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  • "Negro Demonstrates":Politics, Performance, and Making Work Work"
  • Sara Clarke Kaplan (bio)

In a 1992 essay, Ruth Wilson Gilmore relates her father's reaction to seeing her perform in an undergraduate production at the elite university in which she was enrolled and by which he was employed. "Are you going to act," she recalls him asking her, "or are you going to work?" Gilmore never shares her response to this unanswerable question in the text. Instead, in an explication of the dialectical tension indexed by her community-organizer father's challenge, she poses one of her own: "Who works and what works, for whom, and to what end?"1

It is to this second question and its implications for the academy that Gilmore returns in her 2010 presidential address; as more than a few have noted, she could not have done so at a more urgently necessary time.2 She tacks between places and times to tease out how we continue to make our lives work (that is produce value), and how that work can make life amidst the anti-state state's conjoined death-dealing processes of structural adjustment and security enhancement. The resulting meditation not only delineates who works—as academics, we do, a fact that constitutes both our power and our responsibility to other workers—and what works—organizing in all of its forms including policy, research, teaching, writing, and building unions and coalitions. Even more significantly, Gilmore points to how we can make that work work for ourselves and for each other, towards and in the service of freedom. The content, she posits, is abolition; the form is organizing; the method is dialectical.

Culture and politics, imagination and analysis, history and futurity, the image and the word: "The substance of the distinction," Gilmore tells us, "is dialectical, and the tendencies along which the tension both pushes and pulls me are what inform the semiotics and histrionics of my critical performance."3 These lines, written some years ago, could just as well be describing this November's presidential address. Indeed, what follows responds to Gilmore's address as a critical performance, by which I mean that it is as much a reading [End Page 271] of the performed "ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge," as a comment on the archivable text that appears in these pages.4 For if, as Gilmore argues, drama and geography have in common the work of producing history and (re)creating worlds, then to explore their conjoined labor might well offer particular answers to the question she suggests drives every such endeavor: "Why this? Why this, here? Why this, here, now?"5

In the first few moments of Gilmore's address, she calls upon us not as spectators but as participants. "I'm going to need your help tonight, as I always do," she tells the audience. And in that instant, audience members become actors, rehearsing our lines, encouraged to improvise, waiting on pins and needles for our assigned but unpredictable cue to make a previously unplanned-for, and only partially scripted, entrance. No longer are we distant and disembodied intellectual interlocutors, nor are we allowed the pretense of entirely spontaneous congregation born of a kind of Aristotelian moment of collective catharsis. We are now part of the performance, simultaneously producing the outcome of the event and making an implicit future promise that exceeds the presentism not only of the field, but of the academic talk form and dramatic performance more generally.

Concomitantly, in invoking our help, Gilmore makes explicit the distinction between the role of president—she who for this short hour each year is mandated to speak for and to the collective membership—and the subject embodying that role who requests our response. We are called upon to acknowledge the body on stage before us, to read its signs, to mark the undetermined identifiers of difference embedded in the words she instructs us to repeat. Such recognition also requires that we contend with the sign systems that elide the distinction between subject position and institutional position, and the relations of power and difference that such significations both rely upon and disavow to render the address's speaker and form transparent...

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