“Look! A Black Ethnographer!”: Fanon,Performance,and Critical Ethnography

The Critical Black Ethnographer’s Dilemma

I raise this issue to note the paradoxical position of the critical Black ethnographer who must confront the reality of being Black, a critical ethnographer, and a critical Black ethnographer. I separate out these terms to lay forth the tension between being Black in societies structured in racial and gendered dominance as well as becoming a critical ethnographer who labors to transform knowledge ecologies and social systems from the vantage point of those most marginalized. Like the tension that Blackness places on the distinction between subject and object, it places a similar tension between being Black and becoming an ethnographer. Even as Blacks engage critical theory and put it into action as ethnographers, it does not necessarily mean that these forces are merged into a simplistic cohesive manner to become a critical Black ethnographer. Instead, we must conceive how being Black and an ethnographer creates particular tensions and the alternative performances that are necessary as a critical Black ethnographer.

The history of ethnography is such that it produces the distinction between subject and object. In particular, the ethnographer has been and often continues to be implicated with the legacy and ongoing effects of colonialism and racism. This is shaped by who gets to be an ethnographer and the particular assumptions brought with them into the field. Whether it be anthropology, sociology, or even cultural studies, the ethnographer has been molded by its affiliation with a Western White bourgeois male subject who reproduces racial and gender categorization and human hierarchies that affirm and justify White supremacy, anti Blackness, colonialism, patriarchal power, heteronormativity, and capitalistic relations (Harrison, 1997; Kelley, 2004; McCarthy et al., 2007). The ethnographic project works to associate “Man” (Wynter, 2003) as the template of the human who constructs his subjectivity through the negation of his non-White, non-male, non-Western, and non-heteronormative Others.

Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, numerous critical scholars have taken their fields to task for the Eurocentric and sexist assumptions in ethnographic fieldwork and knowledge production. They critique the notion of objectivity, neutrality, and impartiality in social analysis (Rosaldo, 1993). They suggest that ethnographies are fictional texts that represent particular actors, interprets their lives by an authoritative yet biased narrator, and represents them in a text that are disseminated for consumption (Visweswaran, 1994). As a result, a critical ethnography emerges that takes a political stance with those marginalized and addresses issues of injustice (Berry, Argüelles, Cordis, Ihmoud, & Estrada, 2017; Christa & Dána-Ain, 2013; Gordon, 2006; Hale, 2008; Harrison, 1997; Madison, 2005).

In particular, the call for self-reflection and understanding positionality has increased in its frequency. To think through positionality, a critical ethnographer must understand how privilege, power, and biases shape ethnographic fieldwork and representations as well as the structures of domination and oppression that engulf the subjects we work with (Madison, 2005). Key to this is a dialogical performance between the ethnographic self and the groups we perform research with. This negotiates our varied positionalities, relationships to one another, and how we come to understand our selves through one another (Conquergood, 2013b). This requires that we work through the tensions in differences between us and not only overidentify with what we perceive to be our similarities.

Becoming a critical ethnographer is not a simple process. Numerous scholars illustrate the arduous labor necessary to do such work and the political stakes involved in advocating for a more just world that impacts those around us in the world. Almost a given, world traveling is a key facet of critical ethnography: entering social, cultural, and spatial worlds not our own and learning the codes, practices, and meanings of a world outside the academy (Madison, 2005). In these worlds that we travel to, we must also be attentive to how our research subjects are stereotyped as well as the stereotypes they may have of us as researchers and the multiple identities we carry with us.

What is not often covered is how the very stereotypes that engulf our research subjects may also engulf us. The critical ethnographer is not only visible to the communities they research with. They are also situated in another social world and categorized within human hierarchies. Because the history of the ethnographer is such that it is antagonistic to the Black, critical Black ethnographers are frequently read as Black and treated as such. In that case, the critical Black ethnographer must conceive of a plurality of being a Black object and becoming a critical ethnographer. As a Black object, the very master code of race that we so often are working to deconstruct, critique, and reimagine are ones that we must confront in whichever world we are occupying, ethnographic or not. The idea of race is such that it is not locally bounded but rather is at once globally dominant, circulating through transnational circuits of exchange, locally interpreted and then embedded in social structures. Thus, we are also susceptible to the local racial discourses, ones that our participants also confront, and that a given society or state may not see our foreignness, our ethnographic self, and other facets that we as critical ethnographers must negotiate with research groups. This does not suggest that we occupy the same material conditions but rather through fungibility we can be exposed to particular symbolic and material violences like the community we perform research with.

A critical Black ethnographer must balance the differences between the dominant ideas of Blackness as an object and the ethnographic self as a subject. When we enter our ethnographic selves, we are not able to occupy that space as the Western anthropologist, sociologist, or cultural studies scholar would before us. They often enter as a recognized subject whereas we enter as objects. It is that tension that also opens up the possibility of becoming a critical Black ethnographer that learns to not necessarily merge the two but works through how to perform a critical ethnography from the positionality of being Black.

