NYU Hands up Dont Shoot & Lethal Theatre Articles Questions

Answer questions below for EACH pdf, make sure to include quotes and pages from quotes. You will end up with two work sheets, one for each reading. These are the questions below, answer in detail and academically.

Background Context

1)Title of Text:

2)Date of Publication:

3)Author’s Name:

4)Disciplinary Background of Author (Google the author. Explain the author’s scholarly specialization & qualifications to be considered an expert on this topic.):

Content Questions

5)Quote the main thesis of the text (The main argument will be a one or two sentence passage stating the main argument of the reading):

6)Explain the main thesis in your own words (be comprehensive, but brief):

7)Briefly explain 3 major arguments, ideas, concepts, or theories that are used to build up to the main thesis:

8)Briefly explain 2 of the most significant areas of study, scholars, authors, intellectuals, contemporary or historical events, etc, that the author relies on to build the thesis:

9)Define the 3 most important KEY TERMS and explain what the author means by them:

Performative protest:

10) Quote a passage from the text that is significant to you – explain how it connects to the thesis and why it stands out to you:

VISION/MISSION
HOME
BIOS
PEOPLE
CATEGORIES
SUBMISSIONS
COMMENT POLICY
CONTACT US
BOOKING

Home / Activism / “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!”: Gesture, Choreography, and Protest in Ferguson
“Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!”: Gesture, Choreography, and Protest
in Ferguson
By Guest Contributor on October 6, 2014
SHARE
TWEET
SHARE
SHARE
2 COMMENTS
By Anusha Kedhar
“Hands up! Don’t shoot!”
By now, you know this phrase well. It has become
the rallying cry of those protesting the murder of
Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri
earlier this year. Like other memorable activist
CATEGORIES AND TOPICS
slogans—such as “Hell no! We won’t go!” “What do
Categories and Topics
Select Category
we want? Freedom! When do we want it? Now!”
“No justice? No peace!”—it captures the essence
of collective anger in response to injustice.
SEARCH BY WORD
Unlike other slogans, though, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” is not just voiced. It is also embodied.
Type Search term and press enter
Contained within the phrase is both a plea not to shoot, as well as the bodily imperative to lift one’s
hands up. Since Michael Brown’s murder, we’ve seen photos of young black men and women in
Ferguson, Tibetan monks from India, black Harvard law students, school children in Missouri, young
people in Moscow, and a church congregation in New York City with their hands up. Some stand,
some kneel, some bend their heads, some stare straight ahead. Each one symbolizes a bodily act
of solidarity with Michael Brown and victims of oppression of state-over-citizen around the world. As
Matt Pearce comments, the hands up gesture “has been transformed into a different kind of
weapon.”
What does this gesture mean for the different bodies that enact it? How do protesters assign new
meanings to such a codified bodily gesture? How can we read these protests as choreographic
tactics and gestures of resistance? Why is the deployment of the body in the case of the Ferguson
protests so significant?
I want to offer five ways of reading this gesture in the following list, which is by no means
exhaustive:
1. A Habitus: Arms rise and extend high in the air to reveal open, empty, unarmed palms. A silent
scream, this gesture pleads with its spectator: I am innocent. I am unarmed. I am not a threat. I
surrender. I submit. Submission and fear have become embedded in the black body, a part of its
daily habitus. According to Loïc Wacquant, habitus, a term attributed to Pierre Bourdieu, is “the way
society becomes deposited in persons in the form of lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and
structured propensities to think, feel and act in determinant ways, which then guide them.” Young
black men and women in the U.S. learn this gesture of surrender and submission early on when
SEARCH BY MONTH
Search by Month
Select Month
dealing with police. Black parents teach their
children that if they get pulled over, for example,
they should move slowly and deliberately and
dictate their actions to the officer, offering a kind of
play-by-play of their body’s movements. I am
unfastening my seat belt. I am reaching into the
glove compartment. I am handing you my
registration. In a society where the presence of
black bodies in public spaces is seen as de facto
threatening, unruly, and “out of place,” black men
and women are forced to justify their everyday movements, to make their bodies legible to
structures and institutions of power. Even the body’s most mundane actions—walking home in the
case of Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin, knocking on someone’s door in the case of Renisha
