{"id":2952,"date":"2019-07-08T12:00:11","date_gmt":"2019-07-08T16:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aadhum.umd.edu\/?p=2952"},"modified":"2019-05-14T11:49:41","modified_gmt":"2019-05-14T15:49:41","slug":"bain-taking-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aadhum.umd.edu\/2019\/07\/bain-taking-care\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking Care: The Question of AR, VR, and Blackness"},"content":{"rendered":"

I can\u2019t breathe. <\/span><\/i>At once: the wheezing out of a severely singular experience. Yet and also: a hailing of the social, political, economic, and environmental phenomena surrounding Eric Garner\u2019s loss of breath. <\/span><\/p>\n

My dissertation, <\/span>On Black Breath: A Theory and Praxis<\/span><\/i>, undertakes a partial genealogy of breath as it has been racialized within the project of modernity. I argue that Eric Garner\u2019s \u201cI can\u2019t breathe,\u201d sits amongst the larger and longer singularity of Black breath being circumscribed and suffocated, while concomitantly highlighting the struggle to resist and exist within this project. I offer up the term <\/span>Black breath <\/span><\/i>as a lexicon through which we can thread together new histories, theories, and philosophies of the biopolitical project of modernity in order to expand the critical grammars of the contemporary moment. Vulnerability to loss of breath has been a formative figure in the Black performative, literary, and lived tradition, one that provides if not a praxis of liberation, then a kind of radical sociality, a kind of quantum entanglement.<\/span><\/p>\n

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I offer up the term <\/span>Black breath <\/span><\/i>as a lexicon through which we can thread together new histories, theories, and philosophies of the biopolitical project of modernity in order to expand the critical grammars of the contemporary moment.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The struggle I have found over and again while tarrying with breath and breathing is how to represent and practice something that is simultaneously material and ephemeral. In many ways this same question is one that performance studies scholars struggle with in their work. However, the concern for me has always been that breathing and breath are far more ubiquitous, yet also far more at risk of disappearing entirely for specific communities. <\/span><\/p>\n

To my intensive<\/a>, I brought the question: what are the affordances of the specific forms (of inquiry, critique, methodology, text, evidence, and so forth) we turn to? How do we enact care in the projects we undertake, knowing that the people and communities we study, represent, and often come from as people with lives, not static data?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Douglas Kearney<\/a> offers a mode through which to think about the affordances of the written, through the ways we use and represent text: the <\/span>textu(r)al\u2014<\/span><\/i>simultaneously the <\/span>textual<\/span><\/i> and the <\/span>textural<\/span><\/i>. In looking for ways to make my own work textu(r)al\u2014in looking for ways to not only represent or capture life, but to live it in the work\u2014I turned to digital methods because the written form (on its own) did not afford me with the space and techniques to engage with questions of embodiment in a way that felt corporeal. For me, this meant engaging with the fields of augmented and virtual reality not to approach some essential and totalizing truth; rather I deploy these methods as a mode of rethinking the forms through which we might theorize and articulate the ephemeral, ineffable, the absent-presence, relationality, the immaterial materiality of race, and the very air we breathe.<\/span><\/p>\n

Working with augmented and virtual reality of course raises questions of care\u2014how to attend care-fully to lived lives and living lives. We might think to the dangers of uncritically doing this kind of work, as in the case of Childish Gambino partnering with Google for their Pixelmoji service. In the initial ads for the collaboration<\/a>, we see Gambino and his Pixelmoji dancing in tandem, his Pixelmoji (we\u2019re to assume) copying his movements. However, soon the augmented version of Gambino peels off, watching the real Gambino continue to dance and show off his moves. The augmented-Gambino is skeptical, the shot zooming in on their\/its changing facial expression\u2014a look off to the side, a twist of the mouth, skepticism and friendly disdain written on their\/its features. Real-Gambino lays down the gauntlet, which augmented-Gambino takes up, performing its own dance moves to a similarly skeptic real-Gambino. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>