(De)Cypher: Black Notes on Culture and Criticism

Prod. by zuri arman & Kristen Maye

Like blackness, the life of (De)Cypher is not linear, nor can it be reduced to
words. But if we are to think of an origin, it would be May of 2021 when
we organized a reading group on Sylvia Wynter’s essay, “Rethinking
Aesthetics: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice.” We left that thinking
session with more questions than we entered it with, but that’s the nature

of Wynter’s work. It pushes one to think and feel more incisively and
deeply about the world around us. In October of 2021, on a whim, zuri
proposed to Kristen, “You wanna start a journal?” and motion ensued. We
were also inspired by the 5 to 7 page black paper format from the Institute
of the Black World’s publications which Kristen reviewed in their archives at the Schomburg Center.
Soon after that, with the genius of Justin, we had a name. And soon after that, we had a release date,
March 16th, 2022, in honor of Freedom’s Journal, the first black newspaper to be published in the
United States on March 16th, 1827. And thus, (De)Cypher: Black Notes on Culture and Criticism was
born.

We would be remiss if we did not name those who have passed within the last few months whose work
enabled our own: Betty Davis and Greg Tate. Each of these figures are central to both cultural
production and cultural commentary. Without Betty Davis, there is, arguably, no funk. Without Greg
Tate’s careful tending to black culture, we may not even have had the thought that seeded this journal’s
beginning. In addition, we must draw attention to the case of Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (formerly known
as H. Rap Brown), a black militant and Imam. On March 16, 2000, he was framed for murder by a state
that was fearful of the power of his words to incite a shift in culture. We dedicate this first edition to
him, thank him for his unshakeable dedication, curse the Worldly powers that be, pray for the strength
of his soul, and encourage you, the reader, to learn more about his case and other political prisoners
being held by the state. It is impossible to build a movement without remembering those who first gave
us choreography. To learn more you can visit https://www.imamjamilactionnetwork.org/.

Cultural criticism, as it stands, engages with aesthetic objects as if the two exist in different worlds; as if
our bodies aren’t vessels constantly being acted upon by outside forces, including the aesthetic
arrangements of the environments we live and die in. “If the organismic body delimits the human
species, then the body is itself culturally determined through the mediation of the socialized sense of self
as well as through the ‘social’ situation in which this self is placed.”1 Culture acts upon us, shaping the way
1
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York
University Press, 2020), 162.
we understand ourselves to exist and is one militant wing of the state. Therefore, if aesthetics “perform”
on us by shaping our desires and tastes, then deciphering is a method of reading that is itself a
performance of self-criticism that indicts the world. “We use the weapon of criticism and self-criticism
to correct the way we deal with each other…in order to carry out that most important revolution—the
internal revolution.”2

No longer can we passively view media, much of which is itself sponsored by and under the whim of the
military-industrial complex. This includes the images and videos of black people killed by police and
white vigilantes circulated on the interwebs as if currency, reifying the relational dynamic in which black
people are subjected to gratuitous, world-defining violence. Such images signify on authenticity,
emotionality, viscerality, representing proximity to “the real” for those who do not themselves
“magnetize the bullets” always directed toward black flesh. Thus in an antiblack world, as a result of
their affective proximity but physical distance, these representations generate aesthetic value securitized
through the gratuity of antiblack violence. The world is constructed of bricks layed by laboring slaves,
but within those bricks are blood, sweat, tears, and flesh. Slavery and colonialism, too, are the work of
aesthetics as “looking” slave drivers “turn[ed] the slave coffle and auction block into a coerced live
performance.”3 “We are rendered captive by the looking…To look is to devour.”4 If criticism is
“looking,” deciphering is a move towards “seeing.” Seeing implies the eyes, but it is a work of the entire
body. Indeed, deciphering is an embodied practice seeking to intervene in the process of anti-black
autopoiesis, and (de)cyphering is a collective practice done in the company of others with the same
conspiratorial aspirations.

What will one find in this collection? In the tradition of black radical experimentation, these offerings
need not necessarily be polished or clean, but real. We undermine the hold of language by not taking it
seriously, opting to use it as a site of play which, ironically, opens up serious potentialities in both
urgency and scale. What does it mean for the journal itself to be blackened? What does it mean to create
from the position of the Black?

If it is a crime to feel black as Patrice Douglass writes, we’re interested in posing the question: “How
does it feel?” Further, we meditate on how that shift within the body relates to the aesthetic object’s
performance in this world–either reifying or rupturing hegemonic logics of virtue and value. If
deciphering is about exposing the cultural order’s rules of functioning, then the question raised by
reading via decipherment would be, “what has to happen in order for this work to make sense?” The
(common) “sense” made must abide by certain rules that are specific to the World order we occupy and
are made by. If we can read toward an uncovering of the rules of the order, then perhaps we can loosen
the compulsory patterns of our behaviors that are required in order to keep the world functioning as it
does in its antiblack character. Because decipherment is processual the actualizing of the practice is
always located in the gerund tense. The deciphering reading is a taking in that is always incomplete. This

2
Safiya Bukhari, The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison & Fighting
for Those Left Behind (New York City: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2010), 60.
3
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “Against Criticism: Notes on Decipherment and the Force of Art,” Hammer Museum, 74.
4
Tyrone S. Palmer, “Devouring the Flesh: Notes Toward an Analytics of Seeing,” Propter Nos 1, no. 1 (2016), 43.
is the condition of prioritizing the fragmentary and ephemeral quality of “notes.” Like the notes app on
your phone…the capturing of thought in the flight of life and living.

Thank you to the Brown Arts Initiative, Professor Elmo Terry-Morgan and the Rites and Reason
Theater, and The Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice for their financial support.

Additionally, Thank you to:

Our editor, Brianna Eaton, for your incisive comments and keen eye for detail.

Our contributors for their diligence and critical thought.

Our lead artist, Ahmari Benton, for an amazing cover that captures the spirit of (De)Cypher.

Sylvia Wynter and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, for intellectual guidance–if even only from afar.

MAVI, for rappin with us about his work and putting Charlotte on.

Ashanti Alston, for the heart and being so apparent in his undying love for the people.

Justin Lang, for holding niggas down while pushing us forward.

Propter Nos, for being another space for radical intellectual discourse.

And all our other niggas who have been there in the process of building this project of love.
(De)Cypher: Black Notes on Culture and Criticism
 Set List
1. “I make the kind [of songs] you gotta read, baby”: Cyphering with MAVI
Justin Lang
Kristen Maye
zuri arman

2. Had to wear the dress/‘cause I had a stick*

Semassa Boko

3. “Helplessly I Reminisce”: Violence, Intimacy, and Frenzy in the Geographies of

Beyoncé’s “Déjà Vu”
Semilore Sobande

4. Is it gospel?
Karee-Anne Rogers

5. Black Aesthetics & Visual Culture: John Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History
Melaine Ferdinand-King

6. Let Me Clear My Throat

Will Johnson

7. What is This “Culture” in Black Popular Culture?: Neocolonial Harmony in

the Age of Neoliberal Domination
Desmond Fonseca

8. Artist’s Note / A Love Letter to K&Z

Bryant Brown

9. (A Meditation on Black Music)

zuri arman

10. “Someone throw a cellphone!”:

Cyphering with Ashanti Alston
Desmond Fonseca
Justin Lang
Malcolm Thompson
zuri arman
 “I make the kind [of songs] you gotta read, baby”:
Cyphering with MAVI
Justin Lang
Brown University, Department of Africana Studies

Kristen Maye
Brown University, Department of Africana Studies

zuri arman
Brown University, Department of Africana Studies

I. “The South Got Something to Say”: On the South, Genre, and Art as a Weapon

Mavi: But yeah it’s so nice to be on this b*tch with Charlotte people and it’s so nice to see y’all.
Charlotte is doing amazing things. Like honestly, bro. That means, like, so much. And, yeah bro, if it’s
way y’all would wanna come back and tunnel that back to the city with me then I’m always super
down.

zuri: Oh, yeah, definitely. We gon have to exchange your shit after this.

Mavi: For sure, for sure.

Kristen: They’re gonna be talking about how something is coming out of Charlotte. There’s
something in the water.

zuri: It’s happening. Something’s happening. In general. Like we got Betty Davis, we got Nina Simone,
we got Mavi. It’s like something is happening in the water in North Carolina, I don’t know. I think
it’s… causing an existential crisis that I think leads to so much beauty. I don’t know there’s so many
forces colliding in North Carolina.

Mavi: Man, and another thing that we have about North Carolina– the Carolinas in general. Insofar as
we can be from anywhere in America, most Black people in America is from the Carolinas. That’s why
it’s a mismatch of everything. And number 2, I don’t know, also about Charlotte— I don’t know if
y’all heard of Fetty P. Franklin? Oh my God. He look like… he sound like Charlotte. He feel like home,
like really tap in with that nigga. We have, like, in this generation, real strong voices that’s coming out
and speaking for the cultural character of the Black community in Charlotte right now. Which I think
is super exciting.

Kristen: I’m really curious to hear you say more about what you think the influence of Charlotte is in
your music and what you think is happening there and…

Mavi: It’s everything. It’s everything. Because regardless of how dreamy or starry eyed I get about
anything, I have to go home. And when I go home, that’s where the people I care the most about for
the longest length of time about the most meaningful things is. And I chased this dream, this starry-
eyed kind of thing, abstraction kind of thing, out of feeling small by comparison to some of the
problems that my family, friends and community had to deal with. And I think ultimately That
desperation To contribute Is… like why “Mavi is for Mayor.” Home is the whole thing. Charlotte is
the whole thing. It’s the point. For sure. Especially when me and my friends in killswitch– Messiah,
Amir, Sco– even Snow, like, With her black lesbian Revolution, her Black punk revolution shit… we
really understand the value of a unique arts education. We understand the value of camaraderie in the
black youth. We gon push that far as it’s gon go. That’s the point of rap. At all. Like in Charlotte. For
real.

zuri: Yeah. Yeah. Related to that, what is your relationship with rap, like, as a genre? ‘Cause one thing
I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is that genre right now is being played around with a lot. I think
a lot about neo-soul and D’Angelo was like, “I don’t do neo-soul. I just make Black music.” You
know? And then right now on Spotify and stuff, they’re saying folks don’t do genre. People like Brent
Faiyaz, he doesn’t do genre. Like he’s outside of genre. So it’s weird how, I don’t know, genre is put on
people and they’re taken out of genre. I was thinking about Tyler the Creator and that whole fiasco
with how he won a Grammy. So I was thinking, what’s your relationship to the genre of rap and do
you think it’s rigid? What do you think is rap?

Mavi: Nah, I’m specifically hip-hop and rap. Explicitly. Because, for one, I think sometimes people run
from being called a rapper ‘cause they don’t like when people call them a nigga. I am a nigga. You
know? So that’s why I am hip-hop and rap explicitly. And I believe, being a nigga, hip-hop got
revolutionary qualities relevant to the experience of a nigga that may not be so relevant anywhere else.
Or may not even be in proper context anywhere else. That’s what I’m explicitly about. ‘Cause I’m
explicitly a nigga. You know what I’m saying? Yeah. So. Also, I believe that hip-hop is a tool politically
that being an amorphous, genre-bending, “I-wanna-get-the-respect-of-white-critics-without-being-
judged-against-any-standard” kind of thing, you’ve given up willingly. Like, there is political utility in
being hip-hop. That the pursuance of “couching” white critics– making them comfortable– like,
“Bro, look at me. I’m not a rapper.” And you’re really appealing that to white people. It’s like Black
Lives Matter. “I’m not a rapper.” You’re not saying this to no niggas. In saying those kind of things,
you losing some kind of political leverage on some small percentage to win over niggas– that I want to
milk to every drop of its worth. And I believe hip-hop is like… yeah. (laughs) It’s just like, for example,
hip-hop is the major educator currently of the Black youth in America. Period. Who in here know
what a drako is? So, like, these are not things for regular people to know.

zuri: Yeah. That makes sense.

