A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

The opening movement establishes the collection’s mixture of personal history, cultural moments, and collective experiences, which weave into Abdurraqib’s thesis about the Black experience in America. Specifically, Abdurraqib focuses on dance, music, the body, and death as moral aesthetics that reflect the performativity of identity and Blackness. Together, the essays in this Movement lay the foundation for the ideas that will permeate the book: performance, memory, and the alienation and depersonalization caused by racism. The mixing of genres, including confessional autobiography, music criticism, and historical writing, reflects the interconnectivity of Abdurraqib’s topics and prepares readers for his more radical experiments with form later in the collection.

The first of the “On Times I Have Forced Myself to Dance” series of prose poems stands apart from the other essays’ more standard structure. The long single sentence of each of these introductions to the book’s Movements allows Abdurraqib to experiment with pace and rhythm. The use of ampersands instead of the word “and” creates movement and a skipping beat of emphasis between ideas, without interrupting the flow and connections. Event spills into event, building to an abrupt stop. Here, Abdurraqib juxtaposes the comedic image of a boy trying to impress a girl but instead tripping over a pile of shoes with the devastating, sharp fact of his mother’s premature death.

Abdurraqib draws out different meanings of dance, all part of the theme of The Intersections of Performance: the physical feat of exertion, artistic expression, and the enactment of one’s identity. Abdurraqib ties the feats of endurance required for participating in dance marathons to whiteness, ascribing the absence of Black dancers in these marathons to the fact that Black people dancing “with an interest in skill over endurance” (9), since the Black body has no reason to prove its ability to endure:

After all, what is endurance to a people who have already endured? What is it to someone who could, at that point, still touch the living hands of a family member who had survived being born into forced labor? Endurance, for some, was seeing what the dance floor could handle. It did not come down to the limits of the body when pushed toward an impossible feat of linear time. No. It was about having a powerful enough relationship with freedom that you understand its limitations (9).

Conversely, for Abdurraqib, Soul Train is the performance of Black identity—a demonstration of the importance of visibility and the power of having a history. He studies the dancers on the show as “my dearest dancing ancestors” (19), chagrinned that his parents never danced, thus severing his personal story from this cultural history. Looking for his parents on the show is a way to counter this lack of historical documentation—a way to recast Soul Train as a historical document that creates an “archives of what it once was to be Black and a person on television with no real message or no laugh track or no manufactured sitcom family” (20). Instead of being guest stars on white-centric shows as usual, Black dancers on this show did not move with a white audience in mind, thus enacting authenticity. This creation of history connects with another important theme of the collection: the relationship between place, identity, and community. Here, watching Soul Train counters the “very specific dislocation” of being in “a city where I didn’t know anyone, or didn’t see anyone who looked like me” (20). The show allows him to create a “fantasy of kinship” (20), countering the depersonalization of racism. The show’s “performance of partnership” creates community and connection (21).

Abdurraqib also explores gradations of private and public mourning. His anecdotes about the dead bird and his mom’s gravestone to explore the depth of private grief, while a comparison of Muslim funerals and Black funerals examines what it means to perform grief. The solemnity of Muslim funerals casts the ceremony as a service of mercy for the deceased. In contrast, the emotional and effusive nature of Black funerals reflects their role in the grieving process for those still alive. Even more publicly, Aretha Franklin’s televised memorial service is an example of how Black funerals document a person’s life. The elaborate ceremony with long speeches insists that Franklin be remembered, countering the trend of Black invisibility. Despite their differences, all three ceremonies are examples of the Mundane Fight for Individuality. Abdurraqib juxtaposes the highly manicured performance of the televised memorial to the more authentic version of Franklin presented in the documentary Amazing Grace. Showing the subjective nature of documentation, Franklin did not want the film released, possibly hesitant to reveal how her music was crafted, undermining the polished image represented by the record—or by the televised memorial service. However, for Abdurraqib, Franklin’s performances of the song reflect “the improvisational nature of the spirit” (40)—a looseness that speaks to the enacting of authenticity he admires in the Soul Train dancers as well.

The collaborative nature of recording, worshiping, and mourning brings up the idea of audience. According to Abdurraqib, “in the gospel setting, the audience is a part of the stage. The audience, through its engagement, cannot be separated from the experience, or from the document of the experience” (42). Unlike white audiences evaluating Black dancers appearing in white-centered entertainment, Abdurraqib sees Black audiences watching Amazing Grace are in some ways participating in what’s on screen. The performance involved in reacting is another example of the desire for community and the mundane fight for individuality:

[I]t’s noble for Black people to react viscerally to work that is created for us, and to respond in a language we know well. There is something valuable about wanting the small world around you to know how richly you are being moved, so that maybe some total stranger might encounter your stomp, your clap, your shout, and find themselves moved in return (36-37).