Getting Away and Going With

In the introduction to The Only Way Out: The Racial and Sexual Performance of Escape, Katherine Brewer Ball quotes the artist and activist Morgan Bassichis on the twin projects of Palestinian liberation and prison abolition. Talking to a group of assembled students, Bassichis explains that ‘the only way out is through’ (p. 3). These words strike me – a PhD candidate myself – in a moment of mass student mobilisation for the Palestinian cause. Many of those young people entering academic institutions or careers, including students at Brewer Ball’s alma mater NYU, are currently gaining lived experience of what it means to press on despite violence and hostility, learning for them/ourselves the necessity of continuation as much as disruption in the fight for liberation.

While the title omits the pathway that Bassichis identifies, I cannot but read their silent direction as I make my way through The Only Way Out. Throughout their book – the writer’s first – Brewer Ball presents a sustained engagement with the ‘current Enlightenment epistemological structures founded in colonialism and anti-blackness’ which make narratives of escape impossible to tell (p. 26). Ultimately the author accepts that a truthful account of liberation will only come when these structures are abolished, but implicit in Brewer Ball’s argumentation is that the contemporary context demands that to destroy we must first push through these contaminated contexts. Like Macbeth, academia, literature, and the arts are ‘in blood/ Stepped in so far’, meaning that to renounce these forms of study and expression involves an arduous attempt to correctively press forward.¹

‘Escape’ features primarily in The Only Way Out as a narrative or plot device. Brewer Ball argues for escape as a ‘genre of change’ which registers and maps out ‘visual and literary desires for freedom’ (p. 6). This work is grounded in an analysis of what the author term ‘(anti)slavery narratives’, meaning writing by enslaved peoples popular in the USA and England during the nineteenth century. Brewer Ball sees these texts and their circulation among a white readership as foundational to the development of contemporary American fantasies of freedom, bringing this history to bear on the escapist dreams of Black and queer artists of recent years. At its core, escape is a ‘performative narrative method for imagining social change’, where that change is not necessarily radical but often deeply ambivalent (p. 6). This framing introduces the author’s background in performance studies, which provides the overarching conceptual framing, even if the material selected for analysis is not confined to the theatrical. Two other intellectual traditions support this: namely, queer theory and Black studies, with Brewer Ball’s description of a ‘genre of change’ building upon the various uses of the word ‘genre’ by Lauren Berlant and Sylvia Wynter. In a post on their blog, Supervalent Thought, Berlant defines genre as a ‘loose affectively-invested zone of expectations about the narrative shape a situation will take’ (p. 8). Brewer Ball glosses this as an ‘affective event’, the aesthetic form of which bears traces of our sensual investments and thus allows them to map the affects circulating around the desire for freedom – a set of dynamic contours capable of invoking change but also of reinforcing continuity and convention (p. 8). Brewer Ball brings in Wynter to deepen this paradox via Wynter’s description of ‘genres of the human’, a term which expands on ways of being human which exceed the white male whose existence is overrepresented in this category. Genre here becomes a way of understanding how origin stories which reify this singular ‘we’ are narratively produced through repetition but therefore can also be rewritten.²

Brewer Ball engages the overlap between Berlant and Wynter while remaining attentive to the tensions between the fields of Black and queer studies – tensions which animate the central drama of the project around how white fantasies of escape were generated in the nineteenth century from avid consumption of (anti-)slave narratives in the press and on stage. The writing of the formerly enslaved – such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs – dramatised for white audiences the gripping journey from captivity to freedom. In The Only Way Out, these texts are shown to be an affective prelude to how white queers in the next century desired and imagined their own escape from heteronormative society. It is an unexpected narrative lineage, but as Brewer Ball notes, the performance of escape is always already racialised and sexualised. The nineteenth-century fascination with the anteriority of escape echoes through contemporary imaginings, even if they attach to different subjects. Accepting this premise leads the author to what is perhaps their central underlying question. If the performance of escape is always captured by escapist fantasies, always narrated in the overrepresented genre, can the freedom of ‘existing otherwise’ ever be achieved? After a thoughtful mediation between Afrofuturism and Afropessimism’s varied assumptions about narrative possibilities, Brewer Ball lands with Fred Moten’s twin images of the ‘loophole of retreat’ which facilitates the ‘constant escape’ of freedom, and in doing so shifts the frame of focus to emphasise the ontological and epistemological enclosure of Black and queer life, and the possibility of radical aesthetic practices to remake this world (pp. 25–6).

