On Movement(s)

Issue 5.1

Letter from the Editors

16 November 2020

The Process editorial board welcomes new and returning readers to Issue 5.1, On Movement(s). In this moment of lockdowns and protests, isolation and activism, questions of movement—how we move through the world, how our movements are restricted and enabled, how we form movements that create change—are central to our individual lives and our communities. The work you will find in this issue takes up movement as an embodied language, movement as an assertion of settler-state domination, and movement as a performance with the power to make visible racialized, gendered identities. 

In “Upon Seeing the Invisible Man: The Hypervisibility of Black Women in the Not-Telling of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric,” Chasia Elzina Jeffries argues that Rankine’s poem “Making Room”—part of a longer, book-length work that moves through genres and perspectives—situates its readers as the actor, prompting them to imagine themselves performing the racialized, gendered movement described. Jeffries sees Rankine contrasting the hypervisibility of Black women with the “invisibility” of Black men as a way to explore the complexity and demands of Black feminine life. Melanie Crist also focuses on the complexity of physical movement and gesture in the series of interviews and reflection that make up her piece “Dance as Discourse: An Exploration of Gender, Expression, and Communication.” In conversations with dance practitioners, Crist raises questions about how dance might work as a language, considering how that language of dance has been historically gendered and how it has empowered and inhibited. With “Ilira,” Claire Sarson shifts our attention from the individual or interpersonal movement of gesture, movement through space, and dance, to focus on movement on a larger scale: the Canadian government’s forced relocation of Inuit communities from northern Québec to the High Arctic. Defended for decades as a supposedly humanitarian move, Sarson reveals the decision’s connections to assertions of Canadian sovereignty over the territory and the harsh impacts relocation had on Inuit people. 

Together, these creators illuminate how the ways we move—from the simplest gesture to the relocation of entire populations—can tell us about who we are. We hope that things pieces encourage you to reflect on our movements as individuals and our movements as societies, and we invite you to read the call for papers for our next issue, On Sustaining. We look forward to your submissions!

Sincerely,

The Process Editors

Dance As Discourse: An Exploration of Gender, Expression, and Communication

Melanie Crist

In this work, Crist encourages us to move from gendered and simplistic interpretations of dance to an understanding of dance as complex discourse. Interspersed with short critical essays centered in two diametrically opposed genres (classical ballet and vogue), the semiotics of dance and gender are explored via conversation with three preeminent queer performing artists: Alvin Erasga Tolentino, Jason Snow, and Anthony Meindl.

Keywords: dance, language, partnerships, queer studies

ilira

Claire Sarson

This paper examines the ahistorical colonial narrative concerning High Arctic Relocation – a 20th-century Canadian effort to forcibly move the Inuit of norther Québec to the High Arctic. It focuses on the effects of High Arctic Relocation on Inuit communities, responses from officials at the time, and subsequent attempts at reconciliation and repentance on behalf of the Candian state. Refuting defensive and apologetic colonial rhetoric, this paper explores the role of Indigenous Inuit communities in advancing Canadian sovereignty and Canada’s refusal to acknowledge this contribution.

Keywords: Inuit, forced relocation, colonization, reconciliation

Upon Seeing the Invisible Man: The Hypervisibility of Black Women in the Not-Telling of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric

Chasia Elzina Jeffries

This essay places “Making Room,” a poem in Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, in conversation with other literary explorations of Black embodiment such as M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Jeffries argues that Rankine’s poem challenges tropes of Black invisibility and essentialized Black subjectivity by illuminating the hypervisibility of Black femininity. Set on a moving train and written in second person, “Making Room” explores subtle movements, glances of eyes, and the fidgets of shared space, through which readers experience the shifting understandings of identity, the movement through and of the train, to finally see the invisible man – at the expense of Black women.

Keywords: Black women, invisible, lyric, silence