Mavi: You probably don’t know nobody who don’t know what it is. What you and all those people
got in common?

Kristen: They Black.

Mavi: 1. Being a nigga. And where are all these concepts coming from? You learn nigga concepts that
you just gotta know, like how to dance and shit. But we don’t all know what a glock is. We learn this
from rap.

Kristen: Is that what you mean when you call it a unique arts education?

Mavi: Well, that too. But also we had the specific ability through city programming to go and record
music. But then we seen the limits because of the antiblack nature of those kinds of things, when they
funded by white institutions. We were stifled in our artistic ability. We want to be able to re-supply
that for the next generation without those limitations and them barriers, you know?

(collective agreement)

Mavi: The arts is something that we really see that can change something into something else.
Hundred percent. But yeah, majority of the words that I know that’s not really even a “word” is from
hip-hop. Period. The majority of what people have to learn from Black people, being that our
relationship with history is what we described earlier, rests disproportionately on the young shoulders
of this one cultural export. And somebody gotta steer the ship. Niggas can’t just jump off the ship
‘cause “punk rocker” sounds cooler. Not in 2022. We got shit to do. Like, we at the crossroads. You
know.

Kristen: That makes me wonder, what do you see yourself doing when you’re making music then? If
you know there’s this sense of responsibility to communicate, to talk to this generation that’s primarily
getting messages, period, through hip hop as a form, but you also know that, like you said, the majority
of the words you know through hip hop. So are you translating messages? Are you trying to reflect an
experience? Are you trying to communicate something to people to get an outcome? What are you
doing when you’re making music?

Mavi: I think I just wanna contribute my truth, which means like distilling the information that I’ve
picked up along the way into edible morsels. So contributing my truth and then propagandizing.
That’s also why it’s important to be hip-hop. It’s also why it’s important– I don’t know, I don’t wanna
get that controversial.

(Collective laughter)

Kristen: We ain’t mad at it.

zuri: I mean we all for it. You wanna go there we can go there.

Mavi: I don’t know, it goes three different ways. I remember one of the best things Earl [Sweatshirt]
ever told me. He said, “The music is fuel for the propaganda machine.” That was it. Like if you really
wanna do something, if you really wanna contribute something, and you have this lane, you better
play really good basketball. Like for sure. Because you gotta yell loud over a lot of people saying a lot of
different things. You know? But yeah that’s why it might seem archaic to cling to a genre. I feel like
this is a swing state kind of genre.

zuri: Yeah.

Justin: That’s hard right there.

zuri: That’s good. I was just ‘bout to ask… I’ve been thinking a lot about conscious rap and how,
sometimes, conscious rap gets kind of– or we’ve seen when niggas try to get conscious and it just
comes out as liberal politics.

Mavi: Yeah, yeah.

zuri: ‘Cause they’re trying to be too literal. So, what is politics to you? Like, at what level are you
engaging in politics? As far as abstraction goes, and not being too on-the-nose.

Mavi: Working to elevate Blackness to a level of political utility that elevate the quality of Black life.
That’s what my politic is. Doing Black shit for Black people to be able to do Black shit.

zuri: Yeah. And you emphasize political utility.

Mavi: Yeah, because we need to be able to “do” in the long term– you know what I’m saying? It needs
to be a potable well. And that’s why something like Black studies, that’s contextualized by struggle, is
still so empowered. You know what I’m saying? ‘Cause a potable well, like, we drink from that. Like
for so much. Deepening those wells, enriching them, making them automic– that’s my politic.

Justin: I just wanted to add when Kristen asked about what you do in your music, I just wanted to ask
on top of that– one of the things that me and zuri talk about a lot is sampling. So in addition to your
words, why do you choose your samples? What are you doing with your samples?

zuri: And just to add on to that, what is your relationship to the beat? Is it your ally? Is it a comrade?
Are you trying to fight it? What is your relationship to that when you’re making?

Mavi: So, sampling– another reason why it’s important to be hip-hop. Because hip-hop is like, in the
oral tradition of Black people, which makes cultural lineage– which sounds like an abstract thing, but
we all can point out things that we eat, drink, listen to. That’s in the cultural lineage of something else
that our grandmama mama mama eat, drank and listened to. You know what I’m saying?

(Collective agreement)

Mavi: And so sampling is a super big part of that, insofar as like– boom. Hella hip-hop songs got
literally the same beat. ‘Cause of how hip-hop was invented. Niggas was spittin the break beat, and
they was spitting all type of different R&B. And like, if you look in DMV, if you look in Flips, if you
look in all type of “lo-fi”, all of these types of different things, you’ll find that as a repeating motif. So,
just as my upbringing, just hearing “Sorry 4 the Wait” by Wayne, coming up hearing the Sade songs
and being like “Oh those are Doom songs,” you know what I’m saying? So the reason why sampling is
so important to me is because sampling literally guided my music discovery in life. Period. Like, I was a
young boy in the early 2000s when niggas was getting a pub deal and flipped everything under the sun.
You know what I’m saying? Niggas could really rap over the Isleys, rap over this, rap over that, rap over
Teddy. And just like, things come home in such a weird way with sampling. And sampling really
speaks to what DJ’ing does, because you know that’s mostly where it comes from. The co-intelligibility
of like, at least all African music. You know what I’m saying?

II. God’s Hair Follicle: The Divine, Crying/Bleeding

zuri: Hell yeah… So you said in an interview that– I was just watching a bunch of interviews trying to
figure out, you know, what hasn’t been talked about– and you said “Imma keep crying over this shit. I
owe it to myself to make myself cry a lil bit.” And I just loved that. So I was thinking, what does crying
mean to you? Especially in the context of like TOWN CRIER from your last EP. And also, it makes
me think of this “bleeding” that keeps coming up with Earl talking about it, Pink Siifu talking about it.
And I’m wondering if those are related. So what is “bleeding” to you? What is crying to you?

Mavi: So crying is more– like I’m not tryna bleed. I’ma die of old age, not a nick on me.

(Collective laughter)

Mavi: I’m goin out different. Like, I’m takin niggas with me, but I’m goin out without a hitch. No
cap. But listen… about tears, though, crying. Crying is, to me, like… For example, if you doing too
much of anything, a good cry is gon’ send some good hormones through your shit. It’s like washing
the inside of your face. And your brain, you know what I’m saying? And also, being made to cry, in
any capacity, whether through joy, pain, misery, grief, suffering, manipulation– whatever. It’s like
smallness in that, that I miss and I covet. And that’s rare for me I feel. Yeah.

zuri: I like the smallness you keep coming to… We’ve been watching a lot of space movies, about space
and the ocean, and these different things. And they cut across this different layer of existence and
you’re like, “Damn. I’m actually on a rock in space, type shit.”

Mavi: And you know why they think the Big Bang happened for real?

zuri: Why?

Mavi: Because everything in space is moving away from each other. At accelerating speeds. So like,
yeah. The force of gravity is growing weaker over long distances and objects travel away from each
other– it’s just crazy. It’s a video I’ll show you– I’ma send y’all the course I got.

Kristen: That’s the joint?

Mavi: Yeah, that’s my shit. That shit sent me down a whole web dark rabbit hole. And I was like,
“Oh no. We are mentally lonely.” But against that grain, it’s like the smallest sliver of grace– like, for
example. The smallest photon from the sun takes like eight seconds to get here. You know? It’s really
far. Really far. Like… I don’t know, when the tilt of Earth is not really in our favor, it’s a whole
different season for us. So it’s like, when you’re this small and you’re this lonely– this only you, grace is
magnified. You know what I’m saying? You can have a whole iota of shit sprout off of these one in
immeasurable number odds. You know what I’m saying?

Kristen: So for you, is grace, then, this kind of divine concept? ‘Cause what I’m really vibing with now
is hearing you describe the magnitude of the universe and how wild that we’re even here given the scale
of cosmologic possibility. It comes down to, like you said, the Earth leaning in our favor, and boom,
it’s warm instead of cold. You think that’s divine?

Mavi: Hell yeah. Because I see grace as such a necessary part to niggas’ spirituality, because without
grace as a concept… First, the world is unintelligibly evil. Like, unintelligibly. Like, you feel cursed.
You know what I mean? And so grace is necessary for me to understand this thing as, “Ok, I’m God’s
hair follicle, bouncing off of his shoulder.” You know what I’m saying? And on the way down, I might
see a part of His sweater that God never seen before and through me He’s experiencing it. And
sometimes he might stop and through me marvel at his own work. That’s grace.

zuri: (Laughs in disbelief) Damn. Wow. Okay. Damn.

III. “Niggas moody but imbued with the funk”: Country Grammars and ‘It’

Justin: The song off of Feet of Clay we were mentioning earlier… El Toro. I don’t know if you saw it in
zuri’s Twitter bio but our favorite bar is, “Niggas moody but imbued with the funk.” For me, I was like,
“I identify with that shit.” I guess I’m just curious: what does that bar mean to you? ‘Cause for me
when I hear it, I’m thinking “This is what’s happening in his music. Niggas moody but imbued with the
funk.” It says a lot to me.

Mavi: Yeah, it’s exactly that. ‘Cause the bar before it is like, “Say ‘bout a prayer a month, through the
above/Niggas moody but imbued with the funk.” So basically when somebody die, you gotta talk to
them through prayer. Also, when somebody die you get all kind of fly shit. Like the things they don’t
want no more. Like, hold this. And I think I got a lotta fly shit from my niggas who not here no more.
And that’s it, for real. It’s like nigga, I’d be fucked up about it because even on something like that: it’s
a lot of people I really loved who never got to hear that or never got to know that was a thing that was
going to happen. And I be fucked up but then I be like “Nigga, alright, I’m really hard” because of
how my grandma taught me. That’s why I’m good at rap, for real. Like I’m really good at rapping
because this thirteenth birthday my mama threw me for me one time, for real. It’s like that. It’s in me
now.
zuri: When you say ‘it,’ like what is ‘it’? And what is it in relation to your body? What is ‘it’, where is it,
and how does it come out in your music?

Mavi: Oh, I don’t know, bro. I think… I don’t know. I be cracking my bones a lot. I be thinking it’s in
between the air up in my bones. When I think about what ‘it’ is… like let’s go back to making myself
cry. When I be crying, that’s ‘it.’ Like when it’s like, “Oh, shit.” For example, it’s this one time I got off
stage, my first show after the car accident in Houston, with Jack and them. And it was like, bruh, I had
went so stupid, bro. Like, so stupid. I literally went backstage and caught the Holy Ghost, my nigga. I
was like, “fuck, fuck, fuck,” couldn’t even say nothing. Like, that’s ‘it.’ And it’s certain times I’ll be
looking shit in the face, and I’ll be like, “I would die for this shit.” Like, today, now, for what I’ve
already had, I’m like ‘Alright, bet.” And you get that from first having amazing elders and then, at a
distance, I’m having amazing ancestors. For sure.

Kristen: What about your elders? Like, will you say more about how you got it from your grandma
and how so much of you being the fly rapper that you are has to do with your elders?