Chapter 1 takes up the reproduction of the (anti-)slave narrative in the twenty and twenty-first centuries with a view to the fraught and fruitful ways that a liberatory belief in aesthetics has been mobilised. Brewer Ball considers three theatrical repetitions of the 1849 escape narrative of Henry ‘Box’ Brown: Tony Kushner’s play The Henry Box Brown Play: Political-Historical-Doggerel-Vaudeville (1992/2010); Glen Ligon’s art installation To Disembark (1993); and Wilmer Wilson IV’s performance Henry Box Brown: Forever (2013). In each work, aesthetics – represented by surface texture and visibility – become a site of conscious manipulation to allow room for otherwise approaches to an anti-Black world. In this way, escape is viewed as a story crafted for different audiences and to different ends. This is brought into sharp relief in the contrast between Kushner’s spectacular reproduction of Brown’s performances for white audiences, and Ligon and Wilson’s refusal to puppeteer Brown’s continued exuberance in the archive, allowing him respite through coalitional caretaking and shouldering of action. Kushner might attempt to build a coalitional politics, but his reperformance of Brown’s own abolitionist vaudevillian tour is stuck in its white theatrical frame, meanwhile Ligon’s closed wooden crates draw attention to the devices which framed Brown’s body as he fled, and the regime of visibility which sought to capture his story after. Wilson, in taking his body, covered with postage stamps, around the streets of Washington DC, presses that frame against the skin, turning it into an opaque cloak that strikingly, through visibility, allows the subject to slip away.

Chapter 2 turns to Junot Díaz’s 2007 novel The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao to trace the affects which orbit genre fiction and the attendant charge of ‘escapism’. Díaz’s novel, with its focus on the impossibility of both living and describing the full texture of Afro-Latinx experience in contemporary America, positions speculative fiction as a desire not just to leave reality but to create another. The efficacy of any creation within such a highly prescribed context as commercial literary fiction (not to mention liberal capitalism) is contentious, but Brewer Ball argues that escapism is valuable for how it subtends generic demands for heroic escapes, offering instead partial, cathartic, and minor excursions.

Chapter 3 engages the artist Sharon Hayes’ ventriloquism of the heiress Patty Hearst, who was kidnapped in 1974 by the Symbionise Liberation Army (SLA) in in her video work Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20 & 29 (2003). In reperforming Hearst’s broadcasts on behalf of her guerrilla captives, Hayes makes loud the quiet optics of escape which circulated around Hearst’s case. The daughter of a media mogul, Hearst’s objectification in both the CIA and SLA’s public relations reveal the expected sexual and racial scripts of escape narratives. Hearst’s initial refusal to adhere to these conventions ‘textures’ the story, a wavering which is brought forth in Hayes’ vocal reperformance which continues a critique of the whiteness of logical or inevitable rescue in contrast to Black philosophies of breaking out of the anti-Black episteme of reason.

Chapter 4 begins with a close reading of a self-portrait by the American artist Tourmaline. Part of the 2021 series Pleasure Garden,the photograph opens onto a vista of the various forms of pleasure and ecstasy afforded to queer people by the escape narrative. The glory hole is the prescribed opening through which a pleasurable escape from the self might be made. But as Brewer Ball deftly shows, this is a fantasy predicated on a white (cis) male gay subject and the fantasies of orgasmic ego shattering that only a position so constituted could afford. The desires of anti-social queer theorists such as Edelman and Bersani are contrasted with Tourmaline’s vision of escape as another terrain built with community. Curiosity around the abolitionist possibilities of public sex and sexuality remains, but it is re-narrated around entanglement rather than annihilation.

