Abstract

Following bell hooks’ submission that theory making is “a location for healing” “The Shape of Humidity: Performing Black Atlantic Theory Making” riffs upon the historically critical and widely circulated subject of the black body politic and Atlantic waters informing but non-exclusive to performance, art history, and visual cultural discourses. The theory making performed here alternatively frames the black Atlantic body in relation to humidity, illustrating what Deleuze and Guattari might call the “possibles” evoked through “a contraction of earth and humidity”. The theory is shaped upon a discussion of Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream, included in Kara Walker’s cultural-political opus, Kara Walker: After The Deluge, mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Theory making confronts the painting’s adherence to the hegemonic tradition of rendering the black Atlantic body as a perennial form in peril, whose destiny in this instance is as matter consumed by the thermodynamic sublimity of the waters. Alternatively, the action of theory making here collapses space-time separations among black Atlantic flora, the healing processes of artists Lygia Clark and Wangechi Mutu, and modes of breath activation, to access states of limitlessness actualized through bodily openness to humidity’s grace.