Textures of Other Dimensions

Abstract

Abstract In this interview essay, stef torralba talks with scholar-critic Alexander Ghedi Weheliye about the author's scholarly work, writing practice, and musical inclinations, as well as the current state and future directions of Critical Black Studies. Taking inspiration from Weheliye's interests in the textures of Black, BlackFem, and Black queer and gender-variant life and aesthetics as discussed in the interview, torralba offers texturality as an analytic that characterizes the scholar-critic's work. Together, the essay and interview highlight how Weheliye's oeuvre enables more nuanced and capacious, and thus textural and textured, imaginings of humanity, technology, political subjecthood, and modernity that center the experiences of Black, BlackFem, and Black queer and gender-variant subjects. Weheliye's attention to technologized Black and Black queer and feminist sonic aesthetics from the early twentieth century to the present as spaces to feel out the textures of other worlds renders his scholarship and thinking essential to this special issue's engagements with the disruptive and insurgent dimensions of Black queer musical aesthetics.