Left Ruins in Ethiopia: Imagining Otherwise Amid Necroepistemic Historiography

This essay uses the notion of necroepistemology to expose the killing of the other as executed by the neoliberal historiography in Ethiopia. Utilizing Fanonian negative dialectics, it critiques the ahistorical, immaterial, and reified object, as well as universal history, promoted by the official Ethiopian historiography’s absolute time, space, and matter. It does so to reveal the ways in which the enduring social questions and new imaginations are dismissed by this historiography as the work of the global-local left. To counterbalance this practice, I return to the 1974 Ethiopian socialist revolution and to the staging of Ethiopian socialism as a critical transnational rethinking of the human in the country. At the same time, attending to the everyday struggle of women performers in both the imperial and revolutionary spaces, the essay reminds us how the revolutionary practice, which had envisioned a new social human, ended up marking female performers’ bodies as dangerous for the socialist movement. Revealing the ways in which women performers collaborated with and fought against a male revolutionary figure, this essay ends with a call to respond to the current necroepistemic moment to draw attention to the historically vulnerable people who are dying in Ethiopia in the here and now.

Patricia Herrera. Nuyorican Feminist Performance: From the Café to Hip Hop Theater

Patricia Herrera fills a void in scholarship on the Nuyorican Poets Café. Her focus on women performers ( performeras) and their writing and performance challenges these artists’ marginalization and erasure, while the Nuyorican feminist aesthetic she proposes, as situated within intersectional feminism, underscores the work’s critical intervention in feminist performance theory.

From Pari Khanas to Lal Bazaars and Further Away: Female Performers in Nineteenth Century Awadh

While there are a lot of contestations over the identity and subjectivity of women performers and entertainers of Awadh, three terms denote the most popular representations of these women in the nineteenth century. These are: the trained and sophisticated tawaʾif of the Nawabi court, the vulgar and titillating ‘nautch’ girls of the city and the ill-mannered and promiscuous “prostitute” of the British cantonment. For long, these terms have been used to weave a linear narrative about the courtesan’s eventual fall from grace, which does not take into account the politics behind these categorisations nor women’s participation therein. This paper focuses instead, on the making and unmaking of these ontological categories to argue that, while these categories are neither exhaustive nor holistic, they are reflective of the institutions wherein they flourished, the cultural specificities of their existence and the peculiarities of their labour practices. An analysis of these dynamics shall present a more detailed and genealogical history of how women inhabited, embodied, extended and/or negotiated with power structures. This holds the utmost importance in the context of contemporary reminiscence of Lucknow’s past, which, while being marked by a celebration of the courtesan culture, is often accompanied by erasure of their lived experiences, presenting unidimensional imagery that is both unhistorical and ahistorical.

The Black Queer/Trans Femme Representation of Beyoncé’s Media Ventriloquisms and the National Voice

This chapter historicizes the Black diva and the relationship forged between Beyoncé’s singing voice, audio technologies, and the nation. In particular, audiences might receive enhanced voice placed back upon the live performing body of a singer as a national offense until they consider the Black queer/trans femme tradition of gender (re)presentation. Fallout from Black, feminized divas across history who use audio technologies—Beyoncé’s 2013 “lip-synced” performance at President Barack Obama’s inauguration and Marian Anderson’s 1939 Lincoln Memorial outdoor concert—reveals the complexity of media ventriloquism alongside sexist, racist, transphobic, and femmephobic bias. Through debates commentators discussed the appropriateness of Beyoncé’s enhanced body as a gendered, femme icon—namely, why should the Black diva be limited to singing or appearing in a state of naturalness and not artifice? By tracing these debates, we may explore how national outrage persists surrounding the mediatized voice of Black women performers despite our current sensorium infused with media.

Ki sambandha hoibe takhon he?: Locating Nachnis in the Societal Margins of Kinship in Rural Bengal

Na_chni na_ch, a dance form of West Bengal, is going through a difficult time in its 500-year history. The woman dancer, who is known as a nachni, performs, often at night, along with her male partner, or rasik. Her life is intricately tied with that of her rasik, which includes her status as a woman performer at public events and the observance of proper rituals upon her death. Caught in a web of exploitation, the nachni essentially has no ‘kin’. Following the work by Inden and Nicholas on Bengali kinship and its categories and meanings within Bengali culture, this article looks at the amorphous pattern of kinship for the marginalized, with a special focus on the daily lives of nachnis. It explores the networks on the margins of kinship in which women performers of this crisis-ridden folk-art form survive.

‘Why don’t you let me flow in my space?’

The practice of performance or ‘spoken word’ poetry has gained a significant foothold among the youth in urban Namibia in the last two decades. While this poetry has been put to many socio-political uses, one of the main ones has been a protest against patriarchal elements in Namibian society and culture, and an outcry against Namibia’s high rates of gender-based violence. Patriarchal aspects of Namibia’s national culture are often explicitly linked to violence and to the intersectional nature of oppression. Spoken word poetry has also often given LGBT+ women a space to speak out against their oppression and to normalise their existence. This article shows how women performers have used and modified the conventions of poetry and song to get this challenging—in the Namibian context often radical—message across. The paper argues that poetry in this context has the potential to approximate a localised ‘public sphere’ where inclusive discourse can be held around social issues—bearing mind that people are not excluded from this discourse because of arbitrary reasons such as gender or sexuality.

Replaying Video Game History as a Mixtape of Black Feminist Thought

This article, a Black feminist mixtape, blends music, interviews, and critical analysis in order to demonstrate some of the ways in which Black women have impactfully engaged with the video game industry. Organized as musical “tracks,” it uses lyrics by Black women performers as a critical and cultural frame for understanding some of the work Black women have done with video games. In prioritizing the personal as not only political but also instructive for how we might think about digital media histories and feminism, each mixtape track focuses on Black women's lived experiences with games. As it argues throughout, Black feminism as defined and experienced by the Combahee River Collective of the 1970s has been an active and meaningful part of Black women's labor and play practices with video games.