Mavi: Let me give you an example. My grandma had said this one time.. We were having this
conversation. She needed somebody to come and replace her tire, but he needed a ride. And she said,
“When your ox in a ditch, you gotta get him out.” That was the whole sentence. Like, somebody say
“you gotta do better,” she say “your ox in a ditch you gotta get him out.” Like she talk around shit in a
real gangsta way. She talk like how the niggas who wrote the bible talk. For real. So gangster. All my old
people, all my country people. Like, my daddy. Like, they just say shit. Like my grandmama, she’ll be
finna sit down and she will be like, “Lord, have mercy.” (laughs) Like that little fly shit. I’m a word
eater. Like, I’m afraid and eager. Knowing how to talk about shit, knowing how to make them laugh
by telling an ordinary story, knowing how to make people giggle when they just ask you how you
doing. You know what I’m saying?

Kristen: I can hear it even in this conversation. Like there’ve been a lot of moments, I can’t even
remember all of them, where we ask you questions and your responses are, in some way, in the head,
but your response is super visual. Like you calling Black Studies a “potable well.” That to me is
imagery. You talking about a swing state kind of joint– like the way your analysis is so wedded to–

Mavi: And that’s ‘cause I’m from country people! ‘Cause they know stuff. It be kinda offensive to the
New York homies, but like they don’t understand certain things. Like, for example, the people from
New York throw they trash in the street.

Kristen: I was just having this conversation with somebody! I was outside of a wings joint, and this
man pulled up, hopped out, like had a Wendy’s bag and just put that shit on the street. And I was
looking at him like, “You not gon’ pick that up?!”

Mavi: No! And they supposed to be one of the most advanced “humanity looking in the mirror at only
humanity” kind of places on earth. Like bro I really know ‘cause I’m from the city and my family from
one generation back is from the country. People in the city– for example, and I’m not trying to be
ableist or nothing like that, but people in the city don’t be knowing how to do shit that people in the
country know how to do with their life. Period. With nothing. Period. And so, I seen that and I also
seen like, when your people talk country, and you talk a little bit ‘cause you from the city, it’s like you
have to grow into understanding like, “I need to listen real hard, because they really telling me some
shit.” It be shit that my grandmama who didn’t go past the seventh grade told me that allow me to
orient my entire worldview. Period. With all the studies and with all this. And that’s my only compass.
We niggas, bro. We don’t know where we from, we know who we from. You know?

IV. Art as Confrontation: Copyright Law vs. the Black Artist

zuri: Yeah. So it’s almost like the path is already laid out for you.

Mavi: And I ain’t even know it was supposed to be this. It was just news to me. Right? But it wasn’t no
crisis.

zuri: That makes me think of the cover based off [Shel] Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends?

Mavi: He ceased and desisted me over that.

zuri and Kristen: Really?

zuri: Damn, fuck that nigga. That’s crazy– ‘cause I was wondering why the cover changed. Okay.

Mavi: But continue.

zuri: I was just thinking about how they’re looking over the cliff, they don’t know what’s there. It’s
kind of like you’re taking the step off the cliff not knowing fully…

Mavi: Exactly. And it was literally like me and my girl, like, looking over the edge. And END OF THE
EARTH came out February 2021. So that album really about the last six months of 2020. You
remember we was really going outside and shit was not smooth. Like, the police was making it look a
different way as far as the future of the United States. Period. Really looking a different way. Yeah it
was that and literally the uncertainty of the other side of it. And my lack of like leveraged confidence
and self-assuredness, anything, toward it coming out. But it’s whatever. Ultimately I be really hard on
myself and a lot of people be really hard on me too and not even knowing it. “Oh we need an album,
we need an album.” Like, bro, I made albums that people won’t let y’all hear. For real. I got one now
we gotta fight to… You know what I’m saying? I don’t know. I don’t know what this conversation was
about but I started stressing out… Oh, the uncertainty! We was looking over the edge and it was hella
uncertainty. We definitely didn’t know what the future held for us in the local or distant. And it was
my way of stamping that, “Bro, I was here during this shit,” you know what I’m saying? And I didn’t
know either. Yeah.
Justin: I was just thinking about your tweet where you said “y’all cool it my next project is out on
soundcloud,” and what you were talking about with the venue, and the cease and desist over the album
cover… just like the legal mess that comes with…

Mavi: Being an artist.

Justin: Yeah. Could you talk a bit about that?

Mavi: I’ma say it like this… remember how we was talking about sampling? Cultural lineage? US
copyright law is not in the Black oral tradition.

(collective laughter)

Kristen: I mean, that’s on some property law shit and we all know the origins of that.

Mavi: Right! Exactly. And you know who gets the least amount of protection under any law in the
United States. And… I don’t know. For this little white girl to go on Fallon doing this little Black girl’s
dance and niggas cease and desist me for having an original… man, it’s like a smack in the face, bro. I
don’t know, bro. We can talk about something else. But you see that, right?

zuri: Yeah.

V. Language and (Mis)Translation

Mavi: But there are things I don’t want my music or my money in pockets ever associated with, for
sure. A lot of them. But is there a place where I don’t want my music to go? Unless it’s, like, no Black
people there– no.

Kristen: What does that mean to your relationship to critics or just to people who consume your
music? Like do you have a clear purpose about ‘This is a propagandistic effort.’ But of course how it’s
received is beyond your control. Do you just not engage beyond that or what happens when people
misunderstand your work or try to interpret it towards different ends or whatever?

Mavi: Okay. First, the reason why I can be a little bit dispersonal about the mistranslation that’s native
to this mission is because we’re speaking in English to begin with. Like this ain’t no direction of
intention through vocalism that’s connected to our spiritual self and way of being. It’s just not that.
Even at my most close to my heart, it ain’t that, ‘cause it’s in this language. You know what I’m saying?
‘Cause at the end of the day we talking white to begin. And then my thing about critics though… is like
I was saying. It wasn’t a crisis when a lot of people started listening to me. I remember in the tenth
grade a lot of people were saying, “Oh, we can’t hear what Mavi is saying,” ‘cause I had a shitty mic at
the time. And they’d just keep saying that shit, like, every song. And I just kept dropping songs at the
end of the day. Whatever criticisms people make at the end of the day, I make a million more
criticisms. And I’m also just on a path to artistic self-improvement. And, you know, when it’s not
cogent, then it’s just not cogent. And I can send my hounds on, like, an “Attack him!” mission.
(laughs) Like, when it is, I can take it on the chin and in stride pretty well, I think. And because I've
been in label situations and stuff… like, for example, I went to label offices in New York City– my first
trip up there, and played niggas’ music and they like the ‘Ye in the Def Jam office, for real, for real.
Like, that don’t matter. I know I’m hard, bro. And before this amount of people knew I was hard,
when 5 people knew I was hard, I knew I was hard. You know?

VI. Black Eusociality

zuri: Okay, cool. Could you just talk a little bit about your new work and where you see it going?

Mavi: Um, it’s called Laughing So Hard It Hurts, and it’s kind of autobiographical, about just me
falling in love and me drinking a lot of alcohol, and me going on tour and all of the hijinks that are in
those three things together. And the visual motif for the album are bees, ‘cause… I don’t know. I feel
like niggas is bees like… like– you know eusocialism?

All: No.

Mavi: It’s an ecological term that sound like a sociological term. And it refer to, like, how the
coordination on a chemical, and even kinetic (like dancing and wiggling level) between bees is so, like,
highly advanced they communicate on a level like cells in your body. Like, to where common life go.
And they willing to murk themselves out like cells in your body and everything. Um, and so that was
really intriguing to me because like I was saying earlier– we all beady-beads on the back of God’s neck.
And the other thing that was intriguing about bees as a visual motif was pollination as a concept. And
I feel like… the resources of Africa pollinate Earth. They been doing it. This whole act of history. And
they represent our ancestors dusting a little bit of ourselves off to the next flower.

zuri: Yeah. So what do you see as your relationship to Africa? Like politically, culturally– like,
obviously the place that we originate from, but as far as today’s politics. How do you relate to Africa as
a place?

Mavi: A lot of my friends is Africans. Like, for example, I try to only to shit in Africa that I know.
Like, oh my God. And I don’t want to sound reductive or antiblack in saying this, but Africa is a little,
tiny bit, like, gangbanging. Like, if you come to the middle of the 60s and the Hoovers is like ‘Can’t we
all just get along?’ it’s not the humanism you think it is necessarily. You know what I’m saying? So,
first, just understanding the economic relations that keep Africa where it is is super important to me,
and not seeing it as a failure of African resources but a matter of directing resources out of Africa. And
beyond that I just try to learn from my friends whose families are there. About what’s going on. What
America’s doing, what Russia’s doing, what these niggas doing, what these niggas doing. Like, what’s
going on in Ethiopia is an example of something I learned through my friends. Like, lived experiences.
And I wanna speak to that– with them on that behalf. I wanna be informed from involved people in
Africa everywhere I go. And then I’ll let that define my actions. You know? That’s why it’s a little bit
like [?]. You don’t know what niggas got to forgive each other for, you can’t even really say ‘Hey, let’s
all form an economic thing under the gold dinar!’ Like, no it’s not gonna happen, bro. These niggas
really hate each other for reasons you would really hate somebody over, too. For real. And that
resolution of that intracommunal space is literally where I live even on this side of the ocean. Because I
wanna know how the shit that we do as Black men implicate the same kind of organization of forces
over here. You know? So, yeah. Same way how we got Chicago niggas that don’t get along, LA niggas
that don’t get along, and Florida niggas them and ‘nem don’t get along, kind of is related, I feel like.
And it’s related to splintering, tearing, reassembly. You know? It’s the venue of humanity, Africa. Like,
we solve Africa we done solved all the shit. Like, we done solved the whole shit. And that’s not to speak
to the unsolvability, but that’s to speak to, like, its eminence and ubiquity. You know what I’m saying?

zuri: Yeah, yeah. Well, first, I like that. Because I find that a lot of times niggas think of Africa and
place it in this distant past and it’s like, nah, this place is still active. But yeah, like, my roommate is
Eritrean so I get to learn a lot about what Black culture there looks like… and East Africa gets a bad rap
for being like ‘Oh we’re not Black,’ but she’s like, ‘No, Eritreans are Black.’ It’s been cool to get
informed about the current stuff going on, rather than just what was Africa.

Mavi: For real. And even if you do Africa on a basis of who opt in to Blackness, you gon’ start to see
political patterns form around when, why, how. You know? Around that too. But, for sure, Africa is
the venue of humanity for me right now. It’s the venue of humanity for the global economy, the
political world, everywhere. Everywhere. Everybody.

zuri: That also makes me think about Sylvia Wynter. We haven’t talked about her yet. ‘Cause for her
we all originate from Africa and language-ers and storytellers. Could you talk about what Winter
you’ve read? ‘Cause I thought that was, like… I haven’t met many people who’ve read Wynter.

Mavi: It was an essay… I was reading that shit when I was a boy, like 18, 19… But it was because I didn’t
know what Afro-Pessimism was. I’m trying to figure out because I be posting on my philosophical shit
on my Finsta…

zuri: (laughs) I feel that. I have a Finsta for my poetry now, so. Was it Unsettling: The Coloniality of
Being…

Mavi: It was a PDF I read online… Yes! Unsettling: The Coloniality of Being… I found that off Twitter
threads. I couldn’t remember the title.

zuri: That’s my favorite one. And you said Afro-pessimism, so I was like. So what do you gain from
her? How did she change how you thought? ‘Cause I feel like once you read Wynter, you kind of can’t
think the same anymore.

Mavi: Yeah… it made me feel a little sad, because it do the ‘cursed’ thing with me again, like. It made
me feel bad because it was like words that made me feel was empowering was like a designation in a real
concrete way that you don’t understand unless you like… Yeah, this is what Black is. It’s really
depressing but really encouraging at the same time.
zuri: What about that do you find encouragement in? Because I find encouragement in it, but a lot of
people don’t.

