Black Atlantic Research Articles

Between Slavery and Taste: A Response

My interlocutors have done a good job of pointing out the cluster of concerns that drove me to make what was initially supposed to be a short excursus into the library of slavery and enslavement. They are right to note, explicitly or implicitly, that my concern was not the institution of slavery (of which much has been written about), nor the experience of enslavement (who has the authority to bear witness to unspeakable events?). Mine was an allegory of reading, one that sought to understand the inscription and imagination of bondage in the extensive library left behind by both masters and by slaves (to the extent that they could). I considered this library to be the depository of a certain narrative of modernity that could only be accessed through its symptoms, left behind as traces, fragments, images, and fictions of the self. The four reviewers provide us with a good map of my readings or misreading of this library. They note that my book is structured by a desire to understand two archives—that of enslavement and taste—as both connected and disconnected in the making of modern culture in the long eighteenth century. They note that my book is informed by a long standing problematic in African criticism, first evident in Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic—how to account for the place of Africa and African discourses in the making of the Atlantic world. My interlocutors further note that what is at stake in this reading or rereading of the past is nothing less than the terms into which a modern subject emerges at the interstices of bondage and freedom. Sometimes the reviewers are puzzled by my intellectual preferences: why focus on the culture of slavery on the West African coast instead of the interior (Adeako)? Why do I work with a frame that seems to obscure the complex, dialectical relationship between masters and slaves (Harrow)? Why does a discourse that set out to expose the mutual imbrication of slavery and taste seem to leave them separate on the conceptual level (Quayson)? Why do I seem to insist on a rhetoric of newness when it comes to the study of margins in the making of centers when others have been there before me (Tejumola)? When I started reflecting on the relationship between slavery and enslavement and their separation in the conceptual sphere, even when they were constantly brought together in everyday life, I was thinking about the larger problem of explanation and of the disciplinary formation in which making sense of things takes place. My initial target was the philosophers of freedom (Immanuel Kant and David Hume, for example), who seemed so keen to get to the desired ideal

Neither Anglican nor Ethiopian:

This article examines two failed schismatic movements that emerged in 1863 and 1876 within the Liberian Episcopal Church. The goal in both schisms was the creation of an autonomous Liberian Episcopal church that would be ruled by blacks but remain part of the Anglican Communion. The failure of both attempts can be attributed to the same two factors: race and ecclesiastical politics. Both movements were created by Americo-Liberian clergy, yet it failed to integrate indigenous clergy and therefore the movements only represented a portion of Liberian Episcopalians. Additionally, both movements stopped short of a full declaration of ecclesiastical independence and desired to remain part of their parent denomination. In being renegade Anglicans yet not exactly “Ethiopians,” the movements’ leaders lacked the legitimacy to consecrate their own bishop. Yet while both attempts to establish the Protestant Episcopal Church in Liberia failed, agitation from multiple parts of the black Atlantic, including Liberia, did contribute to bringing about an Anglican moment of black bishops from the 1860s to the 1880s.

Pares, Luis Nicolau and Sansi, Roger, eds. Sorcery in the Black Atlantic. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2011. 253 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

Pares, Luis Nicolau and Sansi, Roger, eds. Sorcery in the Black Atlantic. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2011. 253 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

The Mediation and Remediation of Disaster: Hurricanes Katrina and Felix in/and the New Media Environment

Hurricanes Katrina and Felix made landfall in 2005 and 2007 on the Gulf Coast of the US and the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua respectively. Despite many economic, political and cultural differences between these two sites, they share a number of interesting similarities. Their inhabitants are subject to similar modes of racialized Othering and internal colonialism, and both places have vital links with the transnational cultural consciousness that Gilroy referred to as the Black Atlantic. Katrina and Felix also occurred at a time when centralized forms of media are increasingly perceived to be in crisis. This crisis is creating new spaces for the development of alternative ways of knowing, watching and making media. This paper draws on recent literature on decolonization by Mignolo, Escobar, Quijano and others to explore the prospects for decolonizing energies within the new media environment and a context of devastation wrought by neoliberalism and disaster. This research examines disasters in/and the new media environment, and suggests that activists should understand the distinctions between mainstream (or corporate) and alternative media, between top-down and grassroots media, and between “old” and “new” media, in relational and non-categorical rather than absolute terms. These media realms should be engaged from an awareness of how they interact with and impact upon one another. This research also suggests that disasters must be understood as ongoing and open-ended events embedded within historical, social, cultural, economic and political processes and systems. Media, policymaking and emergency management practices that are informed by an awareness of this complex embedding, and which are therefore able to take a long-term view of the unfolding of disasters, will be best equipped to engage effectively, and in democratically responsive ways, with disasters and in particular with the needs of those populations most vulnerable to their impacts.

