The Practice of Diaspora Citation

The African diaspora refers to the dispersal of African people and their cultural practices across the globe. How does diasporic consciousness manifest in twentieth-century concert dance? Brent Hayes Edwards argues that diaspora is most usefully conceived as an articulated, or joined, structure of belonging—one which demonstrates simultaneous continuities and incommensurable differences across diasporic contexts (Reference Edwards2003). He terms these untranslatable gaps—across lines of nation, class, gender, language, and more—décalage.Footnote ² Edwards proposes the embodied concept-metaphor of “articulated joints” as a way to envision diaspora—as the joint is a site of connection and necessarily includes gaps; the décalage allows for movement.Footnote ³ He asks, “What does it mean … that one articulates a joint?” (Reference Edwards2003, 15). Arguably, this question is a central concern of dance studies, a field that considers the significance of articulated joints both literally and metaphorically. Edwards's answer to his own question—“The connection speaks”—offers a point of departure for examining how dancing bodies function as speaking connections, articulating diaspora through the use of choreographic intertexts. Intertexts are quotations that form relationships between contexts and reshape their meanings. I propose that twentieth-century African American choreographers used embodied intertexts as a method for creating “strategically conjoined structures” of diasporic belonging on the concert stage (11–12). I offer the term “diaspora citation” to identify this practice.Footnote ⁴

Diaspora citation is a choreographic strategy that deploys embodied citation to critique the terms for national belonging, while affirming diasporic alternatives. In the United States, the terms for proper national belonging are constituted through the abstract figure of the “human” as citizen—a philosophical form of personhood historically and legally defined through property in the person as white, propertied Man—resulting in the exclusion of African Americans from full citizenship (Harris Reference Harris1993; Lipsitz Reference Lipsitz1998, Reference Lipsitz2011).Footnote ⁵ This sovereign subject is defined by its autonomy—self-possession and the capacity to dispossess Others through systems of property in histories of settler colonization and slavery. This framework of personhood also underpins the concept of movement as the property of an individual “genius” choreographer, a paradigm in Western dance historiography that has obscured contributions by people of color. Historically, white appropriations of Other cultural forms in concert dance operate through models that abstract culture into nationalist representations and individual property—preserving the originality of the artistic genius by claiming movement as autonomous and suppressing citation.Footnote ⁶ In contrast, the practice of diaspora citation articulates, or joins, choreographic intertexts to cite source and affirm cultural connections—across diasporic contexts, between individual and collective authorship, and across everyday movement, concert, ritual, and social dance—proposing an alternative, diasporic paradigm for belonging on distinct terms.Footnote ⁷ The philosophy of interdependence that animates this black citational choreographic practice understands personhood as entangled rather than sovereign, and movement as a source of connection rather than property.

Diaspora citation is an example of embodied counterdiscourses in black performance repertoires that critique the abstraction of the “human” in systems that render people property. Fred Moten argues that modes of black embodiment critique the terms of value and meaning in Western philosophy, particularly in regard to its “subject” (Reference Moten2003). His analysis focuses on the scream in black music as an embodied counterdiscourse—the “object” objecting to the systems of value, property, and “proper” national belonging at the heart of racialized American subject formation. Such embodied discourses also critique the history of Western modernity, including in the United States, in which exclusion from literacy served as a technique for exclusion from the category of the “human” (Barrett Reference Barrett2014). Not only did theoretical activity occur outside of the written word, but this is often precisely the position from which black performance delivers its critique of the “human”: “Such embodiment is also bound to the (critique of) reading and writing, oft conceived by clowns and intellectuals as the natural attributes of whoever would hope to be known as human” (Moten Reference Moten2003, 12). These critical, embodied counterdiscourses also point to other forms of life, suggesting alternative modes of belonging. Stuart Hall clarifies: “These cultures have used the body—as if it was, and it often was, the only cultural capital we had.… [I]n its rich production of counternarratives … black popular culture has enabled the surfacing … of elements of a discourse that is different—other forms of life, other traditions of representation” (Reference Hall, Dent and Wallace1992, 27). In light of histories in which exclusion from literacy served as disqualification from full humanity, scholars of black performance pay careful attention to the significance of vernacular form in quotidian embodiment (Hall Reference Hall, Dent and Wallace1992; Hartman Reference Hartman1997; Moten Reference Moten2003).Footnote ⁸ These are the historical circumstances under which human embodiment, rather than literacy, sets the boundaries of knowledge.