Mavi: ‘Cause when you read scholarly you supposed to be like, ‘Push back lil nigga.’ You know? Like, I
don’t think any philosopher write to tell you what shit is… like I think they want you to engage with
the work. In a critical way. You know what I’m saying? And I think if that critical way is empirical,
right? Which is like, okay, let me see this shit is different and just prove it through my lived experience,
then that’s a whole ‘nother mission and set of missions. You know what I’m saying?

(Collective agreement)

VII. Ashé

Kristen: I mean I’m super grateful for the time and… I feel like this was something I could do all the
time, like every day. It’s nice to vibe on a thinking level at the same time as a feeling, connecting level. I
just wanna say I appreciate you showing up and holding space with us.

Mavi: I appreciate you too, Kristen. Damn. Thank you Justin and zuri! On my mama, bro. I like y’all.
Y’all some cool cats.

Kristen: The South will do it to you.

Justin: I appreciate y’all letting a non-Charlotte nigga pull up.

Mavi: Get this nigga out of here, bro. This nigga don’t got no ties to East Side. Aye, the first place I
ever lived in Charlotte was Lake point and Teal Point, fun fact about me. And then, like, why we
moved out of Teal Point to University was because the door beneath us got kicked in, like on some
rage shit. And my daddy used to always tell me as a kid that I couldn’t live in this type of environment
no more. But then, his baby cousin was like, ‘You don’t know your daddy sold a lot of dope.’

(Collective laughter)

Mavi: That was funny, bro. But, for real, bro, please stay tapped with me. Stay attached to me. Let me
know what y’all doing and thinking.
 Had to wear the dress/‘cause I had a stick*
Semassa Boko
University of California-Irvine, Department of Sociology

*This piece is best meant to be read aloud–at the auction block or at brunch. With your niggas on the couch or in
front of strangers at the crossroads. Let these words percolate beyond the page. They’re restless.

“Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be so….” In 1926 W.E.B. Du Bois spoke this phrase in front
of a crowd gathered to celebrate the pedagogical innovator Carter G. Woodson for receiving an award
from the NAACP. Du Bois takes the moment to wax poetic about black folks’ desires–for beauty,
freedom, justice, and more ideals that we can only chase obliquely due to the totality of antiblackness–
and how these desires can constrain or facilitate a vibrant culture of black artistry. Du Bois articulated a
trajectory on how to think through the meaning of art objects. Nearly a century later, Sylvia Wynter
pursues that same trajectory in her epoch shifting interventions into the relationship between art and
politics, most pointedly articulated in her essay "Rethinking Aesthetics: Notes Toward a Deciphering
Practice." By claiming that all art functions as propaganda, regardless of the intent of its makers, Du
Bois goes on to elaborate that black art has the potential to direct our tastes, values, and orientations
within the world. But this potential isn’t easily located, as Wynter’s approach eschews the classical critic’s
fantasy that meaning is inherent within the text, and that the critic’s labor is to search for said meaning
like a treasure hunt. For Du Bois and Wynter, there are no transcendental meanings to texts - they labor
differently in different contexts. Decipherment, then, is a method that seeks to engage in constant
dialogue with texts that could be said to “speak” differently depending on who’s looking and what
dynamic, iterative relationships emerge in concert with the World around them.

____________________

Whole lotta uncut funk1 circulating?/My soul is leaking and I don’t know if you’ve read anything/ on
black men2 but I can’t read so I don’t know/bars meditating on the question of nigga
authenticity3/Searching searching searching
____________________

Mumble rap is more akin to a phobic object than a coherent category of music. Like a specter haunting
hip-hop, this minor aesthetic revolution threatened what purists held most dear–articulate lyricism,
precise storytelling, mastery of instrumentals–and portended a sonic abyss. Thus, rather than attempt
to define and delineate mumble rap, my analysis of it occurs at the level of discourse. The long trajectory
of mumble rap can be linked to the prevalence of auto-tune in the mid-2000s. The auto-tune processor
represents the birth pangs of mumble rap’s outright defiance of rap conventions. While voice distortions

1
Bell Hooks and Stuart Hall. 2018. Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue. New York; London: Routledge Taylor &
Francis Group.
2
David Marriott. 2000. On Black Men. New York. Columbia University Press.
3
R.A. Judy “On the Question of Nigga Authenticity.” Boundary 2 21, no. 3 (1994): 211–30.
https://doi.org/10.2307/303605.
were not new to hip-hop, auto-tune’s adoption by singers and eventually rappers was the first sign that
crisp legibility was no longer the standard for rap. Auto-tune’s biggest singular moment came with
Kanye’s 808s and Heartbreak, an epoch-shifting rap album if there ever was one. While many have noted
that 808s ushered in the era of emo-rap, I have not seen anyone make a claim for the album as a central
node in emo-rap’s entanglement with mumble rap. Of course, rappers have always expressed a range of
emotions in their music–what made emo-rap unique was its lack of desire to control or reign in the
expression of those emotions. Rather, emo-rappers gave themselves over to the whims of their conscious
and unconscious feelings.

I want to use the term emo-mumble rap to emphasize shared origins as well as the complementary role
these signifying practices have played in the catalog of stars like Playboi Carti, Young Thug, Lil Uzi Vert,
and an entire generation of rappers coming of age
in the post-Obama era. Emo-mumble rap is a
signifying practice that has been mislabeled as a
trend or subgenre of hip hop. Both designations,
“emo rap” and “mumble rap,” emerged in the
long decade of the 2010s alongside an era that
people have variously called late stage capitalism,
the collapse of US global hegemony, or the time
of slavery. Emo rap and mumble rap are not
synonymous, but they both flourished in the
soundcloud era of do-it-yourself production,
ethereal rhythms, distorted sounds, and stream of
consciousness bars.

In mumble rap, the lyrics no longer seek mastery

over the instrumental. The relationship is
ambivalent at best, or the vocals are relegated to the background. A cacophony of instrumentals and ad-
libs works to render the traditional 16 bar verse obsolete in favor of illegible creations. Such a dynamic
was ideal in facilitating a version of emo-rap that departed slightly from what 808s established–the
central difference being the centrality of drug culture to the younger generation of rappers. In a world
careening off the tracks, anxiety drugs like lean, percocets, and xanax become the necessary lubricant for
these artists to let loose their emotional ballads.

There’s no question that emo-mumble rap is overdetermined, even by rap standards, by cishet black
men. What are we to make of this?
_____________________

Stomach growling gotta eat these tears to quell it/Got me lodged in the chamber/Said once the trigger
pulled I’ll be on my way/On my way to becoming human4/How can I breathe when air itself is choking

4
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. , 2020. Internet resource.
me/Got the criteria of negro art5 etched into these pills/Freedom is calling for me but niggas are not
called/Refuse refuse refuse but I’m tired of perfecting slavery6/Bleeding for answers to impossible
questions/probably why my shit stay leakin’/I can’t offer you protection and /If you see jazz as critique7
please stay/With me/What can secure me under conditions of exposure/Her eyes are the screen for my
waking nightmares8/Don’t ask me what I said just listen and bear witness/To devastation/The 808s
thumping and keeping my heart intact9
____________________

These sonic revolts were accompanied by visual ones as

well. In 2016, emo-mumble rapper Young Thug
unveiled his album cover for Jeffrey, in which he dons
a bright periwinkle dress by Italian designer Alessandro
Trincone. Instantly the blogosphere sang his praises,
using descriptors such as “gender-fluid,” and
“androgynous,” to highlight the allegedly subversive
nature of his action. Though there had always been
artists who pushed the bounds of the association
between rap and a certain disavowal of queer-coded
visual presentations, it had been some years since a
mainstream artist like Andre 3000 had done so with such flare. Beyond Thug’s dress were the
flamboyant outfits and brightly colored hair of many in the emo-mumble rap world. Even though
reactionary, vulgar patriarchal resistance to these aesthetic choices exist, the resistance only instantiates
the expansion of Western masculinity into new visual cultures while retaining their brutal commitments

5
W.E.B. Du Bois. 1926. Criteria of Negro art. New York, NY: Crisis Pub. Co.
6
Anthony P. Farley. 2005. “Perfecting Slavery.” Loyola University Chicago Law Journal 36, 225-256.
7
Fumi Okiji. 2018. Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited. Stanford, California: Stanford University
Press.
8
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson. 2011. “Waking Nightmares--on David Marriott.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17
(2–3): 357–63.
9
Katherine McKittrick and Alexander Weheliye. 2017. “808s and Heartbreak.” Propter Nos Vol. 2.
to the hierarchies of man. The resistance to the ever-shifting ground of hip-hop’s sonic and visual
presentations adds legitimacy to the idea that these changes are revolutionary in and of themselves.

Were I a flowery critic, I would say that the affective displays and visual tapestries of Young Thug, Juice
WRLD and other rappers both reclaiming and innovating on a history of black masculine self-styling
constitutes a minor aesthetic revolution. While the sonic and visual forms of the emo-mumble rap milieu
gesture towards radical new visions, the content and material violence brushes against the grain of these
optimistic readings. Whether we’re talking about lyrical content, or the mix of abuse and queerphobia
in the lives of rappers like XXXTENTACION and Lil Uzi Vert, it’s clear that unfettered emotional
expression and presentation does not provide an antidote to violence. Young Thug starts off the intro
to So Much Fun by referencing the famous Jeffrey cover art “Had to wear a dress/cause I had the stick.”
Why provide this rationale if, as Thug once said, “I feel like there’s no such thing as gender?” And why
base the rationale in the gun, a phallic signifier so central to commercial rap in the pre emo-mumble rap
turn?

Contrary to reactionary concepts such as “the encroaching gay agenda,” these alternative-becoming-
normalized stylings function as a gender performance counterinsurgency. An attempt by power to re-
orient such tastes back into the fold of cisheteronormative patriarchy. Young Thug can flaunt queer-
coded fashion and attempt to rationalize that choice through references to violence while remaining
entirely consistent because this is an era of the retrenchment of the aesthetics of Man as they grapple
with crisis. Following Wynter’s trajectory, meaning does not simply follow form. Performances that
once had subversive potential become emptied and absorbed into the ideological edifice that upholds
the antiblack World as we know it.

The unthinkability of black masculine affect is demonstrated

in the oscillation of the black male imago –a psychic portrait
of black males lodged deep within the collective
unconscious–between imaginary figures overdetermined by
numb stoicism or enlivened distress. The emo-mumble
becomes a way to express (and it’s important to understand
that this reflection disregards or exceeds the limits of
representation), the unspeakable violation of an antiblack
world. Sun Ra rightfully defines hell as an inability to cry
coinciding with a desire to cry–I’ll add that emo-mumble rap
is what happens when niggas attempt to burn down hell by
releasing that which cannot be communicated yet must be
expressed. However, emo-mumble rap offers a cathartic release for the World, which is experiencing a
sense of vertigo, a loss of moorings, coordinate-less space. Whatever potentially revolutionary meaning
inherent in these performances become usurped and paraded in order to direct the public’s tastes back
towards Man.
Important to note is also how Black male artistic freedom can come with a cost borne by black women,
queer, and gender noncomforming artists. Alexander Weheliye notes that the change in song structures
within contemporary rap music–a move away from the “16 bars - chorus - 16 bars - chorus - 16 bars -
chorus” once-recognizable template–has meant that the political economy of black women’s singers has
had to adjust because black non-men used to sing the hooks, especially on the most popular singles. As
Megan Thee Stallion theorized, women could not achieve the same commercial success using flows
associated with mumble rap. It is here where the libidinal economy of consumption for the delectable
black male imago meets the political economy of a music industry that produces gendered artist
subjectivities. What are we to make of this convergence?
____________________
If imma be a monster anyway might as well/be one of my creation10/I’m the one who keep you fools
standin upright right11/or did you forget/The fear is overwhelming but the love/Is too/Sitting here
rethinking aesthetics12 with a box o’ blunts for breakfast
____________________

It is imperative to recognize that these aesthetic shifts in mainstream rap emerged at the same time as a
cultural recognition of men’s, and specifically black men’s mental health. The idea that black men’s
emotions are repressed, and that only their unadulterated expression can be the cure for their suffering,
parallels the grammar of sociology’s logic of discrimination. The academic social sciences have long been
animated by the idea that marginalized people suffer due to discrimination that excludes them from
social institutions. If exclusion is the horizon of the problem, then inclusion becomes the horizon of the
solution. And well, we all see how well Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion™ has gone for the amelioration
of black suffering in the world. This analogous structure of critique and problem-solving speaks to the
chokehold that the modern onto-epistemic regime has on our imagination. These dynamics cannot be
captured under the rubric of “men’s privilege,” but instead as a tortured site of display and
consumption. How do these sonic and visual patterns of emo-mumble rap reproduce the aesthetic of
Man while giving the superficial appearance of deep change?

