Notes on Shade

Many things in this world haven't yet been named; many things, even if they have been named, have barely been described. One of these is the practice of "reading" — adjacent to "camp" but not identical with it — that also goes by the name of "shade."

A practice (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest things to analyze, but there are special reasons why shade, in particular, has rarely been examined in a scholarly way. It's not a natural topic for study; it is, as one of its finest analysts and practitioners put it, an art of "the bookless."1 It adores performance: sprezzatura and gestural reaction, oracular intensity and tonal sophistication. And it is black and femme — a fiercely private code for survival, a badge of pride within certain cultural cliques. Apart from appearances in a handful of queer studies texts — the fiction anthology Shade (1996), the scholarly anthology No Tea, No Shade (2016), Tavia Nyong'o's Afro-Fabulations (2018), Timothy Oleksiak's "When Queers Listen" (2019) — it has hardly broken into academia. Perhaps to analyze shade would be to betray it. If that betrayal is to be defended, it will be for the intellectual delights it offers and the affective tensions — the contemporary mood — it registers. For myself, I plead the aim of pleasure and the aid of a sharp tension in my own relation to it. I feel strongly drawn to shade and almost as strongly excluded from it — rightly so, as a bougie Zambian immigrant professor. But that is also why I want to talk about it, and why I can. It is rare that someone fully immersed in a given practice is interested in examining it; it is almost always preferable, whatever her expertise, to do it. My wish to analyze shade, to draw its contours and to recount its history, springs out of a deep sympathy modified by distance.

Though I am speaking about a practice of black femme "reading" that, among other things, often specifies to the point of fastidiousness, these matters are broadly relevant to the so-called "reading debates" in literary criticism of the past three decades. I take these to be debates about how we should approach literary forms. Many scholars think of reading literature as a method that we can subject to meta-analysis. Yes, reading may have mysterious attractions and revulsions — partly sensory, mostly cognitive — but they can yet be brought under the sovereignty of reasoned argument. We allow that subjective feelings play a part in how we read artistic and scholarly texts. For formalists, these feelings might be banished from the analysis or sublimated into the rapturous diction used to describe textual details. For hermeneutical paranoids invested in symptomatic critique, dwelling on these feelings is felt to be naïve. For post-critics who bemoan the negativity implicit in critique — harshness, coldness — to refuse to account for these feelings is disingenuous or worse, cuttingly clinical, and must be repaired. But regardless of what we think, we all seem to feel that to reveal our personal feelings — whether warm or cool or both — about what and how we read is a little self-indulgent. Feelings signify "the personal" as opposed to "the rigorous." ("Don't take it personally.") Nothing is more disavowed than feeling in the discipline.2 We know, deep down, that there is something like a feeling for certain writers and for certain aesthetics, a feeling in our literary tastes — and there is feeling in argument, in the profession, too. ("A formal feeling comes.") Isn't intelligence, too, really a kind of feeling — a feel for ideas? (All these feelings tend to erupt in contradiction. It's rare that a reader feels only positively or only negatively about a text or an author or a concept.)

The feeling of reading itself has no normative system or proofs — it's too steeped in time, in change and flux and conflict and perspective. But there is something of a mood, or rather a vibe, to each reading method: a logic that underlies and gives rise to the haze of feeling around it. A vibe is a shorthand for those affective and aesthetic vibrations that shimmer around a phenomenon, almost like an aura.3 A vibe can be captured, briefly — in an image, a meme, a song, a word, a move, a look — but not quite grasped. Any vibe which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the harsh tools of proof, is no longer a vibe at all. It has already become a theory . . . .

As Frantz Fanon once noted, "the culture that the intellectual leans towards is often no more than a stock of particularisms. He wishes to attach himself to the people; but instead, he only catches hold of their outer garments. And these outer garments are merely reflection of a hidden life, teeming and perpetually in motion."4 To conjure the vibe of a reading practice in words, especially one as deft and alive as shade, you have to try to be as quick and nimble as someone voguing.5 To wit, it's corny to be solemn and theoretical about shade. You run the risk of producing a very stilted reading of "reading."

When it came to "Camp," Susan Sontag wrote, "the form of jottings, rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive argument), seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this particular fugitive sensibility."6 Shade is more resonant with than equivalent to camp and if it, too, is a "fugitive sensibility," that characterization carries a racial connotation that Sontag elides entirely. Nevertheless, in what follows, I borrow from her without compunction: some of her thoughts on the queer context that perfected shade; the scaffolding of these opening remarks; and her oft-borrowed, cavalier genre of "notes." A set of jottings suits shade not only because it's fleeting — a quicksilver practice if ever there were one — but also because this is one form that shade loves to take: a running list, or run down, of fine-grained observations. ("I have some notes," says the teacher, the critic, the reader.)