This history of embodied counterdiscourses highlights the significance of black vernacular modes of theorizing: diaspora citation involves embodied Signifyin’, or “reading,” shifting the terms of meaning making by citing and repurposing dominant terms. Signifyin’ is Henry Louis Gates's intertextual theory about African American strategies of double voicing and subterfuge in black vernacular discourse (Gates Reference Gates1988).Footnote ⁹ In Signifyin’, a citation or intertext means one thing in dominant discourse (a horizontal plane of conventional meaning), while registering alternative meanings in terms of a black vernacular discourse (a vertical plane of rhetorical associations). Signifyin’ is also known as “reading” in African American vernacular. Kobena Mercer explains, “A double-voicing in the African-American cultural text … [to] ‘read’ in the vernacular sense … is to utter unremitting social critique” (Reference Mercer1994, 163). A statement that is “reading” or Signifyin’ registers a conventional meaning, while also conveying an alternative trenchant social commentary for an audience familiar with specific associations. Diaspora citation conveys choreographic critiques of national belonging through embodied Signifyin’, like Pomare's watermelon performance described above. He quotes the dehumanizing minstrel stereotype, a national symbol that conventionally signifies degradation, and repurposes it for his own critical ends, creating a rhetorical association that “reads” the terms that haunt black bodies in US performance. Jennifer Dunning, as a witness to this performance, clearly understood the double meaning in Pomare's embodied Signifyin’ as an incisive choreographic critique, recalling the performance years later as an “unforgettably powerful moment” (1983).

In previous scholarship, John Perpener has established Pomare as a significant figure in African American concert dance, describing his piece Blues for the Jungle (1966) as a “manifesto for the defiant social consciousness that characterized much of his later work” (Reference Perpener2001, 209). Thomas DeFrantz has characterized Pomare's work, especially Blues, as paradigmatic of black nationalist ideologies in Black Arts Movement concert dance: its trenchant commentary on inequality reflected a historical moment of social upheaval (Reference DeFrantz and Bean1999). Rachel Fensham situates Pomare's choreographic projects in Europe and Australia in a diasporic framework to focus on his transnational circulation of modern dance concepts (Reference Fensham2013). This article builds on this research, positioning Pomare as an artist-theorist by foregrounding his choreographic theory of vitality, which he developed as a result of his time as a diasporic subject in Europe and manifested in Blues for the Jungle. Vitality reveals how Pomare understood his choreography and experiences in the United States to be entangled in a larger diasporic matrix. His investigation into quotidian movement vocabulary, as a source of connection between black artists and black audiences, places his theory of vitality in conversation with performance studies’ interest in the performative nature of everyday life. As suggested previously, this article uses the lens of diaspora citation to position vitality as a contribution to embodied theories of black performance that critique the exclusions of the abstract “human.” Finally, it offers previously unrecognized insights into Pomare's engagement with the historical discourse of black aesthetics through a choreographic lens during the Black Arts Movement.

In what follows, I begin with a consideration of how Pomare's lived experiences of global white supremacy inform his choreographic theory of vitality, or “black form.” This strategy seeks to connect with black audiences by referencing black social life—quoting ways of moving cultivated in Harlem to articulate “black oneness” as a structure of diasporic belonging on the concert stage. Vitality is exemplified in Blues for the Jungle, particularly Pomare's solo “Junkie” from the penultimate section. Blues culminates in a “Riot” scene in the audience, a choreographic citation indexing the 1964 Harlem uprising. I read this closing scene in dialogue with an essay on the 1964 Harlem “riot” by Pomare's close friend James Baldwin, revealing a discourse shared by these artist-theorists regarding an embodied epistemology defined by the lived experiences of Harlem: “Harlem knows.” Vitality conveys a knowledge of structural violence—the centrality of race and property to the operations of the US political and economic system—from the perspective of black social life. Simultaneously, vitality affirms collective genius in the quotidian ways of being developed under duress and brutality in black communities. By placing these cultural resources for survival on the concert stage, Pomare celebrates black form's aesthetic value as a testament to the fundamental humanity of black people. Ultimately, vitality constitutes a search for a diasporic structure of belonging beyond the conception of personhood and movement as property.

Becoming Black in the (Dance) World

The trajectory of Eleo Pomare's life moves across four continents. His experiences as a diasporic subject, encountering manifestations of white supremacy in his global travels, articulate distinct contexts that are joined through his embodied experiences of becoming black in the world. Pomare was born in South America (Cartagena, Colombia) in 1937 and raised in Central America (San Andrés, Panama) before moving to North America (Harlem, New York) in 1947. Following his education at La Guardia High School for the Performing Arts from 1949 to 1953, he went to Europe (Essen, Germany) in 1961 to study with choreographer Kurt Jooss on a Whitney Fellowship. He left Germany to work in Amsterdam, before returning to the United States during the peak of the civil rights movement in 1963–1964. He later performed significant work in Australia, as Rachel Fensham has argued, articulating a decolonial, coalitional politics of solidarity with Aboriginal peoples under an expansive global conception of blackness (Reference Fensham2013, 55).Footnote ¹⁰ Although Pomare did not use the term “diaspora” to refer to his experiences, I argue that his global sense of blackness—becoming black in an antiblack world—gives rise to his articulation of diaspora as a critique of national belonging and an alternative structure of being in the world.