Contributors

Other| November 01 2013 Contributors Small Axe (2013) 17 (3 (42)): 244–246. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2379054 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Contributors. Small Axe 1 November 2013; 17 (3 (42)): 244–246. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2379054 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSmall Axe Search Advanced Search Vanessa Agard-Jones is a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. A political anthropologist, she focuses her research on the intersections of sexual and environmental politics and their relationship to debates about sovereignty in the (French) Caribbean. After her tenure with the society, she will join Yale University's faculty as assistant professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies.Wendy Asquith is a PhD candidate at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom and an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award Holder with Tate Liverpool for the project Haiti in Art: Creating and Curating in the Black Atlantic. Her research focuses on the exhibition of Haitian art from the late nineteenth century to the contemporary moment, with a particular focus on postcolonial identities in a global context.Greg Beckett is an assistant professor of anthropology at Bowdoin... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Musical Routes of the Spanish Black Atlantic: The Performance of Identities in the Rap of Frank T and El Chojín

On account of the immigration boom at the turn of the 21st century, the various ways in which cultural production in Spain has engaged with and been shaped by residents born overseas and the issue of ethnic difference now comprise a significant field of academic study. In this paper, I examine the self-representation of artists of African origin on the Spanish rap scene. To this end, I draw on and adapt Paul Gilroy's conceptual space of the “black Atlantic” and Simon Frith's understanding of the musical performance of identities in an analysis of the work of the two most prominent black Spanish MCs, Frank T and El Chojín. In view of their exclusion from dominant notions of what it is to be Spanish (as they detail in several of their lyrics), these two rappers construct alternative identities in dialogue with the international black diaspora by borrowing and sampling from African-American and African musical styles and voices.

BLACK ATLANTIC VISIONS: History, Race, and Transnationalism in Ghana

This article explores Ghanaians' contemporary understandings of blackness and, in particular, of their connection to African Americans. In it, I argue that while Ghana's diaspora tourism industry directs attention toward the legacy of slavery in order to create ties between African Americans and Ghana, many Ghanaians are interested in constructing a different version of a shared black cultural citizenship that does not rely on this history. Slavery in fact represents a problematic history for Ghanaians, many of whom seek to avoid conversations about it. Instead, they celebrate blackness as a form of cosmopolitanism devoid of historical roots. Through this example, I urge black Atlantic scholars to pay attention not only to the presence or absence of cultural memories of slavery in various societies, but to the problem that slavery may represent within many of them.

Nonsynchronous Cartographies: Frank Bowling's Map Paintings

Born in British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1936, a resident of London in the 1950s, and dividing his time between London and New York since the late 1960s, Frank Bowling is one of the foremost artists of his generation. As a pioneer of abstraction during the 1960s, his work as both a painter and critic for the New York–based Arts Magazine is of singular importance to the historiography of the visual culture of the “black Atlantic.” In particular, the six articles he wrote for the magazine between 1969 and 1971, in which he meditated on the notion of “black art,” reveal the ambivalent complexities that inform his aesthetic practices as both theorist and painter, or what Kobena Mercer has aptly referred to as Bowling's “discrepant abstraction.” The nature of the “discrepancies” in Bowling's work is the focus of this essay.

Black Atlantic Literature as Transnational Cultural Space

This essay makes the case for “Black Atlantic literature” as a transnational category of literary analysis, taking as examples the Jamaican-born writer Claude McKay, who lived his adult life in Europe, North Africa, and the United States; and South African author Peter Abrahams, who ultimately settled in Jamaica. The notion of the Black Atlantic is borrowed from sociologist Paul Gilroy, but this paper argues that the concept needs to be carefully broadened in scope, enriched in its recognition of the many layers of transnational cultural exchange, and reconciled with national models of cultural formation. But it is useful for shedding light on the work of writers such as McKay and Abrahams, who, when literary cultures in their own countries were virtually non-existent or mostly closed to Black writers, turned to an emerging international community of Black artists and intellectuals. Such authors wrote in conversation with a distinctive Black Atlantic literary tradition that fulfilled many of the cultural, social, and psychological needs met in other contexts by national cultures.

