Beauty in the Belly of the Beast: Womanist Choreographies of Becoming

In the Belly of the Beast

Womanist Choreographies of Becoming BAH

FOR Dora Ward Pecola Moss Rosa Coachman Mary Barksdale Nancy Moss Laura McGhee Easter Ward Florence Taylor Bertha Sanders Affie Lee Lottie May Flora Lee Sophie Baker Elizabeth Ward Addie Mae Moss Reatha Moss-Heath Lashunda Meshell Heath-Ellison Lenette Brisbon

before we begin.

hi there, my friend, i want to begin by thanking you for taking the time to share this space with me. in the spirit of the black church: you could have chosen to be anywhere, reading anything, but you chose to spend this moment with me and with my words. i do not take that lightly. i do not take that for granted. before we begin, i want to offer a little guidance for moving through this text and share why this text, and why now. first, i am a southern black womanist born and raised in the great city of ATL and the daughter of Black preachers. i was taught that, in the beginning, there was always the word. the creativity that spurred the making of sounds from our mouths, hands, and feet, and the landing of them on paper and in the hearts of others, has always been the foundation of my life. my first encounter with words was through my mother. she taught me how to read and write in cursive at four years old. Mommy always made it clear that words are more than what you say, but how you say what you say. their power lies in the fact that they can conjure memory, become inheritance, form testimony, and create possibility. this zine was born out of a longing to protect that inheritance. my mother (who was also my kindergarten teacher) dons the cover of this zine as the grantor of that gift.

as someone pursuing graduate studies at a particularly precarious moment in american higher education--when academic freedom is increasingly under attack and ethnic studies, gender studies, and black studies programs are being eliminated--I have become deeply invested in retaining ownership over my words, my stories, and my imagination. after completing my first year of a phd program with a nervous system worn thin by the relentless demands of academic production, i found myself longing to make something without the pressure of producing for an institution or a particular audience. i wanted to make something that could simply belong to me, my people, and the communities that have shaped me. this zine is written in the spirit of Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, who invites readers to experience Ezili's Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders like a song. Beauty in the Belly of the Beast asks to be read like choreography. repetition, openings and closings, circling back to the beginning, ensemble moments, pauses, and breaths shape the movement of these pages. rather than following the conventions of academic prose, this text moves across family stories, performance practices, photographs, memories, and everyday rituals, treating them as sites of theory. my family are not simply subjects of research, they are theorists in and of themselves. The zine is separated into four movements: Mama, Granddaddy, Neo-Soul, and Walk/Ways.

the interludes offer moments to pause, breathe, and linger between the movements. they are places where i begin teasing out a personal praxis, asking how my family's ways of moving through the world have shaped my own womanist sensibilities and artistic practice. as a performance artist, cultural organizer, and emerging scholar, i have become increasingly convinced that Black women deserve to be part of the academy, but our work does not belong to the academy solely. Our work belongs and emerges from the earth, from our breath, from our bodies, from our mother’s mother’s bodies. we deserve spaces where our genius is nurtured rather than extracted. where our writing and creative praxis is valued rather than measured only by productivity. where our ideas can move at the pace of breath instead of deadlines. this zine is one attempt at creating such a space.

this piece began as an essay i wrote for a graduate seminar entitled Performance as Research. throughout the semester, we were asked to consider our own artistic practices as sites of research and to ask what they might teach us if we attended to them differently. i found myself returning again and again to Black feminism--to the ways Black feminist thinkers and makers entered the academy while simultaneously creating methodologies for surviving it. i became interested in the practices Black women developed to resist the shrinking that institutions so often demand. as a new PhD student, i am constantly negotiating those pressures. there is an unspoken expectation to make yourself smaller, to apologize for your voice, your curiosity, your ambition, and even the pace at which you wish to move. graduate school can be an extraordinarily isolating and disorienting place, especially for those of us pursuing lives rooted in slowness rather than grind culture, in community rather than competition, and in closeness to the earth and to the people we love.

those tensions extend to our writing practices. writing in the academy can sometimes feel like speaking into an echo chamber, carrying on a conversation with a small circle of people who may or may not ever respond. even more painfully, it can feel as though our work is no longer reaching the people who matter most to us. the communities that shaped us, the families who first taught us to think, the people whose lives make our scholarship possible, are often the very people not considered to be the audience for academic publishing. this zine is my attempt to move differently. rather than allowing this work to exist only as a seminar paper or, eventually, an academic article, i wanted to create something that could circulate in living rooms, churches, classrooms, barber shops, beauty salons, libraries, and between friends. i wanted to make something that could be held in your hands. something that refuses the assumption that knowledge only becomes valuable once it passes through a university press or an academic journal. i believe black women deserve to inhabit the academy, but our ideas have always exceeded its walls. writing these choreographies required another mode of publishing, another way of gathering, another way of sharing. because beauty does not move in straight lines. And neither do black women’s work. Perhaps this is but one rehearsal toward that world.

