Performative Drifts: On the Afterlife of Radical Speech Acts in Education

This commentary examines how radical speech acts circulating in educational institutions can drift over time from charged declarations to inert background décor. Drawing on Butler’s account of performativity, Ahmed’s notion of nonperformativity, and Freeman’s work on queer temporality, we analyze a set of Black Lives Matter posters created by preservice teachers in 2020 and still displayed in our college hallways in 2026. In tracing the afterlife of these posters, we highlight how institutional spaces metabolize, and sometimes exhaust, political possibility. We argue that, as institutional commitments to racial justice falter and repetitions accumulate without corresponding material transformation, the performative force of such declarations contracts, producing affective shifts from hope to quiet disenchantment. We term this temporal slippage a performative drift . Yet we also consider how paying attention to the unfinished energies of past struggles might reorient our encounters with these artifacts, offering openings for alternative, more just futures.