Introduction: oceanic studies

The ocean has lapped at the margins of the critical courses that literary, historical, and cultural studies have shaped in recent decades. Whether in Atlantic, Black Atlantic, transnational, or hem...

Alan Rice, Creating Memorials, Building Identities. The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic. (Liverpool Studies in International Slavery, 3.) Liverpool, Liverpool University Press 2012 Rice Alan Creating Memorials, Building Identities. The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic. (Liverpool Studies in International Slavery, 3.) 2012 Liverpool University Press Liverpool £ 16,99

Alan Rice, Creating Memorials, Building Identities. The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic. (Liverpool Studies in International Slavery, 3.) Liverpool, Liverpool University Press 2012 Rice Alan Creating Memorials, Building Identities. The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic. (Liverpool Studies in International Slavery, 3.) 2012 Liverpool University Press Liverpool £ 16,99

Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto

Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto

The New Masters of Eloquence: Southernness, Senegal, and Transatlantic Hip-Hop Mobilities

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I get it in 'til sun rise, Goin' 90 in a 65, Windows rolled down screamin' out: Hey-ey-ey, so paid. --Akon, I'm so paid, 2008 (1) With a heavy diamond stud anchoring each earlobe, hip-hop hustler Akon disembarks from his helicopter, spreads his arms to sky, and sings about his solvency from bow of a high-seas luxury yacht. For all its exuberance, gesture is a stereotypical one for any Atlanta rapper. Here, fantasy surrounding hip-hop's southern Third (2)--one represented by Akon's formidable pop presence--is crisscrossed by classic cars, fast motorcycles, and sprawling liners. With Akon and his peers at its helm, last decade has witnessed dominance of southern hip-hop in international commercial markets and neighborhood undergrounds alike. As Miami, Houston, Memphis, New Orleans, and Virginia Beach center themselves in global pop scene, this travels in unlikely vehicles, including body of this Senegalese-American singer, whose voice both represents American South's most marketable presence in global industry and Africa's most audible presence in American hip-hop. Commercial television is so saturated with trope of southern rap star on a boat that comedian Andy Samberg's hip-hop video send-up of genre--I'm on a Boat!--has come to define mainstream critical engagement with southern rap. (3) Akon's smooth, blues-keyed cadence, though, is definitive for body of genre, which infuses posture of coastal gangsta hip-hop styles with cool sung tones of Deep-South gospel and a particular attention to scenic narratives and sharp wordplay. Even as these popular forms patch together a legacy of regional sounds and styles, they are contoured by growing African and diasporic communities that line contemporary American South. In wake of economic collapse over past decade, new communities of Senegalese flea-market traders (who often have special relationships with Chinese manufacturers), IT specialists, and taxi drivers have come to thicken suburbs of Atlanta, Raleigh, Houston, Memphis, Virginia Beach, and Miami. They join a host of migrants from throughout a transnational Afrodiasporic circuit, which Black aesthetic theorist Paul Gilroy calls the Black Atlantic. (4) The new Global South incorporates populations of Caribbean immigrants from Jamaica, Haiti, and Cuba; Africans from Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Uganda; Brazilians and East Coast African American families. These immigrants connect with established southern communities that are already textured by global genealogies and cross-cultural conversations. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Akon represents latest chapter in both southern social life and southern that upends notion that southernness must wear its history on its sleeve--that it must cast itself in frayed aesthetic of handmade and moor its imagination in farm and country. Instead, Akon and his contemporaries, poised in present tense, represent a nation they call a loose family of artists associated with urban centers and creative communities of American South and Southern diaspora, who rose to popular prominence in last decade on a wave of novel productions and dancehall hits. With its digitized production techniques and attention to high-end trend, is unapologetically super-modern; its dirt emerges in its bassy car sound systems and club speakers alike, badness in its hustler's lyricism, and depiction of Scarface-inflected imagery in its videos. The is time-stamped with unmistakable low-end rocking beats, tinny synthesizer flourishes, heavily processed vocals (often slowed down to sound vaguely sinister), and heavy lyrics with call-and-response choruses ready for instant memorization. This is of Global Dirty South: a zone based in a messy aesthetic of here-and-now that Mississippi rapper/producer David Banner describes as horror music (5) and Akon calls Konvikt Muzik. …

Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Monáe

0 0 1 228 1304 bacon 10 3 1529 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:Table Normal; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Times New Roman;} The performances, music, and subjectivities of Detroit techno producer Jeff Mills—radio turntablist The Wizard, space-and-time traveller The Messenger, founding member of Detroit techno outfit Underground Resistance and head of AXIS Records—and Janelle Monae—android #57821, Cindi Mayweather, denizen and “cyber slavegirl” of Metropolis—are infused with the black Atlantic imaginary of Afrofuturism. We might understand Mills and Monae as disseminating, in the words of Paul Gilroy, an Afrofuturist “cultural broadcast” that feeds “a new metaphysics of blackness” enacted “within the underground, alternative, public spaces constituted around an expressive culture . . . dominated by music” (Gilroy 1993: 83). Yet what precisely is meant by “blackness”—the black Atlantic of Gilroy’s Afrodiasporic cultural network—in a context that is Afrofuturist? Monae’s Cindi Mayweather is an android on the run from human authorities, and Mills has become The Messenger, a time-and-space traveller returning from the future to forewarn Earth of catastrophic first contact with extraterrestials. The repetitious signature of electronic music, through its sonic affect, likewise appears to amplify nonrepresentational strategies. At stake is the role of allegory and its infrastructure: does Afrofuturism, and its incarnates, “represent” blackness? Or does it tend toward an unhinging of allegory, in which the coordinates of blackness, but also those of linear temporality and terrestial subjectivity, are transformed, subject to a becoming ?

Cultural Studies in the Future Tense by Lawrence Grossberg (review)

Reviewed by: Cultural Studies in the Future Tense by Lawrence Grossberg Eric Weisbard Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. By Lawrence Grossberg. Durham: Duke University Press. 2010. Cultural studies here is no vague term but the specific approach pioneered by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970s under the leadership of Stuart Hall and encapsulated in such important books as Resistance Through Rituals, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, and The Black Atlantic. Lawrence Grossberg, though he only studied briefly at Birmingham, has long been the preeminent American champion of its methods, co-editing the immense 1992 compendium Cultural Studies and since 1990 the journal Cultural Studies. This book undertakes an impossible mission: to clarify the meaning of cultural studies for those now treating it as a grab bag of methodological options, contrast its origins with the very different moment we now find ourselves in, and seed a future for the field. At the core of it all is conjunctural analysis, the notion that one should apply theory to observable material so as to find the fracture points in social formations: their “problematic.” Cultural studies claims no grand victories, just highly contingent interventions. Grossberg values an “interdisciplinary and antidisciplinary” (15) scholarship, characterized by “modesty” rather than “imperializing discourse” (18–19). His repeated goal is to help us tell better stories—well, “produce better conjunctural stories” (101). Yet Grossberg is not shy in his claims, locating a centuries-in-the-making “liberal modernity” (69) that was already under siege in the 1970s and has since been decisively called into question by other visions of the modern. One of the real strengths of this book, unreplicable in a short review, is the author’s ability to gloss the massive literature of modernism, modernity, and modernization in service of his own synthesis. Our own conjuncture, Grossberg argues, entails a kind of “embedded disembededdness” (91) that fractures what should be social totality into economic, cultural, and political domains of apparent separation. This, rather than globalization or neoliberalism, is the beast we are up against. Grossberg in response wants to see conjunctural stories told about economics: the conversation about “value” (158), in a shifting space of actual and virtual capitalism, that economists and popular pundits refuse. He wants cultural studies of culture itself decoupled from much of what passes as media studies and Hall’s notion of “decoding,” reframed to better recognize what Joseph Nye calls culture’s “soft power” use [End Page 141] in empire and emotional and sensory valences. (To put it one way: cultural studies in the classic years loved punk rock; can it confront gaming?) And, in a chapter he endearingly confesses to be his “least satisfying” (4), he struggles to envision a cultural studies for politics that could be less theory driven and more able to address the complexities of the political in connecting the state, the body, and everyday life. What is the moral of this reckoning with conjunctural modernities? We are left with a graphic meant to represent the “stratifying machine” of the multiply modern (280). Time and space are the two axes. On this grid, overlapping, events of the moment get a circle; everyday life a pentagon; institutional space a rectangle; change and history a triangle. A final shape, a splotch, like a substance in a microscope slide, sits on top of the others: that is articulation, the way we mediate or belong to the real. It is all almost ostentatiously unclear. Early on, Grossberg writes: “Cultural studies attempts to strategically deploy theory (and empirical research)” (25). It would be good to see this important scholar reverse those terms, taking research—the illustrious development of a particular example—out of the parenthetical. Eric Weisbard University of Alabama Copyright © 2013 Mid-America American Studies Association

