This interview was conducted in the context of issue 132 of Espace art actuel on the theme of “Flesh.” Mlondi and I met at Northwestern University, Chicago, in the Department of Performance studies, where we were part of the same PhD cohort. Both of us being interested in questions of the body; movement and power; and epistemologies of performance, we gradually developed a dialogue between our areas of research. Mlondi’s scholarship and interdisciplinary artistic practice focuses on contemporary Black performance and art history, an area of study he has used to expand the discourse in Dance and Performance Studies as well as Art History.

Didier Morelli: I first became aware of the theoretical richness of the concept of flesh through your work. Can you explain how you situate flesh?

Mlondolozi (Mlondi) Zondi: I am intrigued by your use of “theoretical richness” and “wealth” to refer to flesh. “Flesh” in common parlance, or Biblical referencing, is often invoked to elaborate upon a certain moral debasement and an attachment to “worldly” material. In certain instances, “flesh” is used to make claims of kinship/inheritance (i.e., “flesh of my flesh”). In certain critical scholarly discourses, “flesh” names a certain bio-/necro-political restriction or total annulment of (the capacity for) human life. For others, “flesh” is that immediate subcutaneous and pulsating substance that functions as a repository for memory and “lived” experience.

Your question about flesh’s theoretical richness encourages me to bear in mind the commerce of the concept, its theoretical purchase and currency in artistic and scholarly practice. Black American literary theorist Hortense Spillers approaches the above permutations of flesh in the context of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in her field-defining 1987 essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Partly a searing critique of the infamous Moynihan report that blamed Black mothers for the purported “failure” of the Black family, Spillers assembled all the tools at her disposal and “went to war”¹ with Moynihan and white America’s willful forgetfulness of the brutal machinations of colonial slavery, which was responsible for severing enslaved Africans from place and kin. In the essay, Spillers exposes the interwoven apparatuses of domination that turned Africans into “‘cargo’ that bled” ² in the trade, dispossessing and murdering Indigenous people in the Americas on a scale aimed at total extermination. She distinguishes between “the body” and “the flesh” as a distinction between “liberated” and “captive” subjectivity respectively. In the context of African enslavement, flesh becomes a primary site of “total objectification” with no protection, legal or otherwise.³

Spillers states: “this body, at least from the point of view of the captive community, focuses on a private and particular space, at which point biological, sexual, social, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic, and psychological fortunes converge. This profound intimacy of interlocking detail is disrupted, however, by externally imposed meanings and uses.”⁴ In her formulation, if the “body” connotes a subject position granted access to African knowledge systems, then slavery’s violence “disrupts” those perceived fortunes for an atomizable and fallen, in the Biblical sense, “flesh.”

Fred Moten understands the scene of objection,⁵ the beating that (re)produced enslaved Aunt Hester’s scream as bearing a “material spirit” whose “absolute poverty is optimal, as absolute wealth.”⁶ This is the role African enfleshment played in endowing the Modern order with its material economic fortunes, cultural wealth, psychic integrity, sexual sovereignty and human subjectivity. Modernity’s “high crimes against the flesh”⁷ are central to modern capitalist accumulation as well as the endowment of Europeans with a sense of self, meaning they know themselves through what they are not— “natural fallen flesh”⁸/ the African. Such brutal enfleshment, the fabrication of African alterity, also buttresses Western aesthetic philosophy, particularly its questions of beauty, the sublime and the entanglement with morality. It is important to note here that every white body “inherits” whiteness despite individual efforts at jettisoning méconaissance.⁹

Black flesh, as Zakiyyah Iman Jackson highlights in Becoming Human, is “ontologized plasticity,” meaning that it is “infinitely malleable lexical and biological matter” to be experimented upon endlessly, creating the African as a figure that is human, non-human and super/supra-human at the same time.¹⁰ Figured as simultaneously magical or excessive/exceptional, as nothing (terra nullius) and everything, as non-/less-than-human animality, as ontological slave prior to colonial encounter, this was not only achieved through violent acts by so-called raging racists, but congealed through the interweaving “sophisticated” scholarly discourses of science, natural history, law, theology, etc. I have also learned a lot about the importance of accounting for this plasticized fleshy materiality, or the politics of flesh and bone, without relying on biological reductionism or biological determinism.

