This writing has been accomplished with the insistent support of many tremendous people to whom I wish to express my gratitude.
I started discussing this book with José Esteban Muñoz, who brilliantly and generously organized the field this publication enters. I am grateful for the extra life Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyong’o, and Joshua Chambers-Letson granted this project. Nyong’o has been a generous advisor, offering important mentorship, even though I am a little older than he. Jennifer Doyle and Francesca Royster gave fantastic feedback and welcome encouragement, and thanks to Eric Zinner and Alicia Nadkarni for their support. Great jobs and inspiring colleagues in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and Hunter College’s Department of Art and Art History have made it possible for me to get to this acknowledgment.
Sue-Ellen Case advised the research from which this book was developed. Her rigor, clarity, and years of attention kept the train on track, and her own scholarship has served as a queer inspiration. I was fortunate to work with a number of consequential professors during my time at UCLA, including Susan Leigh Foster, Steven Nelson, Janet O’Shea, Joseph Roach, Carol Sorgenfrei, Frank Wilderson III, and Haiping Yan, who each helped me think. Before that, while I was studying writing at CalArts, Mady Schutzman planted several seeds that bore colorful fruits. In this list of instructors, I am compelled to mention my high school German teacher, Dorena Kehaulani Koopman, who taught me a lot about order and ambivalence.
Alexandro Segade, gifted facilitator and interrogator, boyfriend par excellence, has much to do with anything that is produced from that which might be construed as my “self” and cannot be thanked enough. Along with Alex and our collaborator Jade Gordon, as the group My Barbarian, I have been able to pose in performance the questions of representation, action, collaboration, influence, and location that instigated this study. I remember once leaving a graduate seminar on transnational theory in Los Angeles, flying to Munich, taking a train through the Italian Alps, arriving at an old castle, performing a short musical adaptation of Titus Andronicus that asked the audience to decide whether or not a black baby could be the emperor of all of Italy, then taking a train back to Munich, flying back to L.A., and going to a graduate seminar on theories of representation. While scholarship and practice are different, they have plenty to say to each other.
In what follows, I describe the year I was born as the end of the excessive sixties, and in some sense, this book interrogates that primal scene. My parents, Barbara Gaines and Charles Gaines, with their various boldnesses, are behind the pages of this labor. My in-laws Gustavo Segade and Irina Kaplan Segade add their own influence to the politics and unstable raciality through which I emerged. And much support has come my way from Joseph Rosato and Roxana Landaverde.
The diversity of these chapters reflects very different archives. Special help negotiating these came from Rumi Missabu, Daniel Nicoletta, Pam Tent, David Weissman, Irwin Swirnoff, Lawrence Helman, Joseph Zaccarella, Emory Douglas, Sam Durant, Wenzel Bilger, Christina MacMahon and the University of California African Studies Research Group, Emeka Ogboh, Alicia Hall Moran, Jason Moran, Isaac Julien, Mark Nash, Thomas Lax, and David DeWitt. Thanks to Yasmeen Chism, J. M. DeLeon, and Ethan Philbrick for their assistance in the final stretch. Much of chapter 1 appeared as the article “The Quadruple-Consciousness of Nina Simone” in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, July 2013, and elicited excellent feedback in that process.
This project began with the artists who are the subjects of these chapters. I have only met one in person, the gracious, witty writer Ama Ata Aidoo; the rest are deceased by the time of this acknowledgment, which is perhaps telling. Their enduring works, in a certain parlance, give life still. One must only consider the present ubiquity of Nina Simone’s music to think of generation in a generative way. Despite her lifetime of difficulties, I hear her songs played regularly these days, in all sorts of settings. On a trip to the Middle East, I heard recordings of Simone in cafés in both Ramallah and Jerusalem, and as I hummed along I thought this must be an instance of transnational imagination, in all of its possibility and impossibility.