Unmournable Void: Tending-toward the Black Dead and Dying in Contemporary Black Performance and Visual Art

Zondi, Mlondolozi Bradley

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-ex52-1h41

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Unmournable Void: Tending-toward the Black Dead and Dying in Contemporary Black Performance and Visual Art

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Unmournable Void: Tending-Toward the Dead and Dying in Contemporary Black Performance and Visual Art, explores critical artistic practices that tend to the historical conditions of anti-black violence resulting from transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. This triad of regimes produced the Black condition as the unmournable void lived in close proximity to death. Unmournable Void describes the labor of tending to the condition of Black life by close reading the specific interventions of Black artists who enact something akin to mourning, while recognizing the limited reach of the “mourning and melancholia” framework theorized in Freudian psychoanalysis, for Black death. These artists include Nelisiwe Xaba, Ligia Lewis, Sam Nhlengethwa, and Ezrom Legae. I am interested in the speculative modes they deploy in dance, performance art, and visual art to represent this voided subjectivity, probing the relationship between Black life and matter(ing), specifically the question of what it means to matter. Their work imagines alternative practices to mourning by invoking racial icons (such as Sara “Saartjie” Baartman, Steve Biko, and racial types from the minstrel stage) whose remains cannot be properly laid to rest. These iconic images which visualize racial-sexual trauma migrate from one medium to another, across geo-historical contexts, changing form and meaning in the process. Aesthetic practitioners incessantly conjure them up and mobilize them for a number of political and formal aesthetic uses. These uses range from subversion, reparation, evidence, catharsis, empathy, and reconciliation.

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