In the Flow

Abstract

In the Flow Kimberly Juanita Brown (bio) Part revolutionary treatise, part sorrow song, and part celebration, Shana L. Redmond's American Studies Association presidential address brought the audience through the four stages of black study within American studies: inquiry, immersion, politics, and prose. Music and motion are organized around collective regard. With "The Dark Prelude" as the title of her address, Redmond reconfigured sites of communion and black presence as the calibration of the soul journeying through the life of the mind, the life of the heart. Beginning by placing herself in the chorus, hoping that as the blend of voices and octaves come together, something new can be gleaned, Redmond escorted all of us through the avenue of engagement that breathed new life into old. This is not your linear narrative, not your rallying call of a presidential address. This is the trace of blackness and presence that upends temporality. If you let it. The process is the product is the method. Redmond brought her activism, scholarly interests, subject of study, creativity, and verve to the one place that could hold it: the first in-person ASA meeting since 2019. Just observing the crowd as they gathered for the address, one could navigate the current terrain of academe through those who have entered it only recently. The same people whose research and writings have animated a whole universe previously taken for granted. Introduced by President-elect Sharon Holland, Redmond took the stage accompanied by her friend and collaborator Kwame Phillips, who provided the musical accompaniment for the talk. The combination of music and prose worked seamlessly to carry the message of interdisciplinary production that is the cornerstone of American studies writ large. Moan, Wail Redmond opened her talk with a nod to the potent directionality of emotion ("I cry a lot for what I'm learning and those things I'm being forced to acknowledge that I already knew"). To begin in this place, in the interiority of feeling and its connection to the lives and labors of study, is to orient the [End Page 225] eye and the ear in the same direction. The sound is unmistakable. As listeners followed Redmond's sonic offering, the pathways of black possibility opened up and out, enclosing much in the space of creation. We followed the trail of movement from Assata Shakur to Sandra Bland, recognizing something familiar in each pause, turn, reflection, and moment of apprehension. Here is one such pause: I'm lingering again in the discontinuities of death named by comrade Sharon Holland. I'm trying to revive the details carried to graves—to write answers to the questions we don't ask. I'm trying to become an amplifier for a chorus whose bright songs have been compressed to undertones beneath the weight of symbolism and spectacle. The presidential address as "amplifier" is one way to traverse the ebb and flow of black studies as it exists in the arena that is American studies. So the address encouraged us to join the chorus in the distance in an effort to make the fullness of sound as effective as one singular voice. We were encouraged, by example, to do what we do best. As she merged popular music playing on the radio at the time with racist confrontations with police (a whole history unto itself), Redmond intertwined the sounds of musical production with the cacophony of driving-while-black, and understanding the precarity of the endeavor. From Leon Bridges and Gladys Knight and the Pips, Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway, Tony Orlando and Dawn, the sounds of survival were articulated as guideposts letting us know where we were going. And the journey, of course, is ever fraught. Part of the particular delineation of purpose Redmond presented in the talk was her way of compelling the audience with fluid musical offerings that were juxtaposed against racialized upheavals perpetrated by the state. Though the music had a softening effect, it also managed to produce pinpricks of apprehension for those of us who know all too well how so many of those traffic stops end. Arrest, injury, escape, or death, there are no happy stories once the sirens begin. Add race...