That the Past May Yet Have Another Future: Gesture in the Times of Hands Up

Abstract

In this essay, Rebecca Schneider develops a theory of gesture. Suggesting that gesture is always off of itself and into relation, she thinks about gesture as engaged in dynamics of call and response. Asking whether there is a time limit on responseability, Schneider turns to examples of gesture as disparate as Paleolithic negative hand stencils in France and Black Lives Matter's Hands Up protest gestures across the contemporary United States. Drawing on Dipesh Chakrabarty's "negative universalism" and Françoise Vergès reading, after Cedric Robinson, of the "racial Capitalocene," she chooses gestures that move inside, outside, and alongside human history, both in geologic time and in human time, to think the urgencies of racial violence alongside the urgencies of climate change.

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