These notes are for Stephen Best.7

* * *

Shade comes from reading. Reading came first. Reading is the real artform of insult. . . . Then reading became a developed form where it became shade.

—Dorian Corey, Paris is Burning8

 

 

1. The clearest definition of "reading" is, as Dorian Corey says, an "artform of insult," but it resists strict terminology. While Corey makes fine distinctions between reading and shade (the "developed form"), the lines between the two have blurred as these practices have become ubiquitous in contemporary print, online, and visual media. People also often use the verb "drag." "She read you," "she dragged you," and "she threw shade" are now nearly synonymous. To emphasize that rhetorical flexibility, I'll use the three terms interchangeably.

2. In the broadest terms of origin, flavor, and vibe: shade is black, by which I mean African-American and Afro-Latin, and shade is femme, by which I mean feminine, female, queer.9

3. The black roots of shade lie in signifying, crowned by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as "the black trope of tropes, the figure for black rhetorical figures."10 This may seem a highly textual endeavor but it is in fact a live, oral practice in the sources Gates quotes, which define it as: "a highly motivated rhetorical act, aimed at figurative, ritual insult"; "making fun of another's appearance, relatives, or situation"; and "communicating (often an obscene or ridiculing message) by indirection."11

4. While much of the sociology and literary analysis of signifying focuses on men — from the dozens on the corner to the debates of Race Men to yo mama jokes to rap battles — the earliest definition of the black femme practice of "reading," from 1942, comes from a black woman, both a scholar and a writer:

The bookless may have difficulty in reading a paragraph in a newspaper, but when they get down to "playing the dozens" they have no equal in America, and, I'd risk a sizable bet, in the whole world. Starting off in the first by calling you a seven-sided son-of-a-bitch, and pausing to name the sides, they proceed to "specify" until the tip-top branch of your family tree has been "given a reading."

—Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road12

5. The queering of this practice emerges in the context of drag balls, as documented in The Queen (1968) and Paris is Burning (1990), and in candified form, in the TV shows RuPaul's Drag Race (2009-), which has a segment called "Reading is Fundamental," and Pose (2018-). In all of these texts, reading often takes place via a mutual, interactive blazon: a critical rundown of the details of bodily surfaces. A characteristic, oft-parodied gesture is an index finger or snapping hand tracing a zigzag down someone's body, as if wrapping them in the lines of everything you see about them.13

As Mother Corey notes, throwing shade is an evolution of reading where direct insult becomes unnecessary. Throwing shade is slant insult whereby a person talks about someone indirectly.

—Timothy Oleksiak, "When Queers Listen"19

9. Shade relies on irony. This is true at the level of language and that of tone, the irony that, per Northrop Frye, is "a pattern of words that turns away from direct statement or its own obvious meaning," and per Paul de Man, is "a dialectic of the self as a reflexive structure . . . within which the self looks at itself from a certain distance."20 Shade's irony also pertains to the context of delivery, the dramatic irony that plays on what the parties involved — the reader, the read, the audience to the reading — know and don't know. We might call shade a form of melodramatic irony.

And when one queen casts it at another — or at a straight heckler — it raises eyebrows and makes the corners of the lips twitch. You might say shade's a subtler form of dishing, a mode of repartee with a black accent whose connotations are more ironic . . . shade is shot through with the idea of irony . . . the aspect of those phrases and rhetorical figures which we are not sure how to respond to — where language opens up, through a moment's hesitation, into an explosion of potentialities, some appalling, some unimaginably wonderful, and all of which seize power for the speaker and, however momentarily, articulate wildly subversive possibilities.

—Samuel R. Delany, Introduction to Shade: An Anthology of Fiction by Black Gay Men of African Descent21

10. Given the dialogic, responsive, "appalling," "subversive," nature of this artform of insult, one might think that an analogue to "reading," especially as it has migrated online, would be "trolling." Trolling emerged as a term on Usenet in the early 1990s. The word comes from the idea of "trolling for newbies." Veterans of chat groups like "alt.folklore.urban" would post questions or topics "so overdone that only a new user would respond to them earnestly." This would serve as "a relatively gentle inside joke" between "long-time readers" who would recognize the poster's name and the topic.22

11. Shade shares trolling's inside-jokery and its aggression: we throw shade; if we cast it, it is only in the sense of casting a spell. Despite these similarities — and the shared topographical etymologies of to drag and to trawl — dragging and trolling are distinct forms. Since its fond, dorky beginnings, trolling has become both more anonymous and more blatant. The point of shade, however, is to be recognized, to be praised, but for your perspicuity and subtlety.

