House on Fire: Baltimore as Epistemology

Body & Welnes HOUSE ON FIRE: Baltimore as epistemology By Jeanne Scheper, associate professor of gender and sexuality studies It was fall of 1968 when an electrical ire burned through the Baltimore slumlord apartment building my parents had recently moved into. My mom was six months pregnant and I was less than a year old. We got out safely with our dog and my dad had to return later to retrieve his smoked-stained, 1,000-page, typed dissertation. The April 1968 Baltimore uprising had just occurred in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination. It was an era of white light and opposition to “open housing.” On moving to Baltimore in 1966, my parents decided not to move into an all-white neighborhood. Instead of responding to classiied ads in The Baltimore Sun, which were individually labeled for desired customers as “cld” or “wht,” my mother drove around raciallymixed neighborhoods looking for housing.1 However, there were few to no neighborhoods that were racially integrated. Eventually, we moved into a row house in a predominantly Black and poor neighborhood, Reservoir Hill, that had a small white minority including, one block away, Jonah house, the non-violent activist peace community founded by Dan and Phil Berrigan (members of the May 1968 Catonsville Nine, who coniscated draft records and publically burned them with homemade napalm to protest the Vietnam war) and Elizabeth McAlister. At the time, my mom was a graduate student working towards a Ph.D. in philosophy at Catholic University. She grew into a community and housing organizer, addressing what now would be called “food deserts” by driving to Pennsylvania to buy the equivalent of organic meat and dry goods from the Mennonite families and running a food co-op out of our basement. As an active member of the neighborhood community association and later director of its homeownership program, she helped write 1 - After an experience of having the same real estate agent answer the phone for several diferent advertised companies, my mother made an appointment to go to the oice, which turned out to be that of Goldseker realty, which was blockbusting, and was not willing to sell to a white couple in the neighborhoods she was interested in. This experience was the basis of my parents’ later participation in a class-action suit against Goldseker Realty. the “tenant’s right of irst refusal” law, which tried to break up the stranglehold of slumlords and create avenues for Black home ownership in the city.2 This brief biographical return to my childhood ofers a snapshot of the choices that my parents made in the late 1960s about where we would live and how we would respond and situate ourselves as a white family in a world shaken by anti-Black violence and war, in a city shaped by housing segregation, racial wealth inequality, urban poverty, as well as Black radical resistance. My approach to my research and teaching emerges from my earliest memories and images of bodies and their social regulation: of being tear-gassed on the steps of the Capitol at an anti-war protest as a baby, of stopping a multi-lane highway cutting through Leakin Park, of my father arrested at the White House for praying for peace, of my mother telling us to duck out of sight of news cameras ilming us at a housing anti-discrimination demonstration, of my lesbian high school teacher chaining herself to the steps of the Capitol for women’s reproductive freedom, of a woman who had been raped knocking on our door for help in the night, of a teenager telling us she was pregnant by a close relative, of serial house ires and families displaced by urban blight as well as urban renewal, of people lining up on hot nights at gates of the Gothic city jail when the windows were open so one could talk to loved ones behind bars. As a child, I saw that my neighborhood and my Black neighbors would be the ones under national guard rule and patrolled by tanks after a snow storm, that helicopters would buzz the houses regularly enough to be called “urban birds,” and that it would require walking to the white neighborhood on the other side of North Avenue to ind a proper grocery store. As Nina Simone sang it: “Oh, Baltimore, ain’t it hard just to live?” I grew up, in other words, less than two miles from where Freddie Gray was arrested and murdered last 2 - Some of her experiences (unattributed at her request) are documented by Matthew A. Crenson in his book Neighborhood Politics (Boston: Harvard UP, 1983). UCI School of Humanities | Fall 2016 25 year while in police custody, spurring another Baltimore uprising. Many of the boarded up houses that deined the neighborhood where I grew up, and the streets nearby where the 2015 uprising took place, had been boarded up since the uprising of 1968. Professor Saidiya Hartman ofers the language of the “afterlife of slavery,” to describe “how Black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago.”3 And, as with all of these cases of death in police custody, not only are these realities not new, but there is no justice, as conirmed last month by a damning Department of Justice Report on Baltimore City (see my colleague UCI Associate Professor of History Jessica Millward’s analysis of the long arc of unfreedom in Baltimore). Flash forward to the present, and I am a professor of gender and sexuality studies at UC Irvine, and my research and teaching take up questions that began forming in my head as a child: questions related to race, gender, and the performance and politics of bodies, especially as they move across highly-regulated, policed, and demarcated spaces. My parents choices set in motion a collection of experiences growing up that have driven me to continue to think about the give and take between past and present, and about the profound impact of what W.E.B Du Bois would call the “problem of the twentieth century”: the color line.4 white audiences invested in the preservation of all-white suburbs while consuming the “spectacle of the Other,”5 there is a diferent backwards glance that recognizes that the anti-Black violence of the present is rooted in the unfreedoms of the past. That insight is central to my approach to teaching popular culture at UCI. How do the cultural pedagogies of performing and consuming culture—and each other—shore up existing power structures? In order to understand the raced and gendered