In Due Time: Performance and the Psychic Life of Black Debt

De Berry, Misty

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-xk98-5p29

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In Due Time: Performance and the Psychic Life of Black Debt

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In Due Time: Performance and the Psychic Life of Black Debt analyzes how routine modes of debt and indebtedness restrict black women’s behavior across the everyday sphere and their subsequent engagement with both aesthetic and everyday performance to dismantle such routines. Modes of indebtedness are characteristic of racial capitalism and are embodied as violent behavioral responses to black women—from the current student loan catastrophe that disproportionately targets the lives of black women, entrapping them in generational scores of material debt, to the use of ideological indebtedness that was used popularly to defend Bill Cosby against black women’s account of sexual assault. Indebtedness gathers in material force and affective meaning across the repetition of the everyday sphere, where, I argue such behavioral responses become habituated. I ask, if notions of habituation and indebtedness signal an accumulation of behavior over a period of time, how might we employ time as an aesthetic device to interrupt such processes of habituation? My project illuminates that practices in indebtedness function much like durational performances—aesthetic renderings that bring attention to the passing of time. Thus, I look at black women’s engagement with durational performance via close readings of socially mediated happenings and other durational media, such as the sitcom, commercial campaigns, online discourses, site-specific performances, as well as enduring, black literary texts. Across my project, I mobilize performance as an analytic platform, a behavioral aesthetic, and communicative tool that unveils the embodied and material consequences of the often abstract relation pitted between forms of power and everyday behavior. I argue that everyday embodied acts taken up by black women might refuse and reimagine the logics of indebtedness that currently regulate black women’s lives. I advance the claim that examining indebtedness through the lens of durational performance enriches our understandings of the everyday impact of state violence on the black gendered body.

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