Designing for Club Culture - Week 1

In this week's reading from Bell Hooks, Performance Practice as a Site of Opposition, she analyzes the tradition of Black performance in America, and creates a nuanced discussion of how it operates both as ritual within black communities and a political tool of resistance. By contextualizing performance as an act of liberation, Hooks makes space to focus on the dichotomy of decolonizing the mind, while also seeking societal acceptance. Decolonizing the mind; applying an epistemology outside of Cis-Hetero White supremacy to ways of being, knowing and recreating. Decolonizing always coincides with a strategic material struggle for upward mobility within existing structures that support the very oppression one opposes. Hooks references this when discussing the Nineteenth century black bourgeois and their emphasis on decorum and manners as a means of assimilation. The fear of assimilation often is a fear of erasure of history, community and culture. This piece addresses several trappings of identity politics, which I believe is summarized well from the except from Jill Dolan, Presence and Desire, Essays on Gender and Sexuality, “...Identity...A place of material circumstance that has deeply marked my own embodiments and movements...” Performance is the space at which new identities are shaped from the material circumstance and sociopolitical landscape of the time.

My first thought In terms of decolonizing the mind through sound, is language and intelligibility. To be unintelligible to the dominant culture is a pillar of counterculture. This passage argues that it is essential to liberation to preserve unintelligible, decolonized, non-commodified performance practice and space.