If it's happening between the gay world and the straight world, it's not really a read. It's more of an insult, a vicious slur fight. But it's how they develop a sense of how to read. They may call you a faggot or a drag queen. You find something to call them. But then, when you are all of the same thing, then you have to go to the fine point.

—Corey, Paris is Burning

12. While trolling is now primarily externally directed, reading achieves its highest form of "shade" within the group. Like signifying, hazing, flyting, roasting, it aims to enhance group cohesion through extreme testing. This is akin to the distinction between "calling out" and "calling in." One rhetorical tell in shade: "y'all better come get your grandpa/uncle/aunty." Another: "I will gather your trifling ass." That both "snatching" and "gathering" are synonyms for shade captures this combination of aggression and communalism.

Reading and throwing shade are audience-bound practices — the audience exists within the community and as part of that community. . . . Reading someone to filth or throwing shade cannot be separated from strategies for queer survival. A read can function as a form of "tough love," a love that stings. But precisely because the sting comes from within the community, it functions as a way to toughen each other up against the violence from without.

—Timothy Oleksiak, "When Queers Listen"23

13. The recent "cancel culture" kerfuffle instigated by the publication of the Harper's "Letter on Justice and Open Debate" isn't really about the nature, limits, or consequences of public free speech.24 If these were truly its concerns, the Letter would address hate speech protections and labor laws. Rather, I would argue, "cancel culture" names the clash between two online rhetorical structures with different relationships to community and to moral and aesthetic values: trolling (mob-like, anonymous, externally directed, sarcastic) v. reading (cliquey, performative, internally directed, ironic).

14. Reading is less blunt and more clubbish: you may club your opponent but you're both still in the club. Levels of reading are distinguished by audience as much as by skill: its greatest sophistication and highest purpose derive from the inside knowledge of an interpretive community.

In other words, if I'm a black queen and you're a black queen, we can't call each other black queens, 'cause we're both black queens. That's not a read. That's just a fact. So then we talk about your ridiculous shape, your saggy face, your tacky clothes.

—Corey, Paris is Burning

15. Reading's subtlety is not meant to hide from, trick, or exclude someone else, but rather to broadcast your own fine discernment. It is a flashy form of close reading. It combines Hurston's synonym for giving a reading in Dust Tracks — "to specify" — with her claim in Mules and Men that it is a way to "show off."25

Simply put, "reading" is an old voguing term describing someone verbally insulting an opponent about something not so apparent to the average viewer.

—Zebra Katz, album notes to "Ima Read."26

16. In short, the highest aim of shade is notice in multiple senses of the word. You give notice, you dismiss, threaten. You want to be noticed. And you keenly notice. What do you notice?

Then reading became a developed form where it became shade. Shade is, "I don't tell you you're ugly, but I don't have to tell you because you know you're ugly." And that's shade.

—Corey, Paris is Burning

17. Shade, like close reading, seems highly attuned to details but also to what is hidden in plain sight, as we say. This paradox is evident in its tendency toward paralepsis — the rhetorical move of raising a topic while ostensibly denying it.  The classic examples of shade that circulate on social media in the form of GIFs and memes are clips of divas reading other divas: Whitney Houston on Mariah Carey; Mariah Carey on Jennifer Lopez; Aretha Franklin on three lesser — ahem, younger — divas. These are master classes in giving notice by suggesting that something is beneath notice.

 

 

18. Shade is an elaborate, eloquent performance of the discovery of the self-evident.

The name is taken from the magazine Vogue, because some of the movements of the dance are also the same as the poses inside the magazine. The name is a statement in itself. I mean, you really wouldn't go to a ball to do the Mademoiselle.

—Willi Ninja, Paris is Burning

19. To say of shade, as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said of hardcore pornography, "I know it when I see it," is to say that something is defined by its recognition — it exists in extremis, in its highest or purest form.27 Something less would be something else. Shade can't be policed, but it is constantly adjudicated: Is this a read or isn't it?

Shade Court . . . was born out of my frustration. Frustration at watching publication after publication misuse this wonderful, beautiful word and all the rudeness and arrogance it entails. I manifested my degree, clerked with none of your damn business and found myself sitting atop the most revered court in the land. But it hasn't always been easy. Even today, the New York Times found a way to test me with a sad and incorrect definition of shade that is so sorry as to not even be worth the court's full attention.

