The Future of Education

In William Grier and Price M. Cobbs landmark book Black Rage (1968) the authors describe how and why the anger and resentment of African Americans is embedded in the national narrative of American identity. In 1992, in the introduction of their 4th edition, the authors reconcile the fact that post-Civil Rights Acts America is navigating the same plights of systemic inequality and anti-black racism as we were in 1968. In 2018, the rage and trauma produced as a result of anti-Black violence in America has the nation on the edge of its seat waiting for another body to drop to its death. This body, the corporeal and the metaphysical b/Black body, is occupied in life and death by and through the trauma of living while black in what African American Studies scholar Christina Sharpe calls the “weather of anti-Blackness.” How do Black people live under the threat of dying daily? How are Black bodies, the physical body and the body of Black people as a collective, policed for failure even while working positively to stay alive? This paper will investigate the ways Black performing artists have addressed states of Black Trauma1 by documenting lived and fictional experiences of rage through Black performance. Using past and present narratives of Black poet-activists, I compare and contrast creative engagements with trauma as expressed through spoken word poetry. I identify two Black Arts Movement poets: Gil Scot-Heron and Nikki Giovanni, who were producing work that addressed Black rage and trauma with contemporary spoken word artists: Amir Sulaiman and Kai Davis. I explore how these artists navigate their personal and collective Black Trauma. I analyze these texts using Christina Sharpe’s concept of “Wake Work,” coupled with Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge’s concepts of Intersectionality. My goal is to reveal the ways that artist-activists and their performances theorize about Trauma as they reclaim their bodies through rhetorical acts of survival.

Keywords: Black, Rage, Trauma, Epigenetic, Sharpe, Wake Work, Intersectionality, Performance Studies, Mental Health, Anti-Blackness;