Frankie Lipscomb-Cobbs

Frankie is a queer Black theatre artist and performer born and raised in North Carolina. Their theatre experience spans from performing and acting, including both traditional theatre and experimental theatre such as Neofuturism, to producing and sound and projection design. Heavily influenced by their politics and their experiences as a queer and non-binary Black person living in America, Frankie is especially interested in working with and creating utopian performance that imagines new ways of Black being and follows in the Black radical tradition.

Title of Project

Black Utopia: Towards an Alternative Understanding and Practice of Black Being

Description of Project

Black Utopia: Towards an Alternative Understanding and Practice of Black Being is an exploration of Black utopian performance: those performances and practices by Black people that invoke and prioritize the life and liveliness that form at the center of Black abjection. Through a close reading of my own experiences, others' writings, and specific performances, I explore present performances and practices Black people have developed in the face of the often dystopian terms of Black being. In so doing, I ask the following questions: How do these existing performances/practices act as utopian dissent and reject the ontological positioning of Blackness as negation? What can we learn, and how can we use that knowledge to move towards a general Black utopian practice? My aim is to define some of the characteristics of Black utopia, how they manifest in already existing practice, and how we might move towards a general Black utopian practice.

Areas of Academic Interest

Black performance, Black studies, everyday performance, utopian studies