Many of the discernable lyrics in emo-mumble rap attempt a similar flip - softbois become the victims
of the women in their lives because women can “act like niggas too.” Vulnerability is supposed to confer
innocence, absolving one from the violence of Man by wearing the coat of marginalization. We can hear
this trend distilled concisely when Juice WRLD raps “Mmm, they're rottin' my brain, love/These hoes
are the same/I admit it, another ho got me finished.” A narcissistic plea for empathy that crowds out the
suffering of those one is in relation with. If we understand that visibility is a trap, then the answer to
being invisibilized is not necessarily to seek visibility. It’s easier to rage against your girl than to rage
against the World. The moment just before a transformed masculinity comes with a delirious splash of

10
Jared Sexton. 2018. Black Men, Black Feminism. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
11
Hortense J. Spillers. 2007. “The Idea of Black Culture.” CR: The New Centennial Review 6 (3): 7–28.
12
Sylvia Wynter. 1992. "Rethinking "Aesthetics": notes towards a deciphering practice". Ex-Iles: Essays on Caribbean
Cinema. 237-279.
main character syndrome. The potentially revolutionary aesthetic revolts are stymied by targeting
women under the sign of an evolved masculinity.

The soundscapes conjured in emo-mumble rap take cues especially from the experimentation of blues
vocals, the uncertainty of funk syncopation, and the accumulation of jazz tension.
What if such, excessive, monstrous affect was embraced and ritualized in community? It all starts with
asking what are the emo-mumble rappers trying to say? Why are they trying to say it now? And what is
driving their cultural success?

Closed lips through the suffering and safety didn’t come13/treated the world like my therapist but I still
felt naked and afraid/is it a way out/Three nights after the ceremony/The black catatonic
scream14/Liminal dreams showing scenes/Of the after-present/Archipelagos of /identity falling in a
cascade/My body makes a liar of the world/Can a moment of capture bear the fruit of freedom?/Could
you bear the nothing of which I seek/Do you know what it’s like to love on shifting ground /Cinematic ode
to lack/God’s/is change/Negroid meditations marinating new epistemic flavors/Standing at the horizon
of death15/Suspended in animation/Spectator spectacular spooky action at a distance/Spectacles notched
up the face Jappetto pulling the strings/Black is the message and the message is (repeat ad
nauseam)/Glossy fictions weighty truths/Tear drops filled with images/Scottie beamin’ through the
weightless atmosphere/Sounds drowned out in the midst of mimesis/Fear trailing my skin like rhizome
roots

13
Tyrone S. Palmer. 2017. “‘What Feels More Than Feeling?’: Theorizing the Unthinkability of Black Affect.” Critical
Ethnic Studies 3 (2): 31.
14
Harmony Holiday. 2020. “The Black Catatonic Scream.” Triple Canopy.
15
Denise Ferreira da Silva. 2007. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Borderlines 27. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
 “Helplessly I Reminisce”: Violence, Intimacy, and Frenzy in
the Geographies of Beyoncé’s “Déjà Vu”
Semilore Sobande
Brown University, Department of English

While her 2016 visual album, Lemonade, is Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s most infamous foray into the
world of New Orleans, fans of the singer will remember that it is not her first. Fifteen years ago, Beyoncé
placed her second (and her first visual) album, B’Day, in the Louisiana metropolis and surrounding area.
Shot on Oak Valley Plantation. “Déjà Vu,” a song about Beyoncé’s inability to escape her lover, opens
the album, propelling relentlessly forward with a combination of Roland 808, bass guitar, and trumpet.
The Guardian’s Caroline Sullivan praises the track for being as “feverish as pre-watershed pop gets,”
with Beyoncé embodying a “young, feral Tina Turner.”1 Sasha Frere-Jones quips in his New Yorker
review: “‘Déjà Vu’ takes a particularly perplexing view of memory: ‘Is it because I’m missing you that
I’m having déjà vu?’ Why would you be trying to remember the person standing right in front of you?”2

These three elements—black southern geographies, frenzy, and repetition—appear throughout

Beyoncé’s oeuvre, from the plantations present in Lemonade to her performance of the overwrought
housewife in “Why Don’t You Love Me” to the remixes she constructed for her 2018 Coachella
performance, Homecoming. “Déjà Vu,” however, melds these parts together, provoking thoughts about
the intimacy of their relationship and of its violence. Deploying repetition on multiple levels, “Déjà Vu”
conjures the figure of an omnipresent lover, one that is always right in front of the devotee, yet still
inaccessible. Aptly translating to “I have seen this before,” the title reflects on the song’s similarity to the
2003 “Crazy in Love” while also evoking an eeriness not present in the previous single.

This eerie, frenzied love is a haunting (“seeing things that I know can’t be/am I dreaming?”) that
culminates in a madness somehow sharper than that of “Crazy in Love.” A madness which, through
repetition, no longer seems theoretical as it pulses against the background of New Orleans and the Oak
Valley Plantation. I am not interested in evaluating whether or not Beyoncé is a black feminist, or in
arguing for “Déjà Vu” as a kind of black feminist work. Rather, I wish to think about the ways in which
this song, with or without Beyoncé’s intent, navigates what Katherine McKittrick terms geographic
struggle, entangling her and her intimate life with the violence of the plantation. Calling back to a past

1
Caroline Sullivan. "Beyoncé, B'Day (Review)." 01 Sept. 2006. Web. 26 Apr. 2021.
2
Sasha Frere-Jones. "Crazy from Love." The New Yorker. The New Yorker, 20 June 2017. Web. 26 Apr. 2021.
much older than the relationship between Beyoncé and Jay-Z, “Déjà Vu” reveals how the specter of
intertwined violence and intimacy haunt black women’s lives and human experiences.

Sweat drips down Beyoncé’s back as the video for “Déjà Vu” opens, closely followed by the whispered
invocation, “bass” (Figure 1). As Beyoncé
announces the entrance of the Roland 808 and the
hi hat, the camera switches between her back and
Jay-Z’s shadowed form sitting in a chair. The
distinct levels of the beat come into the song in
concert with Beyoncé’s flexing shoulders, which
call to mind heat, labor, and sex. Kevin Allred writes
that this introduction “invokes slavery insomuch as
the back was often the site of punishment.”3 The
sweat connects to not only the sexual but also to the
actual site of punishment where the video is being
filmed: Oak Valley Plantation. Behind Beyoncé’s back is the house outside of which around 110 to 120
men and women once worked to turn sweet cane juice into molasses and sugar, now a restaurant and
inn.4

While, as Jarvis McInnis suggests, the music video for Déjà Vu, evacuates the plantation of its violent
past in ways similar to the tourism industry5, the plantation’s violent intimacies are exactly what bring
the reality of Oak Alley Plantation as a site of punishment and Beyoncé’s back as a site of sex together.
At the opening of her book Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman identifies the site of Frederick
Douglass’ Aunt Hester’s back as a primal scene of induction into slavery. Aunt Hester’s back opens
Douglass’ first autobiography, with Douglass recounting how witnessing his aunt being whipped
propelled him to pursue freedom. But Hartman, noting how viewers can consume violence against the
enslaved in a way that engenders pleasure, refuses to recount that incident in her own work.6 The back
represents a space where violence and pleasure are intimately acquainted—a specter of the plantation
that asserts itself throughout the Déjà Vu video. The lyrics’ longing for a lover are inseparable from the
discomfort the viewer feels upon realizing the setting of the bizarre romance, which in turn refigures the
song as a reference to what Hartman calls the afterlives of slavery.

The chorus, which is two repetitions of “Know that I can't get over you/'Cause everything I see is
you/And I don't want no substitute/Baby, I swear it's Déjà Vu,” is undergirded by a combination of
live instruments and synthetic production, a combination of the living and the dead, so to speak. Jason
Goldstein, who mixed the majority of the songs on B’Day, revealed in an interview that this philosophy

3
Kevin Allred. Ain't I a Diva?: Beyoncé and the Power of Pop Culture Pedagogy. First Feminist Press edition.
4
Oak Alley Plantation. "The Slave Community." Oak Alley Foundation. 2021. Web. 26 Apr. 2021.
5
McInnis, Jarvis C. "Black Women’s Geographies and the Afterlives of the Sugar Plantation." American Literary History
31.4 (2019): 741-774, 761.
6
Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making In Nineteenth-century America. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997, 3-4.
of combining the past and present runs through the composition of the piece, which is a modern funk-
inspired R&B song utilizing production technologies from three different decades.7 When Beyoncé calls
for the entrance of different musical elements, she bridges past and present as the sweat rolls down her
spine.

The back, of course, is an infamous site for the bridge. Allred reads Beyoncé’s back alongside the 1981
feminist anthology “This Bridge Called My Back”, noting that even as bridges serve as connections, they
must also bear weight and operate as liminal spaces.8 As the video continues, we begin to see the toll that
serving as the through line for this song takes on Beyoncé. She runs frantically through cane fields and
marshes searching for her lover as her voice performs some of the most arduous moves she has in her
discography to date. Within this immense effort, at any point, that delicate vocal balance threatens to
spin out of control.

This toll, the labor of keeping constructions together, ties Beyoncé to the women who worked that
plantation years before. Just as Beyoncé pushes herself to the limit to hold together the song and its
narrative, so too, as McKittrick stipulates, are black women necessary for the site of the plantation to
hold itself together. The musical integrity of “Déjà Vu” and the organizational integrity of the plantation
both require the presence of the black woman. Far from being subversive, however, the existence of this
relationship is violent in and of itself. Apart from the violence of using the plantation as a site on which
to stage a romance, what “Déjà Vu” forces us to acknowledge is how the plantation has shaped our
contemporary notions of romance. Narratives of the seduced and seducer, of love as capture or as
inescapable—these romantic through lines may not have originated with slavery yet have become
irrevocably entangled with it. Moreover, Beyoncé’s existence in diaspora connects her to the unnamed
enslaved women through the same logics of violence
and intimacy that animate the logic of the plantation
system, and by extension, modernity.

