Audiovisual Materiality and the Technopoetical Gesture in Recent Black Poetry and Performance

Abstract

Abstract Drawing on Black posthumanist theory, I consider the related but discrete areas of performance, poetics, and audiovisual practice, contextualizing and examining the works of exploratory poet Claudia Rankine, Pulitzer Prize-winning hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar, and poet and performer Douglas Kearney. Borrowing from and extending Louis Chude-Sokei’s ideas of “Black technopoetics” as “the self-conscious interaction of Black thinkers, writers, and sound producers with technology,” I focus on how Rankine, Lamar, and Kearney situate Black subjectivity in networks of technological and televisual mediation. With regard to Rankine, I focus on her “Situations”—short video collaborations with her partner John Lucas—and contextualizes these with reference to David Marriott and his analysis of media and surveillance. I then consider Kendrick Lamar’s music videos and their practice of sampling and self-reference within the context of Alexander Weheliye’s and Paul Miller/aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid’s posthumanist theories of the voice. I conclude by attending to the work of Douglas Kearney, who combines expressive typographic forms and unconventional vocalizations in his performance practice. These analyses are situated against a backdrop of white-supremacist violence and the media spectacle of Black death—what Marriot calls “infotainment”—and I arrive at a speculative conclusion regarding the intersections of very recent AI and historical archives of Black life.