McBride, or adjusting a waistband in the case of Kimani Gray—are questioned, challenged, and
deemed suspicious. Through repeated enactments, the hands up don’t shoot gesture has become
part of the black body’s repertoire of survival.
2. A Failed Sign: What happens when this
universal sign is not respected? When this bodily
act of submission is not seen or heard? Michael
Brown’s sign of surrender was willfully ignored by
police officer Darren Wilson. Brown’s hands up
don’t shoot gesture failed to communicate across
the chasm between state and citizen, officer and
subject, white and black. As keguro notes, Michael
Brown’s murder “indexes the failure of this bodily vernacular when performed by a black body, a
killable body […] Blackness becomes the break in this global bodily vernacular, the error that makes
this bodily action illegible, the disposability that renders the gesture irrelevant. [It is read as] always
already threatening, even when that movement says, ‘I surrender.’” In short, blackness is what lays
bare the limits of this kinesthetic sign, what turns this universal gesture of submission into a gesture
of guilt, criminality, and culpability. This bodily act was supposed to signify surrender, but it failed. It
could not save Michael Brown.
3. A Gesture of Innocence: Alive, blackness was all the “proof” Darren Wilson needed to ascertain
Michael Brown’s guilt. He shot Michael Brown not
once, not twice, but at least six times (presumably)
in order to make sure “he was really dead.” My
colleague Paul Buckley refers to this as the
“overkilling of black bodies.” Now, in death, Michael
Brown’s black skin must be opened up and turned
inside out in order to prove his innocence. He must
be repeatedly autopsied, sliced open not once, not
twice, but three times in order to make sure “he
was really innocent.” Were the bullet wounds to the
top of his head not enough? Was the fact that he was unarmed not enough? Were the
eyewitnesses who said he had his hands up and said don’t shoot not enough? The overkilling and
over-autopsying of black bodies is not unrelated. If guilt is skin deep, then it follows that innocence
can only be found under the skin. So, even in death, it is the black body that is charged with
carrying the heavy and unrelenting burden of proof.
By raising their hands in the air, the protesters remind us over and over and over again that all the
bodily proof we need of Michael Brown’s innocence is the position of his body when he died. The
gesture reminds us that Michael Brown was shot while he was kneeling, with his head down and his
arms up. It reminds us that the police violated the code not to shoot when a person’s hands are up.
It reminds us that the black body is never presumed innocent moving in white spaces. That space
itself is white.
The hands up don’t shoot slogan implores the protestor not only to stand in solidarity with Michael
Brown by re-enacting his last movements, but also to empathize by embodying his final corporeal
act of agency. As a collective gesture, it compels us to take note of and publicly acknowledge the
bodily proof of Michael Brown’s innocence.
4. A Choreographic Tactic: As Susan Foster writes,
protest is conceptualized either “as a practice that
erupts out of a bodily anger over which there is no
control” or “as a practice that uses the body only as
an efficacious instrument that can assist in
maximizing efficiency. Neither hypothesizes the
body as an articulate signifying agent, and neither
seriously considers the tactics implemented in the
protest itself.” I suggest that analyzing the protests as choreographic tactics disrupts the popular,
media-fed view of the Ferguson protesters as mobs of black bodies, which are unruly, lawless, and
unpredictable. The actions of the protesters are carefully rehearsed and choreographed; they are
intentional gestural acts deployed to protest the status quo and effect change. By protesting
peacefully with hands up, they “refut[e] in the act of protest the stereotypes on which prejudice
against them was rationalized.” While the bodies of protesters often “refuse to comply with the
bodies of those in positions of authority,” in the case of the Ferguson protesters, it is actually
through the ultimate and most recognizable gesture of cooperation that these protesting bodies
tactically perform non-cooperation with an unjust and racist state.
5. A Choreopolitics of Freedom: André Lepecki recently wrote about “choreopolicing” and
“choreopolitics.” He defines choreopolitics as the
choreography of protest, or even simply the
freedom to move freely, which he claims is the
ultimate expression of the political. He defines
choreopolicing as the way in which “the police
determines the space of circulation for protesters
and ensures that everyone is in their permissible
place”—imposing blockades, dispersing crowds,
dragging bodies. The purpose of choreopolicing,
he argues, is “to de-mobilize political action by means of implementing a certain kind of movement
