How Do We Quote Black and Brown Bodies? Critical Reflections on Theorizing and Analyzing Embodiments

Legibility and Observing the Movements, Gestures, and Postures: Cognition and Bodily Practices

Ooh ooh, aa a a let’s all chant, ooh, ooh, let’s all chant, your body, my body, everybody move your body your body my body everybody work your body. (Michael Zager Band).

During the first viewing of videotaped data, I focus my attention on observing and documenting the physical movements that I see and my sentient response to what I am seeing. In the notes taken during the initial observation I write:

Mr. Wiggles is teaching popping and locking, a genre of hip-hop dance. He begins his class by demonstrating the movement without words. Situated in front of the mirror and students, Mr. Wiggles shows the dance sequence: Arms raised shoulder height, wrist and knees flex and straighten in quick, coordinated movement, while his upper and lower body move in two different directions. Arms cross in front of the body, legs wide in a warrior stance. Left leg straightens; back leg bends as the straightened legs slides away from the body; right arm extends always away from the body. Neck disappears as head drops into shoulders and face is partially hidden by extended arm, which shifts back behind the shoulder and torso as legs lift into space away from the torso. Mr. Wiggles bends the left arm at elbow towards his face while the right bent knee straightens in front of his body. His lower body twists, swirling downward and then spirals back up. His wrist, chest and knees flex and straighten again in quick movements on top of sliding, lifting, skipping feet as he moves across the space. Each limb and body part moves in short, small, staccato progressions.

These notes reflect my first attempt to describe the physical movements, gestures, and postures that I see to discern the stories Mr. Wiggles is dancing. I notice that seeing is connected to my thoughts. I am aware that in that connection, I do not feel my body. My visual acuity seems to be calibrated to cognition, as a product of mind rather than my senses. While I see and can describe Mr. Wiggles’s movements, gestures, and postures as I stare at the computer screen, thoughts of Oscar Lewis, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Charles Murray’s “culture of poverty” and extant images of black and brown youth as thugs, responsible for the squalor of the South Bronx stare back at me. The question of what I see seems blurred by thoughts and those thoughts seem to be blurred by hegemonic notions of black and brown youth. Trying to disrupt the flat, one-dimensional rendition of hip-hop youth that my vision seems to be fixed upon and my mind is conjuring; I attempt to reach toward texture and sensience.

Hurtado (2000) observes “cultural production is a means by which young people can explore alternative forms of consciousness and social relations.” (p. 274). I am also aware that there is a long tradition in Black and Latino performance theatre “as a weapon for fighting racism and white privilege” (Denzin, 2003, p. 5). In Afro-diasporic dance, there is an equally rich tradition where in-motion black and brown dancing bodies are understood as having a way of saying and doing something that cannot be otherwise said nor revealed—something that may otherwise remain concealed (Browning, 1995; Gottschild, 1998; Gottschild, 2005; Osumare, 2007; Roberts, 2005). In public spaces, black and brown embodiments, circulate the excess—beyond words that is said in action and produced in motion, through which cultural and historical knowledges are embodied as a means of making legible the curative, affirming, identity forming vitality of lived experience, creating the possibilities for critical insights (DeFrantz, 2004; Jackson, 1997; Roberts, 2011; Martin, 1990; Roberts, in press). How do I enact a feeling, sensing body to move from seeing to legibility?

What I know is more than what I see staring back at me and in my mind’s eye. Granted what is unseen, cannot be disrupted. However, I want to bring together what I see, with what I know and what I know with what I sense. How do I engage my feeling, sensing body and turn this analysis into a coperformance? Reflecting on these questions I heave against the stagnant, overbearing, and consuming conceptions of black and brown bodies as irresponsible, dangerous, and unintelligible to make way for an alternative, compelling story emerging in the South Bronx during the 1970s and 1980s and that youth animate through their dancing bodies (Chang and Herc, 2005; Schloss, 2009). Reflection makes legible the work before me: contend with accumulations of experience, history, and critical subjectivities that seem to be flattened and stagnated by a racialized discourse of deficit. Turn the pathologizing cognitive discourse in my head on its head, shake it out and create a space for accumulated, stagnated history, experience, and affect to cascade and circulate in and through our bodies as a coperformance. This deeper, more demanding work will require me to engage my body/put my body in it together with my mind as an integrated site of interpretation, refocusing my attention on the physical sensations that are provoked by watching Mr. Wiggles’ dance.

