ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a hybrid, nomadic practice embodied primarily by people of color in the African diaspora. Known in some circles, particularly in New York, as "Yoruba reversionism", this practice is an active resigni-fication in Judith Butler's sense that has created a new context of legitimate speech and action as an insurrection against dominant authority. Diaspora performance provides a model that collapses binary distinctions between spectator and spectacle in which participants are at one and the same time both spectators and spectacles, and in which roles and positions of the participants are continually in flux. Practitioners value difference, or rather repetition with infinite distinction, rather than fixity in the performance. The performances construct nomadic subjectivities among participants within the spectacle itself in the give and take of the collaboration, where subject and object positions are in flux or collapse.
