Introduction

"The conjunction of reproduction and disappearance is performance's condition of possibility, its ontology and its mode of reproduction," writes Fred Moten (2003:5). This conception of performance's ontology, or what Moten describes as performance's "anoriginal drive," owes an (unpayable) debt to black reproduction, to an insurgent and "improvised" maternity that marks and galvanizes the persistent fugitivity of black performance to enclosure, capture, and genesis (28). In this section of the issue, four short essays illuminate and reconceive the performance of this persistent fugitivity, or the fugitivity of this persistent performance, across multiple mediums, political histories, and social practices. Each of the pieces here, whether read individually or in a round, as around a roundtable, takes up the question of black performance in relation to reproduction and/or black reproduction in relation to performance. While other contributions in this issue also explore black performance, the purposefully short format of these entries might allow them to resound with and against each other in interesting and unexpected ways. Our authors did not write together, and yet across the four short pieces, certain similarities sound and rebound with uncertain differences.

Opening this section, Kimberly Juanita Brown ("Erykah Badu's Ambulatory Acts") attunes us to the "ambulatory acts" of singer-songwriter Erykah Badu in her music video Window Seat. An ambulatory act, Brown contends, is "always already a reproduction, embedded in repetition and simultaneous movement." Through Badu's virtuosic performances that attest to "the spectacular ordinariness of a black woman walking," Brown illuminates how Badu reproduces her (nude) body over and against the spatial restrictions that have constrained black mobility. Similarly, Sarah Jane Cervenak ("'Black Night Is Falling': The 'Airy Poetics' of Some Performance") reflects upon "a particular and general ambulation" that contours the "airy poetics" (Englemann 2015) of blackness and black performance. Working with the analytic and collective practice of breath that Ashon T. Crawley (2016) has made newly available, Cervenak considers the atmospherics of "black pneuma" that escape the suffocating enclosures that seek to subject air's wanderings to the violence of measure.

If, as Cervenak suggests, "breathing is reproduction's ur-text," an ur-text without origin or end, Jasmine Johnson and Paige McGinley trace, respectively, the interrupted transmissions and generational schisms through which the reproduction of black performance brings to crisis dominant logics of movement, inheritance, and genealogy. Attending to the "casualties" that fall away "through ongoing enactments of choreographic transference" in West African dance, Johnson ("Casualties") explores the possibilities of failure, loss, and "choreographic death" for forging and reproducing diasporic communities. McGinley ("Generational Schism, Fannie Lou Hamer, and the Future of Protest") closes this roundtable with a reflection on crossgenerational black struggle and the "future of protest." Asking how we might intervene in a binarism that proclaims either generational reproduction or refusal as the only two options for understanding the Black Lives Matter Movement, McGinley tracks practices of "disruption of the chrononormativity of activist discourse." Gathered together in a room with students and community members days after the 2016 presidential election, McGinley recalls how the poet Treasure Shields Redmond conjured the presence of Fannie Lou Hamer in a cross-temporal performance that rendered the "labor of black reproduction—and black generation—visible, audible, haptic, vibrational."

Taken individually or taken together, these short essays crucially signal how blackness chiasmatically constitutes and disfigures the very rubrics of performance and reproduction with which this issue has been concerned.