déjà vu

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.

Praise for the déjà vuA Poets & Writers New and Noteworthy Title“[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“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“Each page of the déjà 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“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.” —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 déjà vu notes metaphysical links between the ancestors and the stars.” —Wendy S. Walters“This is the book I wish I’d had as an artist as a young woman. And it’s the book I’ll 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“Here, Gabrielle Civil has crafted a pedagogical model for writing performance art.” —Alexis De Veaux, author of Yabo“In all this plurality, Civil manages to deliver a kind of replete self-accounting, or auto-theory, in the déjà vu. She goes deeper than ekphrasis or arts criticism, toward an experience that’s closer to that of intimately living with, and within, the text of our culture.” —Anaïs Duplan, author of Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture“Roundly wise and rich with surprise. 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