and so, i invite you to: read at your own pace. read and take breaks. read and journal. read and call a friend. read and write (and mail a letter). read and go for a walk. read and eat something good to you. read and make love. read and listen to Jill Scott. read and say a prayer. read and call your people. read and take a nap.

most of all: i hope that you will read with your body in mind. take care of yourself.

thank you for being here, bri

P.S. i’d love to be in dialogue with you about my writing: what came up for you, what it moved you to do or feel, what memories emerged, or who you are becoming. if you feel so moved, write me using the included postcard. postage included.

“...traditionally capable, as in: ‘mama, I’m walking to canada, and I’m taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me.’ reply: ‘it wouldn’t be the first time.’”

–ALICE WALKER, IN SEARCH OF OUR MOTHER’S GARDENS

MOVEMENT I: MAMA

The

picture that opens this essay is one of my favorites from

my family’s archive. It captures my mother, Barkash McCullough-Heath, and her parents, my grandparents, Bertha Ann Lee-McCullough and Alex Arthur McCullough, arriving on the University of South Carolina campus in 1983. As an 18-year-old who spent her entire life in the rural, small town of Andrews, South Carolina, my mama decided to leave her city– which truthfully resembled a close-knit family in the way everyone knew each other’s name, and was distantly, if not directly related–to attend the state’s premier research institution three hours away in Columbia, South Carolina. She arrived as a freshman, neatly dressed in a pink, yellow, and baby-blue sweater, a matching baby-blue skirt, and a white button-down shirt underneath. Her tight curls cascade down her back, as the colors bounce off her dark, mahogany skin. There is a light in her eyes, bright and round, illuminated by her 1000-watt smile. She stands tall, holding dreams of becoming a doctor, a dream encouraged by her parents, who, neither having completed high school, raised her to believe in her capacity to become. My grandparents made that belief material. My grandmother worked long hours as a seamstress making pants in a factory to support her family, sometimes bringing my mother along to join her during the summer, and each semester, my grandfather drove to the university and paid the balance of my mother’s tuition in cash– money earned through long hours at the steel mill. Their labor, like my mama’s dream, never wavered.

In the photograph, the three of them form a kind of generational triptych: my grandmother, composed and watchful; my grandfather, tall and steady; and my mother, radiant with possibility. Compositionally, it is a beautiful photograph with the light catching their skin, the building behind them laid bare, and a path stretching forward. In theory, they represent an aspirational American scene: hardworking parents dropping their child off to pursue a college education at the premier state university, yet the beautiful photograph conceals as much as it shows.

What may not be readily apparent in the photograph is that the University of South Carolina had only integrated in 1963, just twenty years before this photograph was taken. My mother stands among the early cohorts of Black students who entered its doors, her presence both ordinary and extraordinary. We cannot readily see the racialized conditions that attempted to make this photograph impossible–the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” ruling, Jim Crow segregation, the violent displays of white supremacy that sought to obstruct integration, or the ways that industrialism and urban development sought to displace Black residents in rural towns like Andrews, SC, in the early 1990s.

Although representations of these events do not readily reveal themselves, they are made visible in the fact of my family's presence on USC’s campus in the fall of 1983.

By all accounts, my mother was the ideal student, more than prepared to meet the challenges of a post-secondary degree program. She was a straight-A student, graduated with honors, amassed thousands of dollars in scholarships, and was heavily involved in extra-curricular activities and church. She wrote and produced plays, sang in the choir, cheered on her varsity squad, and was a member of the yearbook club.

My mother graduated in 1987 with a degree in biology, having done what she could, carrying with her lifelong friendships, but not the dream that brought her there. My mother never became a doctor. “I wasn’t focused enough,” she says sometimes nonchalantly while washing dishes or doing her hair. Instead, she moved to Atlanta, GA, with her two best sister-friends and got a job as a lab tech at a hospital in neighboring Marietta, GA. She carried her spiritual life with her as well, embedding herself in a local church in Lithonia, GA, where she met my father.

Instead of medicine, she found a life in education, dedicating herself to passing on the ability to dream to elementary-aged children. When I was a kid, she would tell stories about how teaching had always been lurking on her path. She would often gather children beneath a tree in her hometown and teach them what she knew.