In Cartagena, Colombia, Pomare experienced colorism at an early age when his domineering grandmother showed her “disdain for rearing ‘Negro’ children” by “telling him point blank ‘You're too dark!’” (Pomare quoted in Wilson Reference Wilson1993, 22). This early awareness of exclusion through colorism reinforced the global, historical forces of white supremacy and psychological colonization within the intimacy of the family unit.Footnote ¹¹ At the age of six, Pomare was traveling with his father to visit his mother in Panama. Their boat was torpedoed by a German U-boat. Pomare was the only one to survive the event. He was sent at the age of ten to live with an aunt and uncle in Harlem (Estrada Reference Estrada1968; Wilson Reference Wilson1993).

In New York, at the High School for the Performing Arts, Pomare describes his experience as being like a “fly in a bowl of milk” (Pomare quoted in Fensham Reference Fensham2013, 44; Wilson Reference Wilson1993, 22). His determination to leave the United States was instigated by experiences of racial discrimination and his assessment of the limits for concert dance on the uneven, binary terms that existed in the United States: modern versus Negro dance (Manning Reference Manning2004). He was also drawn to Europe because of an investment in European cultural hegemony: “I believed the myths that one had to study in Europe to be really educated, and that Europe was more sensitive to black people. I was looking for a place to work where my complexion didn't come before my product” (Pomare quoted in Dunning Reference Dunning1983, 4). He received a Whitney Fellowship to study with German modern dance choreographer Kurt Jooss. Pomare describes being attracted to the intensity in photographs of Jooss's dancers and the ways in which his work directly addressed political situations: “It was a tension, a whole way of dealing with things that are a real part of our lives as opposed to escape into some kind of ethereal space which I could never realize” (1983). Tension would become both a signature quality of Pomare's movement vocabulary and an affective state that he cultivated in performance (like the watermelon solo), as he sought to deal with issues “that are a real part of our lives.”

Upon arriving in Europe, however, he realized that an ideology of racial superiority, rather than being absent, was configured through a colonial lens of primitivism. Primitivism “assumes a hierarchical and evolutionary relationship between Western civilization and savage, racialized Others” (Kraut Reference Kraut2003, 435). Narratives of Pomare's departure from Jooss's studio frequently quote his declaration: “I just couldn't take that dogmatic bull” (Pomare quoted in Fensham Reference Fensham2013, 46; Johnson Reference Johnson1969; Perpener Reference Perpener2001, 209). Fensham relates this statement to an argument about demands for Pomare to perform shirtless by ballet choreographer Anthony Tudor, reinforcing primitivist conceptions of black dancing bodies on the concert stage and in the European imagination (2013, 46). Pomare refused to perform the overdetermined role of black exoticized, hypersexualized object prescribed by primitivism. “As a man in Europe, I learned that Europeans were interested in me, but in my body only. Some very, very hung-up people, baby. I am expected to be silent and exotic. ‘Don't you dare think nigger; just look beautiful, and let us chase after that black Thing’” (Pomare Reference Pomare1969). Pomare's conjoining of “Thing” with blackness points to the objectification secured through the lens of primitivism. He refused this reduction of his personhood.

Pomare was keenly sensitive to the role of audience and context in his choreography. His attention to spectatorship and reception is clear in his embodied Signifyin’ on primitivist expectations from European audiences. For example, in Amsterdam, he “read” the ignorance of Dutch promoters who requested more “African” signifiers in his choreography by performing the exact same modern dance movement in grass skirts to drums the following night (Fensham Reference Fensham2013, 46–48).Footnote ¹² What appears to be an accommodation to racist tropes on one level, simultaneously contains a critical dimension that is Signifyin’ on primitivist inabilities to comprehend black modern dance. “Reading” performance conventions from primitivism to minstrelsy, Pomare critiqued the dominant terms that sought to prescribe the meaning of his body in performance. His experiences of exclusion in the white dance world, first in the United States and then in Europe, incited his development of a choreographic strategy that sought to connect with black audiences through references to everyday life.

Pomare's Choreographic Theory of Vitality: Citing Black Social Life

In a speech delivered to an audience on the streets of Harlem in 1969, Pomare explains his choreographic theory of vitality, or “black form.” This approach to form is embedded within social, historical, and political contexts, challenging ideas of aesthetic formalism premised on removing art from these contexts. Pomare's theory of vitality works by citing embodied nuances drawn from black social life—for example, the slow lean, drooping mouth, and twitching arm of the junkie on the streets of Harlem. It joins a critique of the material realities of black life in the United States during the 1960s—he specifically mentions people whose “vital” responses to life do not include the buffers of wealth and privilege—with affirmations of the beauty in the cultural resources for survival developed under such conditions (Pomare Reference Pomare1969).

