Reimag(in)ing Sociality: The Sunday Tea Party as an Ecology of Attunement

abstract: This article reads a serial event of Black creative practice and performance in 1990s Brooklyn, New York, with respect to its fractal complexity. Its interest is not to formalize the event's history by delimiting its aesthetic boundaries nor by determining the forms of subjectivity it produced; the article instead parses the conditions of limitless possibility afforded by this serial collaboration of artists, alongside the conditions of impossibility rendered material by writings on culture from the juridic arm of the state. It traces an ecology of presence emerging out of archival research and oral histories of the Sunday Tea Party—a weekly, artist collective–run event that took place in the neighborhood of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, from 1994 to 2001. More than simply producing a space of belonging for the expression of cultural difference, the Tea Party offered alternate modes of visuality and hapticality based on radical care, a "looking after" and "feeling with" that cultivated a collective presence both entangled with and pushing against the ethical and political violence of modern raciality.