In contradictions, we often find possibility, the opportunity to forge emergent positions within larger relations of power and advocate for marginalized peoples rather than requiring them to change their positions (Madison, 2003). Here, I will turn to Frantz Fanon as a key thinker about a critical Black ethnographer and how his works more than suggest that he was interested in performance, performativity, and the performative. To be more specific, Fanon enables us to conceive how the critical Black ethnographer engages in a dialogical performance with other Blacks in the diaspora. In addition, Fanon demonstrates how the critical Black ethnographer is also trapped with the racial epidermal schema that reduces them to an object by the state and society. It is there that Fanon understands a racial performativity that is not individually produced but rather structurally and symbolically imposed upon racialized bodies. While the Martiniquais intellectual can be read as pessimistic in his theorizations of Blackness, I will also show that he alludes to performative gestures that, like the Black Radical Tradition, emphasize refusal, escape, flight, and refuge. It is the latter where we can find the formation of a critical Black ethnographer through a performative fugitivity.

In what is to follow, I will draw on and analyze my ethnographic research from December 7, 2016, to argue for the importance of Fanon for critical ethnography and performance for Black ethnographers. First, I will outline Fanon’s theories on race, racism, and racialization through his concepts of the historical racial and epidermal racial schemas. Next, I use Fanon to explicate how the critical Black ethnographer can engage cultural performance to forge a “dialogical performance” with the communities they research. This is especially important for Blacks in the academy, especially in the United States or elsewhere in the overdeveloped world, who return to their own or venture to other Black communities for ethnographic study. The following section then grapples with the role of racial performativity where the critical Black ethnographer must shift from performing difference between them and the ethnographic community to performing difference between them and societies structured in racialized, gendered, and classed forms of domination and violence. The penultimate section inquires how Fanon provides clues to what I deem the performative fugitivity as a habitual practice and embodied knowledge of refusal, escape, and flight from the forces that press against as well as expunge Black sociopolitical life.

Fanon, Lived Experience, and Blackness

In his first monograph, Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon (2008) examines the damaging psychological effects of colonialism and racism on Black people. It encompasses the structures of language and the meanings it produces, the role of aesthetics, educational pathways, the neurotic avoidance of fellow Blacks, the internalization of anti-Black racism, and the psychic alienation by approximating one’s self toward Whiteness as a means to obtain one’s humanity: “The black [person] wants to be white. The white man is desperately trying to achieve the rank of man” (Fanon 2008, p. xiii). ² Fanon himself was concerned with the multiple stages of mimicry where, to become Man, the Black can conceivably only do so by imitating White men. Yet, the most impactful damage arises when the Black must see themselves not as White (or French or just a “human”) but rather as Black.

Much of Fanon’s theoretical work on race challenges the essentialism undergirding discourse. Race is not grounded in ontology or phylogeny, he argues, but rather “sociogeny” (p. xv) where race is brought into existence within a social and, by extension, relational context where meaning is derived by what it is not as much as what it is. In other words, race does not have any presocial or prediscursive meaning (Madison, 2005). Even though it appears to be biological or cultural, race is a sociopolitical category that is masked as a biological one to make racial difference appear natural (Roberts, 2012; Weheliye, 2014; Wynter, 2001).

Even though race is a sociopolitical category, this does not mean that everyone equally participates in the construction of its meanings and how it travels through discursive chains. Instead, they are created through asymmetrical relations of power along the axes of race but also shaped by gender relations of domination and subjection. “Ontology does not allow us to understand the being of the black [person] since it ignores the lived experience. For not only must the black [person] be black; [they] must be black in relation to the white man” (Fanon, 2008, p. 90). While the Black person is made in relation to White man, the reverse is not true. Thus, Fanon explicates the loss of subjectivity for the Black person and their reduction to objecthood within the purview of the hegemonic White male gaze.

Race, particularly Blackness, is a particular type of sociality that depends not only on the verbal and the written but also the visual. In other words, race is a visual signifier that is fundamental to social meaning, categorization, ordering, and hierarchies (Hall, 2017). Fanon theorizes this as a two-part process: the historical racial schema and the epidermal racial schema. The first is the larger discourse of race, particularly Blackness, that shape people’s understandings of difference and how they should be arranged within particular social, political, spatial, and economic relations. Because this discourse is both social and political, they continue to be passed on over time and space. At the same time, discourses need a particular material referent in which their meaning comes to be shared. Fanon sees Black skin as that very sight of signification, an epidermal process that signifies on the skin as well as penetrates the body, its senses, and the multiple acts that respond to the scene of Blackness. Critical theorist Hortense Spillers (1987) makes this argument with her theorization of the flesh, akin to Fanon’s emphasis on skin: “before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography” (p. 67). Thus, race appears to be biological in that is continually passed down between Black people but instead it functions as a visual signifier that is constantly being attached to Black skin and thus signifying deviance from the model of humanism. As Stuart Hall (2017) notes, “what precisely tends to fix race in its obviousness and visibility. . . are themselves nothing but the signifiers of an invisible code that writes difference upon the black body” (p. 63).