Discerning Sensations: Disrupting Stagnations Through Dialogic Bodily Practice

The sensible body may still be subordinate to reason but the sensient body operates through another means. (Martin, 1990, p. 38)

I am reminded of anthropologist, dancer, choreographer, and activist, Katherine Dunham. She once said, “You know the expression: Mind’s eye. How do I see things if I don’t think about my body?” ² When I lived in New York City, I often choreographed while riding the subway. I would plug in the earphones attached to my Walkman, the popular music listening device of the 1980s and 1990s. Listening to traditional Afro-Caribbean music, I would dig deep into the old, ancient songs and rhythms to rehearse movements, postures, and gestures of the traditional danced stories passed on to me by family and teachers. Crammed in between two other people on a crowded New York City subway, my brown body danced without outwardly moving. Instead, my choreographic ideas were moving through my body, moving from my feet to my head and back. Propelled by the energy of the music, I could see and feel myself moving to the beats. I was performing in my head and getting ready to perform and produce knowledge with students, allowing collective histories, experiences, and affect compressed in danced stories to move and animate our local histories and experiences—embody them—get into their flow, their vibration, and their vibrancy. In a fit of stops and starts, I eventually bring my mind’s eye into my body like I use to do.

I draw on Gilligan, et al’s Listening Guide because it emphasizes the relationship between researcher and participant and its focus on the micro, interior domain. While the Listening Guide is focused on the analysis of voice, I focus on an analysis of bodies and embodiments. Gilligan, Spencer, Weinberg, and Bertsch (2003) state, “The collectivity of different voices that compose the voice of any given person—its range, its harmonies and dissonances, its distinctive tonality, key signatures, pitches, and rhythm—is always embodied, in culture, and in its relationship with oneself and with others. Thus each person’s voice is distinct—a footprint of the psyche, bearing the marks of the body, of that person’s history, culture in the form of language, and the myriad ways in which human society and history shape and thus leave their imprints on the human soul” (p. 253). Conceptually, expanding voice and its features to include movements, postures, and gestures together with physical sensations will enable me to discern haunting histories, affects, and critical subjectivities that are concealed and stagnated under conditions of racism and racial inequalities (Roberts, 2011; Roberts, forthcoming). That is, how are those movements, postures, and gestures revealing racialized experiences that live, sometimes festering within the boundaries of our individual skin? Relatedly, how do racialized experiences cross the boundaries of our individual skin in ways that render a shared, collective story?

Discerning Sensation, Foregrounding Power

I revisit the three embodiment moves with which I started so as to account for the ways in which the performance of data analysis is, such as the fieldwork, a collaborative process and coperformance that is shaped by power: the power of racism to fix and flatten images and imaginary; the overarching and enduring power of language and body binaries; and the power of the dancing body to reveal and disrupt power discontent. My bodily practice during data analysis disrupts the one-dimensional image that my mind conjures, bringing myself and all the bodies that have danced their experience and historical stories, codified in Afro-diasporic dance and its associative movements, postures, and gestures into contact (Browning, 1995; DeFrantz, 2004; Gottschild, 1998; Roberts, 2005; Roberts, forthcoming), minimizes the distance between body/mind, individual and collective stories (Bell & Roberts, 2010). Recombining and synthesizing the dancer and social scientist in me, I want to (re)experience what the dance is communicating at the intersections of collective and individual knowings and actions, particularly as they relate to racialized bodies. Thus, I wish to stretch beyond the images of thuggish youth that my mind invokes, when I attempted to read the body as if it were text. I also aim to “go beyond the idea of reading dance as text, or [body] as a sign to be deconstructed with tools borrowed from linguistics . . . To provide a model for resistant political action the dancing body, instead of being read as a text, should be seen communicating through movement or what Martin labels as sentience” (Markula, 2006, p. 8). This is particularly the case for racialized black and brown bodies, which are already “read” as sites of social problems, risk, dysfunction, and pathology (Jackson, 1997; Kelley, 1997; Roberts, 1998). Returning to the Listening Guide, which is partly grounded in the “psyche and the construction of the mind” (Gilligan, Spencer, Weinberg, and Bertsch, 2009, p. 254), I conceptually stretch and refashion the Listening Guide method to encompass the mind and body as a relating, interacting knowing/doing whole that also relates and interacts with other knowing mind/body knowledge producing subjects, thereby interrupting a reading the body as text framework. That is, rather than read the body as text and Mr. Wiggles movements, postures, and gestures as if they were words, devoid of the sensations they gesture towards, I reclaim kinesthetic capacity to “apprehend the fully integrated simultaneity of compound movements in every location of the body observed” (Friedman, 2008, p. 10). When I reenter the field through my computer screen, I sense into the kinetic effect or sentience provoked by Mr. Wiggles. During each observation, I recalibrate my lens to come into relationship with Mr. Wiggles’ movements, postures, and gestures. I ask what meaning is contained, provoked, released, and made legible in the tapping, locking, popping, rocking, rolling, brown body?