What my mother names as a lack of focus, I have come to understand differently. Not as failure, but as a

REORIENTATION

A PRA

an opening into

CE I T C that had always been central to who she was/is.

What if beauty is not simply visible in the photograph itself, but in my mother’s refusal of a linear narrative of success?

What if the beauty resides in her ability to become, anyway? And, walk a path that, in many ways, she conjured long before USC.

My mother’s stories of her time at USC soaked into me like water in a sponge. As a kid, I relished rummaging through her photo albums, holding her student ID in my hands, and studying her face: her eyes, bright and round, and the 1000-watt smile splayed against her dark, mahogany skin. Her stories would echo in my head, and I would imagine my life as a college student formed in her image. Our trips to South Carolina would almost always lead us to campus, and we’d walk around as much as we could as she pointed out her old dormitory or the dining hall. From a woman who, over time, became more reserved with her stories, these moments felt like beautiful glimpses into a life marked by beauty, wonder, and becoming.

INTERLUDE

I begin

with my family’s photograph because what

I witness in it is not simply social mobility through education, but a way of moving through the world shaped by beauty–an energy that is not simply aesthetic, but generative, anchored in community, sustained by desire, and carried into institutional spaces that cannot fully contain it.

As I look at this photograph these days, I realize that what makes it beautiful is the historical resonances it conceals as much as it reveals.

The fact that the image does not readily announce the weight that surrounds it reveals something more about the facts of beauty as a Black feminist proposition. Beauty, then, is more than mere aesthetics. Beauty, I argue, functions as a Black feminist practice of stealth. It allows Black women to move through institutions and histories structured by antiBlackness while carrying forms of knowledge, desire, and possibility that evade institutional capture. Rather than simply helping Black women survive hostile environments, beauty creates conditions for imagining and rehearsing otherwise futures and choreographies of becoming from within them.

In a moment marked by social reckoning, the rise of fascism, and violence that feels omnipresent, what does it mean to practice beauty in the belly of the beast–from the inside of institutions marked by and reproducing violence and harm? And how might beauty–the recognition of it and the desire to experience it by way of replication–be an articulation of Black feminism as a public practice? A way of making, feeling, theorizing, and insisting on otherwise possibilities in the face of institutional violence? What can beauty, as a Black feminist proposition that holds both the lovely and the ugly, the extraordinary and the mundane, the awesome and the quotidian, offer those of us in the throes of institutional harm and erasure? As a new PhD student and selfidentified artist-scholar whose research is a constellation of approaches and methods that move through performance art, cultural organizing, and writing rooted in Black feminist consciousness, I am drawn to thinking about what happens when Black feminism enters the academy.

What are the stakes of this institutionalization? What becomes possible, and what is constrained? What does it mean to embrace Black feminist epistemologies as both artistic and scholarly methods? What languages become un/available in that embrace? How does artistic practice function as a mode of theorizing on its own? And what negotiations are inherent in claiming the artist-scholar as a Black feminist position? In the same way that Alice Walker marks a kind of citational essence in womanism’s definition, I find resonances of beauty as a liberatory method in mining my mother’s and other family members’ stories.

Citation, the ethical practice of crediting sources of information and practices, becomes a way not only of marking lineage but also of recognizing liberatory practices that become available to us like inheritances.

MOVEMENT II: GRANDDADDY

Another family story.

My paternal grandfather, Otis, walked at least 4 miles every day from the time he retired until he died in 2018. After retiring, he returned with my grandmother to their ancestral land in Norwood, Georgia.

Each year, my parents would make the hour-and-a-half drive to drop my sisters and me off to spend two weeks with my grandparents. Even though we knew we’d be sacrificing central air conditioning, satellite television, and that we would spend our days sweating as we ran up and down the dirt and grassy roads along Andrews Chapel Road–fighting the thick nightly humidity and missing new episodes of our favorite TV shows–we didn’t care. We were excited to leave the city behind, drenched in both our sweat and our grandparents’ love.

Every morning, my grandfather would wake up before sunrise, purely out of habit after working 30+ years as a delivery driver for 7Up–and head out the door for his daily ritual. I often wonder about what his walks were like. Before dawn, it’s boot-black, pitch dark in the country.

Your hands and your eyes melt into the darkness, no longer recognizable or distinguishable from the unknown before you. As a child, I never understood his routine. I wonder how he felt in solitude. What thoughts accompanied him through the darkness? What sustained him?

