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The HBO television series  Random Acts of Flyness  (2018) created, written and directed by Terence Nance along with a collective of young black filmmakers reconfigures tropes of the variety sketch comedy genre to critique dominant representations of blackness. This article examines how Nance and his team adopt novel and creative approaches to decentring the white gaze in order to hone in on the nuances and multi-faceted nature of blackness, thus challenging essentialist notions of fixed identities. I argue the show’s anti-essentialist approach can be understood through what José Muñoz ( 1999 ) conceptualizes as a performed disidentification on screen. In particular,  Random Acts  works on, with, and against the hegemonic representational economies and discourses of corporate media as a creative tactic of disidentifying with racist forms of misrecognition such as blackface minstrelsy as well as received ideas about heteronormative black masculinity and gender. Finally, I examine how the show employs intersectional politics and a black counter-gaze to challenge neoliberal and co-opted models of diversity within the television industry that fail to seriously engage with the subjugated knowledges and lived experiences of racialized groups.

Performing Disidentification and Disrupting Neoliberal Multiculturalism in HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness