#e patrick johnson

[chantssecrets]

Directed by Karen Thorsen. Restored and remastered in 2K HD from the original 16mm negative Including a “Conversation with Jimmy” featuring director Karen Thorsen in conversation with scholar E. Patrick Johnson about Baldwin’s life, legacy, and continued importance.

[leftofblack]

Left of Black S9:E18:  E .Patrick Johnson on the Oral Histories of Black. Queer. Southern. Women

Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal (@NewBlackMan) is joined in the studio by professor and artist, E. Patrick Johnson, author of innumerable books including two award-winning books, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Duke University Press, 2003), and Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South – An Oral History (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). His latest book is Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: An Oral History,  is drawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South revealing  the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, gender, and class identities – all linked by a place where such identities have generally placed them on the margins of society.

Johnson is the chair of African American Studies and the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University.

[pheowrites]

current read

[tmaemoll]

E Patrick Johnson quoting Audre Lorde. (From “Quare Studies.” Original quote from Sister Outsider.

[ameenasanththeoryblog-blog-blog]

E. Patrick Johnson’s Sweet Tea & Performance Ethnography

Abstract

Saltzberg, Matt  2012 On Sweet Tea: A Yankee’s Response. Text and Performance Quarterly 32(3):259-268

Matt Saltzberg’s “On Sweet Tea: A Yankee’s Response” explores the impact and usefulness of performance ethnography by looking at E. Patrick Johnson’s performance of his “oral history archive,” Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (Saltzberg 2012:260)). Through his performance, Johnson attempts to access something essential in the stories of the various narrators, thereby revealing a shared humanity and destabilizing the truth of discrete identity categories. Saltzberg opens his discussion of Johnson’s work by disclosing that he is a White, gay man from downstate New York. But this Whiteness, according to Saltzberg, is no more impenetrable than Johnson’s Blackness, that is: both identity positions are constituted via performance, which can be appropriated by bodies no matter their phenotypical characteristics. This argument is substantiated through reference to Johnson’s performance of Countess Vivian, Larry J., Chaz/Chastity, and others whose recounted experiences as gay Black men of the South reveal the possibility to connect to Others through storytelling. This possibility is especially relevant to Anthropology as the field seeks to understand the human condition through reflection on the self, the Other, and the relation between the two.

My interest in performance ethnography stems mostly from my concern with the constitution of identity, especially as it relates to what has been referred to as Blackness, and the relationship between Blackness and performance. Prior to reading Saltzberg’s work, I was not at all familiar with performance ethnography or Dwight Conquergood’s dialogic performance. But like Saltzberg, I’ve seen Johnson’s performance and, from it, have been moved to question the relationship between a researcher, their embodied position, and the stories they relay. One question that Johnson’s work inspires is of how a researcher, given their embodied position, can relate to the stories of another who may or may not be situated in a different cultural context, but who is always situated in a body that particularizes their experiences. Ethnographic performance, according to Saltzberg, provides the possibility, not of transcending race, gender, or sexuality, but of forcing a confrontation both with embodied stories that are marked by those features and with a researcher who must maneuver through those stories in their own marked body. These confrontations reveal how much performance matters in constructing our realities, but also how those matters to which we give meaning—skin color, body parts, sexual activity—may not be as fixed as we assume.

Through his engagement with Johnson’s work, Saltzberg concludes that his downstate-New-York Whiteness, his Yankeeness, exceeds the stereotypical image of the average American constructed by “early nineteenth-century American drama” (2012:267). Johnson’s work reveals that performance destabilizes this racial position so that there is no inherent connection between Saltzberg’s physical markers and constructions of Whiteness. Though this conclusion is sufficient, I am disappointed with Saltzberg’s lack of application of the ideas drawn from Johnson’s work to his own work. As a performer, director, and professor, Saltzberg’s phenotypical Whiteness remains relevant in his performances, just as Johnson’s body cannot be overlooked even as he embodies the stories of similarly situated gay, Black men of the South.

Saltzberg’s conclusion that no inherent tie exists to bind performances of Whiteness and physical markers of Whiteness seems to miss the question of Johnson’s work: What happens when two embodied experiences collide? That Saltzberg’s Whiteness is more than a stereotype, though arguably relevant, does nothing to actually come to terms with what his particularized, “Gay Man of the North” (Saltzberg 2012:259) Whiteness means, for example, when he introduces Johnson’s work to his Black female student who then cries “sweet and bitter” tears (Saltzberg 2012:267). What does it mean for him to relay that story—to hold such a “position of authority” (Saltzberg 2012:262)? Saltzberg’s answers to these questions would likely be interesting, and would have made a satisfying addition to an otherwise good introduction to performance ethnography.

Videos

Promo Video for E. Patrick Johnson’s "Sweet Tea :Black Gay Men of the South"

E. Patrick Johnson visits George Eagerson, a.k.a Countess Vivian

[thebookwrightsbooks]

Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity by E. Patrick Johnson "Performance artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnson’s provocative study examines how blackness is appropriated and performed—toward widely divergent ends—both within and outside African American culture. Appropriating Blackness develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identity—avowed and disavowed, attractive and repellent, fixed and malleable. Drawing on performance theory, queer studies, literary analysis, film criticism, and ethnographic fieldwork, Johnson describes how diverse constituencies persistently try to prescribe the boundaries of "authentic" blackness and how performance highlights the futility of such enterprises.Johnson looks at various sites of performed blackness, including Marlon Riggs’s influential documentary Black Is . . . Black Ain’t and comedic routines by Eddie Murphy, David Alan Grier, and Damon Wayans. He analyzes nationalist writings by Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver, the vernacular of black gay culture, an oral history of his grandmother’s experience as a domestic worker in the South, gospel music as performed by a white Australian choir, and pedagogy in a performance studies classroom. By exploring the divergent aims and effects of these performances—ranging from resisting racism, sexism, and homophobia to excluding sexual dissidents from the black community—Johnson deftly analyzes the multiple significations of blackness and their myriad political implications. His reflexive account considers his own complicity, as ethnographer and teacher, in authenticating narratives of blackness."

[jeremymlange]

E. Patrick Johnson

Author of Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South

Shot for INDY Week

[whatijustread]

In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Moten)

"What if the beholder glances, glances away, driven by aversion as much as desire? This is to ask not only, what if beholding were glancing; it is also --or maybe even rather-- to ask, what if glancing is the aversion of the gaze, a physical act of repression, the active forgetting of an object whose resistance is now not the avoidance but the extortion of the gaze" (233)?

and from Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity:

These voices were so strange on it and the feeling was just fantastic. To me it was weird, like it was very exotic and at the same time, kind of earthy and truthful.... There was one strong singer, the alto, and then there was somebody else who sounded like someone's dying grandmother, who was sort of seemingly singing lower than the alto in this kind of strange voice that was not always kind of hitting the same harmonies as someone else. And then there was a sort of bass voice that you could barely hear so voices didn't blend and half of it was inaudible, and that just added a fantastic character to it and I just wanted to find out more about it (164).

problems: the very thing that brings the founder of The Café of the Gate of Salvation gospel is a rather normative, racist, dare i say, effed up understanding of blackness.  he listens to an album of black folks singing.  and, almost immediately, the notion of death just sorta pops up.  it's as if blackness and death are interarticulated, that black folks share an intense, on-the-edge relation to death and dying that others do not have...and more than sharing this intense capacity towards and for death, it is celebrated.  ok.  sure.  there are all kinds of reasons to think about blackness and death.  

but there are all sorts of reasons why the Hillsong Church that is also in Australia, who sing gospel, could also help him articulate the "strangeness" of voices.  what i think is really happening, then, is that the strangeness of voice that he detects is really his strange relationship to any voice, no less those of folks he normatively and easily considers near death. sure. listen to black gospel music. love it. perform it. i don't care. but when the "reason" for its gripping is held in some vulgar associative relations of blackness and death, excuse me while i give you a good side-eye. that is, the jump from blackness to death, from black voices to dying voices was that difficult a chasm for him to leap anyway. it was a ready-made idea. there is a rather normal and normative claim for the impossibility of social life of black folks that animates his very desire to claim this music as possible for him to produce. 

there appears to be an aversion of the possibility of black social life; but of course, this aversion bodies forth, it emerges, by way of the very social life that he only recognizes and hears as the verge of death, of dying. i am fascinated by the claim insofar as its but another display of the necessity to mine the very social field that, previous to mining, is declared as nothing other than a dead social field. ish is corny. but whatever.

it seems, moreso though, that this same kind of aversion to social life is that which makes a certain kind of bourgeois subject position that is all the rage in black studies possible. and i think we must theorize what i see as an aversion of black gospel music as necessarily belonging to a more general theory and philosophy of aversion that works itself out in the ways jazz and the blues are taken up in literary and cultural discourse as tropes of black life, leaving pretty much undone the spirituals and gospel. not that i'm cool with, or think them totally unflawed, tropologies but the very resistance to a certain socio-sexual-sonic field is hella intriguing to me.

so maybe: we can begin to expand upon Moten's notion of the averted gaze to be even more attentive to the philosophy of aversion and the averted: that is, what is it to have aversion to things, and how is this a teleological principle and where can we find it? might we come to think more rigorously with Anthony Heilbut who makes the argument that the Holiness/Pentecostal church is "the blackest of institutions" wherein he locates the blackest deployment of blackness in a queer, non-normative, celebratory, loud, raucous, testimonial, confessional, theological space that separates out itself ["we are in the world, but not of it"] while remaining radically open to others joining in, being born in, birthed, experiencing with? 

are we afraid of movement? are we afraid of being moved? do we associate certain modes of movement and behavior with the things from which we would so escape [a certain blackest-ness comportment?  blackness itself? radical sociality?]

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an attendant question: what is black gospel music?  is gospel music a style? is there an ontological feature or set of capacities by which it moves? or do the lyrics make something "gospel"?  

  when i think/theorize "black gospel music" i do think there is a theology that is involved, but it is one that is not reducible to christianity; i think there is a theology of blackness that operates that is about a radical sort of openness and opening, a refusal of enclosure, an acceptance of encounter with the Divine [but the Divine is more than just God/Jesus/Christ; the Divine seems to be a new sociality of blackness or something...