—Kara Brown, "Goodbye, Shade Court, For Real This Time"28

20. Judge Brown took cases with docket numbers, looked at evidence, deliberated, and gave rulings. She practiced what she preached, throwing shade at inaccurate uses of the term — meta-shade, if you will.

"He couldn't have said what I thought he said . . . ?" That, I suppose is the benchmark response to the casting of shade.

—Delany, Introduction to Shade29

21. Shade is already meta-. In a sense, it contains its own analysis. This is why cases and examples — onscreen enactments, transcriptions of dialogue — are more useful than externally imposed theories and definitions.

 

 

Venus: You want to talk about reading? Let's talk about reading. What is wrong with you, Pedro? You going through it? You going through some kind of psychological change in your life?

Bystander: She went back to being a man.

Venus: Oh, you went back to being a man. Touch this skin, darling. Touch this skin, honey. Touch all of this skin, okay? You just can't take it. You're just an overgrown orangutan.

—Paris is Burning

22. This is "critique" par excellence — the "hermeneutics of suspicion," "paranoid reading," and "symptomatic reading" that literary critics have derived from Marxism and psychoanalysis.30 Venus Xtravaganza reads Pedro's surface — "some kind of psychological change in your life" — as something to critique; Venus treats the text of Pedro as symptomatic of a set of underlying conditions, a "change" to be uncovered and skewered.

Problematizing, interrogating, and subverting . . . . Eve Sedgwick observes that the hermeneutics of suspicion is now virtually de rigeur in literary theory. . . . As a quintessentially paranoid style of critical engagement, it calls for constant vigilance, reading against the grain.

—Rita Felski, Uses of Literature31

23.  But this reading is not literally revelatory. It is shared community knowledge: the bystander explains Pedro's "change" to the camera, saying "he went back to being a man," which Venus then repeats. This redundancy gives the lie to the notion that symptomatic reading is a disclosure of what's hidden; here — per Felski's sense that symptomatic reading is always "rediscovering its own . . . prognosis" — Venus's reading is a penetrating restatement of what's already known.

Nor do [we] construe surface as symptomatic readers often have — as a layer that conceals, as clothing does skin, or encloses, as a building's facade does its interior. We take surface to mean what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible; what is neither hidden nor hiding; what has length and breadth but no thickness, and therefore covers no depth. A surface insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through.

—Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, "The Way We Read Now"32

24. At the same time, Venus clearly practices a surface reading, in Marcus's and Best's terms. She asks to be looked at — this is again self-reflexive as it implicates her body as a comparative mirror to Pedro. But she also calls to be touched, to have a hand drag over her skin, which she enacts while exhorting Pedro to join her — "Touch this skin, honey. Touch all of this skin . . ." — to demonstrate its smoothness by contrast to the hairy "orangutan" she's reading.

25. In this midst of this strategic mimesis, Venus briefly raises her shirt. This would seem literally to be the symptomatic version of surface as "a layer that conceals, as clothing does skin," but again, this isn't a moment of decoding a form. Rather, it's a sensuous play or layering of surfaces. Shade thickens and folds the surface, emphasizing materiality and texture without presuming something hidden behind or beneath it. Venus deliberately exposes her skin as itself a layer, available to be read — with self-doubting awe — but not appropriated ("you just can't take it").

26. If we think topographically, to drag is to run horizontally but also slightly vertically, to undulate unexpectedly, to be hindered or staggered, to scrape under or wrinkle over a level surface. To drag a text would be to trace a movement along it, to touch it without plumbing its depths, but also without the naiveté implied by a strictly "straight" or "surface" reading.

27. Shade's rhetorical figures — there are several; like signifying, it is an umbrella term — are both vertical and horizontal in Jakobson's and Lacan's structuralist axes.33 It uses the deft substitutive logic of metaphor, as in "you're just an overgrown orangutan." (Note the blank verse and assonance that transforms an epithet into poetry.) It also affords a horizontal drag of associative metonymic chains — "being a man," "orangutan" — that run on and over the surface.

Everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, "run" (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced.

—Roland Barthes, "Death of the Author"34

28. Barthes's phrase "nothing beneath" seems to imply a lack of depth, yet the textual structure he describes has "points" (reprises, which can also mean "occasions") and "levels" (etages, "floors" or "tiers") — that is, the surface itself has layers. Reading is a kind of description of that surface, but it is also analysis in the etymological sense of "unloosening" or "undoing."35 When we drag a surface, we do not pierce it nor do we merely slide over it. Rather, we run the thread of a stocking. We gather, pucker, crease. Shade is the feel of a hand dragging backwards over velvet, the laddering of pantyhose, a decadent going against the grain, a drag that catches.