In 2015, when I moved to Chicago for college, my grandfather drove my mother, grandmother, and me the full fifteen hours from Atlanta, my life packed into boxes and trunk party gifts. When we arrived, he sank into the couch in my new apartment and fell asleep while we unpacked around him. At some point, we woke him to say we were heading to Walmart. When we came back, he was gone. My roommate’s dad said that he had walked all the way back to our hotel. “He said he was hungry and y’all were taking too long.” He had walked from 2 East 8th Street to Grand Avenue. Two miles. Forty minutes. At the time, it felt impossibly far for someone new to the city. After he passed, I would make that walk myself, again and again, trying to conjure his presence as I made sense of his absence. I walked that walk until it became ordinary.

I returned to it often, maybe because I, too, had come to depend on them--on the quiet rhythm of moving my body through space, on the way walking could steady me, settle my thoughts, open something in my spirit.

And I began to wonder if his walking had always been more than a start-ofthe-day habit.

Maybe it was a kind of prayer.

A marking.

A steady, faithful tracing of a path before I even knew I would need one.

Marking our way.

Making a way.

Just for me.

Text reads: My paternal grandparents, Otis Heath and Mattie Lee Ward-Heath, and I on the campus of Columbia College Chicago in the Fall of 2015. My mother stands on the other side of the camera as the photographer.

INTERLUDE

In the

way that my mother’s photograph reveals a

choreography of becoming within and outside of institutional structures, my grandfather’s walks reveal a choreography of endurance. Together, these practices of movement and memory form the foundation of my artist-scholar research and ask how embodied practices make room for Black women’s survival and world-making inside of institutions that often feel inhospitable. In this way, my telling of family stories is not retelling for re-telling’s sake. Their lives contain embodied practices that help me think through the connection between beauty, movement, and practices of well-being from within the belly of the beast. Additionally, my family’s stories help me articulate these ideas in ways that traditional archives do not. By citing these stories, I am not simply treating my family members as objects of study, but as theorists in and of themselves.

In this way, their lived experiences demonstrate practices and ways of knowing that help me understand beauty as an inherited Black feminist methodology.

Riffing on the scholarship of Black feminist scholars Jennifer Nash and Christina Sharpe, this zine traces intergenerational choreographies of Black folk moving through institutional space and land as beautiful choreographies. Calling on performance studies and Black studies, I argue that beauty functions not only as a Black feminist practice of survival, refusal, and world-making but also as a Black feminist choreography of stealth toward becoming. Its “hiding-in-plain-sight” qualities make it a site of liberatory potential by Black women who fly under the radar of white supremacist systems to undermine them. If beauty becomes an inherited Black feminist methodology, handed down through communal experience, how might it be practiced or rehearsed through artistic research? Through an analysis of my performance project, Walk/Ways, and its accompanying writing practice, Brown(ed) Studies, I explore how performance art and performative writing function as embodied forms of theorizing that embrace “not-knowing” and aesthetic practice as strategies for reimagining how to inhabit the “belly of the beast.”

MOVEMENT III: NEO-SOUL

I am a child of the Black church.

A daughter of preachers. A child raised in a home where only gospel music was allowed, mostly.

Neo S

Until I got my own car.

My first car, my Nellie Belle, My 2001 Nissan Altima was a sanctuary–a soft place to experiment with melodies that felt good in my body.

l u o

found its way through my AUX cord like a Black girl's rite of passage as I cruised down ATL’s I20 East.

RITE OF PASSAGE RITE OF PASSAGE RITE OF PASSAGE RITE OF PASSAGE RITE OF PASSAGE It was a soft and steady crossover, not a break from gospel, but an extension of it. India.Arie, Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu aka Fat Belly Bella, DJ Low Down Loretta Brown, Badoula Oblongata, Sara Bellum, and Analog Girl in a Digital World, and of course, Jilly from Philly, Jill Scott comprised my musical constellation.

An imperfectly perfect melodic collection, their music would follow Kim Burrell’s Lift Him Up, or The Clark Sisters’ Jesus is a Love Song, on my Pandora station as I drove down I20 in Atlanta.

Their melodies would mix in my headphones, drenched in the blues, soul, and hip hop. And they sang wisdom and lessons and warnings and pettiness and fun and heartbreak and grief and laughter and good lovin’. Their music was gospel in a different register–a negotiation with love, selfhood, the sacred, respectability, the erotic, desire, and freedom. They sang becoming. Like “Are you sure sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” (Bambara 3).

In their music, what was once forbidden became a world of color. The ordinary became exciting.

And they invited me to marvel at all its wonders.

If my mother’s stories are choreographies of becoming otherwise, and my grandfather’s walks are choreographies in endurance and being with the land, then Black women neo-soul artists were my teachers in thinking about the ordinary as places from which to create. India.Arie sang about loving her brown skin, Erykah crooned about green eyes and intuition, and Jill Scott sang about a kind of intimacy that grows from conversations on long walks. Neo-soul music, with its political and spiritual resonances, insists that Black life encompasses more than suffering or constant resistance to epistemological violence.