The Only Way Out concludes with a look at Toshi Reagon’s 2017 opera Parable of the Sower, itself based on Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 book of the same name. Brewer Ball uses this as an opportunity to reiterate moments from earlier chapters. Escape emerges again as a genre of change, a story crafted in coproduction with others and their desires – here, between performers and audience, Reagon and Butler. The opera’s sonic order also activates Wynter and Moten’s demands to slip beyond common-sense logics of futurity. Brewer Ball plays us out with these breakthroughs, reanimating and reinvigorating parts of the text via the enlivening form of Reagon’s performance, such that their analysis might slip from the page and be seen as praxis already being worked through in the artists and artworks they describe.

Brewer Ball’s emphasis on the opera’s ‘agitat[ion of] what is in order to imagine what could be’ might be an appropriate framework through which to see their project. The author is careful to distance themselves from strategies which aim at ‘dictating, mapping or making transparent Black strategies and discourses’, instead ‘asking questions about how queer and Black artists narrate freedom, collectivity, progress and coalition’ (p. 26). This is a modest ambition, testament to Brewer Ball’s awareness that they speak from the enclosing episteme of the American academy which too often overrepresents and underserves these narratives. Approaching the project’s question as one of narration is a useful method, allowing the author to say something alongside their subject’s voices rather than drowning them out. Such a framing also facilitates interdisciplinary thinking with Black and queer studies and the asymmetric relations between, within, and at the intersection of these two fields. It is not simply that these two disciplines have overlapping concerns but that these shared desires to exist otherwise are structured by racialisation and sexualisation via predetermined genre conventions, which modes of academic study variously participate in perpetuating.

The ways in which race and gender transverse and co-constitute each other have been well theorised in recent years by Black, brown, and indigenous scholars, primarily within the Anglophone academy. Drawing on the pathbreaking 1987 essay ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe’ by Hortense Spillers, as well as historic sources, C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity deals with the emergence of gender as a fungible object in the context of Black fugitivity in the slave-owning and Antebellum USA.³ Sita Balani’s Deadly and Slick tells a story of sexual regulation within the British Empire, constructing an argument around coercion and extraction which Jules Gill-Peterson’s recent A Short History of Trans Misogyny also picks up.⁴ Brewer Ball’s description of how race, sex, and gender are intertwined through fantasies of escape emerges out of this scholarly moment, and offers these histories as a necessary intervention into writing on contemporary art and performance studies, which are too often treated as separate from such legacies. One writer whose work delved into the performativity of race, sexuality, and gender’s co-construction is the late José Esteban Muñoz, whose gift to Brewer Ball and their field of performance studies is explicitly noted by the author (p. 7). If Brewer Ball extends Muñoz’s work, it is to use genre to consider how the affects and impacts of performance are structurally prescribed (and might therefore also be transcended) in ways which mirror historical or sociological investigations of race and gender.

The Only Way Out’s central claim is that from this consideration of the ways that escape has been told, the reader might imagine the changes necessary to turn escape from narrative into action, collapse performance into reality – even if this remains a fantasy, since escape is at its core a thing to be acted out. As Brewer Ball notes, it would be necessary to destroy the anti-Black and colonial epistemological structures gifted to us by the Enlightenment in order to truly tell, or tell truthfully, stories of escape. Escape begets escape: an intractable riddle impossible to solve in an academic book which speaks in the language of the university. But from no way out The Only Way Out emerges, tracking aesthetic leaps – both ambivalent and radical – towards retelling tales of slipping from this constrictive cape beyond the conditions of their impossibility.

Endnotes