The violence of enfleshment is irreducible to scenes of pain and suffering, as amusing and entertaining scenes of Black performance can also reinforce blackness as abject.¹¹ When the racial stereotype and racial fetish are met with applause, such a response fortifies the performer’s position in social death. It underscores their distance from the human category.

With this genealogy in mind, how do you interpret the use of “flesh” in the proposal for the issue of ESPACE art actuel?

The first thing that came to mind was a scene from Sarafina! (1992), a film about the general conditions of apartheid in South Africa. The film’s high point references the 1976 student uprisings in Soweto, focusing on the lives of high school students who rebelled against apartheid education laws. There is a scene showing Sarafina, played by Leleti Khumalo, confined to an electric chair and cross-examined by the Interrogator, played by Robert Whitehead. The electric chair operated as an instrument of enfleshment, not only as a torture device for extracting information out of anti-apartheid political dissidents, but also an apparatus of capital punishment. This and other torture scenes show how state violence reserved no empathy for women or children, enacting violence democratically even if it was manifested in different ways. This violence rendered unthinkable the notion of “female violability” or a certain vulnerability afforded to “youth.” This does not imply that Sarafina is not a Blackwoman. It is to say that her Blackwomanhood is precisely that which is targeted for these uses and projections.

I often think about how the mediatized representation of brutalized Blacks happens with such ease while landing on few sympathetic ears. I am curious about why increased re-presentation of violence in art, performance and film barely scratches the surface of the warfare that has transpired to perfect modernity and its attendant aesthetic regimes. In other words, increased representation of Black enfleshment often obscures the degree of enfleshment’s unknowability. It also obfuscates the degree to which powerful custodians have actively squashed and disappeared knowledge of that enfleshment.

These relations of domination still structure many forms of interracial and intercultural intimacy, including both quotidian and framed performance. Western subjectivity, psychic integrity and material wealth accrue meaning through the accumulation of African flesh. Flesh here functions not as protected or prized “property,” but as sentient inertia, licensed to survive, to be overextended and brutalized.

That is the paradox of Black survival, either as survival beyond/despite the cruel machinations that brought about Black abjection, or as survival within and against those machinations. Slavery and colonialism did not completely prohibit Black survival but permitted it insofar as it facilitated slavery’s endurance/survival. In my work, I am interested in juxtaposing the celebration of Black survival against the surviving cruelties of enfleshment that render Black survival as protracted genocide. The slave’s survival came because of countless rebellious performances that never accepted slave positionality, but this resistance also became the master’s possession. Psychically, accumulating slaves buttressed the master’s understanding of themselves as master. The master needed the slave’s survival for his own self-understanding.

This is partly why Spillers states, in her essay, “this country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.”¹² This is one of the most haunting lines I have ever read because it shows how even though slavery, in the form of physical labor, has been made illegal, it remains intact as a psychic elixir and stabilizer of the World. We live in a world where African slavery (sometimes) exists without its brutal performances tied to plantation labour, but as psychic panacea. If slavery were truly over, the World would have to invent it for its own survival. This is part of the gift of “fortunes” that flesh provides to non-Black life, including ally and anti-racist non-Black life. If Black flesh is wealth, who does not accumulate and feed well off it?

My artistic practice acknowledges these facts about flesh, and the itinerary I take is to not so much re-present flesh, or mobilize flesh publicly for catharsis, but rather to invoke wounding in ways that other media oftentimes obscure. In other words, my work is about posing questions about whether flesh can move from being a victimhood/defeat or pathology showcase, to something that can be put in service against the World. I hate the World. The World can’t embrace me and be held intact at the same time. The World only embraces me partially as a form of benevolent but violent and extractive cooptation.¹³ Considering flesh, in performance, for me, augments the description of this world, particularly its “social conditions that might be designated a post-emancipation neo-enslavement.”¹⁴ When I mentor Black undergraduates studying performance, I encourage them to consider flesh’s insistent reflexes against domination as the rebel work that is often tamed for its putative bestial proximity, muted and destroyed through policing, religious conversion, acts of genocide, or neutralized through bourgeois/respectable and subversive aesthetics alike. What does it mean to create work that terrifies as well as intensifies antagonism beyond “representational ‘monstrosity’”?¹⁵

This knowledge of enfleshment, as far as aesthetic production is concerned, is a reminder to resist “joining the ranks” of both liberal and “subversive” methods of critical performance—since these modalities either ventriloquize Black suffering by endowing it with an artistic language of Human suffering or co-opt and alchemize flesh into beautiful aesthetic artifact that elicits “good” feelings—a failure or unwillingness to bear flesh’s total and unrepresentable devastation. I am not at all interested in participation within the (liberal) human project. My work, rather than being a shining achievement in the relinquishment of humanism, is a process of attempting a confrontation or expulsion of my own (latent) humanist investments and failing most of the time. The disappointment is not trivial because it shows the endurance of humanism harbored in some of our most radical gestures.

