Abstract

Abstract:

Recent critiques of the self-proclaimed white ally as “performative” signal a need to reckon with the question of how we bind ourselves to projects of liberation with which our own privileged status is in conflict. This brief intervention proposes that the call for allies to forsake mere “theatre” in favor of “real action” paradoxically reveals the necessarily theatrical and performative dimensions of solidarity—its precarious appearance, under constant threat of erasure—and positions embodied performance as a way of understanding the difference Sara Ahmed identifies between commitment as a “sending out” versus “a state of being bound.”

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