"Cuban music is African music": negotiating Africa and the African diaspora on the world music stage

Discussing the Senegalese band Orchestra Baobab’s incorporation of Cuban music, guitarist and band member Latfi Benjeloune told me, “The music didn’t come home and influence African music. Cuban music is already African. These are African sensibilities that are being expressed...in some ways we felt like parents with this music...it came from us” (Interview, 25 October 2011). Here, Benjeloune justifies his musical mixing by positioning himself in relation to the black Atlantic and African and Afro-diasporic peoples. Making musical and cultural connections across the black Atlantic is not a new phenomenon. African and Afro-diasporic musicians have long shared and taken up each other’s musics, be it funk, jazz or rumba. The dynamics of musical mixing, however, have varied widely and have been affected by power relations, histories, cultural understandings and misunderstandings, as well as by access to technology, the workings of the music industry,and distribution networks.

Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic. Alan Rice. Liverpool, U.K.: Liverpool University Press, 2010. ix + 244 pp. (Cloth US$ 95.00; 2012, paper US$ 39.95)

Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic. Alan Rice. Liverpool, U.K.: Liverpool University Press, 2010. ix + 244 pp. (Cloth US$ 95.00; 2012, paper US$ 39.95)

Make It Funky: Fela Kuti, James Brown and the Invention of Afrobeat

Make It Funky: Fela Kuti, James Brown and the Invention of Afrobeat Alexander Stewart (bio) Evoking the image of ships and black sailors navigating the Atlantic, Paul Gilroy’s heuristic stresses dynamic cultural exchange among diverse populations of the African diaspora and the mother continent itself—the “black Atlantic.” Gilroy argues for the central role of black musical expression in producing a “distinctive counterculture of modernity” on a basis of shared oppression, common goals, and hybrid cultures (Gilroy, 1993, 36). While the perspective of black Americans’ discovery and cultivation of African cultures and sensibilities (both historical and imagined) is more familiar to those on this side of the Atlantic, this process also figured importantly on the African continent. During the early postcolonial years, the interest of African Americans in discovering their African roots stimulated a similar impulse in some Africans. Describing the epiphany brought on by his 1969 trip to the United States, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the originator of the jazz, funk, and soul-infused genre Afrobeat, recalled: It was incredible how my head was turned. Everything fell into place, man. . . . For the first time, I saw the essence of blackism [black nationalism]. It’s crazy; in the United States people think the black-power movement drew inspiration from Africa. All these Americans come over here looking for awareness. They don’t realize they’re the ones who’ve got it over there. Why we were even ashamed to go around in national [End Page 99] dress until we saw pictures of blacks wearing dashikis on 125th Street. (Darnton, 1977, 6) In West African popular music an important shift occurred as many musicians looked less to Europe and, by extension, its former colonies in the Caribbean, and began to draw inspiration from African American cultures in the United States. This essay examines Fela’s seemingly paradoxical adoption and assimilation of American funk grooves and musical practices in his quest to further Africanize his music, and his transformation from British-trained Nigerian jazz trumpeter to black-nationalist countercultural dissident icon. From Palmwine and Highlife to Afrobeat and Beyond With its proximity to maritime commerce and overland trade routes connected to North Africa and the continent’s interior, West Africa has long been a cultural crossroads and nexus of musical development. As noted by Waterman, the interwar years were a particularly fertile period for “the growth of pan-West African urban musical traditions [as] traders attempting to extend their networks, sailors manning the large vessels operated by European lines, . . . and other Africans in search of employment” moved back and forth among colonial entrepôts (Waterman, 1990, 48). Since its introduction by Europeans in the late 1800s, the guitar figured importantly in many of these traditions. The most widespread and influential of these guitar-based genres, palmwine music, swept the region during the 1920s and 1930s. Eponymous with the intoxicating beverage whose consumption it accompanied (and that often was used as a form of payment to the musicians), palmwine was most often heard at informal gatherings among the urban lower classes. Accompanying themselves with guitars and percussion tapped on beer bottles or kerosene cans, singers frequently touched on contemporary political issues and social commentary. In contrast, the other most widespread genre, highlife, as its name implies, was more associated with the musical tastes of the upper classes and social elite. Performed at important events such as weddings, funerals, and holidays, highlife ensembles combined European band instruments and harmonic structures with distinctly African practices such as praise singing. Highlife’s appeal was broadened by its origins in Ghana, the first African nation to gain independence (1957). Under the leadership of the charismatic prime minister Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s political and cultural influence was strong throughout the region during the postcolonial period. Nigeria, with 150 million people, the most populous country in sub-Saharan Africa, became independent in 1960. As in most of the continent, its borders were drawn during the 1885 Berlin Conference with little regard to different ethnic, religious, or linguistic groups, and these internal divisions were exploited by the European powers to maintain control. Nigeria includes over 250 ethnic groups, with the four largest the predominantly Muslim Hausa and [End Page 100...