calculus of our society and the urgent need to address its efects, we must ask ourselves, what are the ways that our neighborhoods, our cities, our families, our experiences and our ways of seeing and consuming the raced urban landscape are shaped by the social inequalities writ large across bodies over time? How are we to understand the antagonism between those who project the city and its people as “rioters” and those who insist the city and its people be known as a “city that reads”? What are the ways that the past haunts and shapes the present, from slavery to racial wealth inequality and the growth of prisons, from Jim Crow segregation built on fears of miscegenation to the regulation of sexualities and motherhood, the persistence of conditions of policing and militarization, and the lasting efects of lead poisoning, conditions that deine cities like Baltimore or Flint, Michigan. Baltimore, and the material conditions of life in “the city without pity” undergird my understanding of the contours and complexities of bodies, their performances, and their boundaries: whether surveilled, regulated, resistant, or reimagined. These lessons from Baltimore undergird a sense of ethical urgency in my work to recognize and question how social violence is not new and how our current ways of looking have been shaped by past ones. Unlike sensational televisual representations of Baltimore that traic in what I call the “nostalgic grotesque” for With this set of questions and sense of urgency as an epistemology and method for thinking, my work on early 20th century popular stage performers contributes historical insights into how women in the arts have fought to be recognized as cultural producers and critics, not merely as muses or objects on display. They used their bodies as sources of knowledge and resistance, and I am particularly interested in how these igures have mobilized their critiques of the mandate to perform both on-stage and of. The igures I examine navigate the enormous cultural shifts of the early twentieth century, performing with and against prevailing prescriptions and boundaries: one challenges the color line of the stage 3 - Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997): 6. 4 - W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903). 5 - Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the Other” in Stuart Hall (Ed.) Representations: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. (London: Sage and The Open University, 1997): 223279. and the racial segregation of the streets while another is caught in the tangles of cultural appropriation. For instance, African American dancer and choreographer Aida Overton Walker (1880-1914) not only challenged the racist reception of the Black female body on stage— through her choice of costume and choreography—but she also wrote outspoken newspaper editorials and contributed to the formation of the irst Black Actor’s Union. [See Women You Should Know.] My forthcoming book, Moving Performances (Rutgers UP, 2016) looks at why we remember certain performers and forget others, and examines the uneven archiving of the history of women and women of color in the arts. I am also interested in how later contemporary feminists and artists then re-cycle and cite these diva icons from the past, illuminating the meaning and politics of these past performers. Moving Performances: Divas, Iconicity, and Remembering the Modern Stage - Excerpt from Chapter 1: “The Color Line is Always Moving: Aida Overton Walker” "[Aida Overton Walker] drew attention to the way Jim Crow and racism in the U.S. demanded particular embodiments of the Black body—ways of moving and not moving, spaces to occupy and not occupy—and authorized which tropes were naturalized as 'proper' to Black bodies. Race, she understood, is constructed at the level of the body and geography; power demands that bodies perform according to certain social scripts, whether these are registered directly in and as rules, codes, and laws that enforce racial segregation, or in and as performative repertoires of expectations, social blueprints, cultural practices, and so forth that regulate social identities. As Overton Walker describes in her editorials, these compulsory performances, on stage and of, were ubiquitous and relentless, and she directly addressed and protested them through her performances. As a public thinker, Overton Walker’s cultural production on stage was augmented by the cultural critique she ofered in newspaper editorials that addressed racism and discrimination. Bringing the efects of racial power into view by responding to the injustice of these cultural mandates, she also articulated the added labor of critique required of Black performers and of Black people moving as social actors through the public sphere. She produced these critiques implicitly through her choice of theatrical material and her own modes of embodied critical practice on stage, including teaching and making visible new approaches to dance, movement, and political embodiment for Black women. She thus resisted the limits placed on Black bodies by producing a variety of public discourses that critically analyzed the impact of U.S. racism on Black people and Black performers who labored on segregated, predominantly white-owned and -managed national theater circuits. Aida Overton Walker’s signiicant yet all-too-brief career demonstrates the political complexities embedded in popular dance performances. Popular dances like the Salomania dance craze and the cake walk could easily be dismissed by her contemporaries and later by twentieth and twenty-irst century critics as merely 'cheap amusements'6 rather than political interventions. The result is that Black feminist thought, especially that conveyed through moving embodied practices, could be erased and hidden from view in the archive and in the myriad ways that the modern stage is remembered." Excerpt from Moving Performances: Divas, Iconicity, and Remembering the Modern Stage. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Jeanne Scheper. Reprinted with permission of Rutgers University Press Jeanne Scheper is associate professor of gender and sexuality studies. Her book, Moving Performances: Divas, Iconicity, and Remembering the Modern Stage publishes this December. 6 - See Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986): 163. UCI School of Humanities | Fall 2016 27