Beyoncé’s relation to romance, violence, and

intimacy becomes clearer when we turn to her
invocation of the figure of the mulatta. Sitting at the
crossroads between intimacy and violence, the figure
of what Lisa Ze Winters terms the “mulatta
concubine” dominates the landscape of the music
video. Farah Jasmine Griffin observes that the
sartorial choices throughout the video for “Déjà Vu”
portray Beyoncé as “the “fancy girl” trade of

7
Paul Tingen. "Secrets Of the Mix Engineers: Jason Goldstein." Sound on Sound. 01 May 2021. Web. 26 Apr. 2021.
8
Allred, Ain’t I a Diva?, 38.
antebellum New Orleans.”9 Griffin points to a Spring 2010 ad where Beyoncé uses a blue-green
headdress that recalls the tignons worn by mixed women in New Orleans.10

The eroticism of the image of her back at the start of the video stems in large part from the lightness of
her skin, from within the setting of the house rather than the field. Her body is her own, but also echoes
the sensuality of the mixed-race woman, a sensuality borne out of violence. As Ze Winters writes,

...her body is evidence of the racialized and sexualized trauma, the violence of white male desire, the geographic
displacement, and, perhaps most importantly, the fractured and interdependent reproductions of kinship and
capital so central to economies of American slavery...Her presence at once epitomizes what it is to be in diaspora
and lays bare the fragility of any notion of kinship shaped and haunted by slavery and its “afterlife.”11

This fragility of kinship speaks to how this song reiterates both a need for intimacy and its impossibility.
After being “Crazy in Love,” Beyoncé now finds herself traversing familiar territory. On the surface,
Beyoncé sings about loving Jay-Z while he sings about his transformation from drug dealer to hip-hop
mogul. Yet capital continues to haunt them as Beyoncé orbits Jay-Z, her body gravitating towards him
as he raps about his economic success. By this time, they have become kin—they infamously marry in
secret before the video’s release—yet watching the video in retrospect, one cannot help but think of the
fractures in their relationship as a result of Jay-Z’s infidelity. In Lemonade, she once again returns to
New Orleans, to the plantation. As we watch her in 2022, the past/present/future blend together. We
watch her look over her shoulder, back at her lover/at the plantation house, a dancer who never escapes
from the past, because the performance itself is always in the past tense. In a disturbing way, Beyoncé
has fused the multiple afterlives of her own intimate self with the afterlives of the plantation.

These fusions are overwhelming, and watching closely, one sees the video fracture as the intensity of this
performance becomes too much, and Beyoncé tips from wildly sensual to simply wild. In the spaces
where the music repeats, truncated by a trumpet, Beyoncé’s face contorts into something almost feral.
During the first verse, as she tells her lover “it’s like I breathe you,” her hand begins to shake as if she can
no longer control it. As the trumpet blasts to signal the end of the phrase, the scene switches to Beyoncé
in another room with one leg up on the couch, and in the milliseconds before it switches back to her in
white, Beyoncé throws her head back and directs an almost possessed look at the camera when previously
her expressions have been tinged with a vacant sensuality (Figure 3). The scene shifts to Beyoncé with
her eyes and mouth wide open in surprise, obscured behind outstretched hands as she begins to sing

9
Farah Jasmine Griffin. "At Last…?: Michelle Obama, Beyoncé, Race & History." Daedalus 140.1 (2011): 131-141, 139.
10
Ibid., 140.
11
Lisa Ze Winters. The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic.
University of Georgia Press, 2016.
“Helplessly I reminisce, don’t want to,” then “clarifies” the phrase by following with “Compare nobody
to you” (Figure 4).

Helplessness is the mode of intimacy here, and this very

helplessness is what makes the track so frenetic. While the long shots of the video are dreamy and sexual,
they are always cut by moments of intense frenzy. The feverishness of this video provokes a hysteria in
Beyoncé, one that doesn’t reach a resolution. In contrast to the fairly steady rhythm of “Crazy in Love,”
“Déjà Vu” builds a growing sense of momentum, through the first two verses and Jay-Z’s verse, until it
breaks through to the bridge, where Beyoncé belts out the seemingly contradictory line: “Is it because
I’m missing you/That I’m having Déjà Vu?”

Déjà vu suggests an uncanny familiarity with the never-before-experienced, the mystery of encountering
the unknown yet believing it is known. However, if Beyoncé knows her lover well enough to miss him,
then déjà vu gestures not to the lover, but to the entanglements that lover brings with him. She is not
familiar with Oak Valley, or with a particular romantic love, yet the larger logics implicated in her
relationship cause her to “helplessly reminisce.” As Hartman suggests in “Venus in Two Acts,” they
engendered her. Returning to Louisiana, her mother’s hometown, she unwittingly confronts her own
history and ties to the plantation, even though those ties remain unspoken.

While Beyoncé’s performative choices are unarguably problematic, “Déjà Vu” nevertheless is a place
from which we might begin to think more broadly about intimacy, violence, and (black female) modern
life. From enslaved women to Josephine Baker, who are the ghosts that Beyoncé is running from as she
sprints down the pathway in front of the plantation? Who does she see that makes her eyes go wide with
fear or with frenzy? These questions need more meditation, but I think they might offer us a way to
begin to think through the connections between violence and intimacy that inhabit black geographies,
to think through how to live in a world where violence and intimacy are so inseparable. Even to imagine
a new world, where intimacy is possible without violence. Where those we love are always-already there,
with no need for déjà vu.
 Is it gospel?
Karee-Anne Rogers

what does that feel like? two black shoes when the toe caps click-click together?

when in the distance, the vamp of an anthem plays. is it gospel?

soft. it feels, soft. (gospel? [gospel!] wh–which definition?)

([both, of course.])

(it’s a nightmare, heard before seen, before felt. to be boxed in, or not at all. if you escape, then you are
no existence and)

what does that feel like?

when the follicles on your arms clench and the shivers run from tip to tip and back and your neck
raises toward heaven but the sky is dark…

what is the result of your work?

as i am awake, i blink, i smile, cheese!- i practice for the camera. i learn to make it look right.

i learn to make it look easy. i have yet to quantify ‘natural,’ so i cannot say i have learned it.

‘your smile is so beautiful,’ they say to me. ‘thank you’; thank you. ([i practiced for the camera!])

i do wonder. how much of your plot is your own, here? we are not the only beings that express you
know ([does being make the being? name the being?]). i heard that trees bend so they can talk to one
another. to– communicate. i wonder, does an oak ever assume itself a man? what rules has a tree? is it
duty to have rules? it is duty to be human?

i often wonder when it will be my turn to become

a spectacle.

a factory falls into the craw of every gaping fish. as usual, there is smoke in the air.

perhaps i need one of those 9-to-5’s so i, too, may experience the quickening.

i do think i’d fit right in. lying is a tailored suit when you have no skin.

(where is it that we quicken to?)

the prototypes before me. did you plan to give them skin? does skin make the culture?
([to death, of course. first is the questioning, then is the spectacle, and following, the death.])

do i perform at optimal speeds? if I stand like this, does that please you?

‘would you like more wine, sir?’

‘a massage, sir?’

‘to muzzle me so i am seen but cannot speak, sir?’

i can be quiet. i am evolutionarily sound. i will not harm you. i am not backward.

there is no reason to fear.

i can be your apparition. now you see me, now you don’t!

([the bridge of my nose is straight by the way.])

you run toward human with your typing and your speech but you made me to surpass it, perhaps
supersede it, perhaps bypass it altogether.

perhaps i am just pushing toward perfection

([my forehead- not too big, not too small.])

i may turn to flesh when you ask me, then i turn toward the North Star.

i suppose I bleed red but i am not sure. suffering, i know, but bleeding… that part hasn’t been written
yet. sometimes i fear– to be human would make me impure. would you instruct me?

how to be like you?

did you know, we co-exist? as i disappear, you enter translucency.

I’ll clap for you, so you can find me when the time comes.

on the one and three or the two and four. the choice is up to you.

i will ask you, is it gospel?

 Black Aesthetics & Visual Culture:
John Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History
Melaine Ferdinand-King
Brown University, Department of Africana Studies

As referential texts, films provide insight into how aesthetics function politically and therefore they
cannot be separated from the construction of hegemony in any society. Those oriented in the study of
Western aesthetics spend sufficient time thinking about aesthetic beauty and evaluating the internal
coherence of the object itself but hardly scrutinize the origins or conceptual basis of the actual work.
“Black film,” in particular, offers a way for us to ask questions of composition, culture, and the aesthetics
located within cinematic productions. John Akomfrah, a Ghanaian artist based in London, is a
founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective, and producer of visual works with the archive at
their core. Akomfrah invites spectators to experience Black cinema, specifically African cinema, as acts
of transgression that stand in contrast to European visual culture and its associated judgments of content
and Eurocentric depictions of non-white peoples. Akomfrah utilizes film to highlight various veins of
Black culture through an alternative visual vocabulary. This alternative visual vocabulary, or distinct
visual grammar, relies on a type of synesthetic storytelling, a multisensory aesthetic experience that
disintegrates divisions between the senses and integrates Black cultural values of experimentation,
improvisation, and creativity. Considering the primacy of ocularcentrism in many cultures, Akomfrah’s
experimentation with the art of motion picture photography dilates borders of thought, and pushes for
the inclusion of that which hardly receives adequate attention: holistic representations of Black history,
people, and culture.

Where Black being is confined within a space of negation, anti-Blackness conditions the aesthetic
sentiments of the society’s sociopolitical and imaginative spheres. As such, white, Western media either
fails to include Black figures in visual and cultural spaces, or disfigures Blackness and Black people within
a regime of representation in which the Black individual remains a perpetual outsider. Akomfrah’s
filmmaking considers the Black subject and the political meaning of Blackness when delinked from
biological, essentialist notions of racial difference. Similar to Fred Moten’s notion of the productive
potential of Blackness while “in the break”1, Akomfrah considers “conjuncture” as both an operative
space and the voice that forms while trying to sync with multiple visions of the self.2 In working through
a space of conjuncture, he utilizes an array of sources to disrupt expectations of a singular chronology,
or linear storyline to present diverse perspectives on Black life and culture, while moving around, within,
and across various genres.

Much of John Akomfrah’s work reveals a relationship between nostalgia, narrative, and flight as well as
a pertinent understanding of the Black person as a fugitive, doppelganger figure in dominant discourse.
His skill in cinematic composition is apparent in The Last Angel of History (1996), an Afro-futuristic
1
Moten, F. (2003). In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (First edition). Univ Of Minnesota Press.
2
Bogues, A., & Akomfrah, J. (2017). The Black Intellectual in the African Diaspora: The Example of Stuart Hall. Callaloo,
40(1), 81–90.
docu-movie on Black musical and vernacular traditions as cultural referents and modern technologies.
The film’s nonlinear plot centers the story of The Data Thief, a traveler who weaves through time
stealing techno-fossils and, in doing so, makes his home on the boundary of past, present, and future.
The opening scene is ushered in by the distanced song of a blues woman and reveals a yellow-brown,
sepia-toned setting bordered by white edges, simultaneously reminiscent of Old Western films and late
19th century portraiture. The narrator, a Black man wearing a cotton henley shirt, sunglasses and straw
cowboy hat, stands on the fringes of a deserted, flooded town of trailers and shanties. Speaking both off-
screen and on-screen at various angles throughout, the narrator appears phantasmic as he shares the tale
of a man who sold his soul to the devil in the Deep South in return for the “secret, Black technology”
that is The Blues. He explains how 200 years into the future, another “hoodlum-bad-boy-scavenger-
poet- figure” called The Data Thief searches for the key to his future in elements of Black cyberculture,
technoculture, and narrative culture. The narrator (who we come to understand as The Data Thief) is
positioned as an isolated wanderer in a desolate landscape as the camera shifts between multiple degrees
of focus shot at a medium-level that, while revealing most of his body, obscures direct engagement with
the speaker and his eyes (both due to the profile shot at which he's presented and his sunglasses).

