the dj vu: black dreams & black time

(Paperback)

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Gabrielle Civil mines black dreams and black time to reveal a vibrant archive of black feminist creative expressions.

Emerging from the intersection of pandemic and uprising,the dj vuactivates forms both new and ancestral, drawing movement, speech, and lyric essay into performance memoir. As Civil considers Haitian tourist paintings, dance rituals, race at the movies, black feminist legacies, and more, she reflects on her personal losses and desires, speculates on black time, and dreams into expansive black life. With intimacy, humor, and verve,the dj vublurs boundaries between memory, grief, and love; then, now, and the future.

Reviews

Poets & Writers, New and Noteworthy
Ms. Magazine, February Reads for the Rest of Us
Literary Hub, New Books to Dive Into

In this radiant work, poet and performance artist Civil pays tribute to a legacy of Black artists while contending with the twin moments of pandemic and uprising after the murder of George Floyd. . . . Taken together, [Civils] musings act as a radical reclamation of place and identity, and challenge the pandemic of white supremacy. The result is an evocative work of art that brings to life an era ripe for a revolution. Publishers Weekly, starred review

Civil describes herself as an idiosyncratic writera brilliant synthesis of the subtly self-conscious thinking-out-loud displayed throughout the text. Alongside Alexis Pauline Gumbs and other self-proclaimed Black feminists who have risen on the shoulders of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan, I count Civil as a trailblazer with my generation of writers committed to Black feminist consciousness, as a fluid, genre busting, idiosyncratic archive, dedicated to uncontained, vulgar, and shimmering cycles of curiosity. Erica N. Cardwell, The Brooklyn Rail

As a tour, mapping, archive, and cross-genre reckoning, like [Civils] other work, each page of the dj vu opens up space by addressing time through dreams, memories, archived performances, and visitations to old writings with fresh eyes. . . . Her distinct voice and style rise from the page. Amy Bobeda, Full Stop

An exuberant collection of texts and artifacts by a Black feminist performance artist. . . An unwavering commitment to upholding a unique personal aesthetic while exploring black dreams is the driving force behind this unusual book, a kind of archive or scrapbook of performance pieces, scripts, poems, conversations, collaborations, lectures, and essays. . . .To be read, as the author suggests, like a dream: Garner what you can, and hopefully something new will unfurl in your mind. Kirkus

Gabrielle Civils ambitious project the dj vu integrates the authors performance pieces and poetry into an ongoing narrative of her life. Civil runs with the idea of black time, which melds and melts and flows and runs against the dominant and thereby white-centered conception of time. She brings up questions of what it means to dream, and to enact ones dreams, while encouraging readers to themselves keep dreamingto dream things into being. Civil has crafted her own self-archive, documenting performances that would otherwise have been temporally and spatially situated, ensuring that she is not looked over and forgotten as black women have been for as long as memory allows. At once a meditation, a reflection, and a call to action, Civil's unique work expands genre boundaries of memoir and performance studies. Meghana Kandlur, Seminary Co-op Bookstores

What if we could offer our archives to each other like flowers Hold them in glass, heavy but transparent. What if we could show each other the journey of unknowing and remembering ourselves now Why would we wait With this work, Gabrielle Civil continues to model generosity, bravery, and vulnerability as core principles of black feminist performance, creativity, and living. Read it for the beauty, the black feminist references. Read it for a particular herstory of this time. Look for what you might be unknowing right now and what you need urgently to remember.Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Civil soldiers for the possibility of black life to dream beyond the confines of colonialist rhetoric laden within modern world systems. Here, she asks the reader to think and experiment playfully with her as she skillfully complicates our time-dream-space continuum with new poetic knowledge.the dj vuis a book project that performs as a conceptual artwork crafting its own genre of intertextual experience.jaamil olawale kosoko

While the world insists that blackness exists only in the body, Gabrielle Civil shows us that black feminist consciousness extends well beyond any corporeal limitations. Affirming the power of black dreams and black time,the dj vunotes metaphysical links between the ancestors and the stars. It is an astounding book.Wendy S. Walters