This intervention illuminates the sociogeny of race as it moves between representation and experience. Fanon’s work influences cultural studies scholars who study the representation of the Black Other across various mediums (e.g., Fleetwood, 2011; Read, 1996; Soares, 2012; Wilderson, 2010). The epidermal racial schema has also been a useful tool for ethnographies of the African diaspora that focus on race, racism, and violence rather than culture, heritage, and ancestral connections (Lima, 2001, 2016; Nascimento & Thomaz, 2008; Pacheco, 2013; Pinho, 2008; Smith, 2016).

With the release of previously unpublished materials, his plays demonstrate that Fanon (2018) concerned himself with the role of performance as well. However, a la Erving Goffman, his first manuscript Black Skin, White Masks (2008) also illuminates the importance of performance, performativity, and the performative offstage in his own life. Still, others also view Fanon as a cultural anthropologist who challenges the cultural relativism, undergirded by a particular type of essentialism, that negates the impact of colonialism on Black people’s lives and processes of meaning-making (Cherki, 2006). And as he details the injustices and systems of oppression that zero in on Black life, he exposes us to a path of how to function as a critical ethnographer through dialogical performance, being reduced to a Black object caught in a web of racial performativity, and the collective formation of a critical Black ethnographer that is committed to a performative fugitivity.

Becoming a Critical Ethnographer and Performing Hip-Hop Culture

Before Alvaro and I left his one bedroom apartment, we partook in our common ritual that began when we first met. When he arrived at his apartment, he yelled out “Yo what’s up Bryce!” down the stairwell where I waited for him in front of his locked gate. “God damn, mufucka you hella late! And you can’t text nobody back?” Knowing damn well that he was in the wrong, he just grinned at me and said, “You know how it is. Everything runs late here.” True, I do know that but I have to let him know that he was the one that was adamant that we leave on time. Our soon to be tardiness was not going to deter our proceedings and our operating on impossible time.

We stepped into the slightly chilly apartment two floors deep into the basement. That’s right. It’s a double basement floor. I immediately commandeered the dining room chair in front of the desktop in the living room. With a large monitor, a Macbook operating system, two large speakers, and a mix board, the desk functioned as entertainment center, business office, and music production studio. But at that time, it was meant to be an entertainment center. I pulled up the Spotify music player and searched for the new Childish Gambino album Awaken, My Love! that released the Friday before.

Playing the hit song “Redbone,” I jokingly mocked Alvaro for not knowing that this was released. This is in response to the numerous times that he clowns me for not knowing when all the U.S. rap music releases, such as Top Dawg Entertainment’s Isaiah Rashad. Using Gambino’s emphasis on “stay woke” in his song, we took turns discussing our own histories of racial awakenings and political consciousness that influences his music and my own research. Despite growing up with many White family members, I noted that as a multiracial Black man I was exposed to numerous racist encounters, such as my grandmother telling me at age seven that I should marry a White woman or being called a “nigger” by a skinhead White supremacist at the age of 11, that were key moments of my own racial awakening. Alvaro articulated his through his upbringing in Plataforma, a predominantly Black neighborhood comprised of poor and working-class peoples. For both of us, hip-hop culture provides a lexicon of understanding how Brazil is in fact not a racial democracy but a polity that is equally racist against Black people.

Still, Alvaro and I had places to be. We had to get to gettin’. He prepared some afternoon cafezinho, an important ritual for any day in Brazil; hopped in the shower; and then rummaged in his room for the evening’s attire. Eventually, he popped up in his doorway, “aye yo! Bonito?” Now, I can’t let nobody just get immediate praise. I have to mess with them first. I gave him a quick glance that conveyed, “what are you thinking?” before I quickly smiled and followed up with “bonitão homie!” We were set and ready to depart the apartment and make our way to Plataforma.

In this scene, hip-hop is a pedagogical conduit for Alvaro and I. It enables us to draw on biography, society, and personal narratives to negotiate our identities with one another. As young Black men from working-class backgrounds who participate in hip-hop culture, it would be simple to conflate us through our similarities. This would be the easy interpretation as we engage and bond over hip-hop through sound, aesthetics, politics, and meaning. However, hip-hop can be a tool to negotiate what distinguishes us as well. This is part of a “dialogic performance” (Conquergood, 2013b) that brings the ethnographic self and the ethnographed Other in conversation to forge meaning, identity, and culture through each other.

This dialogical performance is in conversation with Fanon’s own inspection of Black people as a highly heterogeneous population. In particular, Fanon was aware of class, color, and cultural differences between Blacks. Fanon understood that Blacks comprise a highly heterogeneous population and that class was a key distinguishing force. This is most likely a result of his own upbringing, son to a shopkeeper and a customs agent, who was born into a middle-class family and largely avoided any major tragedy (Cherki, 2006). His mother, a “mulatto” woman, also had Alsatian heritage, which conferred a level of status to the family on the small island. Fanon attended the most prestigious high school on Martinique, even having Aimé Cesairé as his teacher. Through his own personal biography, Fanon was highly aware of the intraracial group differences between Blacks on Martinique. ³

