ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author examines his experience in the 2014 demonstration in Berkeley, California, his involvement in the graduate research working group "Social Death: Race, Risk, and Representation," and the 2016 “Black Lives Matter” demonstrations in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He considers how participating in pro-Black lives demonstrations fashions an anti-Black embodied experience and the consequences of this realization for performance as research. The author offers to the reader the use of "accompliceship" rather that allied strategies. He chooses performance as research because it offers an approach that might transfer the contours and affect of the Black Lives Matter movement into an academic setting. A proposal to examine the methodologies of performance as research with issues of the Black Lives Matter movement might appear at first as an odd advancement. Saidiya Hartman argues that the specticality of violence perpetuates the techniques of Black subjectivation from the outside.