In 2020 you presented the most efficient, most collegial negro in the whole entire world (Ariel’s treatise) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. How are the notions of obedience and rebellion in oppressed subjects that you explore related to the concept of flesh as you understand it, and how do you activate these theoretical frameworks in this performance through a form of praxis?

If there is a hard line between practice and theory, it remains indeterminate to me. That is, when you say “theory,” its “intra-action” with practice is presumed and vice versa.¹⁶ This recognizes however, that the theory/practice binary exists mainly to maintain a hierarchy, to subordinate not only aesthetic practices, but most disturbingly, to make inferior or ridicule Black revolutionary practices¹⁷ even as they are simultaneously lionized condescendingly in theoretical texts. I always hope that my work frustrates this bifurcation and its desired hierarchies.

the most efficient, most collegial negro in the whole entire world (Ariel’s treatise)¹⁸ is part of a series of performances that allow me to think about several themes alongside William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In this work, I collaborated with Chicago based artists Zachary Nicol and Joelle Mercedes. The series began with tetra nullius which was performed in Cape Town in 2018 (in collaboration with Thami Majela, Mbongeni Mtshali, and Kwanele Thusi) as well as TRAIN (“to supplant good prospero”) which I performed in Chicago at Axis Lab in 2019. My process of creating Ariel’s treatise involved two activities that we tried to give equal footing. These procedures included: a) trying out different formal performance gestures and modes of staging in the rehearsal studio, b) collective dramaturgy which involved serious engagement and discussion of Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (1969) and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610); excerpts from Orlando Paterson’s Slavery and Social Death (1982), and Nathaniel Mackey’s Discrepant Engagement (1993); and studying video footage of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s FASE (1982).

In this performance we wanted to work out problems about Black political participation, especially the recruitment and rewarding of Black figures as tokens of transformation in institutions that are fundamentally untransformed or untransformable. We were interested in how the tasks of discipline, securitization and surveillance are shifted and placed on dispossessed communities to police their fellow community members. Historically, this is how the state has infused discipline, by removing its emblems of physical presence while its operations remain ubiquitous in the township/favela/ghetto/Bantustan. It’s a way of expanding (self-)policing beyond the paid police officer in uniform. Oftentimes, representationalism works by way of recruiting and deputizing a political representative, a single member of a community, often a politically neutral(ized)/moderate member, to speak on behalf and represent the interests of the masses. This then becomes a way of shutting down demands for liberation, as the representative is mobilized as alibi, representing a more collective emancipation struggle. The representative gets rewarded to mute dissenting voices, thwart rebellions and obfuscate the machinations of power that lock people in a state of deprivation and social death. People are expected to celebrate the representative, despite the representative’s deputized role in presiding over genocide, war, and other imperial efforts.

In Ariel’s Treatise’s final moments, I superimposed a video of hands cutting up meat while performing the gestures of the violin phase from De Keersmaeker’s Fase. By invoking De Keersmaeker, I attempted to show how an underbelly of Black wounding anchors the piece’s remarkable mathematical formalism, and therefore, opens a discussion about the politics of/concealed by abstract performance.¹⁹ My collaborator, Joelle, manipulated the original Steve Reich soundtrack, chopping it up and slowing it down. This choice to invoke De Keersmaeker is part of my ongoing project to trace the Black fleshly inheritances of postmodern performance, not just the Black formal performance strategies that ghost it, but the way that Black suffering and resistance informs the abstract language of postmodern dance. There had been some commotion online about Beyoncé “stealing” De Keersmaeker’s Rosas (1983) choreography for one of her music videos. I thought the concept of stealing was a bit absurd in not accounting for how disavowed Black performance informs much of experimental performance. How could a Black woman artist, admittedly with capitalist aspirations, be said to extract culture when according to Spillers, she is “vestibular to culture?”²⁰