29. Shade shares many features with the "Camp" sensibility that Susan Sontag describes. Shade, too, is "rife with artifice and exaggeration"; it is "esoteric, a private code within a small urban clique"; it "places everything in quotation marks," even "being"; it is "a self-parody"; it "reeks of self-love"; it brims with a "spirit of extravagance," the "too much," and "the outlandish," what we call "being extra"; and it induces a kind of excruciation of taste: "it's good because it's awful." Sontag admits she is "strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it" and feels that it is "disengaged, depoliticized — or at least apolitical."36

[For] historian David Halperin, through camp — this inner-directed, tautological, and syllogistic pedagogy — gay men learn how to practice a "dissident way of feeling and relating to the world." Empire presents a style of black camp that both affirms Susan Sontag's aesthetic criteria and satisfies Halperin's sense of camp's political dissidence.

—Stephen Best, "Black Camp"37

Today's Eyebrow: Plucked thin, defiant. A brow that says "You'll soon find out that some wizarding families are better than others, Potter" pic.twitter.com/CK7CSpD6K5

— RuPaul (@RuPaul) July 25, 2017

30. RuPaul closely, even lovingly, reads Jared Kushner's surface, his literal face, and implicitly includes him in a community with the label "Today's Eyebrow."38 But this is a critique — one that playfully drags Kushner's hetero-masculinity, while making a political dig at the hetero-misogynistic bravado of the Trump administration. The allusion is to J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, a line uttered by the rich, villainous child wizard Draco Malfoy. In the vein of a Marxist symptomatic reading, RuPaul connects the British upper classes to the wealthy Kushner, whose parents bought his admission to Harvard, and whose wife bought his entrance to Trump's White House. Coupling an allusion to a kid's book with the word "defiant" (both an aesthetic and ethical descriptor), RuPaul quasi-psychoanalytically diagnoses Kushner's statement as a tantrum. And given Kushner's literal resemblance to the actor who plays Draco, this read is citational in multiple ways.

I am a person just like you. You cut me, I bleed the same way you do.

—Paris is Burning

If you prick us, do we not bleed?

—The Merchant of Venice

31. Camp, drag, citation, the theater, verbal action — reading is, in a word, performative.

Sometimes saying something seems to be characteristically doing something — for example insulting somebody.

—J.L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words39

The subject is constituted in and through the iterability of its performance, a repetition that works at once to legitimate and delegitimate the realness norms by which it is produced. . . . "reading" means taking someone down, exposing what fails to work at the level of appearance, insulting or deriding someone. For a performance to work, then, means that reading is no longer possible or that a reading, an interpretation, appears to be a kind of transparent seeing, where what appears and what it means coincides. . . . the impossibility of reading means that the artifice works; the approximation of realness appears to be achieved; the body performing and the ideal performed appear indistinguishable.

—Judith Butler, "Gender is Burning"40

 

 

32. For Butler, a perfect gender performance would obviate "reading" — what would there be to insult? But Lucas Hilderbrand contests this reading of "reading" as that which finds the flaw in imperfect repetition. Hilderbrand points out that the ball category "Bangee Boys" perfectly imitates gang bangers but still throws shade at closeted straight men on the DL who exude machismo.  Hilderbrand also raises the category "Butch Queen First Time in Drags at a Ball," the point of which is to look like an amateur.41 This perfect imitation of a failed gender performance is also still a read, one that finds the flaw but delights in it, takes it as a mark of success. In these ball categories, reading is precisely an attention to where "what appears and what it means coincide," but it is less "transparent seeing" and more a dizzying set of facing mirrors.

 

 

Critical shade looks to the kairos of performance's critical movement — the precise moment, occasion, or angle from which, in a momentary pause, the gaze can be reflected back in a gesture of counter-mimesis.

—Tavia Nyong'o, Afro-fabulations (2018)42

33. Shade is already critical; criticism is already shady.

I began to think that the many yuppie-looking, straight-acting, pushy, predominantly white folks in the audience were there because the film in no way interrogates "Whiteness." These folks left the film saying . . . "Didn't you just love it?" And no, I didn't just love it. . . . the film was a graphic documentary portrait of the way in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness.

—bell hooks, "Is Paris Burning?"43

The problem with the [feminist] analysis of drag as only misogyny is that . . . it makes male homosexuality about women, and one might argue that at its extreme, this kind of analysis is in fact a colonization in reverse, a way for feminist women to make themselves into the center of male homosexual activity.

