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Last spring, preparing to leave for a University of California conference on “black thought in the age of terror,” I tuned into the local public radio station and heard a BBC report on “tragedy fatigue” in Australia. The reporters narrated, among news of varied atrocities on aboriginal lands committed by aboriginal men, the stitching together of an infant following a rape (the mothers of the victims, I was told, were out drinking when the assaults occurred). Make a face. Our very horrors function as infomercials and markers of our limitations , and currency for the entertainment of trauma tourists, and justification for corporate-state punitive cultures to expand in their violence. We are inundated by trauma sites and tragedies—from invasions, occupations, and failed democracies punctured by insurgencies’ improvised explosive devices (or IEDs) to reflections on shoot-to-kill edicts that dictate to conscientious (black) mothers to first obtain bullet proof vests before securing bottled water, baby formula, and pampers for those abandoned by the state in post-Katrina New Orleans. (A survival guide that addresses black female expendability might prove a very useful cultural handbook.) Those who create and perform in the academy are indeed indebted to those outside or those who “straddle” to theorize and make theory into politics as aesthetic agency that counters empire. Christa Acampora writes in the introduction to the volume, a tribute to Gloria Anzaldúa, of aesthetic agency as social and political progress engendered not only by conventional intellectual or cognitive development but also by sensibilities that hone perceptions or critiques and inspire creative political acts. Such aesthetic agency likely creates a resting place, a haven for struggle to continue. A “home” of sorts. Where else would transformative aesthetics exist in the practice of freedom if not in our lives at home, beyond the closets of corporatist or statist academia. xi Foreword “Tragedy Fatigue” and “Aesthetic Agency” Cultural production that creates a breathing space, or momentarily stops breath, allows us to pause to catch our thinking and move in a different way in pursuit of freedom. Such work is both necessary and alienating . Some domiciles, particularly those for most (black) women of color, often pose the inverse of the dominant cliché cemented in sentimental family values: in which “A man’s home is his castle” becomes “A black woman’s home is her bomb shelter.” Would it matter if the poor or rich (white) man’s castle has less or more resale value than the rich or poor woman’s bomb shelter (once she has removed all black family photos for the prospective buyers)? Labor to culturally produce is necessary because everyone must shelter. But perhaps the necessary labor is to no longer seek culture as reified real estate, to improve on property values by aspiring to some developer’s fantasy of gated community. “Tragedy fatigue” manifests not only among the invaded and colonized , among the impoverished or caged in penal sites that double as trauma sites. It is the hallmark of imperial ambitions and the corporate, statist , militarist, or academic agents that further or counter those ambitions. Exhausted by struggle, captivated by the idea of freedom, seeking relief and an alternative to the reality of empire—where the breaking of souls and bodies is routine, as patriotism, patriarchy, (hetero)sexism, or racism—some create an altered reality through aesthetic production and political action. Such production might enable us to pass from this current reality of growing police powers and concentrations of wealth and avarice to another imagined or fabricated existence. We can ask the price of the ticket to travel beyond a cultural and political morass marked by terror in which state violence and domestic violence seem to have an uncontested marriage in conventional thought. But then, after inquiries, we balk at the cost for an altered reality: the struggle of liberation that ensues from loving when one has gone beyond one’s limits—beyond fatigue and beyond tragedy—to create something revolutionary. Some, beyond their limits, perform in streets, such as Daisy or “Miss Prissy” in David LaChappelle’s documentary RIZE. Through their “Krump” dancing, they create new art forms and manifestations of fused female identity and black identity in Los Angeles zones designated as expendable, yet home to ecstatic or trance performances that transport while remaining connected. The cultural productions of those discussed in this volume frame shelters. It is likely the making of shelters through cultural production, not the structure itself, that offers some promise of protection, that xii FOREWORD...

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