Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom by Sarah Jane Cervenak (review)

In Wandering Sarah Jane Cervenak focuses on the emancipatory potential of philosophical wanderings, “daydreaming, mental and rhetorical ramblings—[to offer] new pathways for the enactment of . . . philosophical desire” (2) for black bodies, which have historically been denied such freedom. This book is an exemplary contribution to resistance and liberation discourses in performance studies scholarship. A project in dialogue with the current discussion of race in the United States, Wandering presents an alternative way of understanding what liberation can look like for black bodies that have been/are under surveillance. In her readings of plays, performance art, literature, and art installations Cervenak finds that black artist-philosophers have long wandered through daydreaming, meditation, and kinesthetic meanderings.

Notably, the author responds to “the tendency [in performance studies] to privilege the philosophical capacities of purportedly legible acts over unseen drifts and dreams” (3). In a bold and refreshing move Cervenak suggests that wandering is not always legible and does not have to be legible to be worthy of study and subversive. She contends that her case studies of philosophical wanderings resist even the boundaries (pages) of her book. She argues that even as Enlightenment thinkers Kant and Rousseau came to conclusions about intellectual reasoning by theorizing and reinforcing ill-conceived notions of blackness (e.g. black bodies lacked the ability to reason), a black philosophical enlightenment was also burgeoning.

In the first chapter, “Race, Sexuality, and the Perverse Moves of the European Enlightenment,” Cervenak hinges a critical analysis of white male, European Enlightenment thought on a reading of Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare’s Age of Enlightenment. This installation “reveals . . . the Age of Enlightenment’s hegemonic conceit” through the exhibit’s “display of disfigurement, deformity, and compromised mobility. In it we see headless, disabled philosophers engaged in the production of reason” (2–3). Cervenak uses Shonibare’s work to ground her thorough critique of Kant’s and Rousseau’s contradictory notions of race and reason. This lengthy critique proves a necessary foundation for exposing the concurrent black philosophical enlightenment highlighted in the second chapter, which analyzes the wanderings of Harriet Jacobs, Martin Delany, David Walker, and Sojourner Truth.

Chapter 2 is founded on the premise that “[t]he black enlightenment was formed by the interanimation of two modes of performance, two modes of moving across the [slave] plot: an upright, straightforward, composed, self-determined comportment (forward looking, planning, and in some cases, walking) . . . and a wayward, inspired, divinely guided, and for some, debilitating wandering” (61). Cervanek’s writing moves from theory to practice with an ease and skill that emulates the acts of wandering she exposes. Extending the work of such scholars as Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Gayatri Spivak, and David Kazanjian, Cervenak acknowledges alternate “coordinates of freedom” in “ante-articulate moments and unseeable terrains” to surmise that “Jacobs’s quiet encounters with the sublime, Delany’s anxiety and faith, Walker’s exclamatory pauses, and Truth’s unfollowable prophecy extend the terrain of reason to include the wayward, unpredictable, and errant—roamings across the plot invisible to the light of enlightenment” (63). In this chapter the author persuasively presents the implications of Truth’s wandering from the “straight lines” of enlightenment—her disinterest in literacy, her illegibility, and her secularism—as perceived by abolitionists Frederick Douglass, Marius Robinson, and Frances Dana Gage. She argues that they could not perceive the “unlearned” Truth as having agency, but outside of their gaze (with God as her interlocutor) she experienced freedom in the sublime.

The work of playwright Adrienne Kennedy is the focus of chapter 3, dedicated to Trayvon Martin. Cervenak attends to the policing of characters’ bodies (and paradoxically Kennedy’s) in Funnyhouse of a Negro and The Owl Answers. The characters, Cervenak argues, undergo psychiatric policing by audiences and critics alike. “A crisis emerges,” she writes, “when minoritized people refuse their scripts or endeavor to write them outside of reason’s regulatory schemes. Tragically, punishments—death or incarceration in prison or mental institutions—become enlightened...