1st Edition
Performative Intergenerational Dialogues of a Black Quartet Qualitative Inquiries on Race, Gender, Sexualities, and Culture
Performative Intergenerational Dialogues of a Black Quartet promotes the importance of intergenerational Black dialogue as a collaborative spirit-making across race, genders, sexualities, and cultures to bridge time and space.
The authors enter this dialogue in a crisis moment: a crisis moment at the confluence of a pandemic, the national political transition of leadership in the United States, the necessary rise of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color activism—in the face of the continued murders of unarmed Black and queer people by police. And as each author mourns the loss of loved ones who have left us through illness, the contiguity of time, or murder, we all hold tight to each other and to memory as an act of keeping them alive in our hearts and actions, remembrance as an act of resistance so that the circle will be unbroken. But they also come together in the spirit of hope, the hope that bleeds the borders between generations of Black teacher-artist-scholars, the hope that we find in each other’s joy and laughter, and the hope that comes when we hear both stories of struggle and strife and stories of celebration and smile that lead to possibilities and potentialities of our collective being and becoming—as a people.
So, the authors offer stories of witness, resistance, and gettin’ ovah, stories that serve as a road map from Black history and heritage to a Black futurity that is mythic and imagined but that can also be actualized and embodied, now. This book will be of interest to scholars, students, and activists in a wide range of disciplines across the social sciences and performance studies.
Performative Intergenerational Dialogues: An Introduction
The Black Quartet
Section I: Tribute and Libation to A Black Quartet
1. Generational Drama/Intergenerational Trauma
Bryant Keith Alexander
2. When You Hear It From Her
Dominique C. Hill
3. "I Wish Cotton was a Monkey"
Mary E. Weems
4. "And the Protest Goes On…"
Durell M. Callier
Section II: Motha/ Sista and Fatha/Brotha Wit: Listening to the Lessons
5. Motha Wit
Mary E. Weems and Dominique C. Hill
6. Fatha Wit (or Brotha Wit)
Bryant Keith Alexander and Durell M. Callier
7. I Affirm
Bryant Keith Alexander and Dominique C. Hill
8. "Reading (to/for) Daddee"
Bryant Keith Alexander
Section III. Letters to Those Who Mattered
9. To Daddee (Love, Keith)
Bryant Keith Alexander
10. Dear Grandpa (Love, Cookie)
Mary E. Weems
11. What Becomes (Possible) When a Black Woman Sees You: A Gratitude Meditation for Mama Crystal
Dominique C. Hill
12. A Praisesong to Softness: Reflecting on Soft Black Masculinities and Survival
Durell M. Callier
13. A Tribute to Franklin: A Comic Appreciation
Bryant Keith Alexander
Section IV: Monuments of Memory and Remorse
14. Monuments to Living (or Finding and Reviving the Dead in a Graveyard)
Bryant Keith Alexander
15. Rice: A Visit to a 12-Year-Old Black Boy’s Memorial
Mary E. Weems
16. The First Time . . .
Durell M. Callier
17. Going There
Bryant Keith Alexander
18. High Bar Love
Dominique C. Hill
19. Standing at the Intersection of 38th Street E and Chicago Avenue S
Bryant Keith Alexander
Section V: B(l)ack Talk
20. April 20, 2021: On Luther and Chauvin
The Black Quartet
21. Trilogy of Terror on the Black Hand Side
Bryant Keith Alexander
22. Feel/Think the Kink: A Dialogue with Jubi Arriola-Headley’s Original Kink
Mary E. Weems and Bryant Keith Alexander
23. Spell Casting as Talking Back
Dominique C. Hill
24. Admirable or Ridiculous: Talkin Black, Back, & Between Kin Folk
Durell M. Callier and Mary E. Weems
25. Feeling Real: Reprise (Talking B[l]ack to a Younger Brother)
Bryant Keith Alexander
Section VI: Voting Rights and Writing Volition
26. Why Did Black People Vote for Trump?
The Black Quartet
27. Another Prayer Meeting
Bryant Keith Alexander
28. We are the People (July 4, 2021)
The Black Quartet
29. What’s the Matter? (A Play)
Mary E. Weems
30. The Will to Love: Dialogues on Loving Blackness in an Anti-Black World
Dominique C. Hill and Durell M. Callier
31. A Letter to Process, Positionality, and Possibility
Bryant Keith Alexander
Performative Intergenerational Dialogues: A Conclusion
The Black Quartet
Biography
Bryant Keith Alexander is a professor and dean in the College of Communication and Fine Arts and an interim dean in the School of Film and Television at Loyola Marymount University, USA. He is coauthor of Still Hanging: Using Performance Texts to Deconstrict Racism and Collaborative Spirit-Writing and Performance in Everyday Black Lives.
