Saidiya Hartman Uses Performance to Challenge Colonial Power

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 255, ‘Performance’

‘Minor Music at the End of the World’ is a performance in three movements, made in collaboration with actor André Holland, performer Okwui Okpokwasili, and artists Arthur Jafa, Precious Okoyomon and Cameron Rowland. It takes its inspiration from two of my essays, ‘The End of White Supremacy: An American Romance’ [2020] and ‘Litany for Grieving Sisters’ [2022]. I don’t think I would ever have come to the idea of it being a performance if not for invitations from others. The first came from the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, to have André read ‘The End of White Supremacy’. Hearing him read was an entirely different experience than reading my words on the page. It no longer felt as if they were solely mine. They became something else.

After seeing André read, Arthur and I thought, wouldn’t it be great to make a film of him reading the text? Then, Precious, knowing that Okwui and I are friends and collaborators, suggested we all work together. Even though writing is a solitary activity, we’re at the page with so many other thinkers. I joke that, when I wrote my book Scenes of Subjection [1997], I thought I knew something about performance – then I met Okwui. There was a deepening of what I thought I knew in the context of this long-term engagement with her practice. The second movement, ‘Dead River’, was written with her in mind.

‘Minor Music’ isn’t a play. It’s performed discourse. It’s important to say that. This is consonant with the African diasporic intellectual tradition, where poetry finds a place in critical writing. It’s alive, like Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land [1939]. I’m following in the path of many other artists who are trying to create thought in multiple domains. It’s not that I’m leaving my discipline and going into another. How do we make thought in multiple places, like the stage, the performance, Arthur’s film, Precious’s beautiful petrified forests, the movement of Okwui?

The ‘minor music’ is the articulation of grief, endings, afterlives, opening, possibility. What is to emerge? What new arrangements might unfold at the end of this particular formation of world? In the 1920 story ‘The Comet’, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about the strains of a minor music that resonate after the collapse of the world. He understood the beauty and promise of the minor. I think of the minor in relation to practices of becoming which don’t have the aspiration to be major or proper. There’s a kind of richness, vitality, plenitude and openness in it. There’s the weight of everything that has been lost, but certainly, for Black people in the diaspora, every beautiful thing we’ve made has been produced in the wake of loss.

The question to be considered is: how might this structure, based upon violent extraction and accumulation, come to an end? For those who have been enslaved, colonized and dispossessed, those who have been subjected to genocides, we never stopped planning, imagining and plotting other visions of the possible. ‘Minor Music’ exists within that rich genealogy of imagining the otherwise.

Part of the work is about a radical act of affirmation, even in perilous conditions of utter negation. The wonderful potential and paradox of the performance space is what unfolds. There’s a way in which the performance exerts a pressure on the audience. But there’s no guarantee about the outcome. It’s not likely that people step into an art or performance space and are transformed. So, what does a performance do? It offers this incredible occasion for gathering, where something might happen or where we get to be in relation in different ways. The work is open. Enter if you can. If you cannot, so be it.

Our ways of knowing are produced and marked by particular formations of power, but they’re by no means eternal. A certain contingent set of events produced the world – a structure which is now so taken for granted that most of us can’t imagine a different set of arrangements. Another set of contingencies, ones that are as yet unforeseen, might change everything. The wretched of the earth welcome an end to the colonial order of being. There have been myths and prophecies of what will come after. ‘Minor Music at the End of the World’ offers no definitive answers, but inhabits the openness of the question, the moment of dereliction, the incompleteness of the not-yet, the interval of the in-between. In that, there’s possibility.

As told to Vanessa Peterson

This article first appeared in frieze issue 255 with the headline ‘Imagining the Otherwise’

^{Main image: Saidiya Hartman, dir. Sarah Benson, Minor Music at the End of the World (detail), 2025, performance documentation, Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. Courtesy: Hartwig Art Foundation; photograph: Fabian Calis}