Search

This article examines the work of black feminist performance artist and scholar Gabrielle Civil as a mode of transhistorical historiography. By working from Civil's artistic aim to open up space and her commitment to breaking the frames of identity, history, and art, the paper explores how textual and temporal slippages cultivate an embodied polyphonic practice responding to individual and collective histories and senses of belonging. With specific regard for transnational and diasporic identities and experiences, Civil's work addresses three different relationships between oneself and others: familial, (re)imagined familial, and ancestral bloodlines. The resulting dynamic enacts a "collaborative timeslip" as a means with which to address racist and patriarchal histographies and transgenerational trauma and memories. This approach allows for layering asynchronistic local and global perspectives to elicit calls for and demonstrations of protest and joy. Drawing from interdisciplinary, performance, and African diaspora scholars such as Avery F. Gordon, Long Le-Khac, Kara Keeling, Tina M. Campt, Nadège T. Clitandre, and Jack Isaac Pryor, the article primarily examines Civil's Fugue (Da Montréal) (2014) performance and debut full-length collection Swallow the Fish (2017). Extending beyond medium and genre, the collaborative timeslip perpetually enacts an oscillation of Civil's experiments: truth telling, creating, inviting someone in, documenting, and repeating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]