DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.3| WILLIAMS-FORSON: SEEKING THE ABSENT POTENTIAL_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 41National Museum of African American History andCulture, so there would be much attention on African American life in the United States. Additionally,in 2016, George Washington’s historic site, MountVernon, would be unveiling its own exhibition aboutthe lives of the enslaved who lived there and howtheir lives were inextricably bound to the Washington family.Lives Bound Together: Slavery at GeorgeWashington’s Mount Vernon,explored“the personalstories of the people enslaved at Mount Vernon while providing insight into George Washington’s evolving opposition to slavery”. This is significant not onlybecause of its timing in terms of the opening of the“Blackseum” but also because the timing of MountVernon’s exhibition would limit our access to certainassets for our installation.And here is why the“absent potential” is important.We need to look and think beyond thenorm—those ideas, sources, terrains, identities—taken as an ideal.Sandra Richards makes this argument when she writes how scholars(and practitioners) largely ignorethe African-American contribution to theatre andperformance as if it is a disreputable second cousinto literature. She says,“Literature locates‘authentic’cultural expression on the terrain of the folk, but thefolk have articulated their presence most brilliantly inthose realms with which literature is uncomfortable,namely in areas centered in performance.”5Whenthe folk insists upon performance being upheld as aform of criticism then they are seeing the absent potential. Richards maintains that we have to be willingto analyse“the latent intertexts likely to be producedin performance, increasing and complicating meaning”6and to also see the various possible opportunities for interpretation. In drama, people embody acharacter through performance. In real life, however,these embodied performances are called living, andwe can analyse the voices and experiences of thoseless often heard to spotlight and bear witness to thecomplexities of their lives.Because my material culture practices and thinkingare often from an intersectional point of view, I revelin reading the latent intertexts of performance where varied and complicated meanings reside but areoverlooked. An intersectional point of view enablesthinking beyond levels of oppression when it comesto Black people’s work with food. Intersectionalityis both a conceptual tool and a theory created bylegal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. She argues forseeing subjectivity/identity as dynamic, messy, andintertwined, but never singular. More specifically, intersectionality examines the context-driven ways inwhich axes of power intersect and cohere. Additivemodels of identity(female, or Black, or middle-class,or coloured, or disabled, or …) are limiting and tendto categorise people in terms of varying degrees, orlevels, of oppression. For example, a friend told herdaughter,“If you are going to be Black and a lesbianwith a disability, please do not also be poor because that makes you way too oppressed.” It is because identities are complex, shifting, and oftentimescontradictory with interdependent components thatare lived and experienced, that intersectionality is auseful model for ferreting out a whole bunch of interpretations about food and people of the AfricanDiaspora.I was thinking these thoughts as I looked through thepacket of select readings that we had assembled.While thumbing through the cookbookDining withthe Washingtons: Historic Recipes, Entertaining, andHospitality from Mount Vernon,I came upon a pagetitled,“A Cooks Day”[sic]. This day in the life of the5Sandra L. Richards,“Writing the Absent Potential. Drama, Performance, and the Canon of African American Literature”, in AndrewParker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick(eds.),Performance and Performativity(London and New York, 1996), 64–88, at 65.6Ibid.
