Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life by Tavia Nyong’o (review)

Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life considers anti-Blackness as not simply a condition of our time but a condition of time itself. If racism progressively comes undone over the course of history, then what accounts for its duration? In addressing anti-Blackness as “the changing same” (10), author Tavia Nyong’o challenges an orthodox historiographical enquiry into “change over time” (21) by seeking Black expressions in literature, music, art, and audio-visual media that privilege “time over change” (21). Afro-Fabulations calls attention to Black performative accumulations in audio-visual media, such as cinema and digital technology, to urgently address “ethical and critical debates regarding the visuality, spectacularity, and representation for black lives in a North American context” (11). Importantly, argues Nyong’o, a fabulist “is nothing like a liar”; rather, the fabulist “exposes the relation between truth and lying in an other-than-moral sense” (5; emphasis in original). By examining how Black intellectuals, artists, and media disassemble historical narration and layer time, Nyong’o foregrounds the power of fiction to disrupt well-worn truths and to “inspire belief, emotion, and attachment” in moments that “arise out of the indeterminacy and flux of living and dying, with life being perhaps the greatest fiction of all” (7).

Nyong’o offers us a new analytical framework, “black polytemporality” (11), which folds time, enabling seemingly divergent Black aesthetics and criticism to be brought into “disjunctive synthesis” (61). Nyong’o analyses how Black cultural memory recalls the transatlantic world as a duration rather than a historical past. The present–past is multiply invoked across artworks and performances and their audio-visual recordings, and via social media postings. Kara Walker’s Brooklyn-based sugar sphinx installation, A Subtlety (2014), led to the formation of a Black feminist counter-public that deployed the #WeAreHere hashtag (123). This critical intervention entangled visitors’ demeaning photos of the installation in a media ecology that revealed the enduring “dark time” of Black women’s dehumanization. Simultaneously, #WeAreHere culled a “dark fabulation” in ways that collectively valued and sustained Black women’s lives and erotic conviviality (125).

Elsewhere, Afro-Fabulations mines the “playful but pointed” (33) dynamic between artist and theorist. Trajal Harrell’s 2012 dance series Twenty Looks, or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church performs what José Esteban Muñoz terms “disidentification.” That is, Harrell’s choreography and techniques are staged “both for and against the camera” (34). Twenty Looks brings together ball culture, and its exposures in fashion and popular media, in a cross-cutting praxis to create a “method of active and aggressive interpretation of an unfair and unequal social order,” which Nyong’o calls “critical shade” (34). Featuring white dancers performing downtown Black vernacular “shade,” Twenty Looks confronts Manhattan’s uptown audiences at the “precise moment, occasion, or angle from which, in a momentary pause, the gaze can be reflected back in a gesture of counter-mimesis” (44).

These disjunctive interstices, or “angular socialities” (5), activate a synthesis of the seemingly discrete genealogies of Black studies and queer theory. Nyong’o tracks the early 1990s advent of Afrofuturism and queer theory to their shared predecessor, Samuel R. Delaney’s 1967 science fiction novel The Einstein Intersection. He also draws together performers Melvin van Peebles and Adrian Piper through the “changing same” of Black bricolage in funk music. Although they differ in age, gender, and class, each artist’s use of “funk idioms to defy norms of compulsory heterosexual and gender embodiment” (79), Nyong’o contends, presaged “queer and trans of color critique” (76). Nyong’o likewise compares Lucy Alibar’s play Juicy and Delicious (2007) to its cinematic version, Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), wherein the storyline about the rewilding of extinct aurochs involved different lead characters. For Nyong’o, the protagonist’s transformation from an effeminate white boy to a resilient Black girl warrants an analytical shift from qualifying what counts as...