Editorial Comment: Abolition and Performance

Abstract

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• Editorial Comment:Abolition and Performance
• Ariel Nereson

[A]bolition has to be the way to relate to one another. So, not a tool to implement, but a posture and a way of life.

—Ashon Crawley¹

Theatre, dance, and performance studies offer many methodological tools for understanding practice and interpreting theories embedded in and arising from practice. Attending to time, space, embodiment, affect, energy, and lived experience is a foundational commitment of our fields. In bringing abolition and performance together as paired keywords, this special issue seeks to understand how interventions in theatre, dance, and performance studies can be tools that help us reorient our individual and collective postures toward abolition. Abolition is a set of relations, a doing, a way of life, as Ashon Crawley writes, that seeks the undoing of the forms of relation we currently live under in the racial capitalocene that presume the necessity of carcerality in order to recompense harm.² In other words, rejecting modes of social organization oriented around punishment (and hegemonic assertions of whom can be punished, and how) requires practicing the postures of "restorative justice, abolition, hospitality, [and] joy," both as individual alignments and in community.³

This special issue explicitly connects theatre, dance, and performance studies with the carceral turn in the humanities and social sciences, where, as Robert Fanuzzi writes, "abolition" refers to a "horizon of change" that encompasses "an end to traditions, or epistemologies, that normalize centuries of racial oppression and gender inequality as inevitable, if regrettable, features of modernity and which center or overrepresent Western European male concepts of humanity as their default."⁴ Taking up "carcerality" [End Page xi] as a keyword, Beth E. Richie defines the term as "a condition or set of social arrangements that advances a reliance on punishment or incapacitation."⁵ Across disciplines, performance is a flexible analytic for understanding the circulation of power. In an address to members upon becoming president of the American Studies Association, abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore recounted the many intersections between her study in drama and her work in abolitionist thinking and organizing, encouraging listeners to think of public policy as a "script" for the future.⁶

As a focus of theatre, dance, and performance studies, abolition has a short but powerful bibliography. Abolition and performance intersect memorably in a foundational contribution to Black performance studies from Daphne Brooks in her chapter "The Escape Artist: Henry Box Brown, Black Abolitionist Performance, and Moving Panoramas of Slavery."⁷ The influential collection Race and Performance after Repetition (Duke University Press, 2020), coedited by Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones, Jr., and Shane Vogel, features several essays grounded in performance studies that take up carcerality as their primary focus.⁸ More recently, Robin Bernstein has documented how William Freeman refused to perform according to the script of Auburn State Prison in the 1840s and how understanding the motivations and consequences of his refusal rewrites the history of incarceration in the United States.⁹ Performance-adjacent works such as Nicole R. Fleetwood's Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration and its theorization of carceral aesthetics have proven influential across several disciplines; performance has likewise become central to understanding carcerality, as in Sam C. Tenorio's jump: Black Anarchism and Antiblack Carcerality, which reads the motion of jumping as a repertoire of Black political refusal.¹⁰ From staged performances that activate spectacle in order to stir their audiences¹¹ to studies like Jessi Lee Jackson's, wherein police culture is defined as "every performance of identification with the existing [End Page xii] social and economic order and the violence used to maintain it," "performance" is both a salient site and a flexible analytic for understanding the embodied practices of the carceral state and of abolition's past, present, and future alternatives.¹²

This special issue opens with a subject who has a long association with abolition: the mythic and historic John Brown. Ben Spatz, SAJ, Eero Laine, Michelle Liu Carriger, and Henry Bial invite readers into a multifaceted exploration of Brown's many iterations as they flicker through racial formations across media from murals to mascots and taglines to television. Through the authors' collective focus on "the unbearable...