Malik Gaines is a writer, performer and associate professor of performance studies at New York University, USA. He is the author of Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible (NYU Press, 2017). A survey of his work in collaboration with Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade, as the group My Barbarian, will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on 22 October. He lives in New York.