In his speech, Pomare positions vitality in direct opposition to primitivism, caustically referencing the word “primitive” throughout. In contrast, he defines vitality in this way: “Vitality is neither crude, incompetent, nor a by-product of groping ignorance. It is the expression of a people who have a direct and immediate response to life, people whose ‘art’ is a channel for expressing powerful beliefs, hopes and fears and desires” (Pomare Reference Pomare1969). Pomare's theory of vitality uses “black form,” in its vital connection to black social life, as a strategy to communicate urgent messages to black audiences. He is driven by a sense of connection.

However, this sense of connection is not uncomplicated or based on a homogenizing sameness. Pomare connects the décalage of diaspora—the misunderstandings, misrecognitions, and mistranslations across national borders—to his lived experience:

Pomare's sense of alienation drove him to Europe and back. His ongoing displacement incites a longing for black connections in a larger context of white supremacy; “the white attitude is the same everywhere” (Pomare quoted in Estrada Reference Estrada1968, 46). Pomare acknowledges the gaps and misunderstandings of diasporic décalage—“banana pickers and the whole shit”—making a direct appeal to audience members in a call for solidarity against global white supremacy—“let's keep it together” (Pomare Reference Pomare1969). He articulates this as a diasporic consciousness: “I came back to do something, and that is to tell black people that I discovered black oneness in Europe” (1969). Pomare uses black oneness as a bridge discourse, while simultaneously acknowledging décalage as an integral dimension of the complexities of diasporic belonging. “This is the kind of experience whites don't understand, and which I try to communicate to Negro audiences in their own terms” (Pomare quoted in Estrada Reference Estrada1968, 48). By referencing a shared knowledge of black social life in quotations of everyday movement, he seeks to communicate with black audiences on black terms.

To illuminate the terms of a black movement aesthetic, Pomare studies quotidian performances: “It's important for me as a choreographer to know how the baby moves, how the father moves, how the mother moves. I must know this if I am going to communicate urgent messages to them in terms of movement. That is the discovery part of my paper, the desire and attempt to define the beauty of or, if you insist ‘Art,’ of black life” (Pomare Reference Pomare1969). He reorients the concept of aesthetics, as a science of beauty in art, from its universalist, ethnocentric European formulations—for example, Kantian aesthetics, which remove considerations of beauty in art from context to focus on the metaphysical, visual apprehension of a white, male viewer (Kant [1790] Reference Kant, Guyer and Matthews2000)—toward a consideration of the social world from which cultural products emerge.

The embodied nuances of “vital” responses to life are entangled with place, with the physical environments that give rise to specific movement patterns. “After losing many nights of sleep, I made up my mind that it would be a waste of time and energy to bring dances which are unrelated to the people's conditions and surroundings to them” (Pomare Reference Pomare1969). Pomare's unrelenting critiques target the neglected state of black neighborhoods in the United States as sites of structural violence, demonstrating “what it's like to live in Harlem, to be hung-up and uptight and trapped and black and wanting to get out. And I'm saying it in a dance language that originates in Harlem itself” (Pomare quoted in Estrada Reference Estrada1968, 46). In developing this dance language, he positions the most mundane forms of black life as culturally significant, worthy of close choreographic attention: “I have been working in Black neighborhoods, and my intent, what I've been trying to do so far, is to discover black form, black form. You know, there is a way we walk and talk and sing and eat and take a crap” (Pomare Reference Pomare1969).Footnote ¹³

Pomare's focus on the nuances of quotidian movement also includes vernacular dance: “When I dance like an American black person or like a West Indian black person or like a black person anyplace, my dance talks to all black people. You know, we all have a kind of rhythm, a similarity of being. (But we don't have the kind of rhythm THEY think we have. THEY don't know what it's about)” (Pomare Reference Pomare1969). Here, Pomare positions the distinct articulations of joints in different cultural contexts—black American is not collapsed with West Indian—as also shared, through a diasporic, Africanist rhythmic sensibility across contexts. His declaration, “my dance talks to all black people,” recalls Edwards's question, “What does it mean to say … that one articulates a joint?” and his answer, “The connection speaks” (2003, 15). Vitality positions the articulated joints of dancing bodies across the diaspora as potential speaking connections.

This shared sensibility simultaneously resists white, primitivist constructions that naturalize the technical dimensions of rhythm and reduce blackness into a homogenizing sameness— “the kind of rhythm THEY think we have.” As Anthea Kraut explains, “The notion of diaspora not only troubles stereotypes of black people as unthinking, uncivilized exotics. It also replaces the hierarchies and dichotomies on which primitivism depends with a model of black influences and exchange not wholly dependent on any white arbiter. That is, whereas primitivism views blackness only vis-à-vis whiteness, diaspora foregrounds the relations within blackness” (Reference Kraut2003, 450). The shift toward diaspora, then, is also a shifting of terms, a movement toward self-determination, broadly understood in the context of the Black Arts Movement as the capacity of black subjects to define themselves, speak for themselves, and operate on the terms of their own choosing.Footnote ¹⁴ Rejecting a lens of primitivism for viewing black bodies signals Pomare's shift toward centering and articulating the diasporic relations within blackness.

