Considering Bad Behavior and the Migration of Tears

Abstract

The history of transatlantic slavery is everyone’s history — not just that of people, Black or otherwise, from long ago, or of the American South, or just of the United States or Europe. Our present-day lives, shaped by late-stage capitalism’s increasingly dreadful manipulations and precarities, are directly tied to this history. These assertions, neither new nor original (DuBois, 1935; James, 1938; Robinson, 1983; Williams, 1933), have only recently and only partially entered the consciousness of the larger public by way of, for example, The 1619 Project (New York Times, 2019), to cite one prominent North American example. Mainstream resistance to this analysis remains powerful and entrenched (Serwer, 2022, among many numerous examples), to the detriment of our planet and all its beings. My research addresses optimum ways of bringing these assertions into individual hearts and minds. My goal is to create space whereby non-specialized as well as art and arts-adjacent audiences can absorb the material and affective present-day implications of transatlantic slavery. Towards realizing this goal, I explore the potential of combining Feminist Autotheory (Fournier, 2022) with the art form known as lecture-performance.