Ashon Crawley

University of California, Riverside, Ethnic Studies, Faculty Member

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I am Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of California, Riverside and my research and teaching experiences are in the areas of Black Studies, Performance Theory and Sound Studies, Philosophy and Theology, Black Feminist and Queer theories. My first book project, *Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility,* which will be published with Fordham University Press (2016), investigates the relationship of aesthetic productions to modes of collective, social imaginings otherwise.
Address: Riverside, United States

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Papers by Ashon Crawley

Otherwise, Instituting

Performance Research, 2015

Can You Be BLACK and Work Here?

Black Genders and Sexualities, 2012

Can you be BLACK and Work Here?: Social Justice Activist Organizing and Black Aurality

Souls, 2009

... heard outside the bewildered gaze of white, gay normativitythat is, privilege and power ... ... more

Coming Out in Christianity: Religion, Identity and Community

Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, 2006

Page 1. Coming Out in Christianity: Religion, Identity and Community. By Melissa M. Wilcox. India... more

Blackqueer Aesthesis: Sexuality and the Rumor and Gossip of Black Gospel (2013)

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Circum-Religious Performance: Queer(ed) Black Bodies and the Black Church (2008)

This essay addresses how the black body is the site of sacred and secular contention, how it can ... more This essay addresses how the black body is the site of sacred and secular contention, how it can traverse, transcend and transgress normative ideologies through both the real and imagined performance of movement, through physical peregrinations across, through and around spatial planes. This essay utilizes both queer and performance theories as foundational for understanding the rhetorics of the institutional Black Church in the United States with regard to issues of queer(ed) sexualities and erotics. It discusses how the queer(ed) black body is a production of its movements from place to place, from the church to night club and back and how this instantiates both possibilities for flourishing as well as trauma concurrently. It also utilizes a sermon preached by Pastor Willie Wilson of Washington, DC to illustrate how the queer(ed) black body is produced through voyeurism, fetishism and erotic imagination.

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Breathing Flesh and the Sound of BlackPentecostalism (2014)

‘‘Breathing Flesh and the Sound of BlackPentecostalism’’ constructs a theory of history embedded ... more ‘‘Breathing Flesh and the Sound of BlackPentecostalism’’ constructs a theory of history embedded in the performance and transference of breath as the necessary physiological and spiritual force that is the constitutive element of BlackPentecostal performative production. As breath is the vivifying force enlivening and quickening flesh, this essay attempts to outline another mode of existence in the world, through performance, that is a critique of normative theologizing and philosophizing. The essay considers how breathing itself — through aestheticized approaches — is a means to speak back and against violence and violation. As breath was interdicted — through whippings, through language lost and acquired, through lynchings — as a basis of modernity, I analyze the ‘‘whooping’’ practices of BlackPentecostal preachers to elaborate the intentionality of breathing practices as a necessary corrective.

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Harriet Jacobs Gets a Hearing (2012)

What can one hear in confinement, and how can that hearing be connective lineament? In her grandm... more What can one hear in confinement, and how can that hearing be connective lineament? In her grandmother’s crawlspace for seven years—compressed as a means to escape, confined with access only to shallow air as a means to flight—Harriet Jacobs was both discarded and discardable. What did it mean to be discarded, for discardable materiality to bespeak an ontological condition? What can we learn from Jacobs’s existence in the crawlspace, of her throwing herself into claustrophobic conditions to stage her eventual scurrying away? Her discarded body bodies forth socially and a sociality. What is the social life—as opposed to the social death—of the discarded? Her existence in that crawlspace, as an object that was thrown and thrown away, is cause for celebration. Harriet Jacobs knew something about black performance as a mode of sociality that is still reproduced today. Sound, for Harriet Jacobs, was an important resource for allowing her thriving, even in the most horrific of conditions.

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'Let's Get It On!' Performance Theory and Black Pentecostalism (2008)

In this paper, performance theory, augmented with both feminist and queer theory critiques and id... more In this paper, performance theory, augmented with both feminist and queer theory critiques and ideas, help analyze the various aspects of Black Pentecostal experience. This paper is primarily concerned with the rhetorics of the Black Church and how these rhetorical strategies can immure congregants to abject embodied experience. I use the Black Pentecostal church tradition as a site that both consolidates and disrupts binary, heteronormative, heterosexist and homoracist gender systems, analyzing a sermon titled "Let's Get It On* by Bishop Iona Locke to demonstrate this.

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Otherwise, Instituting

Performance Research, 2015