Performing Black life: the FAMU Marching 100 and the Black aesthetic politics of disruption, presence and affirmation

Abstract

Black thought has long emphasized the vital importance of aesthetic politics to Black activism and community life. Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of analyzing the aesthetic geographies of festivals. In this paper, we extend the discussion of festival geographies through theoretical engagement with Black thought and empirical engagement with Black parades in the US South. Specifically, we use an examination of the aesthetic geographies of Florida A&M University’s Marching 100 to think through the relationships between form and improvisation, performance and belonging and affirmative aesthetic politics. Following Black scholars, we show that Black aesthetic geographies work to counter the normative containment and erasure of Black spatiality in a white supremacist society. We demonstrate that Black aesthetic practices act as a refusal of this containment and erasure, disrupting normative geographies of whiteness and asserting Black socio-spatial presence and relations of belonging that affirm Black life.