This shift toward diaspora also proposes a concept of personhood that is imbricated in a larger sense of collective responsibility and belonging, resonating with the articulation of “ourselves” in black self-determination: “I came back because I found out I ain't going nowhere unless all of us go somewhere” (Pomare Reference Pomare1969).Footnote ¹⁵ His new conception of the self is as a multiplicity: “I am in constant search of another self now.… I have to know how to be articulate to black people.… I study myself as a people” (Reference Pomare1969). To study the self “as a people” reorients selfhood conceived as an autonomous, sovereign individual—the “human”—by positioning personhood as entangled in a matrix of cultural and historical influences, as well as ethical and political responsibilities. This entangled self is elaborated in Pomare's piece Blues for the Jungle through his use of movement material that emerges from the material conditions of Harlem's concrete “jungle.”

Home to Harlem 1964: Blues for the Jungle

Pomare credits his close friend James Baldwin with his return to the United States for the Freedom March in Washington, DC, in 1963. “Jimmy, he called me several days before the March on Washington, and he said, ‘Eleo, you are going to be there, and you better come home.’ That march literally changed the rest of what I would do, what I would say, and where I belonged” (Pomare quoted in Free to Dance [Lacy Reference Lacy2001]). In 1964, Pomare returned to New York for the remainder of his life. This return constitutes an intentional act of belonging by a diasporic subject claiming a home in the world:

Pomare had begun working on Blues in Amsterdam in 1962, and it premiered in New York on October 16, 1966, at the 92nd Street YMCA. The piece joins modern dance vocabulary with quotidian movement drawn from repertoires of black social life. In particular, Pomare's solo “Junkie,” the penultimate section, provides a compelling example of his use of choreographic citation to elaborate forms of subjectivity that emerge in the physical environment of Harlem, a social milieu formed in the wake of histories of people as property.

“Junkie”

In a grainy black and white film of “Junkie,” Pomare wears sunglasses, jeans, a light jacket, a black beret, and a turtleneck.Footnote ¹⁶ He cites the singular physical vocabulary and embodied nuances of the addict—drooping his mouth at the corners, scratching his forearm, holding his crotch, employing the shuffling walk, and performing the almost virtuosic lean in which the addict is hunched over, eyes closed, inclined just to the point of toppling, before recovering. His body convulses, his fingers grasp for nothing, and he squishes his chin against his shoulder, distorting his facial expression even further. These embodied quotations, drawn from everyday life on the streets of 1960s Harlem, are cut with movement more readily recognizable as dance. He draws his foot up his leg into a parallel passé, arms reaching in opposition, straining at the very limit of his range of motion. He breaks into a little shuffling tap dance and then gently waves it away, chuckling as he stumbles across the stage.

Photo 1.

Eleo Pomare in “Junkie.” Photographer Jan Dalman, courtesy Dr. Elizabeth Dalman and Andreas Dalman.

The junkie turns into the corner to light a cigarette, grabbing his arm at the elbow and collapsing into an overdose. In some versions he takes off his belt to cinch the veins in his arm. His body flops on the ground, jerking unpredictably, his feet twitching. This episode is not the end. His recovery performs the cyclical nature of overdose and addiction. Pomare pulls off his sunglasses, revealing his eyes. In one of the most compelling moments of the solo, he softly touches his lips, as his eyes convey the ecstatic state, the escape from this world that the junkie relentlessly pursues. His eyes are fixed on something beautiful that the audience cannot see, revealing his departure, a sublime state of relief. This blissed out moment is cut with the instability of his stance, facial contortions, and animated talking to an invisible presence. As he leaves the stage, he makes a dismissive little hand gesture, as if to say, “Hey man—it's okay.” In later versions of the piece, he goes into the audience, directly engaging them, demanding that they satisfy his fix. One version ends with an overdose. Pomare's head hangs lifelessly off the edge of the opera house stage.Footnote ¹⁷

One of the first gestures in “Junkie” is Pomare pointing his finger directly at the audience. Rather than internalizing social hatred, as the junkie does, Pomare forces it back on the spectators, transforming internalized anger, as a private emotion, into affective tension in the performance space. As Pomare approaches audience members, begging for a fix, he thrusts the scene of the junkie's abjection, which is passed over in daily life—avoided on the subway train and the street corner—into the concert stage spotlight. Viewers are provoked to consider how their subjectivity is entangled with this figure (who is not just a figure, but a human being). They are provoked to consider the larger political economies that create the conditions for his emergence: the afterlife of slavery in the formation of Harlem-as-ghetto. Saidiya Hartman explains, “If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” (Reference Hartman2007, 6).