—Butler, "Gender is Burning"44

34. The contestatory energy of shade resonates with the bellicose and scathing interactions in our scholarly debates, theories, and practices.45

Crrritique! The word flies off the tongue like a weapon, emitting a rapid guttural burst of machine-gun-fire. There is the ominous cawing staccato of the first and final consonants, the terse thud of the short repeated vowel, the throaty underground rumble of the accompanying r. "Critique" sounds unmistakably foreign, in a sexy, mysterious, pan-European kind of way, conjuring up tableaus of intellectuals, gesturing wildly in smoke-wreathed Parisian cafés and solemn-faced discussions in seminar rooms in Frankfurt.

—Felski, The Limits of Critique46

35. For Felski, critique is fiery and weaponized but also too cool for school. Her personifications of it combine these opposed affects: the detective, who is hotly "intent on tracking down a guilty party" but has a chilly "attitude of distrust"; and the dandy, whose "debonair stoicism combines knowing distance with aesthetic flair and the verbal lash of wit and aphorism."47

36. Heather Love contests Felski's analogy between critique and the dandy, noting that queer theory, "hardly known for its attitude of detachment," is "chock-full of "sentimental effusions" and political commitments, to boot.48 For Sedgwick, too, queerness and camp can be warmly reparative rather than coolly critical:

To view camp as . . . the communal, historically dense exploration of a variety of reparative practices is to do better justice to many of the defining elements of classic camp performance: the startling, juicy displays of excess erudition . . . the "over"-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste or leftover products; the rich highly interruptive affective variety; the irrepressible fascination with ventriloquistic experimentation; the disorienting juxtapositions of present with past, and popular with high culture.

—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading"49

37. In a schema of red hot and cool blue kinds of literary reading practices, shade is purple — or rather, both blue and red at once. It is not a blurring or blending or a synthesis of opposites such as critical reading and reparative reading, or symptomatic reading and surface reading. Rather, shade juxtaposes these opposed extremes of "affective variety" near-simultaneously; it is "an explosion of potentialities, some appalling, some unimaginably wonderful." Reading is heated ("insult someone ruthlessly") and cool ("without breaking a sweat"); it is dark and bright or, we might say, shady and lit.

38. Shade skirts and winks at the self-seriousness and combativeness of these recent "reading debates" in literary study, which have come to seem a bit like an extreme sport of navel-gazing. Few scholars invested in these debates, not even those who study queer culture, have noticed that the same word — reading — is used for this common, non-academic, yet highly sophisticated practice, one that strongly resonates with how we negotiate critique and appreciation in scholarship. Attending to shade might fling open the doors of the rarified halls of academe and let in: the use of multiple methods; an embrace of contradictory affects; troubling canonical texts that we need not cast out nor chastise, but can actually just read; texts and practices outside that canon; and a broader sense of the "political."

A read or thrown shade uses insult to involve others in different ways of knowing and being. . . . Reading and throwing shade seek to pry open closed audiences.

—Oleksiak, "When Queers Listen"50

39. Throw a little shade at Felski's use of ars to render the harsh "throaty underground rumble" of crrritique. Draw out the delectable joke in that. Append some flamboyant ars to the word in question: rrreading. Rrreading is aggressive but lovingly so. Rrreading is a perspicacious but pleasurable practice. Rrreading is cutting and scathing; rrreading is funny and self-mocking.

 

 

Voguing is the same thing as, like, taking two knives and cutting each other up, but through a dance form. . . . Voguing came from shade because it was a dance that two people did because they didn't like each other. Instead of fighting, you would dance it out on the dance floor, and whoever did the better moves was throwing the best shade.

—Ninja, Paris is Burning

41. The gestalt shifts between critique and appreciation in shade are as sharp and smooth as the voguing to which Paris is Burning often analogizes it — "like breakdancing, the dance takes from the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt"; "the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics" — and just as affectively ambivalent. 51 Like capoeira, vogueing dilates, softens, and aestheticizes the time of aggressive interaction. The players repeat and elaborate chops, blows, spins, drops, and kicks whose power registers not in physical impact but in aesthetic force. The point of the pugilistic performance isn't to wound; it's to win.

42. And how startling and beautiful that one of voguing's most recognizable moves — in which the dancer swoons or swans to the ground with one leg extended — was originally called a "dip" and is now known as a "death drop." It is as though the romance of being bedded in the air has become both singular and wedded to the fantasy of a controlled little death — and resurrection. The quickness and violence of voguing are always offset by the virtuosic elasticity, wry humor, and affectionate touch of the dance.

