In her article “Performance as Place Preservation: The Role of Storytelling in the Formation of Shankleville Community’s Black Counterpublics,” Andrea R. Roberts defines three interconnected subsets of agency: cultural, spatial and performative. She explores cultural agency as a cultural group’s ability to protect itself and assert its autonomy through grassroots tactics. Groups with cultural agency “legitimizi[e]” their own “methods, spaces, traditions, and creative adaptations” in contrast to dominant discourses that minimize their ways of understanding the world (Roberts 16). Spatial agency references the ability to claim autonomy within and exert control over an environment (Montgomery, qtd. in Roberts 17). The Shankleville community that Roberts examines asserts its spatial agency by linking its foundational story to a specific place (13). Finally, performative agency is a means through which groups like Shankleville can exercise their cultural and spatial agency. By performing their foundational story, the community asserts its meaning-making power over the spring—a form of spatial agency. Their performance also highlights Winnie and Jim’s control over their own worlds as a demonstration of Black cultural agency in resistance to enslavement (12-13). These three subsets of agency reinforce Roberts’ emphasis on performance’s significance, as I explore further in the term “performance.” They also reveal Robert’s more general understanding of agency as a community’s capacity to empower itself by asserting its identity.
Like Roberts in her discussion of spatial agency, Susan Leigh Foster centers agency’s “physicality” in her article “Choreographies of Protest” (Foster 395). Foster argues that physical bodies make powerful meaning in political protests (397). For example, during the Civil Rights movement, sit-in protesters’ bodies literally depicted the action they hoped to make legal: sitting down and “expectantly” awaiting service at lunch counters (399). In this instance, physical bodies constituted an indispensable part of protestors’ argument that they deserved equal service. Furthermore, their bodies forced oppressive institutions to change their physical patterns, as demonstrated when waitstaff had to maneuver around sit-inners. This physical change gave protestors the ability to control the physical world around them—or, in Foster’s words, gave them “a sense of agency” (402). Physically joining together inspired a similar sense of agency in activists at the 1999 World Trade Organization protests (410). Given the importance of physicality in these protests, Foster argues, agency cannot be understood as an abstract concept separate from the physical world. Instead, individuals’ assertion of their agency through political protest stems from their physicality and depends on their bodies for its existence (412).
Ruja Benjamin does not emphasize a connection between individuals’ physicality and their agency in Chapter 3 of her book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. However, she does highlight the power of individual action—or rather, of individuals’ agency—to enact meaningful change against oppressive institutions. For example, when Polaroid’s technological support of apartheid became evident, individual Polaroid employees joined together to protest the company’s enablement of oppression. The employees’ sustained resistance forced the company to divest from South Africa, which in turn sparked broad economic sanctions on the nation and contributed to apartheid’s collapse (Benjamin; Lipsker, “Definitions”). Through this example, Benjamin demonstrates that individual agency has real power to combat injustice and create change. Although the Polaroid workers did not center their physical place in the world like the communities that Roberts and Foster discuss, they still demonstrate that individuals’ chosen actions—their agency—constitutes a powerful force for justice.
