Fallings, Resurrections, and the Spaces Between: Black Performance Cultures and Violence in Millennial Los Angeles

Stephanie Leigh Batiste
Black Studies and English
UC Santa Barbara

Black performance in millennial Los Angeles acts as a provocation to examine affect, memory, trauma, mourning, death, creativity, resilience and grace. Los Angeles has become a field of danger for young people who exist within or along the edges of certain class status, neighborhoods, and social practices of belligerence. Contending that affective inequality constitutes a form of national injustice burdening communities of color in urban areas plagued by violence, this analysis probes the spaces between tragedy and transcendence, love and loss, navigated in black urban performance that theorized space, feeling, violence, and humanity in drama, dance, music, and song.