This upbringing in a petit bourgeoisie context firmly situated Fanon within the “coloured” class. It is mostly comprised of lighter Blacks who perform European-oriented cultures in their mimesis of affirming their social value, and really their humanity, by approximating themselves to Man as the paragon of the subject. The “coloured” caste is a common race-class-ethnicity segment within Caribbean societies (Hoetink, 1967). Stuart Hall (2016) notes that to be “coloured” is to be

not black. The “blacks” were the rest—the vast majority of the people, the ordinary folk. To be “coloured” was to belong to the “mixed” ranks of the brown middle class, a cut above the rest—in aspiration if not reality. (p. 147)

In other words, the “coloured” class was seen to be an exception to ordinary Black people. Elsewhere, Fanon deems this population “colonized intellectuals” (Fanon, 1963, p. 44) who forge common values with the colonizer. It is not common for Black academics in Brazil to challenge the racial hierarchies and the politics in cultural practices and preferences (see Lima, 2001). Those who do are ostracized for not upholding Eurocentric knowledges and colonial legacies.

When I engage in politics and aesthetics through hip-hop with Alvaro, I am actually negotiating and performing from my positionality that is in many ways akin to the “coloured” caste. That is, to have a PhD, be educated in the West, and be physically mobile shapes my race and gender in ways that are entirely different than Alvaro as a Black working-class man with a high school education. While many “coloureds” sought to distance themselves, I work to create intraracial solidarity and identification that does not evade difference from my position of privilege and power but instead pushes to work through it and negotiate the various points from which we stand. When Alvaro and I relay stories of experiencing race and racism, we not only have similar stories but also vastly different experiences, especially my own as an academic in the United States. Yet, we cannot pretend that racial and ethnic identification is all that is necessary. I must negotiate the differences of class that does distinguish and marks me as exceptional in relation to Black masses. The history of colonized intellectuals, Brazil and the United States included, raises issues about the biases that someone like myself would usually bring. Thus, I have to perform and engage with my research population that I am not attempting to reify symbolic and material anti-Black racism, sexism, and classism that is typical of someone in my position.

As one might easily surmise, color is also a distinguishing for Black people across the diaspora. Fanon was highly aware of this not only in his own family but also in Black people’s desire for lighter partners in which they can reproduce lighter children than themselves. This whitening is a common facet in Brazil as well (Skidmore, 1993). While sociological data debunk this myth (see Telles, 2004), the racial democracy ideology suggests a “mulatto escape hatch” (Degler, 1971) where Black people are able to avoid the racial, class, and ethnic antagonisms of Blackness. In the United States, a growing emphasis on mixed race as somehow transcendental of race, or at least Blackness, has risen as well (Joseph, 2012).

This is especially relevant for myself as a U.S. Black man with a White mother. I recognize that my brown skin and facial phenotypical features socially mark me as “mixed” or “brown.” In a color conscious society such as Brazil, I could socially ascend to White if I stay out of the sun, dress a particular way, and insert myself into White spaces, company, and groups. This is a common feature for many Brazilians to identify a shade or even shades lighter to affirm Eurocentric beauty standards as well as devalue Blackness (see Neymar). Because I do circulate in academic circles there and here, many White Brazilians will feel comfortable saying racist quips to me, as if being mixed and lighter in tone automatically means I despise Black people as well. To riff of James Baldwin, I let them know “I am not your mulato” by critiquing their preferences of White partners or their disdain for and hyper fear of poor Black people or their smugness for once having a mulata partner many years ago. Yet, this is not an option for someone like Alvaro whose skin tone, dreadlocks, and phenotypes do not provide such affordances or experiences. This is a particular difference in how we experience being Black men who perform hip-hop culture.

My color and racial identity are common aspects that I negotiate with Blacks in the Bahian hip-hop movement to explain not only my privilege and power but also my bias. One such way I do that is through fashion, where my stylistic choices visually signify on my body racial alterity and an alternative masculinity (Fleetwood, 2011). In Brazil, these modes of fashion acknowledge, appropriate, and resignify the codes that mark Black men as subaltern threats to society, White femininity, and White patriarchal power. Being lighter in tone does not inhibit Black identification and recognition. There are numerous lighter Black male rappers, such as Mano Brown and MC Marechal, who refuse to approximate themselves to Whiteness and instead identify as Black as a sociopolitical category. One thing I commonly refer to is that even though I’m lighter in tone does not prevent women from being startled seeing me walk down stairwells, being ignored by customer service employees in shopping centers, or being harassed for trying to use a student ID to receive a discount at a movie theater. When I told Alvaro about being robbed by police in Rio de Janeiro (see next section), Alvaro half-jokingly said, “See that’s how you know you Black in Brazil. The police know who is Black and who ain’t.” While color does distinguish me and shapes how I experience being a Black man, I also still have similar experiences as well. It is not that these commonalities can’t be found but that it requires moving past facile points of identification.