Rather than locating liberation beyond the present moment, these artists invite listeners to marvel in the worlds unfolding all around them.

Long before I encountered Black feminist theory in the academy, neo-soul taught me about pleasure, desire, and beauty as places from which to imagine ways of living that exceed antiBlackness in the world. In this way, neo-soul offered an early lesson in beauty as a Black feminist methodology: attending to the ordinary in Black life with care allows new possibilities of becoming to emerge.

Text reads: Portrait. 20-year-old me. 2017. Chicago, IL. Jubilee Tai, Photographer.

BRIDGE

BEAUTY METHODS

Christina Sharpe’s “Beauty is a Method,” and Jennifer Nash’s How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory are my north stars for this research on beauty as a Black feminist methodology. As my familial life finds itself in a very precarious place at present, and my anxiety rages about this path I’ve chosen to become a scholar, I’ve found Sharpe and Nash’s writing on beauty to be a balm to my spirit and a critical theoretical foundation from which to think about Black feminist performance praxis and choreographies of becoming.

Both Sharpe and Nash’s testaments to Black feminist beauty begin with their mothers. Sharpe’s argument that beauty is a Black feminist method, found in and charged with the ordinariness of life, is tested through her mother's life. As a child, Sharpe’s mother’s attention to the everydayness of life offers respite from the social and economic violences that often plagued Black folk in Wayne, Pennsylvania. The presence of Black books written by authors such as Toni Morrison and Jean Toomer filled Sharpe’s childhood home, as did her mother’s soft homemaking skills–decoration and the making of a purple gingham dress that fit just right.

Although Black people in the city of Wayne were facing psychological and physical violence at the hands of police, Sharpe’s mother arranged moments for her children to become, anyway. Sharpe writes:

“My mother gave me space to dream. For whole days at a time, she left me with and to words, curled up in a living-room windowsill, uninterrupted in my reading and imagining other worlds” (Sharpe, e-flux journal).

Sharpe’s conception of beauty begins in the ordinariness of life, the moments that can often go overlooked, that hide in plain sight, but have immense resonance. For Sharpe, beauty is a method that not only allows one to contend with grief, loss, and social death but also enables other possibilities to emerge. Her mother’s display of an “attentiveness to a Black aesthetic…moved [her] from the windowsill to the world.”

Interlacing personal reflections about the grief behind the slow loss of her mother to Alzheimer’s, Nash builds on the work of Christina Sharpe to articulate beauty, not merely as an aesthetic quality, but as that which has political potential.

Nash attends to loss and the particular voice that Black feminist theory employs to articulate that loss through writing. In the wake of anti-Black state violence, Black feminist theorists (and practitioners) have injected their own particular kind of voice to mourn the dead and tend to the living. This voice insists on being active, not passive. It is alive. It insists on “speaking intimately…whispering to its reader” (Nash 4) with poetic language and slick tongues. It pays attention to how words sound when they are read or heard.

This work is tedious, for as Nash and other BF theorists believe (and know), words can save lives. Nash calls this voice “beautiful”--a term to describe not the value of the writing, but its aesthetic properties, particularly its intention to move its readers. In Chapter 1, Nash defines the “how”, “we”, “now”, and “living with” of Black feminist writing.

These tenets guide her argument for beautiful writing: it is communally produced, has a temporal and palimpsestuous attention to history, and is committed to living alongside Black feminist theory rather than merely analyzing it. Nash’s articulation of beauty intervenes in intellectual fields often dominated by narratives of despair and social death.

Rather than ignore grief, Black feminist theory, through beautiful writing, tends to grief and loss, and mothering and being mothered. Sharpe and Nash’s works are cornerstones of my theoretical framework for imagining beauty as a Black feminist performance methodology of stealth, articulated not only through performance art but also through writing that attempts to capture it. Sharpe and Nash’s attention to the ordinary and the slipperiness of beauty’s appearances provides a theoretical framework for understanding what I call the choreographies of becoming.

Instead of locating liberatory praxes solely within institutional frames, Black women cultivate practices of beauty within and through structures that seek to limit their possibilities. These choreographies, whether expressed through familial stories, daily rituals, sound, performance, or writing, are methods of becoming otherwise when survival is not enough. Beauty emerges, then, not as an aesthetic quality, but as a Black feminist methodology of stealth--a way of rehearsing desire, possibility, and freedom in spaces that were never designed to hold them.

