A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

“After all, what is endurance to a people who have already endured? What is it to someone who could, at that point, still touch the living hands of a family member who had survived being born into forced labor? Endurance, for some, was seeing what the dance floor could handle. It did not come down to the limits of the body when pushed toward an impossible feat of linear time. No. It was about having a powerful enough relationship with freedom that you understand its limitations.”

In describing the lack of Black marathon dances, Abdurraqib ties the physical exertion of dance marathons to the historical enslavement and abuses of Black workers. By connecting two disparate historical events, he retrieves Black history from obscurity and gives it the causality usually reserved for white history. He also ties the body to both artistic performance and the performance of a racial identity. Dancing will also be a recurring topic throughout the collection.

“[Music] acted as both a call for people to take to the streets and a reprieve after a long day of protest, or marching, or working some despised job.”

Abdurraqib’s understanding of music will be more fully explored throughout the collection. Music’s expressive qualities allow it to function as a medium for both personal and political feelings. Here, as throughout the collection, Abdurraqib contrasts the exceptional with the mundane.

“The drawn-out funeral, or the pictures on the wall, or the remembrances yelled into a night sky are all a part of that carrying. It is all fighting for the same message: holding on to the memory of someone with two hands and saying, I refuse to let you sink.”

Memory and remembering are important topics for Abdurraqib, as history has often forgotten Black Americans. A Black funeral, then, becomes the site of insistent remembering of the deceased. The image of a sinking body also summons up the image of Africans thrown into the sea during the Middle Passage. Remembering the dead becomes a radical act of reclamation.