During the 1950s and 1960s, Harlem was flooded with hard drugs. When I interviewed dancers Abdel Salaam and Martial Roumain, who grew up in the vice districts of Harlem and Times Square at that time, they were so familiar with the physicality of the addict that they immediately broke into this embodiment, the facial distortions and signature lean (Roumain Reference Roumain2016; Salaam Reference Salaam2013). Salaam remembered how his elementary school was besieged by heroin. He spoke of children using in the fifth grade (2013). “Junkie” choreographically forecasts the knowledge that US government drug policy has been a racially motivated project of criminalization, underscoring why drugs are treated as a criminal problem, rather than as a public health crisis.Footnote ¹⁸ The aim of Pomare's critique is clear in Wahneema Lubiano's discussion of the ways that the figures of addicts and dealers are deployed to justify increased policing and surveillance of black neighborhoods, “as if drugs and the black underground economy of which they are a part are what is determining the contours of our lives and not the operation of an unfettered and capitalist political economy that has declared war on jobs, poor people, and black people” (Reference Lubiano and Lubiano1997, 249). Ultimately, it is the operations of racial capitalism that Pomare indexes when he jabs his finger at the audience.

Pomare describes his experience as a performer: “The thing that I try to reach when I do ‘Junkie’ is articulated anger … as a dancer and a performer it's a study in self-destruction” (Pomare quoted in Dance Black America 1983). His use of the term “articulated anger” is distinct from his reputation in the white press as the “angry black choreographer.” In response to this reputation he clarifies, “Angry, I wouldn't call myself angry for seeing these things, just call me alert” (Pomare quoted in Estrada Reference Estrada1968, 46). The articulated anger he reaches for in “Junkie” is the result of alert analysis. It is the culminating affect produced by the articulated joints of the preceding scenes of Blues, which, when joined, constitute a critical analysis of systemic racism as the historical and political condition of possibility for the junkie on the streets of 1960s Harlem. Blues begins with racial capitalism—the irresolvable internal contradiction of people as property at the foundation of the nation—and the sections that follow articulate the enduring forms of racialized exclusion and deprivation determined by this capitalist political economy. It gathers momentum, leading up to “Junkie” as a figure of black pathology and abject outsider status. This figure simultaneously refuses pathologization by pointing to the structural, historical conditions from which he emerges.

Articulating the Enduring Terms of Race and Property

Blues for the Jungle links a series of six scenes to construct an argument about the relationship between racialized personhood and property as the condition of possibility for the 1964 Harlem “riot”: Slave Auction; Behind Prison Walls; Preaching the Gospel; View from a Tenement Window; Junkie; Riot. Pomare's choreographic articulations join these scenes, building them sequentially and linking them through choreographic intertexts. Each scene details mechanisms that exclude African Americans from full citizenship and the figure of the “human,” culminating in “Riot” as a collective refusal of these terms.

The first section, “Slave Auction,” opens with a shirtless man (Chuck Davis in the 1967 filmed version) standing on a block, slowly contracting his ribcage. The voice of an auctioneer, appraising the physical characteristics of the “property,” resonates menacingly around the dancers. Men crawl backward on their knees, arms clasped behind their heads. Women walk backward, their ribcages contracting in fractured rhythmic pulsations. The narration cries out, “Going, going, gone!” This scene portrays a foundational national paradox—a history in which people were property—as a past that continues to shape the present.

“Behind Prison Walls” is a trio for men in striped tank tops. The music, a chain gang song called “I Got a Hammer,” drives the dancers with its pressing call and response pattern. Pomare hinges to the floor, rubbing his face into it. The incredible muscular tension in his body contrasts with his loose fingers, as he holds an imaginary partner in the memory of an embrace. The setting of prison and the sonic intertext of the chain gang song index the historical continuities of systemic exclusion in the afterlife of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment banning slavery had a loophole—criminals did not have access to the basic rights of the “human” or the citizen. This led to the development of discourses of black criminality and to the current situation of mass incarceration of black and brown people in the prison industrial complex (Alexander Reference Alexander2010; Duvernay Reference Duvernay2016).

“Preaching the Gospel” opens with a woman (Carole Johnson in 1967) wearing a handkerchief, a long-sleeved leotard, and a circle skirt. A preacher enters in a suit jacket with a wide-brimmed, black hat. He is followed offstage by a group of convulsing dancers, while Johnson stays behind for her solo. She kneels, grabbing her own hands, twisting, distorting, pulling to the very edge of her physical capacity. The group returns, and the preacher places the bible over her head. The church is rendered as an institution that is complicit in justifying the dominations of slavery and colonization with the promise of salvation.Footnote ¹⁹ Pomare also criticizes career-minded black preacher-politicians who neglect the needs of black folks in Harlem (Harvey Reference Harvey2013).