Even as hip-hop provides a dialogism of identification and relation to one another, the meanings embedded in hip-hop culture are not necessarily the same. As numerous critical theorists argue, non-Western cultures are not static, timeless, and fixed (Hall, 1990). Yet, many racialized groups revert to a strategic essentialism as a rhetorical move and site of political collectivity and power (Spivak, 1988). Fanon understood this discursive tactic, one that was especially prevalent in the negritude movement, but ultimately distanced himself from its underlying meanings and assumptions. Fanon critiques how this essentialism reifies the very forms of difference that so many Black, colonized, and Native peoples were fighting against. Fanon’s biographer Alice Cherki (2006) notes that Fanon was suspect of the school of French culturalism, particularly in anthropology, that “attributes specific mentalities to cultural spheres and engages in the a priori identification of individuals to the cultures to which they purportedly belong, thereby assigning them a preconceived identity” (pp. 209-210). Even those in the negritude movement or other Afrocentric movements had different conceptions of culture. Fanon notes what constitutes African or African-derived cultures are wildly different. He notes that the only cultural similarity that Blacks possess is their African-derived cultures in relation to Whiteness (Fanon, 1963).

While Alvaro and I enter hip-hop culture as a site of diasporic self-fashioning and connectivity, we are coming from two vastly different trajectories. As Black men in hip-hop, one as a producer and another as a researcher, the values, meanings, and significations are not the same. These are shaped by the place of hip-hop in our own nations where U.S. Black popular culture is almost synonymous with U.S. popular culture and Brazilian hip-hop is viewed as a bastard and marginal expression of American cultural imperialism by deviant Black youth who are refusing to participate in authentic African-derived cultures that Brazil is known for harboring.

This is most explicit when we converse over the meaning of being “woke,” already quickly becoming overused and outdated as a term in the United States. When I express that it is a point of political consciousness around the racial problems in the United States, it is in the context that race is something we supposedly transcended only 50 years ago. Yet, what Alvaro explains is that one’s racial consciousness is often framed in a context where some respectable Afro-Brazilians are symbolically accepted to say that Brazil was never racist in the first place. While we both understand woke as being a site of racial consciousness, it is the context of what we are aware of and how it manifests in multiple fashions. What is necessary to consider is that our dialogical performance occurs in his social world and that I am inserted there not only as a critical ethnographer but also as a Black man.

Black Objecthood and Racial Performativity

The scenarios created by the presence of the critical ethnographers and the scripts they help produce are not the only sites of performance. Critical ethnographers engage in world traveling where they must be in the world of their research co-performers. While the anthropologist or sociologist or cultural studies scholar may have been viewed as distinct from their participants, that can’t always be said for the critical Black ethnographer. Often, the insider researcher is corporeally inscribed as belonging to the group they are researching with. As Latina feminist media studies scholar Jillian Báez (2007) argues, “I serve as the putative subject of my own research as an in-group researcher who shares a marginalized position as a woman of color or a ‘sameness’ based on ‘our personal history of otherness’” (p. 198). What Báez points to are the larger scripts of performativity that serve to naturalize specific forms of difference and is viscerally attached to the body.

While Fanon is critical for conceiving an ethnographic performance that analyzes the political stakes in cultural practices and injustices at the lived domain, he is equally adept at exposing how the critical Black ethnographer is cleaved from full subjectivity and instead reduced to a fungible Black object that is inserted into other performances not of their own choosing. A noticeable amount of critical Black ethnographers explicate how they are exposed, as fungible objects, to the same local racial scenarios of anti Blackness (e.g., Allen, 2011; Berry et al., 2017; Perry, 2012; Santana, 2017; Williams, 2013). These familiar scenarios are ones that center in on the Black body as a key site of affirming White supremacy, anti Blackness, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and capitalistic relations through repeated performances which become part of a larger Black performativity that naturalizes injury against and subjugation of Black people (see Smith, 2016).

A key aspect of framing race as biology or culture is that racism is merely prejudice of an individual. This prejudice is often dismissed as the beliefs of an aberrant individual and not reflective of a society structured in racial and gender domination (Hall, 1980). Instead, we would be better served to use Ruth Gilmore Wilson’s (2007) definition of racism as “state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (p. 28). This is produced by the state and civil society, maintained by a variety of institutional mechanisms, predictable encounters, and naturalized actions. Both work in tandem to reproduce the historical conditions of slavery into the present for Black people through “accumulation and fungibility” (Wilderson, 2010, p. 14). Literary critic Saidiya Hartman (1997) analyzes how the conditions of slavery are created through “performing blackness” (p. 57) where Blackness is called into form through relationality rather than an individual’s identity. Due to the asymmetry of power, Hartman’s concept illustrates how systems of White supremacy, patriarchal power, and anti Blackness hail Blacks to engage in both performance and performativity that illuminate racialized and gendered power; incessant desire for Black subjection to punitive and often lethal performances; the Black body as a site of surplus entertainment; and the negation of Black agency and ability to claim redress.

When Alvaro and I step outside his apartment, I must also understand Blackness as performance and performativity. Fanon (2008) realizes this as well, most notably when the little boy cries to his mother, “Look! A Negro!” (p. 91). There, Fanon must see himself as the world would. He is no longer the refined man from the Antilles he imagines himself to be but rather an object of fear, derision, and terror that is corporeally projected onto him. The Martiniquais intellectual is suddenly grouped with the Black masses:

I was responsible not only for my body but also for my race and my ancestors. I case an objective gaze over myself, discovered my blackness, my ethnic features; deafened by cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders, and above all, yes above all, the grinning Y a bon Banania. (p. 92)

There, he realizes that he is interchangeable with other Blacks as a site of racial signification and performativity. This fungibility also reduces him to an object embedded in a libidinal economy of racial desire, hierarchy, and categorization.

