Everything You Know About Queerness You Learnt from Blackness: The Afri-Quia Theatre of Black Dykes, Crips and Kids

Abstract

Blackness, queerness and performance are inseparable for me. I learnt all I know about blackness/queerness from the life of boxing legend and black leader Muhammad Ali. When the heavyweight boxer danced on his toes and declared ‘I’m pretty, I’m as pretty as a girl’, he was playing with people’s perceptions and prejudices of what a black man could be (Hauser 1997: 52). Ali troubled gender stereotypes and racist beliefs about black masculinity being monolithic, inarticulate, even savage (Butler 1990; Wallace 1979). But Ali did not slug. He kept his hands low and shuffled lightly on his feet; he danced — backwards — did magic tricks and recited poetry, until they took his licence away for refusing to go to Vietnam and shoot his fellow brown-skinned man. When he changed his name and his religion, from Christian Cassius Clay to Muslim Muhammad Ali, he undid the idea of what an American was supposed to be. As performance theorist Peggy Phelan has stated, ‘self invention and re-invention structures the performance of identities’ (1993: 168). Muhammad Ali was a master of self-/re-invention, which is a quintessentially queer quality. Ali is heterosexual, but he showed me that blackness and queerness do not need to be seen as sparring partners, but as dancing partners.