 

 

43. Like its analogue in vogue, shade's insults are always oriented toward building a frisson, a rapport — the chokehold that is also an embrace. This tender aggression responds to Sontag's call at the end of "Against Interpretation": "In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art."52

44.  Shade as in shadow; shade as in what is cast by and also surrounded by brightness; shade as the inverse of a spotlight; shade as in the sketch artist's technique that is used to evoke penumbra and detail, to pull dimensionality out of a flatness; shade as in calibration, gradation, nuance, subtlety; shade as in ghost, haint, spirit, spook; shade as in tint, tinge, tone, hue, or simply color.

Negro speech is vivid largely because it is private. It is a kind of emotional shorthand — or sleight of hand — by means of which Negroes express, not only their relationship to each other, but their judgment of the white world. And, as the white world takes over this vocabulary — without the faintest notion of what it really means — the vocabulary is forced to change.

—James Baldwin, "Sermons and Blues"53

45. Isn't adopting shade as a hermeneutic — rather than as a sociological topic or ethnographic text — a form of scholarly colonization, appropriation, or worse, minstrelsy?54 Isn't that question a little condescending? Non-academic practices, even "bookless" ones, have formed the foundation for many of the literary criticism's extrapolations: ordinary language and structuralism (Austin); signifying and canonical revision (Gates); jazz in black studies (Moten). Can't shade be at least the basis for a theory or a method?

Ima Read.¹⁸ In this context, my black queer call-and-response takes the specific form of reading and shade, critical performance practices wielded by queers of color and made famous in the film Paris Is Burning. Reading is an artfully delivered insult, while shade refers to disrespectful behaviors or gestures, which can be subtly or not so subtly communicated. . . . Academics know how to be shady, but they usually dress it up in ideology or jargon. Part of my intervention here has to do with how I seek to occasionally sidestep some of these professional niceties.[Note 18. Zebra Katz, "Ima Read" (Mad Decent, 2012). Black queer rapper Zebra Katz explicitly links his song to the art of insult developed in the queer black and Latino Harlem ball scene and popularized in Jennie Livingston's Paris is Burning (1990, Miramax Films).]

—Shaka McGlotten, "Black Data"55

 

 

46. The humming drone of the song's house beat reverberates under the taunting, threatening schoolyard chant, "Ima read that bitch," which repeatedly disintegrates and reconstitutes itself in a dialectical deconstruction: "Ima . . . that bitch. I'm that bitch." 56 Again, we see the ironized self-reflexivity of reading: the phrase throws us into a weird subjunctive mode in which "I am the bitch I am reading" (DRAG ME) or maybe a metafictional one in which the song itself is the bitch being read. In the song, a queer man and a queer woman both use the word authoritatively to refer to themselves and the other. The word "bitch" flips gestalt-like between opposed gender-inflected meanings, from feminized submission (being someone's bitch) to masculinized domination (being that bitch). "I'm that bitch" makes the aggression of the song both funny and self-aware.

 

 

47. We're being schooled. In the music video, Zebra Katz sits at a desk covered with books and marks a paper with an F, wearing an outfit one might see in the ball category "Schoolboy Realness." Njena Reddd Foxxx wears a schoolgirl uniform: plaid bowtie and black knee-high socks. The lines "It's gonna be cohesive, / It's gonna be my thesis" and later "Ima make an outline to the point you'll get" oscillate between high and low forms, while slyly referring to the fact that Ojay Morgan, aka Zebra Katz, wrote this song for his senior thesis at the New School in 2007. "Ima Read" both critiques the institution from within and exploits the skills that the institution imparts.

48. This kind of reading isn't just a drag of critique. It's critique in drag. It teaches us that scholarly reading need not be naively positive nor insistently negative, either. There is more to aesthetic reception than stan-dom and pan-dom. It can embrace many different, even contradictory, vibes, all at once.

49. If "ordinary" or "lay" reading seems to lack a rigorous politics, shade also reminds us that the ordinary is political. (What could be more ordinary, what could be more political, than the word bitch?)

50. Shade's self-reflexivity, affective ambivalence, ironic playfulness, and sense of egalitarianism make it an apt method for engaging with contemporary cultural artifacts, especially in a post-paradigm moment when it comes to questions of taste (what Carl Wilson calls the "no-brow," what I'd call the "all-brow").57

51. Some brows of contemporary culture featuring shade:

Low brow: Black Twitter; Instagram "kikis"; Jarvis Derrell's "She Has Had it" and Branden Miller's "Joanne the Scammer" social media accounts.
Middlebrow: RuPaul's Drag Race; The Read, a podcast hosted by Kid Fury and Krissle West; Ryan Murphy's Pose.
High brow: Wu Tsang's for how we perceived a life and Rashaad Newsome's Shade Compositions, both of which appeared in the show Elements of Vogue; Trajal Herrell's Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church.

