’Insurrectionary Imagination’: The Rehearsal is the Revolution

Damani Partridge, University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology and Department of Afroamerican and African Studies

Damani J. Partridge (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 2003) is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.  As a researcher, he has published broadly on questions of citizenship, sexuality, post-Cold War ‘freedom’, Holocaust memorialization, African-American military occupation, ‘Blackness’ and embodiment, the production of noncitizens, the culture and politics of ‘fair trade’, and the Obama moment in Berlin. He has also made and worked on documentaries for private and public broadcasters in the US and Canada, and currently directs the Filming Future Cities Project in Detroit and Berlin (see filmingfuturecities.org). In 2012, he published Hypersexuality and Headscarves: Race, Sex, and Citizenship in the New Germany and is currently preparing his manuscript, “Articulating ‘Blackness’ as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, European Enlightenment, and Noncitizen Futures,” for publication.

"Insurrectionary Imagination”: The rehearsal is the Revolution

This paper thinks through the stakes of the rehearsal and subsequent performances for a re-articulated “Blackness," better understood when one sees the otherwise deleterious effects of everyday racism in contemporary Europe. One sees friends, colleagues, and acquaintances being undone. Even without a state on which one might otherwise rely (at least in the nation-state centered fantasy of protection), rehearsing “Blackness" becomes a possibility for re-articulating the self and the everyday realities of who one might otherwise become. “Post-migrant” theaters in Berlin are important spaces through which to think this possibility.  Within these theaters, “Blackness” stands in as a kind of universal claim that is opposed to blackface and other kinds of appropriation.