they’re just a bunch of riley, just ghetto, heathen and thugs.’ No.
No, what we are, are oppressed.”50
The “oppressed” dancers in Rize enter the past by embodying the
ancestors in spiritual movements that whisper stories of place and space.
Here, these dancers tell their stories of economic hardship, interpersonal
relationships, and personal experiences in churches, family living rooms,
private parties, and community competitions. As Dragon explains,
This was our board. And from this board we float abroad and we
build us a big ship. And we’re gonna sail into the dance world, the
art world and we’re going to take it by storm. Because this is our
belief. This is not a trend. Let me repeat. This is not a trend… a
group of us, got together and we invented this.51
Many of these dancers perform these inventive manifestos because
the only thing they ever wanted to do was change their material reality. And
as Dragon explains, “You can channel that anger, anything negative that has
happened in your life you can channel that into your dancing and you can
release that in a positive way, because you’re releasing it through art. Art of
dance.”52
This is how Krump dancers begin to change their collective
consciousness. Performers become conscious of the need to respond to “the
49. Croft, “‘Rize’ Steps Lively in Tracing South Central’s ‘Krump’ Craze,” June 2005.
50. LaChapelle, Rize.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
Performative Decolonization
•••
— 57 —
racist atmosphere [that] impregnates all the elements of the social life.”53
What onlookers witness in the performances expressing this awareness moves
cultural performers, such as Miss Prissy and Dragon, from an understanding
of “racism as a consequence” of (post)colonial contact to “racism as a cause”
of structural exploitation of subjugated peoples.54 With Dragon using terms
like ‘oppressed,’ to describe the conditions dancers must perform in and Miss
Prissy describing the difference between her home environment and those of
the dominant community, it becomes clear that performing is used as a vehicle
to mark these differences.
My suggestion is that the internalized social narrative of racism exists
because of the structures in place, transitions into these structures are in place for the
production of racism in the performances of Krump dancers. To say this another
way, the performative conditions created by racist institutions allow discourses
of race and color to direct cultural performances of being. As Bryant K.
Alexander explained, “Culture is doing, race is being, and performance plays a
similar yet alternating role in the accomplishment of social membership.”55
A trudging through history in search of the genesis of race (as a
cultural theory of being), is an abysmal task. The abyss, as Soyinka describes,
is the “essential gulf that lies between one area of existence and another.”56 If
racism, (as a method of doing), is to be understood as a cause of performative
conditioning (as opposed to a consequence), then as a solution, decolonization
must be recognized as
a historical process: that is to say that it cannot be understood, it
cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact
measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content.57
To enter the historical abyss of race for the purpose of eradicating racism
would be defeatist, in that race is a permanent feature of the national landscape.
Rather, the initial goal is to best understand racial productions across history,
to best analyze contemporary strategies countering hegemonic practices. In
Rize, the abyss is represented as a space of racialized drama occurring at the
53. Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture,” in African American Philosophy: A Reader, pp.
305-310, 309.
54. Ibid., p. 309.
55. Bryant Keith Alexander, “Black Skin/White Masks: The Performative Sustainability
of Whiteness (With Apologies to Frantz Fanon),” Qualitative Inquiry, Vol. 10 (2004),
pp. 647- 672, p. 650.
56. Soyinka, “The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of
Yoruba Tragedy,” p. 440.
57. Frantz Fanon “Concerning Violence,” in African American Philosophy: A Reader, pp.
142-145, p. 142.
— 58 —
Rachel N. Hastings
•••
Battle Zone. Krump dancers challenge the limitations of their bodies for the
purpose of transcending their racial conditioning.
The point of race origination for the African is expressed in Yoruba
cosmology “as the existence in collective memory of a primal severance in the
transitional ether, whose first effective defiance is symbolized in the myth of
the gods’ decent to earth and the battle with immense chaotic growth which
had sealed off reunion with man.”58 For the African American, this point of
racial origination is identified with colonial contact on the African continent
and then the implementation of the colonial system of chattel slavery; a system
of inferiorization which severed the Black being from her African metaphysics
with the purpose of (pre)serving Western social systems. In this sense, Africans
in the United States were born into a racist culture, (as suggested in Fanon’s
assertion that “a colonial country is a racist country” because of its use of
a systemic process of inferiorization).59 Their subjection as the “destruction
of cultural values, of ways of life. Language, dress, techniques” has led to
“cultural mummification.”60 The objective attempts to make Africans a
product of Western values through policies of race, functioned as a method of
performative colonization.