Documenting the flurry of physical sensations, I experience a sense of heaviness and notice my breathe become labored as I watch Mr. Wiggles’ neck disappear into his shoulders as he bears down on his twisting, swirling hips, and legs. Just before his lower body twists, swirls, and spirals back up I sense into the heaviness—the weight. Feeling the weight of lived experiences, making meaning of them, and taking in those experiences as one contends with the social world transforms experience into knowledge (Greene, 1988). When the weight of experience is internalized as a process of critical awareness and externalized through the action of connecting with others through sharing knowledge (Roberts, 2005), individual bodies are dual in their possibility of also being and producing collective bodies (Haug, et al., 1999). By engaging in this bodily practice, I discern physical sensation and the social meaning that kinetic effects animate. Turning up the volume, I observe and hear Mr. Wiggles critique the absence of weight in the student’s attempts at popping and locking. He says, “Put your weight on it and tap [your knee].” Sensience and utterances come together. I position my body in dialogic relationship with Mr. Wiggles’s to better understand the interaction between collective and individual knowing. The flatness produced by isolated cognivity, gives way to texture and texture gives way to felt weight. Here I use language strategically to make legible knowledge produced by the sensient body and like Anzaldúa (2007), to wrest out the lived reality of racial oppression that is smuggled and compressed in physical movements, gestures, and postures and accept it as an a priori, “official” reality. After returning to view the clip, two more times, each time recording sensient responses (“holding breathe”—“heavy”—“release”—“contract”—“contain”) in a manner that gives way to critical subjectivities, histories, and affects, I use written performance-based language to “make my theoretical perspectives more tangible [and to] ” maintain the visibility of [the] relationship . . . [between] body and the text to create new lines of flight” (Markula, 2011, p. 45). Following Markula’s impulse, I create a space of inquiry, where the performance of dance and analysis become a coproduced process of revelation, interpretation, and knowledge production. By engaging in bodily practices of monitoring and documenting the felt experience that observing Mr. Wiggles’s movements, postures, and gestures provoke, a coproduced space of performance, interpretation, and legibility is created. The structures of inequality that Mr. Wiggles’s compresses dance and that I discuss in the next section are revealed. Turning toward the body, I disrupt the relentless primacy of language-thought-mind connection and hyperrationalization, ³ which seem to create stagnation and move toward theoretically and methodologically centering body without disavowing language and its relationship to body. I now sense a critical sociological/social imagination that conjures history, critical subjectivities, and experience as a set of ideas that are lived and experienced in and through body and bodies. And as I linger in the weight, I am weighing how to address the resistance to black and brown bodies as knowing, critical subjects worthy of quoting in social science research. To be sure what is said is important because it interrupts the deadening silence associated with oppression. However, within the context of complex race relations to say can be dangerous (Bell, 2010) and insufficient. Thus, what is done/performed with and through bodies is also critical.

Creating New Lines of Flow and Elaborations

Shaped by the critical sociological imagination (Mills 1959), this version of doing social science attempts to do more than just show how biography, history, gender, race, ethnicity, family and history interact and shape one another in concrete social situations. The desire is to show how the histories and the performances that persons’ lives are shaped by forces that exist behind their backs (Marx [1888] 1983). (Denzin, 2003, p. xi)

Mr. Wiggles moves his wrist and knees with lightning speed. I ask what do Mr. Wiggles’s movements signal to language and what do my physical sensations signal in language? Sensing into his movement, postures, and gestures, he provokes/makes legible a serving of acuity and technical dexterity and a whole lot of swagger—evidence of a life lived on the margins. Watching the video clip with the volume turned up I hear/see Mr. Wiggles say, “If you’re going to make it in the streets, you have to move fast from zero to 100 and back to zero.” Mr. Wiggles ends the sequence in a deep knee bend, arms extended, and hands facing up warrior stance. Turning away from the mirror and a group of perplexed young people, he claps as he walks to the back of the studio. The students clap, laughing nervously they too walk away. Two students stay in front of the mirror, repeating the basic wrist and knee flex/straightening action or “popping.” Within minutes, Mr. Wiggles calls the students back to the mirror. With Mr. Wiggles leading, the students move across the floor, line by line, repeating the dance sequence. When he reaches the head of the space, Mr. Wiggles stands and watches each line move past him. After the last line, Mr. Wiggles offers the following corrective to the class, “Put your weight on it and tap.” I feel the bearing down and tap as a release of the weight that was barely visible given the 0–100 mph speed. By sensing, I see the texture and contours of the bearing down that initiates the tap. Watching Mr. Wiggles shift from side to side, I hear his utterances, while watching and feeling the force of the pop. Together language and gestures bring forth with force and speed a moment of creation—of meaning and of meaning making. Its fast—but there is a pause, which my sensing finds where his body moves “100 mph” and then back to “0.” In that short span of time, space is created for “extension and funk” in the dance and for the invisible to become legible. His popping and locking are actually popping and unlocking, revealing the tethers from the short, staccato, sharp, and angular movements to their collectively endured structural counterpart—the every day, the history and lived experience of oppression, and resistance to oppression that are smuggled in, compressed and released through the dancing body.

