The déjà vu: black dreams & black time
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 déjà vu activates 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 déjà vu blurs boundaries between memory, grief, and love; then, now, and the future.
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
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 include Swallow 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.
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, [Civil's] 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 writer'--a 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
"Gabrielle Civil's ambitious project the déjà vu integrates the author's 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 one's dreams, while encouraging readers to themselves keep dreaming--to 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