As creators of the piece, we were not interested in doing a contemporary revival of either Césaire’s or Shakespeare’s iterations of The Tempest. We studied both and put them in conversation with contemporary politics. Not only were we interested in examining the ends of language and the exhaustion of gesture, but we noted—upstairs, downstairs, and in the vestibular space—how the idioms of colonial modernity coexist with flashes of colonial modernity’s dissolution. Rather than creating a narrative with characters that undergo psychological states, we dealt with overarching themes, problems, and attributes emanating from the characters. Zakiyyah I. Jackson’s approach to Caliban as “more a personified idea than a traditional character”²¹ became informative here, as we were more interested in the general assumptions that congeal around the personified idea than in individual roles.

Many asked why Shakespeare, and whether I was attempting to “decolonize” Shakespeare. I am not certain that Shakespeare can be decolonized. I was also not interested in “elevating” my work through referencing or becoming a praise singer for the Western canon. It was also less a revival of Césaire’s play than a resuscitation of the anticolonial force that made him adapt the play. In his book entitled Contested Memory: The Icons of the Occidental Tradition (2007), philosopher Tsenay Serequeberhan critiques this futile exercise in mimicry, the desire and tendency to “play Kafka’s ape” in the realm of Western aesthetics.²² I wanted to highlight what Selamawit Terrefe describes as “a Black insurgent will made subordinate within the turn to colonial modernity and nativism, away from the abolitionist politics and practices engendered by racial slavery and colonialism.”²³ Having noticed this renewed nativist fervor in Black aesthetics in both strategic and sincere permutations, I aimed to problematize this rebranding of primitivism as either “decolonization” or a vaguely defined “indigenous knowledge system.” Does the point of view/cosmology/metaphysics of the “captive community” hold any ontological resistance against the regimes of horror that wreck(ed) such metaphysical cohesion in the first place?

The treatment of the dissolution of language in the piece was not put in service to critique language’s violent anti-blackness only to propose or prescribe better, less disciplining, language, and “recover other signifiers free of abjection” in language.²⁴ The turn to Indigenous knowledge has brought new inventive identifications. It is difficult to ascertain how the gesture of decolonial self-naming, its individuated reprieve, contributes to collective struggle. It can render antiblackness a problem of individual Black people who do not “self-name,” “self-fashion,” or “return/ignore the white gaze.” Rather than excavating a pure or unviolated (pre-/extra-colonial) Indigenous metaphysics, I wanted to draw attention to the violence of metaphysics itself. When considering “dissolution,” I remembered the words of Patrice Douglass and Frank Wilderson when they wrote, “We need to imagine metaphysical violence rather than a metaphysics that violence destroys.”²⁵ We endure the continuing banalities and extremities of this metaphysical violence, whose solidification sometimes takes the form of absorbing and extracting Indigenous “metaphysics.”

I am planning a final part of the series, which I am tentatively calling Syc°/(analysis) and I will take as a point of departure the absenting of Sycorax in The Tempest. Returning briefly to Spillers’ critique of Moynihan’s “tangle of pathology” about the “absent father,” I pose questions about the intentions of the hands involved in the deliberate absenting of Caliban’s mother. The challenge is working out this absenting without returning to the convenience of figuration, since that reproduces a set of preconceived archetypes that invite a set of projections on “the Black woman/mother.” I’m not sure yet if this is a work that anyone’s going to see. It might so happen that it doesn’t need an audience or a happening. The point, however, is not to recover Sycorax from/within the World of Shakespeare, but to remain curious about a different script for her altogether.

Mlondolozi (Mlondi) Zondi is a scholar and interdisciplinary artist whose research focuses on contemporary Black performance and art history. A Provost Postdoctoral Fellow and later Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California (Fall 2023), Mlondi is currently working on a book project titled Unmournable Void, a study of critical art practices that are concerned with the historical conditions of anti-black violence, resulting from transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. Mlondi completed a PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern University with certificates in Critical Theory, African Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. The dissertation project received support from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Prior to attending Northwestern, Mlondi received an M.F.A in Dance as a Fulbright scholar at the University of California, Irvine; and a BA (Hons) cum laude in Cultural Studies and Performance Studies from the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa. Mlondi’s work has been published in The Drama Review (TDR), ASAP Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly, and Propter Nos.