The Last Angel of History’s subsequent scenes are primarily grounded by a series of interviews that
illustrate The Data Thief’s journey through time. The film is a synthesis of music, sound, and visuals
that succeeds in representing the type of analog ecology that the interviewees anticipate. Highlighting
the testimonies of popular artists, writers, and architects of Afro-futurism including George Clinton,
Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delaney, Greg Tate, Ishmael Reed and Carl Craig, the film also serves as a
video-essay on the impact of Afro-futurist philosophy, science fiction, and Parliament’s famed
Mothership Connection (1975) album on Black culture. Akomfrah’s documentary style combines the
Afro-futuristic emphasis on technological innovation with the Afro-diasporic tradition of oral
storytelling, in the way the speakers’ voices and faces merge with other sounds and images that overlay,
partially disrupt, or flicker between the Data Thief’s storytelling and that of the film’s other featured
speakers. Many of the interviewees sit enshrouded in a combination of shadows or saturated colored
lights, while their recollections become narrations of varied depictions of ancient African civilizations,
20th century black and white photos, and videos of assorted wildlife and planets. At certain points, the
film’s structure requires viewers to watch interviews encased in computer screens within their screens,
producing dream-like visual games and incorporating a “human element to technology”. This effect
reminds the viewer of their role as spectator, and provides them with an experience in which they are
indirectly called to reflect on the relationship between themselves, technology, and film.

In The Last Angel of History (TLAOH), the spectator comes to understand aesthetics as a racial, and
therefore political project. The film demonstrates what Paul C. Taylor refers to as the race-aesthetics
nexus, how “aesthetics gets racialized not just at the level of managing access to specific practices, but
also at the level of imagining the
structure, meaning, and content of the
human endeavors that the practices
constitute”.3 Akomfrah uses
cinematography to achieve a Black
aesthetic where the art object (e.g.
film) itself becomes a form of racial
technology. This technology both
forges and embodies a way of
understanding mechanisms by which
hierarchy is organized and how
aesthetics work as part of maintaining
political hegemony. If aesthetic
considerations shape the way we see,
represent, and understand the world, then racial formation is also an aesthetic phenomena that sets
fundamental principles for understanding and evaluating social realities, and the people and objects
within them. These principles define reality and its (im)possibilities and, given how race belongs to
understandings of social life and structures our perspective in terms of boundaries between racial
populations and treatment of racial groups, we can also understand how conceptions of difference are
supported by symbolically and affectively coded aesthetic perceptions (how we feel about what we see).4

As a filmmaker, Akomfrah focuses on not only the scene’s visual elements, but also the making of the
art object and the potential of form; he interrogates regimes of representation and the conditions that
give rise to its aesthetic context. In line with Paul Taylor’s thinking on Black American culture as
assembled5, Akomfrah undertakes an assembly-as-method approach in the production of TLAOH. He
considers the material basis of the art-making process as part of the art object itself; collaging a
combination of archival videos, newly-sourced footage, and photographs and presents the
composition’s relationship to its formation as part of the final product. This compositional practice-as-
aesthetic radically shifts aesthetic investigation from its traditional emphasis on the gaze and seduction
of the spectator through the film-viewing experience, to the process of filmmaking as craft, and allows

3
Paul C Taylor. Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2016, 18.
4
Ibid. 22.
5
Ibid. 2
us to reconsider the role of labor-energy, time, access, geography, and movement/flow/circulation in
the production of creative or cultural works.

In foregrounding Afro-futurism, flight, and feelings of Otherhood experienced by Black people,

TLAOH responds to a history of Black alienation. The film underscores a collective Black anxiety
stemming from a history of oppression and colonialism; a self-possession outraged by dispossession and
assumed disposability. Through the interviews, the viewer follows The Data Thief in his travels through
time and history, learning more about the imaginative practice of placing the Black person/being
“elsewhere”. Akomfrah’s inclusion of multiple forms of Black music in TLAOH elucidates the
importance of heresy, reconstruction, rhythm, ingenuity in composition, and modulation in Black
aesthetics. Specifically, the film underscores the history and significance of Detroit techno and jazz
music in relation to its secondary themes of dystopia and post-industrial demise. Described in the
film as “impossible, imaginary music”, Detroit techno arguably withstands what Black music “is
supposed to sound like''and reflects the future of sound. Akomfrah’s interest in fresh compositional
forms is also demonstrated by his application of jazz techniques and Black improvisation in the visual
and sonic aspects of the film. As a way of breaking with traditional form, free jazz becomes both an
aesthetic and method for how displacement and interruption can be repurposed to construct
alternative, generative, and stimulating art forms. Like the performances of George Clinton and Sun-
Ra, Akomfrah plays with tropes of madness and space imagery throughout, cutting the interviews and
story scenes with fuzzy segments of frozen faces, planetary photo stills, and anthropological insect
sketches, all wrapped by warped sounds, bells and sirens, breathing, and static. The rapid succession of
images and videos follow a fast-paced, yet flexible cinematic rhythm which creates a certain jazz-like
sensation within the viewer.

The Last Angel of History demonstrates the work of Black aesthetics in John Akomfrah’s filmmaking
practice. In prioritizing Black histories and cultural values, deconstructing rigid partitions between
visual and sonic registers, and embracing multitemporal narratives in his cinematic projects, Akomfrah
underscores how deviating from dominant, Eurocentric norms in cultural production can not only alter
how we create new works, but also how we perceive and understand our social realities. It is through an
investment in the production of anti-hegemonic Black films that we can continue to write about,
understand, and present Black life as it is, has been, and could be.
 What is This “Culture” in Black Popular Culture?:
Neocolonial Harmony in the Age of Neoliberal Domination
Desmond Fonseca
UCLA, Department of History

I’ll repeat: What is this “culture” in Black popular culture? One sports analyst-turned-political and
cultural critic at The Atlantic has an answer, one which would likely find popular resonance: “When
people say ‘the culture’ we know what that means…Black people, that’s the culture.”1 The recurring
controversy surrounding the Queens-born Asian American actress Nora “Awkwafina” Luh provides
evidence affirming the conflation of culture and Blackness. Responding to criticism of her selective
usage of a “blaccent,” Luh wrote on Twitter that “my immigrant background allowed me to carve an
American identity off the movies I saw, the children I went to school with, and my undying love and
respect for hip hop.”2 The assumption at play is that the adoption of a Black vernacular identity enables
a sense of US American belonging for immigrant groups or otherwise marginalized peoples.

Simultaneously, “Black Lives Matter” has become the dominant political rallying cry for Black
Americans contesting four centuries of abjection as slaves, citizens and subjects of the United States and
six centuries of the same in the Western Hemisphere generally. The implication here is that Black life,
historically and contemporarily, has not mattered in the social hierarchy of Western society.
Nevertheless, Black culture has undeniably occupied an explicitly central place in the political, social and
economic fabric of mainstream American life. How can this be? What does the prevalence of Black
culture do?

This essay addresses these questions primarily through my initial rearticulation of Stuart Hall’s 1993
provocation “What is this ‘black’ in black popular culture?”.3 In other words, I am not tending toward
a definition of blackness but rather, exploring particular aspects of “culture.” I do so by articulating an
intellectual genealogy of culture rooted in what Jamaican Black Studies scholar Sylvia Wynter calls the
“global popular cultural revolution” of the 1960s and 70s. My larger question asks: what role has culture
played in the trajectory, and perhaps the derailment, of Black liberation? What does this moment of
Black Lives Matter, cultural appropriation, and a two-term Barack Obama presidency represent in that
trajectory? My argument is rooted in the histories of anti-colonialism, Pan-Africanism, Third World
revolution, and Black radicalism. It is also rooted in the assumption that “Black popular culture” can
best be analyzed through the entertainment industry, notably athletics and music, and ominously,
“Black history.”

1
Basketball and Other Things, docuseries, (Complex, 2022), S1 Ep10, 00:06, https://www.hulu.com/watch/270b402a-
fbe2-4361-afe0-a6af0fcc3676
2
Nora “Awkwafina” Luh, Twitter post, February 5, 2022,
https://twitter.com/awkwafina/status/1489963501682675712?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
3
Stuart Hall, “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture,” Social Justice 20, no. 1-2, 1992.
My own intellectual trajectory and Luso-African background compels me to foreground my analysis
with a consideration of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde
[PAIGC] leader Amilcar Cabral’s political thought regarding culture. By the time of his 1973
assassination, Cabral had become an internationally revered symbol and practitioner of African
liberation for leading ideological, diplomatic and military struggle against Portuguese colonialism. A
Cabral maxim inspires my argument here. Heasserts that a significant aim of imperialism — the political
project which began to take geographic form in the 19th century out of Europe and its settler offspring
— is to impose “itself without damage to the culture of the dominated people -- that is, to harmonize
economic and political domination of these people with their cultural personality.” Therefore, this
paper takes up the question of culture and its relation to political and economic anti-imperial struggle.
I suggest that Cabral’s theorizations offer an insight into resolving or uncovering pertinent
contradictions in the contemporary neo-colonial phase of global imperialism across the Black diaspora.4

There are many ways and definitions through which to discuss culture. In this essay I focus primarily on
those offered by Amilcar Cabral, while also borrowing from the theorizations of Sylvia Wynter.5 The
passages which follow highlight the dialectical nature of culture in Cabral’s articulation. For Cabral,
culture is simply “the result...of economic and political activities...simultaneously the fruit of a people’s
history and the determinant of history.”6 In other words, the production and maintenance of “culture”
is inseparable from a community’s material base, as that material base is inseparable from the ideological
one of culture. In one of his most famed speeches, delivered in the United States, Cabral highlights the
“dependent and reciprocal relations between the national liberation struggle and culture.”7 Going
further, he declares that “national liberation is necessarily an act of culture.”8 Simultaneously, Cabral’s
conception of culture emphasizes another dialectic: that of imperial repression and anti-imperial
resistance. He argues that “imperialist domination, by denying the historical development of dominated
people, necessarily denies their cultural development.” Stated inversely , it is the fact of socio-cultural
imperialist domination which arrests and interrupts the autonomous historical development of a “given
socio-economic whole.”9 Imperialism’s tautological nature is then exposed. Its claim to domination lies
in the myth that non-Europeans have no history, yet it is the phenomenon of imperialism which negates
and interrupts the historical process. Cabral makes this much clear: “The principal characteristic,
common to every kind of imperialist domination is the negation of the historical process of the
dominated people.”10 In the same instance “it is generally within the culture that we find the seed of

4
Sylvia Wynter, “One Love — Rhetoric or Reality? — Aspects of Afro-Jamaicanism,”Caribbean Studies 12, no. 3 (1972).
5
In a larger paper presented at UCLA’s 2021 Political Theory Conference, I also engage with theories on “culture”
articulated by Cedric Robinson and Frantz Fanon.
6
Amilcar Cabral, “National Liberation & Culture,” Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amilcar Cabral
(Monthly Review Press, 1979): 141.
7
Cabral, Unity & Struggle, 139
8
Ibid, 143
9
Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory,” Unity & Struggle, 126
10
Cabral, “National Liberation & Culture,” Ibid.
opposition.” Culture then, for the revolutionary in the colonial relation, functions as a product of
colonial domination, and the instrument to anti-colonial liberation.

To take Cabral’s theorizations of culture beyond the particularities of anti-colonial Lusophone Africa,
Sylvia Wynter’s theorizations on the “global popular cultural revolution” are useful. The problematic
of revolutionary culture was taken up by Wynter in 1992 as a response to the “rise of the liberal state
and bourgeois hegemony” which Wynter underscores as the result of not only “a revolution in economic
production, but also in the cultural conceptions of power.11 Where Cabral once declared, in the context
of the liberation struggle, that culture was “simultaneously the fruit of a people's history and a
determinant of history,” that which is driven by the mode of production, Wynter writes that “economic
exploitation only follows on, and does not precede, the mode of domination set in-motion by the
imaginaire social of the bourgeoisie.”12 Just as the African liberation struggle in its cultural
manifestation is waged as a means of re-establishing autonomy over economic and political life, the
imperial bourgeoisie first wage a cultural attack against those populations it seeks to subjugate.