Brazil is no exception to performing Blackness. Structurally, it is designed to push and position Black people to the literal and socioeconomic margins of society (Hasenbalg, 1979; Telles, 2004). Beyond structural forces, Black people are also vulnerable to premature death, what anthropologist Jaime Alves (2018) deems “governing through death” that creates neoliberal zones of Black death through intensifying marginality, violence, and criminality. These forces depend upon Black people being viewed as less-than-human and beyond having political rights in a democratic society. This manifests, namely, by denying Black people the ability to seek protection from the state as well as redress for injury. The hyperviolence that structures Black life is illuminated not only in appalling statistics of homicides (more than 66,000 in 2012) where the victims are overwhelmingly Black male youth (Waiselfisz, 2014) but also the lethality of a military police who target this very demographic on and off duty (Smith, 2016). As other Black ethnographers in Brazil relay, they too are often mistaken (or perhaps not so) for being a Black Brazilian and are suspect to various forms of surveillance, inspection, and at times harm (Perry, 2012; Santana, 2017; Williams, 2013).

In the vehicle, Rodrigo told Alvaro and I that a few weeks earlier a gang faction on the periphery of the city had stopped him. He said that they interrogated him a little bit about what he was doing but eventually let him continue on his way. Understandably, he noted that he was scared, not only for the encounter with the traffickers but how it would also be perceived: “If something happens to me, they’re not even going to blink. Just another case of violence on the periphery. Pretty much what they expect from the people there.” I could not help but think about the time I was in Rio de Janeiro with two Black male friends and a White-ish Brazilian American male friend. Returning to our hostel after a night of adult beverages, we were stopped by military police who stuck AR-15s in our cab, dragged us out, searched us, planted drugs in the vehicle, and then asked us to “pay the fine on the spot” to avoid jail time. Both of these instances of Rodrigo and I illustrate the precarity of Black life, whether Brazilian or not, in its vulnerability to violence. This is not to suggest that I permanently live under these conditions but rather the fungibility of Blackness is such that it can even hail those beyond a locally specific socioeconomic formation.

Being in an Uber in Salvador also provides increased opportunities for such racial scenarios. Its legal status is somewhat murky. Since its arrival in Salvador, it has been a highly contested subject. Its opponents decry that it is unfair to taxi drivers who must obtain a license and a permit from the municipality to operate. Moreover, its cheaper prices would put numerous middle-class taxi drivers out of work for a U.S.-based company. Its supporters note that taxi drivers are overpriced and engage in racism by denying service to Blacks, overcharging, and even beating their clients. In addition, it would allow poor and working-class people, who are overwhelmingly Black in Salvador, the opportunity to move more freely, at a price much cheaper than a taxi, and when the bus system stops operating at around 10 or 11 at night. In other words, it would circumvent how racism is spatialized in Salvador, designed to keep Black people on the periphery and limited in their physical mobility (de Carvalho & Pereira, 2015; Hugo, 2015).

At the time of this fieldwork, Uber was not regulated or recognized by the municipality. Numerous Uber drivers desire both security and regulation. Their reasons include desiring to work without fear, the ability to pull into a hotel driveway rather than hide around the corner, and the scrutiny by the Secretary of Urban Mobility (SEMOB) for being “clandestine transportation.” Due to its unregulation, Uber drivers’ vehicles are regularly taken by the municipality, fined R$2,500 as well as numerous other fees that are prohibitively expensive for a workforce that is predominantly Black and/or working class (Aquino, 2017; Santos, 2017). Thus, Uber ironically gives Black people more mobility and economic means while also exposing them to increased interactions with the state and potential violent racial scenarios.

Being Black in Brazil means confronting how the epidermal racial schema that Fanon theorizes is attached on the Black body. This is a schema that the critical Black ethnographer must also realize, how they are not immune from this epidermalization and the centrality of race as a visual signifier that engulfs the Black ethnographer as well. The fungibility of Blackness is such that it is not necessarily concerned with the individual but rather repeated performances of racial terror that needs the Black body to signal Blackness as subjected and subjugated to White supremacy, racial capitalism, and European patriarchy. This serves to not only socioeconomically marginalize Black people but symbolically displace Black people from being a liberal subject, and in effect recognized as human, as well as European constructions of gender in how femininity and masculinity are tethered to submission and domination, respectively.

Fungibility does not discriminate but rather needs a visual referent to perform and produce these social meanings and do so repeatedly so that it would appear natural and ordinary. Like Fanon, critical Black ethnographers do not enter and perform the category of ethnographer the same way that the Western White male anthropologist has historically been able to. The critical Black ethnographer can also be hailed as a fungible Black object in these situations. This is a key dilemma of the critical Black ethnographer, when our Blackness becomes salient and we must be aware of those performances outside of our role as a critical ethnographer. Fanon realizes this as well as the glaring object of Blackness as seen by the little crying boy. Fanon expresses surprise that he is being hailed as Black when he is also performing as a critical ethnographer detailing the very mechanisms that impede on Black people’s everyday lives and experiences. He too is vulnerable to the epidermal racial schema, where his own liberal self-fashionings crumble and becomes reduced to an object within the purview of the liberal subject.