This is the book I wish Id had as an artist as a young woman. And its the book Ill relish in sharing now. Performance studies has a new one for the mantel in this generous, funny, tender journey through the thicket and politic of Becoming. Cauleen Smith, filmmaker

the dj vu is a rousing, eclectic black feminist project. It blends elements of spoken word, critical writing, poetry, letters, journal writing, book review, photography, artwork, and performance, defying at once the limitations imposed by more conventional approaches to genre. Here, Gabrielle Civil has crafted a pedagogical model for writing performance art. Alexis De Veaux, author of Yabo

So often, in reading the dj vu, Im reminded of how breakable memory is, especially when that memory tries to hold trauma within it. The act of remembering itself haunts the dj vu as Gabrielle Civil catalogues her experience through impetuous lists, vigorous anaphora, repetition, and the interpretation of dreams, both waking and asleep. Civil meets the multiplicity of memory with formal multiplicity. There are several categories of memory, after all: childhood nostalgia has a peculiar quality to it; history is never yet fully formed; and visioning, also, is related to dreams. Moving in and out of enjambment, Civil works from poetry to prose to arts criticism to inexplicable junctures of poetic bravery to sheer amplitude to breaks into the conversational to epistolary to performance. In all this plurality, Civil manages to deliver a kind of replete self-accounting, or auto-theory, in the dj vu. She goes deeper than ekphrasis or arts criticism, toward an experience thats closer to that of intimately living with, and within, the text of our culture. Anas Duplan, author of Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture

Gabrielle Civils luminous the dj vu emanates deeply within and around the speakers memory, in which the politics of joy are palpable intimacies of language and performance, a sphericity in which all the time / is seeping and oozing. Civil brilliantly envelops the reader in BLACK TIME, hers, ours, a way into the present moment by excavating a self, one taking great risks and following big dreams, where humility and compassion ignite a vivid tableau and conceptual stratagem, ever human, where blood clots form . . . a bright red arterial flash that leads . . . a few steps to find aSNOW GLOBE. This book is roundly wise and rich with surprise, where art-making and black feminist professing reveal the heart of this incredibly moving work: Gabrielle Civils own vibrating, undeniable power ~~~~~~~~~~~~~black future~~~~~~~~~. Civil inspires a life of love for the self, for others, for the human condition, as we follow hers, engaged in practice and play as human beings, out of which Civil urges and instructs: Imagine an iridescent bubble around your head / This is your dreams happening now. Ronaldo V. Wilson

Praise forSwallow the Fish

Enjoy. Enjoy Enjoy! Perhaps this is Gabrielle Civils calculus for performance art, though I suspect that accuses her praxis of being too pat. Instead,Swallow the Fishdiscloses that the Enjoythat doubt, her sense that shes maybe said or done the wrong thingis catalyst and outcome. Thus, this remarkable book is a monograph and manual, a catalog and travelogue rendered as a progress of generative failures. An intimate showcase for Civils fierce eros, mordant humor, and intellectual appetites,Swallow the Fishis also a vital record of how a black woman moves through spaces where desire and aversion make equally rough contact. So, enjoy! But enjoy(), too.Douglas Kearney,Mess and Mess and

This book paints a beautiful Black woman sky of possibilities. This book makes me want to perform/it makes me want to write-to holla-to hold it close. I love this book!Sharon Bridgforth

This book is so meticulous and so absorbing, I am in awe. It is declamation, reflection, proposal, documentation, blueprint. Gabrielle Civil is revealed as an artist perfectly poised to speak to how race, gender, and sexuality enact embodied performativity. She writes and performs herself into history in ferociously intelligent and relentlessly personal ways. And Ive never read such a perfect articulation of the turbulence of performingthe way that externalizing the possibility and conflicts of ones body leaves you open and vulnerable to the quagmire of interpretation, misunderstanding, and projection. How the specificity of identity mixes with desire to confound, comfort or disrupt public space. As with so many things that I love, I want everyone to read this book.Miguel Gutierrez

Praise forExperiments in Joy

Gabrielle Civil has made a book into a performance space and living archive. Words dance and bodies speak: together they invent languages of keen pleasure and ardent thought.Experiments In Joyis the memoir as solo and as collaboration with other questing artists. Led by Civil, they engagetease, tangle withthe stuff of history, of particularity, of imagination. Read, watch, listen, and dream. Be transformed.Margo Jefferson, author ofNegrola

Author Bio

Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer originally from Detroit. She has premiered fifty performance artworks around the world. Her performance memoirs includeSwallow the Fish, Experiments in Joy, (ghost gestures) and in and out of place. She teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.