MOVEMENT IV: WALK/WAYS

This semester, I felt an urgent need to create something. No one really talks about the psychological impacts of pursuing graduate education, or the ways it can make you feel disconnected from your body. Theorizing can sometimes become a cerebral exercise that demands you leave the rest of your body behind. My inheritances from Black feminist praxis tell me that I must make different choices if I want to survive these spaces whole. The only way I know how to remain connected to my body in academic spaces is by theorizing from it.

Walk/Ways emerged from my desire to reconnect to my body. I revisited my grandfather’s ritual and began walking the University of Texas at Austin campus to orient myself to the space, be outdoors, and settle my spirit. My walks always involve sound, and on the heels of Jill Scott’s announcement of a new album in February 2026, I revisited her entire discography. Scott’s melodic voice transported me back to drives through the streets of Atlanta and the summers spent in the country with my grandparents. I could hear my grandfather’s laugh and see my mother’s smile, and remember why I chose a life dedicated to Black feminism.

My walks settled my nervous system as much as they also heightened my awareness of the institutional space I now inhabit. The University of Texas at Austin's decision to eliminate departments in ethnic studies and gender and sexuality studies arrived in my inbox one day before Scott dropped her album. I was at home in Atlanta visiting family for Valentine’s Day. I could sense the rising anxiety about whether I would be able to pursue Black feminism in this institutional space (or anywhere else).

What might that mean for how I might do this work? How can I continue to pursue Black feminist practice in a way that feels good in my body? Am I only relegated to an academic life that must find ways of flying under the radar of institutional surveillance? How might Black feminist beauty aid me in ensuring I (and my comrades) can continue to do my work in ways that preserve our spirits? My mother’s presence on her college campus reveals a choreography of becoming; my grandfather’s walks reveal a choreography of endurance; and neo-soul taught me choreographies of possibility. Together, these experiences shape my understanding of Black feminism as a way of inhabiting space, a way of stewarding spirit, and ancestral gifts. My performance project, Walk/Ways, and the accompanying writing practice, Brown(ed) Studies, are my attempts to rehearse these choreographies, to test what beauty can do in institutional spaces that are becoming increasingly violent towards Black feminist ways of knowing.

INTERLUDE

Melding Black feminist pleasure politics with performance praxis, and anchored in the sonics of neo-soul legend Jill Scott, Walk/Ways, takes the form of a durational procession across the UT-Austin campus. The performance engages the history of Black women-led student protest as acts of political refusal, sovereignty, world-making, and memory.

Part conjure and part invocation, the procession draws on Africanist spiritual aesthetics, spectacle, and sonic ritual to remember past student protest movements while questioning the resonances of institutional erasure of indigenous, Black, and femme scholarship, activism, and presence. Adorned in bright Longhorn burnt orange, I push a breakfast cart carrying mixed-size speakers broadcasting Scott’s discography. Her catalog–often described as love letters to Black women articulated through R&B, spoken word, and neo-soul traditions–functions here as both sonic accompaniment and Black feminist text.

Scott’s music articulates intimacy, bodily autonomy, relationality, and pleasure as liberatory practices, offering an alternative grammar of sovereignty rooted in feeling, embodiment, and care. She offers a soundtrack to think about a Black feminist ethos of beauty that also leans toward political resistance. As Mark Anthony Neal posits in his essay, “‘You Remind Me of Something’: Toward a Post-Soul Aesthetic,” neo-soul artists like Scott are the babies of soul.

Neo-soul music emerges from a generation not old enough to have participated in the Civil Rights Movement nor the Black Power Movements; a generation that formed their own relationship to Black political consciousness that shirked the respectability of the Civil Rights Movement, but didn’t quite encompass the political agenda of the Black Power movement.

Drawing on Black feminist performance praxis as a mode of political refusal, Walk/Ways asks: How might beauty serve as a means of moving through spaces structured by surveillance, domination, and exclusion? What risks and possibilities emerge when beauty is made public? As the performance unfolds as a slow, steady processional across campus sites shaped by protest and resistance, it positions beauty not as escape, but as a method of inhabiting space otherwise.

The power of Walk/Ways lies in the fact that it does not appear to be a protest, but it conceals its personal and political aims in the spectacle and beauty of the costume, as well as ordinary movements like walking, pushing a cart, and internal, close-tothe-body grooving to the music. Although the movements appear ordinary to passersby, the beauty of the performance lies in how the protest literarly moves alongside institutional violence, seeming to critique it from within. Africanist spiritual aesthetics, particularly spectacle, help me conceal the performance as a protest.