The next scene opens with a woman sitting in a chair back-to-back with a man (Delores Vanison and Ronald Pratt). They pull each other close, almost kissing, before roughly shoving each other away. Ultimately, he strangles her, pulling her offstage. “View from a Tenement Window” conveys domestic violence, staging the publicity of private life in the overcrowded tenements of Harlem-as-ghetto—a consequence of economies of white property ownership and racialized housing discrimination (Lipsitz Reference Lipsitz2011).

The conjunction of scenes leading up to “Junkie” articulates the ways in which this figure on the streets of 1960s Harlem emerges from histories of people as property, discourses of black criminality, institutionalized neglect, and the exclusions of black people from “proper” citizenship. Pomare began developing Blues in a 1962 piece called Harlem Moods in Amsterdam (Fensham Reference Fensham2013, 48). Its full-length premiere in 1966 reveals the impact of the 1964 Harlem riot in the culminating scene. While “Junkie” and the preceding sections provide a structural analysis of the historical conditions leading to the present, “Riot” simultaneously records, performs, and recommends the collective refusal of this structural violence.

“Riot”

The final section of Blues is introduced by the slave auctioneer's voice. This sonic intertext from the opening scene reminds the audience that the afterlife of slavery forms the condition of possibility for the uprising. “Riot” opens with a prostitute in a blond wig, slinking in from the wings. She is followed onstage by a nun, the Salvation Army lady, the boxer, the “cool Madison Avenue type,” the bag lady who shouts epithets at no one, and the policeman, in charge of regulating the scene, maintaining law and order (Pomare quoted in Estrada Reference Estrada1968, 50). Pomare, as the junkie, twitches on the ground. He is ignored and stepped over by the others. The general estrangements of African Americans from the nation are underscored in Pomare's exposure of the fungibility of black life in the United States.Footnote ²⁰

The opening scenario of “Riot” is a Harlem populated by “socially unacceptable types” (Pomare quoted in Nuchtern Reference Nuchtern1974, 31). The distinction between white stereotype and “socially unacceptable type” is a point of confusion across articles and reviews of Blues. However, it is important. Pomare's technique of drawing on his lived experience growing up in Harlem references and critiques the material effects of structural exclusion manifested in social unacceptability, rather than presenting stereotypes that confirm white expectations of black social pathology. “Every character in my dances has his real life counterpart. They're not white stereotypes” (Pomare quoted in Estrada Reference Estrada1968, 50). The distinction is between the source of pathology: the individual who fails to conform to norms of the “human” and the citizen, versus the structural forms of inequality and exclusion that produce the outside of the citizen and the “human,” embodied as “socially unacceptable types.”

Exclusion from the legal, historical, and philosophical construct of property in the person also produces an embodied way of knowing, or bodily epistemology, of the integral role of race and property to the functioning of the US political and economic system. This way of knowing emerges from the lived experiences of growing up in Harlem.

“Harlem Knows”: Embodied Epistemology in “A Report from Occupied Territory”

James Baldwin, Pomare's close friend who encouraged his return to New York, was born and raised in Harlem. On July 11, 1966, three months before Blues premiered, Baldwin published an article in the Nation entitled “A Report from Occupied Territory,” reflecting on the conditions that led to the 1964 Harlem riot. Reading Blues for the Jungle in dialogue with Baldwin's essay underscores embodied ways of knowing the reality of racism in the United States. This knowledge is central to Pomare's theory of vitality—“what it's like to live in Harlem, to be hung-up and uptight and trapped and black and wanting to get out”—whereas it appears in Baldwin's text in a rhetorical device—“Harlem knows”—deployed throughout his essay (Pomare quoted in Estrada Reference Estrada1968, 46; Baldwin Reference Baldwin1966, 40–43). I am proposing that Blues and “Report” are two artifacts that contain the trace of a shared discourse by these artist-theorists. In bringing together their meditations on the knowledge of racial capitalism from the lived experience of Harlemites, I seek to illuminate that historical discourse, while opening considerations of its relevance for the present.

In his essay Baldwin, like Pomare and Lubiano, directs his critique at the economy of racial capitalism that has declared war on jobs, poor people, and black people:

In one version of Blues, the event described by Baldwin instigates the riot scene. A boy approaches the policeman, shoving a newspaper article in his face.Footnote ²² The policeman shoots him, inciting the dancers to stage an uprising in the audience—throwing chairs, screaming, and thrusting newspapers at audience members. Pomare directly implicates the viewers in this shooting. Just over fifty years later, the demands of the Movement for Black Lives—to end state-sanctioned police brutality against black people—demonstrate the ongoing grip of this history on the present. “Report” and Blues are searing indictments of the nation's enduring exclusion of African Americans, “a deep and dangerous estrangement” (Baldwin Reference Baldwin1966, 41).