Where Fanon takes us in the tension between being a critical ethnographer and being Black is not only being reduced to an object within the vantage point of the hegemonic White male gaze but also how subjectivity is derived through the object making of the Other, in this case the Black. Critiquing the master–slave dialectic of Hegel, he notes that the Black lacks ontological integrity, expressed most powerfully in the realm of lived experience. There, in the social world of racial relationality, “not only must the black [person] be black; [they] must be black in relation to the white man” (Fanon, 2008, p. 90). While the Black person must understand their being in relation to Man, the White man only understands their subjectivity through other White men. Thus, it lacks a dialogical performance that works through difference and a multiplicity of subjectivities that deviate from Man and our dominant representation of the human.

The ethnographic self, much like the liberal subject, is one that ties particular mental attributes to a visual embodiment. This is especially the case in the context of Blackness, how it is doubly used in unbalanced relations of power to forge both the liberal subject and the ethnographic self. For Black people who enter into the category of ethnographer, this is not the taking off of one robe and putting on another. Instead, these two press against one another, creating an immense amount of tension that is not easily resolved. Instead of conceiving of how Black people enter the domain of ethnographer, it merits further attention to conceptualizing how ethnography, as a critical theoretical practice, can enter the domain of Blackness in pursuit of the principles of ethical research and political commitment.

The Critical Black Ethnographer and Performative Fugitivity

In this final section, I present how we might conceive of becoming a critical Black ethnographer and the role of a performative fugitivity. This last step explores the relationship between these two categories, Black and critical ethnographer, not in conflict but rather through its own dialogism. As I outline above, becoming a critical ethnographer requires a dialogical performance with the Other to work through difference and forge a multivocal portrayal of injustice at the lived level. Yet, the performance of the critical ethnographer becomes complicated when we are also Black and are subjected and subjugated to a performativity of race that is dependent upon material and symbolic violence against the Black body. As other scholars argue, the goal of critical theory and performance studies is to not reproduce the Other through domination and resistance or convince them to change their position but rather to win their position through a politics of possibility (Madison, 2003).

Here, I explicate the figure of the critical Black ethnographer as one who engages with performative gestures that create some type of symbolic, material, or ideological difference between individual staged performances and social performativity. What type of gesture is necessary? I argue here that it is a performative fugitivity, one of refusal and escape where the critical Black ethnographer refuses their negation, conditions, and embodied precarity and partakes in unpredictable and divergent paths to other spaces and possibilities. This is of course part of the Black Radical Tradition (Harney & Moten, 2013; A. D. Nascimento, 1980; B. Nascimento, 1985). It is not only a refusal from the conditions of violence and racialized terror but also the practice of individuality and the façade of liberal self-expression. Instead, it focuses on a “shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality” (Robinson, 2000, p. 171).

Fanon’s theories are informative of a critical Black ethnographer who participates in the refusal of both racialized violence and the theory that humanism is articulated through the template of Man. When Fanon (2008) reaches for his cigarettes in front of the White man in his office, he realizes that he must carefully reach for them at the end of the table and then lean back to grab the matches out of the drawer. “And I make all these moves not out of habit but by implicit knowledge” (p. 91). He realizes that he must make this move as a means to not startle, alarm, or create fear in the eyes of the White man. To do so might initiate a racial scenario where his actions could be misconstrued as a threat and perhaps even an act of violence against him. This is also noticeable when he details his nervousness for the Black physician who may commit an error but then be responsible for his own discredit and those that come after him.

These actions that Fanon speaks of are forms of refusal, from the deprecating tropes of Blackness being attached to his Black skin. While many imagine these forms of fugitivity to be grand gestures, such as maroon communities, these also take place in small acts that redirect predictable racial scenarios and its performativity of Blackness. These forms of escape are what Black feminist scholar Tina Campt (2017) deems “the future real conditional” (p. 17) where Blacks undertake a future that has not yet happened but must happen. These acts enable Blacks to avoid acts of subjugation and subjection to go on to achieve “new possibilities for living lives that refused a regulatory regime” (pp. 32-33). Fanon not only refuses to be hailed as a Black male threat but also escapes the subjugation that would come. It is from there that he is able to continue on his own dreams and desires for Black liberation.