Mr. Wiggles’s hip-hop moves were born/borne on the streets of the South Bronx, the birthplace of hip- hop culture. Despite problematic stereotypic constructions that suggest raced bodies acquire rhythm and dance “naturally,” Mr. Wiggles was not born knowing how to dance. His capacity to compress meanings through bodily practices, and articulate and make legible the achy, weighted realities that he danced and narrated was learned and acquired over time. Today Mr. Wiggles is a sought after artist and teacher, traveling throughout the world teaching hip-hop dance and culture. He lives far from the South Bronx and yet, he continues to embody and enact stories of this urban landscape of the 1970s and 1980s. When I interviewed him about his experience growing up in the South Bronx and how that experience shaped him as a dancer, choreographer, and teaching artist, Mr. Wiggles narrated those days when youth danced in the streets. According to Mr. Wiggles, street dance was a way to counter the “culture of poverty” framework that was swiftly taken up by local and Washington politicians to explain/manufacture and conceal the people’s story that made its way into hip-hop dance (Interview, conducted by the author at The School at Jacob’s Pillow, July 8, 2009).

Watching Mr. Wiggles provoked a recollection of large vinyl decals of windows, shutters, flowerpots, venetian blinds, and curtains placed on abandoned South Bronx building facades, facing the Sheridan Parkway and Cross Bronx Expressway. The decals were part of a 1983 $100,000 beautification project under the guidance of Anthony Gliedman, then New York City Commissioner of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). It was aimed at managing and diminishing negative perceptions of the South Bronx. Indeed, Gliedman was reported to have said, “Perception is reality.” (Chromopoulos, 2011). Along those lines, Robert Jacobson, director of the Bronx office of the City Planning Commission, argued that “most people [from outside of the Bronx] knew the Bronx from what they saw when they drove on the Cross Bronx Expressway . . . By making the windows of the buildings more presentable . . . negative perceptions would diminish” (p. 126). Just on the other side of the decaled building facades existed the reality that cheery curtains and flowerpots were meant to cover over.

When Mr. Wiggles was growing up in the South Bronx, hip-hop was still being defined on the streets, in living rooms and local community centers. Life was as hard as the concrete upon which he learned to dance. The hard-edged, sharply angular shapes and postures are an embodiment of those days in the South Bronx when landlords were paying to burn down buildings so that they could make a return on the money they invested—so that they could cash in and run away from the blight. ⁴ More than a geographic location, the South Bronx came to be defined by outsiders as a bastion of “culture of poverty” and a place where “criminals” rather than people, seized the streets. Movies about the South Bronx such as Fort Apache, Beat Street, and Wild Style, took advantage of the pervasive socioeconomic destruction of neighborhoods and fed into the most stereotypic images of thuggish, dangerous black and brown bodies. The youth/residents bore the weight of these depictions and representations. They also bore the weight of the socioeconomic blight that was disavowed by the city and covered over in “beautification projects.” These depictions and disavowals converged with young people’s attempts to counter them and to contend with the everyday lived reality through art and culture—the cultural revolution we know today as hip-hop. Indeed, emerging interdisciplinary scholarship views hip-hop as a multi-faceted intellectual, cultural, social (Forman, 2004), and global movement (Osumare, 2007). Hip-hop has been defined as pedagogy (Akom, 2009; Pulido, 2009), curriculum (Baszile, 2009; Hall, 2009), and a means through which young people construct identities (Dimitriadis, 2009; Flores, 2004; Ogbar, 2007), articulate and critique oppressive conditions of racism and other forms of social inequalities (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008; Fine, Roberts, & Torre, 2004; Fisher, 2007; McCormick, 2004; Roberts, Bell, & Murphy, 2008; Weiss & Herndon, 2001). According to Mr. Wiggles, the more showy, acrobatic, head spinning moves of b-boys and b-girls were performed to bring attention to the harsh social and economic realities experienced by South Bronx residents (Interview, July 8, 2009). What read as entertainment and a glorification of thugs, was a strategic move to reveal what was concealed behind feigned windows, flowerpots, and curtains. With each wrist and knee, Mr. Wiggles releases the stagnated weight, performing and circulating and cultural and historical knowledge that are produced from oppressive, enduring institutional racism, and attendant poverty. With rubble on one side and painted windows on the other, youth were defining the margin between the destruction of the South Bronx and the concealment of the destruction. Black and brown dancing bodies transgressed the margin, embodying stagnant weight of individual and collective stories of pathology, destruction, struggle, and resistance. Notably, hip-hop dancing bodies’ performance of social meanings cannot be fully understood as knowledge production unless their power discontent and power to reveal are foregrounded.

