Black Texture: the Character of Domestic Space
Les Gray
In her book Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship 1890-1930, Koritha Mitchell draws our attention to lynching dramas’ relationship to public lynchings and private domestic space. Mitchell argues that lynching was less about racism and more about asserting a kind of revenge against successful Black bodies.
These Black bodies were the texture in a presumably uniform white porcelain space glazed over by centuries of white supremacy. These Black bodies were at home. A home that was created after decades of displacement and alienation. That were kidnapped from their domestic spaces and converted into spectacles of pain and death. Their interiors became exteriors as they were removed from the interior spaces that we so often assume to be spaces of safety. As we have been saying for so long now, their lives mattered.
What is the texture of a Black home in the wake of the unfinished project of emancipation? What does it mean to be a texture against the stark white reality of a racist nation? What do we bring home?
These are all difficult if not impossible to answer questions. One of the things lynching dramas sought to do was to humanize the Black body; these were people who had homes and communities. Their bodies belonged somewhere. They belonged in their communities, their chosen families. They belonged at home. For me, this brings up the question: how do we as Black folks go about the process of belonging to a community that so often violently rejects us with small, sharp, repetitive injuries? The continuous salting of transgenerational wounds.
I have been thinking about protest and the texture of gathered bodies. How bodies transition from home to becoming a larger landscape of textures. And how when they are separated to promote a particular mood of diversity, the texture of their skin creates a Blackground that apologetic white bodies set themselves up against. The creation of texture in the perceived permanence of white supremacy just like on stage is characterized by redistribution of fluids. Blood spatters and sprays like paint when bodies are assaulted by the police. The repetition of these bodies has a kind of sponge like quality, absorbing the brunt of white supremacy with necks being pressed to the ground with knees over and over again. Isn’t that a kind of pattern? Does that pattern create a texture on the streets upon which we march?
Black folks have been forced from their homes for so long to die; now we force ourselves from our homes to the streets to live.
Bios
Rosalind Isquith hails from Thetford, VT. A scenic designer and artist, Rozy has enjoyed designing and painting for venues throughout New England after receiving her B.A in Theatre from the University of Vermont. Rozy is currently working towards her Masters in Fine Arts in scenic design at The Pennsylvania State University.
Les Gray is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Missouri. Their research focuses on Black cultural production and its relationship to trauma and terror with examples ranging from blues dancing to police brutality videos. They are interested in performances of spectacular Black pain as well as the potential for joy, healing, and solidarity.