52. Shade is among the profusion of contemporary affects we can group under the umbrella term love-hate: the hipster's "earnest irony," the consumer's "guilty pleasure," the viewer's "hate-watching." To love and to hate, diametrically opposed, are both intense, id-laden feelings. Love-hate is not a happy medium or compromise ("I hate-watch The Kardashians" is not "I tolerate The Kardashians"). Rather, both love and hate maintain their intensity in their proximity.

53. The risk of combining love and hate when it comes to taste is ideological complicity: affective ambivalence can become a merely interesting paradox or self-serving hypocrisy. To delight in bad taste can be to indulge in bad faith; the difference is often a matter of degree, a matter of vibe, a matter of time.

Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation — not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. . . . Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "character" . . . Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing . . . they're enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.

—Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

54.  Shade is related to but distinct from affects like "black cool" and what I have elsewhere called "black nonchalance," which make use of its gestures and irony, but lack its intensity — the heat that burns under a frosty surface — and its softness, the way an imperious glance can melt into affectionate one. 58

55. Shade requires the simultaneity of opposition, the balance or rapid shift of the "at once." Shade at once relishes and judges. It identifies with and distinguishes from — it cleaves, it discerns. It laughs at and with. It is tender and malicious. It has a compact polarity of feeling, a generosity of attention both + and -. It appreciates/excoriates. Shade isn't cozy and safe, nor is it simply cruel. It is not just "a kind of love," nor is it pure hateration.

So much of music criticism . . . has gotten saddled with the idea that it's all negative: If someone criticizes something, it's out of anger, or bitterness, or jealousy. . . . Critique, for me, has to be an act of love — or else it's a waste of time.

—Hanif Abdurraqib, "How to Be Critical of the Things You Love"59

56. Criticism that slyly adopts shade as method in order to explore receptive and analytical ambivalence: Toni Morrison's 1996 "This Amazing, Troubling Book," on Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn; Andrea Long Chu's 2019 "Psycho Analysis," on Bret Easton Ellis's White; Lorrie Moore's 2020 "The Balletic Millennial Bedtimes of [Sally Rooney's] Normal People"; Patricia Lockwood's 2020 "Eat Butterflies with Me?" on the works of Vladimir Nabokov.60

57.  The tenderness of shade is not about sweetness but about mutual vulnerability. You're made tender; you've been tendered a "cutting," "scathing," "excoriating" read — a sharp-edged disclosure. Yet, you're also being tended to by being closely attended to. When you snatch someone's wig, you expose them, you humble them, you peel back the surfaces you know they have taken care to layer, precisely because you yourself engage in the same glamorous self-protection.

For any of my reads, I never come from a place of hate or trying to cut someone down. We all have lived lives on spectrums, with crazy highs and crazy lows. That's what I like about reading — it includes everyone in on the joke. I'm laughing at you, but I'm also laughing at me, so we can laugh at each other. Everybody's laughing, let's laugh! Nobody's safe, which makes it a safe place. It's not hard to read someone to their face if you're living for them. And I'm also vulnerable enough to be read, whatever you have to say about me I can handle it.

—Jarvis Derrell, interview with The New Inquiry61

58. A classic formulation of shade: "I just love that," meaning "I hate that." (Whereas "Bitch, I hate you" means, of course, "I love you.")

 

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Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer and a Professor of English at Harvard University. She is the author of Seven Modes of Uncertainty (Harvard UP, 2014), The Old Drift (Hogarth, 2019), and Stranger Faces (Transit, 2020).

 

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In This Issue

Part 1

Introduction: Formalism Unbound
Timothy Aubry and Florence Dore

Good for Nothing: Lorrie Moore's Maternal Aesthetic and the Return to Form
Florence Dore

On Philosophical Imagination and Literary Form
Yi-Ping Ong

"Now can you see the monument?" Some notes on reading for "form"
Gillian White

Transformation and Generation: Preliminary Notes on the Poetics of the Memphis Sanitation Strike
Francisco Robles

The Sight of Life
Sarah Chihaya

Beyond Desire: Blackness and Form
Amber Jamilla Musser

Part 2

Form contra Aesthetics
Timothy Aubry

Zadie Smith's Style of Thinking
David James

Queer Formula
Joan Lubin

Formalism at the End Times: A Modest Account
Danielle Christmas

Furnishing the Novel, Feeding the Soul: Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Benjamin Widiss

Notes on Shade
C. Namwali Serpell

Afterword: Form Now: as Limit and Beyond
Dorothy J. Hale

 

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References