Baldwin articulates the concrete jungle of Harlem with the geopolitical jungle of Vietnam, intimating the growing suspicion in Harlem that police brutality and conscription into military service are interrelated ways to deal with the “Negro problem.” He quotes the “bitter prescience” in the observation of one of the boys from the Harlem Six, who were on trial for defending younger children from police brutality: “They just don't want us here, period!” (Baldwin Reference Baldwin1966, 43).Footnote ²³ This suspicion is connected to a larger “Harlem knows” way of understanding the US political and economic system: “No one in Harlem will ever believe that The Harlem Six are guilty—God knows their guilt has certainly not been proved. Harlem knows, though, that they have been abused and possibly destroyed, and Harlem knows why—we have lived with it since our eyes opened on the world” (43). Baldwin connects this knowledge to racialized subjectivity conceived through property in the person in his references to the “No Knock” and “Stop and Frisk” laws. The latter allows police to stop and search bodies on the street, whereas the former allows them to enter people's homes unannounced: “Harlem believes, and I certainly agree, that these laws are directed against Negroes” (42). Racialized personhood determines which bodies are stopped and searched and which homes, or whose property, will be violated without a warrant.Footnote ²⁴

Baldwin also conveys the sensory details, the phenomenological dimensions of “Harlem knows” as an embodied experience: “This means that I also know, in my own flesh, and know, which is worse, in the scars borne by many of those dearest to me, the thunder and fire of the billy club, the paralyzing shock of spittle in the face, and I know what it is to find oneself blinded, on one's hands and knees, at the bottom of the flight of steps down which one has just been hurled” (Baldwin Reference Baldwin1966, 40). This intimate corporeal knowledge of the practical functioning of the US political and economic system registers at the level of the body, constituting a way of knowing ingrained in and as the flesh.Footnote ²⁵ The Harlem Six endured such severe battery, by six to twelve police officers at a time, that two boys were taken to Harlem Hospital for X-rays between beatings by the police themselves (42). In this economy, white property interests are placed above the physical safety and civil rights of black people.

As Baldwin implies, despite Harlem's renown as an iconic African American neighborhood, the majority of property holders have never been its black residents. Rather than protecting the community that pays taxes for this service, the police are the “hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function.… This is why those pious calls to ‘respect the law,’ always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene” (Baldwin Reference Baldwin1966, 41). Blues for the Jungle culminates with this explosion as a collective refusal of these conditions. Although Blues is often understood as a cynical critique, “Riot,” as a culminating performance of refusal, in fact constitutes a powerful affirmation of black folks claiming their humanity in the face of dehumanizing conditions, of civil disobedience as collective self-defense.

Vitality as Humanity

Pomare and Baldwin's critiques are aimed at the systemic oppression woven into the social fabric of American democracy. The threads of liberal humanism and racialized capitalism are intertwined in the exclusions of the proper subject, the sovereign figure of the “human.” Baldwin states outright that his report is “a plea for the recognition of our common humanity. Without this recognition, our common humanity will be proved in unutterable ways” (Baldwin Reference Baldwin1966, 40). At stake is the legal, philosophical, political question of the rights of the abstract “human” versus a recognition of common humanity. At stake is the question of who counts as fully human. Pomare's theory of vitality, as a theory of entangled subjectivity, affirms common humanity in “black form” forged through the lived experiences of blackness:

In its evocation of an epistemology of survival—knowing the reality of America through surviving its racialized brutality and violence—vitality participates in Fred Moten's theorization of the aesthetics of the black radical tradition: the knowledge of freedom produced in conditions of unfreedom testifies to fundamental humanity in the cultural resources for survival developed in an antiblack nation and world (Moten Reference Moten2003, 7, 21–22).

For Pomare, vitality enables critiques of structural racism but also significantly conveys profound affirmations of black social life through a deep appreciation of collective cultural resources—spirituals, jazz, blues, soul, funk, and quotidian ways of moving. These resources are simultaneously marked by that violence and contain knowledge of what it means to be human in lived experiences of black resilience. Baldwin attests to this affirmative dimension, writing that attempts to leave the economic and social conditions of disenfranchisement of black social life in the United States “will be painfully complicated by the fact that the ways of being, the ways of life of the despised and rejected, nevertheless, contain an incontestable vitality and authority” (Baldwin Reference Baldwin1966, 41).

Pomare's theory of vitality not only reorients European philosophical discourses of aesthetics by attending to cultural and historical specificity instead of universality; it also reorients the conceptual figure of the “human” in Western philosophy, by attending to the constitutive humanity of its “outside,” manifested in the beauty rendered in the lived experiences of this outside. As philosopher of black aesthetics Paul Taylor observes, “Insisting on black beauty, and on the ideological and political dimensions of the stigmatization of black bodies, has been and remains a vital part of the work of black aesthetics” (Reference Taylor2010, 11).