In their seminal study on the lavish spectacle of the Gẹlẹdẹ– Yoruba masquerade performances that incorporate elaborate costuming, dances, songs, and drumming commonly found among peoples in Nigeria and Benin, Henry and Margaret Drewal offer a rich analysis and historicization of sacred ritual performance at a time when those in the academy did not explicitly connect African ritual performance and craftsmanship as mutually related phenomena within African cosmology. Their opening chapter, “Yoruba Spectacle,” establishes a conceptual framework for the book by examining the role and characteristics of spectacle and performance in the Yoruba worldview. The authors begin with the concept of ìron to articulate the fleeting and transitory nature of spectacle. In this sense, a spectacle exceeds entertainment. It is an ephemeral phenomenon performed for the divine, ancestors, and mothers (to whom the Gẹlẹdẹ masquerades belong), that includes visions and storytelling.

Referencing other African Studies scholars, such as LaPin, the authors argue that spectacle is “otherworldly phenomena whose worldly manifestations are temporary and periodically reintroduced or regenerated” (Drewal 1). The Yoruba concept of ìron is deeply intertwined with the performative power of asè– the belief that one possesses the power to bring things into existence. As a core concept within the Yoruba worldview, the invocation of asè–through spoken word, incantations, song, or prayer–within spectacle makes it efficacious while underscoring the importance of language in performance. As the authors argue, artistic practice is not separate from spiritual practice.

“Artistic displays carry the sacred power to bring things into existence” (Drewal 6).

Art, therefore, is a kind of sacred labor from which realities can be called forth and realized in the world. And for the Yoruba, women are the central force within this sacred performance, positioning feminine energy as a powerful communal force. The Drewal's text is instrumental to my research on Black feminist performance praxis, particularly to my performance project, Walk/Ways. In creating a performance that positions pedestrian acts such as walking, resting, and pushing a cart across the University of Texas campus, alongside elaborate costuming, I bring African spiritual aesthetic practices into conversation with Black feminist performance praxis. By mobilizing archival material, sound, costuming, and movement, Walk/Ways invokes the power of asè through beauty to call into existence realities under attack in this institutional space: academic freedom and Black feminist imagination. Spectacle as an Africanist spiritual technology produces a choreography of stealth. Beneath the costuming and seemingly joyful existence of the performer lies ancestral memory, refusal, and conjuring work.

Walk/Ways cites my familial and sonic Black feminist inheritances in its formation to perform a choreography of becoming. The performance calls upon the ancestral presences of Black women student organizers on UT’s campus and grieves the ways in which the institution is attempting to erase its resonances: academic freedom and the indigenous, Black, and femme scholarship that develops students into active, present citizens. Walk/Ways appears to be a Black woman walking, pushing a cart, blasting music, but beneath the ordinariness, it reveals Black feminist memory, conjuring bodily autonomy and world-making.

As a graduate student, I am deeply anxious about how academic training feels like a constant battle between the theoretical and the embodied. I am particularly anxious about what this training is molding me to become, and who I will be at the end of this phd journey. Walk/Ways, then, is an intentional act to remember my body. It also attempts to address the question of who the “scholar” is in precarious times. Who is the “artist” in precarious times such as these? Is the “artist-scholar” an imagined, pretentious, capitalist trope formulated as another way for the academy to claim practices that have always belonged to the people, or is it a Black and feminist intervention toward reclaiming what was already ours?

Alongside the durational performance, I archived my creative process through an online series of voice recordings titled Brown(ed) Studies. Named after the 16th-century term “brown study,” which is used to describe a melancholic state of deep thought and daydreaming, Brown(ed) Studies leans into daydreaming and informal musings as a freedom strategy, an experiment in Black feminist writing that models affective creative scholarship. This collection of voice recordings is a series of quick-and-dirty studies or reflections on my creative and scholarly research, the “-ed” at the end alluding to Black feminist coding of academic writing as a “collaborative process of meaning-making,”--to cite performance studies scholar Nandita Dinesh–between the writer and the reader/listener, the artist and the audience, the living and the dead.

Echoing the process of heating sugar in a pan until it produces a deep color and complex flavor, “brown(ed)” articulates my desire to cultivate a scholarly writing practice (and voice) that is multilayered, active, in-process, willing to be made and remade, anchored in ancestral memory, and informed by community. On the Walk/Ways webpage, readers/listeners are instructed to click individual vinyl records to listen to the recordings. At the end, there is an invitation to respond and think with me by recording voice notes in response to two prompts. These recordings serve as a mode of documentation, reflection, and theorization— imagining writing as a record of the performance, and an extension of the performance itself. Through the practices of procession and text, I explore how performance and writing together function as Black feminist methods of world-making and theorizing. Together, they function as rehearsals of scholarship that refuses to separate theory from practice. Here, beautiful writing and beautiful spectacle function as choreographies of stealth, moving this work beyond the page.

