Theatre Journal

Tarana Burke is the performance theorist of this historical moment. Notwithstanding any individual assessment of its efficacy, her coining of “Me Too” has produced a transnational movement that has left a seismic impact on the protocols of departments like dance and theatre, which center bodies and the knowledge they carry and enact. Like Ntozake Shange, one of her muses with whom she dialogues in the beginning and ending of her published narrative, Burke insists on the power of women’s speech as efficacious in diagnosing and responding to racialized patriarchies. As an illustration, Burke’s memoir Unbound: My Story and the Birth of the Me Too Movement demonstrates the power of performativity, of ritual, of reciprocity between speakers and audiences that foster new relationalities and a continued ethical praxis of healing in the wake of structural racism and intersectional violence. The first part of my title for this editorial cites Burke’s own framing of her project. Examples from her text divulge the ways in which Burke anticipates, elaborates, or otherwise contextualizes the force of Me Too as striving toward recognition and the benefits and drawbacks attendant to such goals.

Echoes of Frantz Fanon’s hailing, “Tiens, un nègre” or “Maman, regarde le nègre” in a critically gendered timbre resound in Burke’s experience of epithet.¹ She perceives a passerby whose “discomfort churns through their body” as that person’s inevitable “stare” marks her as “ugly.”² “The world” that hails Burke is constituted by white supremacy. However, here she exposes its effects not through a white girl à la Fanon’s famous illustration, but from someone whose race is indeterminate: racism saturates all communities in the US.³ As one component of this structural violence, the repeated performance of “unkindness creates a particular kind of vulnerability” resulting in what Burke calls “slow death.”⁴ With these words, Burke revises Fanon’s description of “l’expérience vécue du Noir” (the lived experience of Blackness, which has often been translated into English as the “Fact of Blackness”) orienting her discussion to heterosexual Black women. Fanon’s own attempts to deal with gender and sexuality proved productively inadequate despite his incisive commentary on race. Burke’s writing similarly cannot account fully for the slipperiness of identification and authority, but she nevertheless opens inquiries into overlapping vectors of oppression as well as improvisatory and structured acts to live through them.⁵

In this vein, the prose continually evokes religious practice as a resource for survival. Such a move departs from Fanon but situates her in a tradition of Black intellectuals that extend back to Sojourner Truth and W.E.B. Du Bois. Burke’s avowed calling is to develop frameworks through which certain forms of violence can be processed and [End Page vii] integrated into subjectivity as opposed to dissolving it. The emphasis rests heavily on identifying material and psychic conditions that cause pain, especially for Black straight women, and to find means to perform through it. Put otherwise, survival in a racist and sexist world requires performance from minority subjects. From this perspective, aligning Burke with Fanon proves useful. Stuart Hall provides a constructive reminder of the contingency of Blackness, a position articulated with more ambivalence in Burke’s writing but one that can be gleaned from those pages regardless.

Fanon certainly knew that, in the system of radicalised exclusion and abjection sustained by the look from the place of the Other, the bodily schema is constituted, not given, and culturally and historically shaped . . . any notion that the return to the site of the body represents a recovery of some essential ground or foundation that will restore the essential black subject is not only mistaken but has taken a message from Fanon’s work which he explicitly precludes.⁶

For Burke, what exactly each performance entails cannot be determined in advance; the negotiation of life in a structure that mandates Black death is contingent work. And that, for me, is what Burke’s work ultimately aspires to do: to demonstrate a trajectory of work through and against racism, sexism, and their intersections.

When I first joined the editorial team...