Producing Lines of Elaboration/Articulation/Examination: Performance as Knowledge Production

Figuring out how to quote black and brown bodily practices provokes me to take on the weight of responsibility I feel as a researcher, aiming to foster a social science that enacts a decolonizing methodology/pedagogy. I encountered a number of struggles as I work through and experiment with combining and recombining methodology and theory in new ways. First, I struggle with the flat, untextured, uncomplicated thoughts and image that I see floating in my mind of “thugs” roaming the streets of the South Bronx (not an image of my own more youthful days). Identifying this initial struggle gives way to another challenge: To maintain a view of dance as a site of knowledge production, when more prevalent conceptions of dance as ephemeral blend with the primacy of language and text. As my retelling of choreographing while on the subway suggests, I experience my mind’s eye and body even while I’m not in motion. Movements, gestures, and postures are experienced as physical sensation, which I in turn conceptually relate/align with a sense of real, concrete. Indeed, the inert weight I discern feels real, particularly as I link it to individual and collective stories of oppression and resistance. Moreover, the synthesis allows me to flow back to the vibrancy of the moment in which the data emerged in the Jacob’s Pillow dance studio. I was there behind the camera witnessing and watching its unfolding. Later as I sit in front of my computer screen I notice a sense of ambivalence, which, as the researcher, I have the privilege to ponder, even in the coperformance. Mr. Wiggles has already put his body on the line countless times before and during the research project/process. How do I shift my position to create a coperformance that is collaborative and also puts my body on the line too? That is, how do our relative performances become conditions for the stagnated weight to flow? In fits of discomforting stops and starts, I return to the video footage again and again, each time more deeply and consciously sensing into where sensations of weight provoke me to locate its substance and meanings.

I remain in the haunting weight and social meaning that is compressed in each gesture, posture, and movement. To be oppressed is more than a feeling. The physical sensation of weight bearing down on bodies, and the sharp, staccato movements, postures, and gestures that are produced lead to nuanced understandings of how knowledges of macro level—structural injustices live and are animated in and through bodies. I am pointed in the direction of a collective reality, rather than an individual experience. Moving toward the collective, I find where the sheer power of a critically conscious bodily practice asserts itself, provoking me to stay in it, shake up the torpid weight and push past it. Moreover, this type of embodied analysis turns the analytic event into a coperformance in which the researcher allows herself to be provoked by the concealed, prying open a space of coproduced knowledge, which Mr. Wiggles performs in the studio and I perform across the page. Conscious attention to physical sensation is now a sense making processing of images, thoughts, ideas, sensience, micro and macro are brought together by the researcher. Rather than reading the body as if it were text, which reinforces the problematic notion that knowledge construction and performance are cognitive processes (Jackson, 1997; Roberts, in press) I parse out the difference between visibility and legibility in acts of knowledge performance by focusing in on sensation first. Revealed are concealed histories of South Bronx youth, such as Mr. Wiggles, who during the 1970s and 1980s were using dance to push back hard against institutional and structural forces that were systematically killing the vibrancy of community at the same time as their bodies were being represented as if they are the source of danger posed to community life.

An embodied analysis of dance, unlike textual or text-based analyses alone, harnesses and exposes the stagnated weight that inhibits and conceals the structural and social psychological experience of the racial inequalities and the acts of resistance to that socially constructed form of oppression. Gestures, postures, and movements performed by black and brown bodies in hip-hop dance exposes the ways in which the body gestures to speech and, by extension, language as a call to action to make legible by producing cultural, historical, and subversive knowledges. Joining dance and observation, performance, and hermeneutics and mixing them up, this experimentation is conceptually anchored in a synthesis of —methodology and theory—a touchstone that allow me to analytically and physically dance with the data, and create new lines of elaborations and analyses.