Filmmaker's Journal: <em>resonanz.01</em> (2008–2013) notes / fragments on a case of sonic hauntology

Filmmaker’s Journal:resonanz.01 (2008−2013) notes / fragments on a case of sonic hauntology Tony Cokes (bio) Mourning always follows a trauma. I have tried to show elsewhere that the work of mourning is not one kind of work among others. It is work itself, work in general, the trait by means of which one ought perhaps to reconsider the very concept of production.… A question of repetition: a specter is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back.… There has never been a scholar who really, and as scholar, deals with ghosts. A traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts—nor in all that could be called the virtual space of spectrality. —Jacques Derrida, “Specters of Marx” Note One: Early Thoughts (2008−2010) I am developing resonanz.01, a video essay that ghosts, or thinks through and rearticulates Derrida’s concept of hauntology, as referenced in the above epigraphs, into relation to my reading of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, in which he maps blackness as a transnational diasporic form whereby musical, cultural, and political tropes, themes, and genres circulate via technologies, particularly sound recordings. Given that sound recordings (like the texts that I often deform in my practice) are objects of commodity circulation and consumption for multiple publics in disparate contexts, they inhabit a kind of virtual space and time of future deployment, consumer desires, and potential abuse. By that I mean that these familiar forms are constantly being shifed, re-encoded, and re-circulated among nodes: their origins [End Page 220] are played, replayed, and displaced. My adaptation of Gilroy’s concept involves unsettling any notion of fixed historical origin, or essentialist notion of blackness, and thinking instead about how black cultural practices inhabit, shadow, and shif modern cultural forms in unexpected ways and contexts. This video case study will consider ways in which non-blacks participate in, retrofit, and complicate black cultures, not through appropriation, thef, or misappropriation (as these exchanges may have been traditionally enacted and described) but through reworking the logics, technologies, abuses, and improvisations that blacks themselves deployed to invent, reproduce, and circulate their historical and sonic interventions. It’s not about simply copying or imi tating a given image or static idea, as if there were an authentic mode. It’s about taking up a technology or structure (usually at some cultural or geographic distance from its normative use or tradition) and trying to produce differential originary meaning with it. I’m arguing that blackness is not an essence, but a hack (or series thereof), a method, a technological intervention under construction (and also under often dire social pressures) being coded, or played into existence daily. My work is an attempt to think blackness as an uncanny, ghostly methodology, that is, blackness as a critical, technical hauntology in relation to whiteness. My video resonanz.01 explores the sound of Manchester post-punk band Joy Division and its linkages to dub reggae and subsequent forms like minimal techno and dubstep. Additionally, the video will consider Joy Division’s habit of producing darkness and the uncanny in visible form, particularly the way that English art director Peter Saville’s design vocabulary appropriates certain generic modernist or minimal forms to question the normative conditions and tropes of display for popular music in late 1970s capitalism. I will take up some of these same visual and cultural codes in the aesthetic of my project. Note Two: (2011−2012) The product did not have to appear as if it was for sale, only that it now existed and was itself. It did not have to draw attention to itself in the old fashioned way, with photographs and large blatant type and a general attitude of commercial neediness. —Paul Morley, “Joy Division: Piece By Piece” What does it mean to construct a visual form that functions as a conceptual or imaginative symbol, not an illustration or caption for sonic (or other) content? What would a critique of neoliberalism or late capitalism look like, or sound like? I read Saville’s decision to use a series of layered radio waves from the first observed pulsar1 for the cover...

Afro-Brazilian Culture in London: Images and Discourses in Transnational Movements

This text forms part of a three-year project, funded by the AHRC, on Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic, hosted by the Centre for the Study of Brazilian Culture and Society, King's College London.