Could the affective nature or transformative potential of Black feminist writing be enacted through other media, such as online forums, sound essays, or film? Walk/Ways and Brown(ed) Studies articulates beauty as a stealthy choroegraphy, by arguing for Black feminist practices that move, are rehearsed, and produce movement that help us become even while inhabiting institutional spaces that seek to erase us.

CODA

In a 2001 conversation with Frank McCourt, as part of The Connecticut Forum, Toni Morrison answers a question about survival. “How do you survive whole in a world where we’re all victims of something?” This is the question that spurs Morrison’s famous and perhaps most quoted response. “Um..I can’t do this quickly,” Morrison says with a bit of exhaustion at the breadth of the question. “You know it’s a nice big, fat, philosophical question about how you get through,” she says. Another breath, as her hands pull at her dress collar and she slightly adjusts in her seat, punctuating her attempt to “get at” the question.

But there is a regal calm even in her attempt, as she places her hand gently on the armrest, very becoming of who we understand Toni Morrison to be. She says:

“Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It's that, that makes it elegant. Good is just more interesting, more complex, more demanding. Evil is silly, it may be horrible, but at the same time it's not a compelling idea. It's predictable. It needs a tuxedo, it needs a headline, it needs blood, it needs fingernails. It needs all that costume in order to get anybody's attention.

But the opposite, which is survival, blossoming, endurance, those things are just more compelling intellectually if not spiritually, and they certainly are spiritually. This is a more fascinating job. We are already born, we are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between” (Morrison).

When I first heard this now-famous response, I thought to myself, "But I desperately want to survive whole." I perhaps misinterpreted Morrison’s response as giving up on the possibility of surviving whole. I was not satisfied with the interpretation that somehow resilience is the only way toward a full life. What if I don’t want a life that is constantly centered around resistance or responding to the viles of ontological violence? As I move toward the end of Morrison’s response, and consider the moral binaries that she sets up, I wonder about what it might mean to, instead of living a life of resistance, what it might mean to live a beautiful life and what (or who) that might require that we become. To be clear, I am not trying to romanticize beauty or pit beauty against resistance. For as Morrison says, the beautiful consists of all of the ways that we blossom, endure, and lean into possibility. Becoming is, then, a choreography of surviving, in part, in an attempt to survive whole.

Within my mother’s photograph, my grandfather’s walks, Neo-soul sonics, and my Walk/Ways project, I have come to understand beauty differently. Beauty is not only an aesthetic experience, nor is it merely a means of survival. It creates the conditions under which Black feminist becoming can continue. Beauty, as a practice of attending to the ordinary, to the living, and to the dead, provides me with motion, gestures, and rehearsals for living well beneath conditions that enact violence on Black life. Beauty teaches us how to be present for each other, hold one another close.

The transformative power of beauty is not just in its aesthetic qualities, but in its potential to move us toward what feels like liberation in our bodies and in our world.

Black feminist scholars such as Christina Sharpe, Jennifer Nash, my mother, my grandfather, and Jill Scott teach me to trace the resonances of Black resistance in the ordinary, quotidian moments of Black life. There is beauty there. It is available to us, hidden in plain sight, if only we look for it.

Beauty alone may not free us from the belly of the beast, but it will help us to create worlds within it.

Text reads: My mom walks the stage to receive her college degree, BS in Biology, from the University of South Carolina. 1987.

CITATIONS

Bambara, Toni Cade. “One.” The Salt Eaters, 1–41.

New York, New York: 1980, 1980.

CTForum. “A Conversation Between Toni Morrison & Frank McCourt.” YouTube, January 22, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMggOyA4S4k.

Drewal, Henry John, and Margaret Thompson Drewal.

“Yoruba Spectacle.” Gẹlẹdẹ: Art and Female Power Among the Yoruba. 1-16. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.

Neal, Mark Anthony. 2002. “‘You Remind Me of Something’: Toward a Post-Soul Aesthetic.” Soul Babies, 1st ed., 1-22. Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203950623-1.

Nash, Jennifer. “Beauty, Or All About Black Feminist Theory’s Mothers.” How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory, 1–24. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2024.

Sharpe, Christina. “Beauty Is a Method.” e-flux Journal, December 2019. https://www.eflux.com/journal/105/303916/beauty-is-a-method.

Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

Beloved.Projects Brianna Alexis Heath

2026