Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism by Alex Zamalin (review)

This final part of the collection emphasizes “the possibility that pleasure and risk, excitement and disappointment can reside in a single experience” (237) for performers, critics, and audiences across different temporalities, such as in Mario Lamothe’s reading of queer Haitian “self-possessed lives” (246) in art photography. Finally, Joshua Chambers-Letson brings us back to the Introduction’s evoked “care” by tracing Black feminist performance art’s “revelation” of repetition in everyday life within “the sphere of performative behavior that reproduces the world anew each day [and] coheres through routines and rituals that accumulate into performative reality, whereby a social fiction (that a body lying right in front of you is not, in fact, there) becomes a material fact” (277). Rather than stop at the “gotcha” moment of revelation, however, and like the Nyong’o essay that begins the collection, Chambers-Letson argues that this genealogy of work by Black feminist performance artists (as well as the theories of José Esteban Muñoz that course throughout the collection) create a different temporality of the present that insists on incommensurability. It is through this articulation of knowing race differently through the “savvy virtuosity” of Black and minoritarian performance that these two books collaborate on new epistemologies in the field.