And so the point of racial origination and the point of racial departure
both take place through the embodiment of discursive identification. Therefore,
the Battle Zone of decolonization also takes place on, with, and through
the body, literally and metaphorically. Just as the human body was used as
inspiration for the development of racial categorization and identification, the
recognition of racialization by the performing body causes the consciousness
to come into being. The use of performative actions through creative will calls
for the releasing of the social wraps that bind the bodies of the colonized.
This calling, that occurs through a dialect between the spiritual and the
material, is a trudging through the Black abyss of racial history, a revalorization
of “culture put into capsules,”61 a grasping of tradition where the “inferiorized
individual, after this phase of deculturation, of extraneousness comes back to
his original positions.”62
Conclusion
The documentation of Krump dancing demarcates a genealogical rebirth
within the area of Black Theatre and performance. In his article “Performing
58. Soyinka, “The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of
Yoruba Tragedy,” p. 440.
59. Fanon, “Racism and Culture,” p. 309.
60. Ibid., p. 306.
61. Ibid., p. 310.
62. Ibid., p. 309.
Performative Decolonization
•••
— 59 —
Africa in America,” Paul Carter Harrison notes an ideological shift in
philosophical concerns between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts
Movement of the 1960’s. He reflects that absent from W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1926
declaration for serious representation of “Negroes,” was “any concern for an
aesthetic departure from the conventions of the Western Tradition other than
an opportunity to produce on stage authentic (read, respectable) portrayals
of black life.”63 By 1968, Larry Neal’s aesthetic manifesto asserted that the
Black Arts Movement was “radically opposed to any concept of the artist
that alienates him from his community.”64 As such, he called for a “separate
symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology.”65 From this assertion,
Harrison explains that during “the next two decades, Black Thea(tre) began to
emerge as an ethno-specific, ritual performance mode, rather than a thea(tre)
presentation that replicates black experience.”66
By calling for a departure from Western Aesthetics and confronting
racialized realities within their performances, Black Theatre and its
performative counterpart, began to follow in the footsteps of its oratorical
predecessors and participate in what Jacob Carruthers posits as the fight against
intellectual historicide. In his book, Intellectual Warfare, Carruthers explains the
challenge of “African thinkers to decisively continue our project to dismantle
the European intellectual campaign to commit historicide against African
peoples.”67 Drawing on the work of Cheik Anta Diop (1987), Carruthers’
position functions as a reminder to those engaged in the production of
intellectual thought that “the military victory against biological genocide must
be consummated by a final triumph over the cultural tyranny that has been
imposed on the life and history of African peoples.”68
From this perspective, Carruthers views the intellectual conflict
between African and European worldviews as one where intellectual thought,
or philosophy, constructs historical, spiritual, and material realities. He argues
that the intellectual canon adopted by Western Civilization and the Eurocentric
ideologies projecting these thoughts, all “accept the Western worldview—they
share the same cultural orientation, the same view of history, the same view
of science, and so on.”69 By adopting an Afrocentric standpoint, Carruthers
applies an historical analysis to the intellectual canons of both European and
African thinkers, arguing that African American philosophers participated in a
history of intellectual contribution that can be traced back to antiquity.
63. Paul Carter Harrison, “Performing Africa in America,” Theatre Journal, Vol. 57
(2005), pp. 587-90, p. 588.
64. Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” p. 62.
65. Ibid.
66. Harrison, “Performing Africa in America,” p. 588.
67. Jacob Carruthers, Intellectual Warfare (Chicago: Third World Press, 1999), p. xiii.
68. Ibid., p. 3.
69. Ibid., p. 21.
— 60 —
Rachel N. Hastings
•••
The significance of the intellectual climate as a performative condition
is realized in Rize. The dancers documented by LaChapelle continue to reveal
how the African spirit refuses to accept the oppressive conditions in which it
must exist. Rather, this generation of Black aestheticians offers us a revision of
how one of our original art forms can continue to be used successfully as an
articulation of subjectivity and an engagement of intellectual warfare. —‌• —