This performance and transcript emerge from a collaborative journey that grapples with what it might mean to agitate dominant pedagogical and methodological conventions of Eurocentric Angophone academia. Together, we perform an argument and a search: for multiple entry points into decolonizing feminisms; for multiple modes of knowing and being that can interrupt and challenge the epistemes that are rooted in thoughts and practices of colonialism and coloniality; for interrogating the dominant politics of citation that often operate in academic practices in disembodied ways. We search for a politics of knowing that is firmly rooted in relationalities where power and authority can be shared across uneven and unequal locations and languages. We invite you to step into the spaces that we have started imagining here and push all of our collective conversations and imaginations further, beyond the silos that cage us in our disciplined modes of thinking, writing, arguing, and dreaming.
This piece develops haunting erotics as a Black femme and feminist methodology. Following the implications of Saidiya Hartman’s formulation of ghostly pain as part and parcel of the anchoring of Blackness in abjection, I read Mayfield Brooks and Molondi Zondi’s processional and haunting performance entitled Dancing in the Hold which premiered in April of 2018 at Gibney Dance New York. With poly-vocalic attention to embodied and expressive theorizations of Black life, I locate haunting within the field of Black Studies, and more specifically in conversations about abjection and Black art. I engage Fred Moten's formulation of ‘absolute nearness’ in my discussion of intimacy in the afterlife of slavery, and then turn to Audre Lorde’s erotics in order to analyse why Black performance’s engagement of spectrality, opacity and haunting marks an emergent and healing, site of Black experimentalism (Moten, F., 2018. Black and blur. Durham: Duke University Press; Lorde, A., 1978. Uses of the erotic : the erotic as power. New York: Out & Out Books).