that prevents any formation and expression of the political.” Lepecki then asks what are the
relations between political demonstrations as expressions of freedom, and police counter-moves as
implementations of obedience? How do the choreopolitics of protest and the choreopolicing of the
state interact?
In Ferguson, we saw ample evidence of choreopolicing—police lined up in military like formations,
charging suddenly or marching steadily forward like in battle, even their tactic of dispersing through
the streets of Ferguson was a kind of choreographed chaos meant to break up groups and induce
panic. If police formations and blockades in Ferguson are choreopolicing strategies of an
increasingly militarized police force, the hands up don’t shoot gesture has become a choreopolitical
tactic of defiance. Demonstrators walk towards police officers with their hands up, challenging the
police officers to shoot, daring them to respond, to reckon with the officers’ culpability, to remind
them of their culpability. The protesters’ movements defy structures of state power which restrict
where, when, how, and with whom black bodies can move in public spaces. When young men like
Michael Brown can be harassed and killed for walking in the middle of the street, the mere act of
walking in a group through the streets of Ferguson constitutes an act of defiance, a choreopolitics of
freedom.
I want to come back to a question I posed earlier: Why is the deployment of the body in the case of
the Ferguson protests so significant? The black body in the U.S. is seen as disposable, inhuman,
valueless. The fact that police left Michael Brown’s dead body in the street for four hours is proof.
As Charles P. Pierce points out, “Bodies do not lie in the street for four hours. Not in an advanced
society. Bodies lie in the street for four hours in small countries where they have perpetual civil war
[…] Bodies are not left in the streets of leafy suburbs.” The bodily act of the hands up don’t shoot
protests takes those same bodies that are
surveilled, disciplined, controlled, and killed and
infuses them with power and a voice. It resurrects
those dead bodies left lying in the street, and asks
us, compels us to confront the alive-ness of the
black body as a force of power and resistance.
Lepecki argues that if to be political is the ability to
move freely, then the ideal political subject is the
‘dancer.’ To me, the Ferguson protesters are
quintessential dancers who, even in the most policed spaces, “the tightest of choreographic scores”
as he so beautifully puts it, can transform a space of control, in which their movements are
restricted, into a space of freedom, in which their movements are defiant, bold, and empowered a
space in which they have the ability to move freely. With their hands up, the protesters reclaim a
space for mobility for Michael Brown, for Trayvon Martin, for Eric Garner, for John Crawford, for
Renisha McBride, for Yvette Smith, for Tarika Wilson and for all those named and unnamed black
men and women who, in one way or another, raised their hands up and said ———.
Anusha Kedhar is an Assistant Professor of Dance
at Colorado College. Her research looks at the
intersection of race, transnational labor, global
capitalism, and embodiment. She is currently
working on an ethnographic book project which
chronicles the lives of South Asian dancers in the
UK and India and the effects of globalization on
their bodies and bodily practices. She was a
Fulbright Scholar to India in 2008 and was the
recipient of the Selma Jeanne Cohen award by the
Society of Dance History Scholars for excellence in dance scholarship in 2009. Anusha is also an
established artist in the field of classical and contemporary Indian dance. She has been practicing
Bharata Natyam for over thirty years, and has worked with some of the pioneers of contemporary
Indian dance in the UK, including Subathra Subramaniam, Mayuri Boonham, Mavin Khoo, and
Shobana Jeyasingh. Her own choreography has been presented on various international stages in
London, Los Angeles, and Malta.
RELATED ITEMS
ANUSHA KEDHAR
HANDS UP DON’T SHOOT
CHOREOPOLITICS
MICHAEL BROWN
DARREN WILSON
MIKE BROWN
DON’T SHOOT
FERGUSON
HANDS UP
PROTEST IN FERGUSON
← Previous Story
Next Story →
#FergusonFridays: Not all of the
Black freedom ghters are men: An
Interview with Black Women on the
Front line in Ferguson
Personal is Political: The Myth of
Diversity and Critical Thinking in
American Academia
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE…
New Interdisciplinary Resource,
Black Lives Matter, Introduces 612th Graders to Antiblack
Violence in U.S. Law and Society
Poetry by Fabienne Josaphat and
Laila Malik
TFW’s Co-Founder Tamura A.
Lomax Invited to The Harvard
Kennedy School
2 COMMENTS
Pingback: Defiant Gestures | Theatre Room Asia
Pingback: Between The Lines – Kevin Alexander Gray: ‘Ferguson October’ Civil Disobedience Protests Target Police
Violence in Communities of Color Nationwide |
All Content ©2016 The Feminist Wire All Rights Reserved