These forms of refusal and escape in the “future real conditional” are what Rodrigo is engaging in. Using the Bible as a performative prop, he is predicting familiar scripts, encounters, and stages of performing Blackness that are so frequent in Brazil. Rather than leaving it to chance or frequency, Rodrigo is anticipating it. He understands that for him to pursue his own future travels in ways that subvert dominant logics of White supremacy, anti Blackness, and patriarchal domination, he must find ways to refuse the dominant coding of race, its epidermalization, and secure alternative pathways of escape. Doing so, he uses the Bible as a means of working through our collective objecthood but also a potentiality of other politics. It is to present us, or at least him, as Black men who are Christian and by extension with Christian values and morals. Whether or not true, it predicts the bricolage of three Black men in an Uber on a stage predicated upon racialized terror. If a police or gang members stop the vehicle, they will see us as three Black men, objects among other objects, but they will also see the Bible which may be enough to view us as men of good moral faith and distant from the ordinary and dominant meanings of Blackness. The hope is that we secure continued paths of flight to the studio, to the school, and to the U.S. academy.

How might this pertain to what we would call a critical Black ethnographer? After all, Rodrigo is the one that places the Bible on the dashboard and not I. It pertains because the critical Black ethnographer recognizes how we are reduced to being an “object among other objects” (Fanon, 2008, p. 89). Fanon argues that objecthood is the antithesis of subjecthood and the ability to self-fashion one’s self as an individual and not tethered to a group or larger community. Yet, Fanon (1963) conceived of decolonization of the structures of colonialism and racism to be anchored in the disappearance of individualism: “the interests of one will be the interests of all, for in concrete fact everyone will be discovered by the troops, everyone will be massacred—or everyone will be saved” (p. 47). In other words, it is through the group collectivity rather than a “society of individuals” that will grant Black freedom. It is parallel to Robinson’s (2000) notion of the “collective being, ontological totality” (p. 171). There, we find ourselves in collective formations that refuse our lot as Black fungible objects and escape from the various regimes of racialized terror.

When I see the Bible, I must understand the particular directions and performances that Rodrigo is moving toward and taking us. Dwight Conquergood (2013a) once deemed the field of performance studies as a “caravan: a heterogeneous ensemble of ideas and methods on the move” (p. 30). The caravan metaphor is also pertinent for this scenario in that as a critical Black ethnographer, the caravan is also empirical in that we must let other people drive and steer us toward a performative action that interrupts and decenters master discourse of race. In this situation, I relieve myself of my own individuality in favor of the group. A performative fugitivity also requires putting aside our forms of power, privilege, and bias to secure the collective well-being of Blacks. Put differently, if we get pulled over, I’m sure as hell going to act like I’m a good Christian man if it means I get to leave unharmed. I do not assume that my privilege will distance me from them, absolve me of asymmetrical racial relations of power, and biases against either Rodrigo or Alvaro. These acts put into play misdirection and trickery that undermine the racial performativity of Blackness and enables us to escape in our contradictory flights of Black life.

This scene, while seemingly minor and irrelevant, opens up the possibility of a critical Black ethnographer. It is one who is willing to renounce, even if momentarily, their own individual self in favor of a group collective that practice refusal, escape, and flight from the conditions and re-enactments of gendered anti Blackness. This requires that we, like those we research with, do not attempt to change our positions to garner legitimacy but instead attempt to win the positions we are already in. It often requires that we refuse the façade of a liberal ethnographic self and instead understand and perform our selves as part of a collectivity that interrupts the dominant performances of culture and performativity of social identities in society.

Conclusion

In this article, I have mapped out the tension between becoming a critical ethnographer and being a Black object in my own ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil. Using Frantz Fanon, I examine how the critical ethnographer is not exempt from the overarching discourses of race, gender, and class. Situating Fanon within both performance studies and critical ethnography, I argue that Fanon provides a template for negotiating becoming a critical ethnographer, being reduced to a fungible Black object, and forming a critical Black ethnographer. In doing so, he highlights the role of dialogical performance, racial performativity, and performative fugitivity within a critical Black ethnography.

While Fanon is no doubt fundamental to how I theorize a critical Black ethnographer, he raises larger issues about Blackness as a relational category and how it derives meanings for other categories. As critical Black theorist Fred Moten (2017) argues, Blackness places pressures between the distinction of the person-as-object and the person-as-subject. Enormous thought, energy, and performance are expended to maintain this separation socially, politically, economically, and symbolically. Fundamental to Fanon’s own thought was that for Black people to be conceived as human it was not enough to simply conform to the practices, values, politics, and aesthetics of those who are considered to be human. He understood that the very category of the human itself had to be transformed.

The very antagonism that emits Blackness from the category similarly structures ethnography. The assumption is such that the ethnographer is a fully formed liberal subject based on the contour of Man and the ethnographed based in some form of racial and/or ethnic alterity from the vantage of the Western White bourgeois male subject. What has become increasingly apparent for me is how entering prevailing notions of the ethnographic self cannot accommodate my Blackness or anyone else’s. It is an unacceptable idea to continue to reproduce an ethnographic identity that continues to maintain a particular ideal of who constitutes the human. Rather than conceiving of how Black people may become ethnographers, I want to instead conceive that the critical Black ethnographer illustrates how ethnography and the idea of the ethnographer must change to foreground Black people as knowledge creators who interrogate the political stakes of cultural practices within larger social relations of power. In other words, rather than Blackness attempting to enter the category of the ethnographer, we would better serve to imagine how ethnography would have to be accommodated by Blackness to have a truly more radical and emancipatory critical ethnography.