Mary E. Weems is a poet, playwright, scholar, and author of 14 books, including Blackeyed: Plays and Monologues and five chapbooks. Weems was awarded a 2015 Cleveland Arts Prize for her full-length drama MEAT and has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is coauthor of Still Hanging: Using Performance Texts to Deconstrict Racism and Collaborative Spirit-Writing and Performance in Everyday Black Lives. Weems may be reached at www.maryeweems.org.Dominque C. Hill, PhD, is a creative and vulnerability guide whose scholarship interrogates Black embodiment with foci in Black girlhood, education, and performance. An artist-scholar, Hill is an assistant professor of Women’s Studies at Colgate University and is the coauthor of Who look at me?!: Shifting the Gaze of Education Through Blackness, Queerness, and the Body.
Durell M. Callier, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University. An artist-scholar, he researches and interrogates the lived experience of Black youth and the racialized queer dynamics of power within educative spaces. He is coauthor of Who look at me?!: Shifting the Gaze of Education Through Blackness, Queerness, and the Body.
"In this quartet, the reader enters what the best and most skilled of what performative writing offers: the entry into a panoply of temporalities, embodiments, and daring alterity. Reading this book took me back to my roots in 1960s Chicago Jazz clubs where the un-apologetic, improvisational, and interanimating collaborations of sound, imagery, space, and time became a testament to the complex and abundant fabric of black existential love, suffering, and joy. This book is a model of collaboration as interlocking form and dialogic content as well political activism drenched in the beauty of speech, persuasion, and intimate relations. Reading this book was, in Toni Morrison’s words, ‘a gift to my mind’ and it was also a salve for my soul in a most needed time." -- D. Soyini Madison, Professor Emeritus, Department of Performance Studies, Northwestern University, USA.
"This masterfully written intergenerational dialogue reminds me that Sankofa, the Adinkra symbolizing the notion of "go back and get it," is alive and well! This text beautifully captures the interconnectedness of history and futurity as dual sites of liberation for Black, queer, gender expansive scholar/activists charting their territory in the sphere of world-making. To remember and return is an act of resistance that honors the ancestors who laid the very path for our existence. Radically imagining new futures in the now offers reprieve from our present and rhetorically constructs the free future within which we are already alive and well. May you find yourself peppered throughout these lines in a moment of inspiration, love, and unapologetic brilliance." - Amber Johnson, Professor of Communication, Interim Vice President of the Division for Diversity and Innovative Community Engagement, Saint Louis University, USA.
"Across generations, critical love languages, and literary genres, Alexander, Weems, Hill, and Callier invite the reader on a journey of witnessing, revelations, and reverence of Blackness. Speaking with and to liberated souls and souls under siege, this beautiful quartet operates as a siren of possibilities as they collectively wrestle with new ways of knowing through intimate expressions of self and re-membering. This riveting collection is a must-read for anyone interested in dialogic performance, freedom-making artistry, and celebrations of Blackness." -- Sharrell D. Luckett, Associate Professor of Drama & Performance Studies, Director of the Weinberger Center for Drama & Playwriting, University of Cincinnati, USA, and Director, Black Acting Methods Studio.
"Performative Intergenerational Dialogues of a Black Quartet is an empowering rollercoaster that evokes our past experiences, questions our current crises, and sketches out potential possibilities for our future. Through interactive poetry, prose, drama, rhythm, and rhyme that pop off the page, I found myself called into responding as a reader who is remembering Blackness, revisiting parallel experiences, and rethinking my role in the creation of Black futurity. This Black Quartet shares the formula for tough skin in Hill’s narration of "groove(ing)," listens to the voices of our ancestors in Alexander’s "Black Notes", expands Callier’s que(e)ry beyond sexuality, and becomes transformative in Weems display of how form and content can spread out across the page to interrupt and disrupt our current norms, while also encouraging new growth around old wounds. Each author masterfully unpacks the liminal space between everyday Black life and the performance of intellectual labor as they draw upon the power of storytelling to teach readers how to heal from cultural crises and activate our imagination in an embodied way." -- Rachel N. Hastings. Professor of Communication, MiraCosta College, USA, and the Director of the North County Higher Education Alliance.