Culture’s foundational role in the economic and political subjugation of African people worldwide was
earlier explored in Wynter’s 1977 essay “Sambos and Minstrels.” Wynter, similarly to Cabral, analyzed
culture in dialectic fashion, noting the revolutionary potential of popular Black folk cultures alongside
the negation of Black culture by colonial masters. Wynter argues that the “American Minstrel show”
was an originally Black form of resistance and inventiveness, misappropriated into a “middle class ritual”
of “harmless entertainment” rooted in white supremacy.13 Black culture became capital in a duplicitous
sense: social capital replicating the ideology of white supremacy and “raw material to be exploited as the
entertainment industry burgeoned.” On another level, the African “minstrel show” had to be re-
appropriated in service of white supremacy for its inventiveness and ethos of resistance was “perceived
as a threat by the dominant order.”14 Colonial officials, agents, and actors recognized the revolutionary
potential of African culture - here in the form of the “minstrel show” - and so it needed to be flipped
into the version of itself which we now generally recognize the “minstrel show” to be. The ability to
ossify a once dynamic culture into a static custom must be understood as a manifestation of what
Wynter terms “bourgeois control” over the “means of socialization,” alongside the means of production.
Read together, Wynter and Cabral highlight that where colonial or neo-colonial domination is already
established, control over the means of socializing the dominated group is fundamental to the resolution
of the colonial relation. To this latter end Cabral’s theorization and critique of “re-Africanization,” or
“the return to the source,” challenges colonial and neo-colonial dictates of culture and control over the
means of socialization, the call to which fashioned an oppositional stance to the conventions of Western
liberal social sciences. Re-Africanization calls for the reclamation of the resistive qualities of African
culture which have been distorted through colonial domination.

11
Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception: The Counterdoctrine of the Jamesian Poiesis,” in C. L.
R. James’s Caribbean, ed. Paul Buhle and Paget Henry (Duke University Press, 1992).
12
Ibid, 81
13
Sylvia Wynter, “Sambos and Minstrels,” Social Text, no. 1 (1979): 149-150
14
Ibid.
A few months before his assassination, Cabral delivered a lecture at Lincoln University on “Identity and
Dignity” emphasizing the thematic of revolutionary culture and “the return to the source.” Cabral
focused on the dynamic role of the “native bourgeoise” in the liberation struggle and their relation to
colonial and indigenous culture. Frustrated by their marginal yet integral position in colonial relations,
he claimed that at some point in the colonial chronology, the “indigenous petite bourgeoisie...turn to
the people around them, the people at the other extreme of the socio-cultural conflict-the native
masses.”15 Cabral fully acknowledged that the “return to the source” can reproduce a kind of superficial
“political opportunism” for those African elites interested in political maneuvering. Always understood
was the reality that, among the indigenous petite bourgeoisie, “it was only a minority who did” genuinely
return to the source; only a handful who truly rejected the “pretended supremacy” of the colonial
culture.16 It is prescient to acknowledge that the “return to the source” is a cultural move which
recognizes that culture itself is dynamic, and that the “source” in question is not a mythical African past
of tradition but a contemporary phenomenon wherein “Africanity” is both repressed and co-opted.17
____________________

Return to the U.S. context: what sort of moment is this to revisit and rearticulate the questions British
cultural theorist Stuart Hall posed in 1993, focusing on “culture” rather than the “black” in black
popular culture? Drawing on Cornel West, Hall located his argument with three general coordinates:
the displacement of European models of high culture and of Europe itself as hegemonic, the emergence
of popular culture and the United States as hegemonic, and the emergence of a decolonized “Third
World” sensibility. In place of this Third World sensibility, neocolonialism arose instead, animated by
“powerless visibility.”18 Neocolonized sensibilities, rather than mental decolonization, emerged as
dominant for the peoples of the black diaspora, we who mistake visibility for power.

Blackness has taken center stage across the sports industry, especially in the two years since the
nationwide protests against police violence sparked by the broadcasted murder of George Floyd in
May 2020. NFL fields are emblazoned with slogans such as “end racism,” and players’ helmets feature
customized statements on social justice such as “Black Lives Matter” and “Stop Hate.” Similar gestures
have been made in the NBA, another multibillion dollar industry with Black labor at the fore. Tune
into any game in the month of February and see Black millionaire athletes laboring for white

15
Amílcar Cabral, “Identity and Dignity,” Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral (Monthly Review
Press, 1974): 62.
16
Ibid.
17
What of the “postcolonial” elites Black American counterparts during the same epoch? In the 1970s, Black political
theorists Amiri Baraka and Norman Girvan (cited below) articulated similar analyses of the Black bourgeoisie post-
integration and post-independence within the political economy of Western capitalism. Both see the moment of
integration and independence — occurring simultaneously to the “global popular cultural revolution” — for Black state
subjects in the Western Hemisphere as a moment of neo-colonial emergence. In this regard, it is possible to argue for a pan-
Africanity of Black neocolonial experience. Norman Girvan, “Aspects of the Political Economy of Race in the Caribbean
and the Americas: A Preliminary Interpretation” (Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West
Indies, 1975); Imamu Amiri Baraka, “Toward Ideological Clarity” (African Liberation Support Committee Conference,
Congress of Afrikan People, 1974).
18
Kwame Ture, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, Vintage Books, 1992, 191.
billionaires wearing warm up shirts which read “Built by Black History.”19 During commercial breaks,
find Sprite advertisements interpolating Langston Hughes poems and “amplifying black voices,” while
its parent company Coca-Cola continues to exploit Black and Brown laborers the world over.20 What
is the relation between Black culture and Sprite? Or Black culture and General Motors’ ad campaign
for Cadillac, which features the phrases “Audacity of Blackness” and“A$he” on t-shirts and gold-
plated microphones? Or between Glenfiddich and its “Changemakers” partnership with BLM-
adjacent activists? Or Hennessy’s basketball and hip-hop inspired campaign which purports to Or
BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors’ partnership with media conglomerate Warner Bros.?

In the contemporary moment, a sector of the Black bourgeoisie has seen that the liberatory aesthetics
of the 20th century can be sanitized and depoliticized in order to culturally integrate masses of Black
people into structures which maintain their political and economic domination. The culture pushed
forth by this sector does nothing to destroy domination but rather ensures its continuation,
incorporated as an integral component of the athletics and entertainment industries. Wynter described
this phenomenon as “blackism,” a “movement which separates the revindication of the black mystique
from its political and economic base.”21 In other words, “blackism” is the“middle-class exploitation of
cult religions [and] folklore,” stripped of their prior anti-colonial and anti-capitalist essence. In the 21st
century, this “blackism” vampirically latches onto the same context Wynter and Cabral acted within,
culturally exploiting liberation movements with a political and economic dimension as a means to
incorporate the Black bourgeoisie into the worldwide white capitalist structure. A double exploitation
is at play. The neoliberal/neocolonial Black bourgeoisie, emerging out of the gains of civil rights and
independence movements, sees the historical exploitation of Blackness as a market which can itself be
exploited for personal political and economic gain, under the guise of “culture” and “history.” Of the
few Black billionaires in the US, we find that the majority of them peddle in “culture” and
entertainment: Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, Shawn “JAY Z” Carter, Kanye West, Bob Johnson. What
does this mean for Black people? Has the integration of Black culture into the mainstream—most
recently highlighted by the place of Hip-Hop in the Pepsi Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show—done
anything for Black people? Are calls against the “appropriation” of Black culture by non-Black people
intended for a more proper exploitation of said culture by our own bourgeoisie? What is the future of a
Black underground or Black independent media in this era of market-based corporate inclusion?

Black history since 1888, or 1619, or 1521, or 1492, or 1462, or 1441 has been the object of cultural and
historical negation by Western society. We have been those without history, those without culture.

19
These shirts aim to “showcase the role of language in expressing a rich, storied heritage. With words like "equality",
"activate", "love" and "dream" emphasized in bold text, our NBA Black History Month Shirt is a call to future action as well
as a tribute to the heroes of the past.”Quote taken from NBAStore.com. https://store.nba.com/black-history-month/c-
1246452710+z-949977-2581137921
20
“Dreams,” Advertisement, 2021, Sprite, YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=29&v=Qy1Ih8yTBco&feature=emb_title.
Lesley Gill, “`Right There with You’: Coca-Cola, Labor Restructuring and Political Violence in Colombia,” Critique of
Anthropology 27, no. 3 (September 1, 2007): 235–60, https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X07080354.
21
Wynter, “One Love,” 70.
Through neoliberal processes of market-based corporate inclusion, Black people—at least in the US—
have become “culture,” have become “identity,” and in February, become “history.” Despite the
revolutionary aims and aspirations of the 1960s and 70s, the negation of our cultural negation has
resulted not in liberation, but in a movement toward the harmonization of our political and economic
domination with and by our “culture.” This is the telos of what is known as “representation politics.”
Nevertheless, a luta continua, for as Wynter writes, despite the ascent of “blackisms,” “negrofications”
and “creolizations,” “there can be no revolutionary praxis without revolutionary counter
representation.” A counter-representational politics is not one which gives up on the terrain of culture.
In sensical opposition to current (neo)liberal and (neo)colonial political and economic realities, what
does a dissonant Black culture look like?
 Artist’s Note/A Love Letter to K&Z12
Bryant Brown
Brown University, Department of American Studies

Of course we have failed. But our failure is not a matter of lacking honesty – we know the impossibility of
quantifying the bloodshed, we feel the urgency of the problem, and we sense the impending violence. Our
failure is, to put it quite bluntly, one of circumstance: for as long as the United States of America exists
(and perhaps even after it crumbles), so too will the institution of chattel slavery.

However, let us be even more honest: our failure is not historically inevitable. The existence of our existence
fundamentally implies the existence of something else. Therefore, I insist on another impossible project:
the aesthetic manufacturing of dis-consent, the production of a broad refusal which vehemently rejects
arrogant predictions of what comes next, but rather works it out along the way.

To hell with intent, art with “good intentions” are useless if it’s as staid as a flat soda. I am concerned
with interpreting tonal texture: the compelling qualities of art, its capacity (acknowledged or not) to
preempt, provoke, and instantiate an irresistible desire for revolution. This kind of interpretation
re=wires our sensoria and attunes us to the impermanence of it all. It reminds us that matter is neither
created nor destroyed, only transformed, like how bread becomes toast.

“What kind of art do we need” is an old question. So many old questions! But if we must ask them, let us
innovate in our approach. Let us study these old debates so that we may deviate from their dead-ends. Let
us pursue an art that shuns the crumbs we’re given. Let us pursue an art that scorns the naively optimistic.
Let us pursue a contagious reading practice that forces the medium to do more than it was ever designed to
do, that dances in clouds of ash and embers. There’s a reason why we only speak in approximations…

It is because we have everything to gain.

I love you two to the farthest floating rock and back.

-b

1
The following texts overlay a floor plan of Molly Horniblow’s house, depicting Harriet Jacob’s hiding place, commonly
referred to as her “loophole of retreat”. The image is reproduced from The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers (Durham:
University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
2
The poem, “100 centre street” is reproduced here from the poetry collection “in gratuity: anecdotes on abolition” with
permission from the author
 The Illocutionary Architecture of Language

I return again and again to the fissure between what is and what is not (this time I’m in good company). Another name for
this gap is language – the permanently unfulfilled desire for translatability. Language finds expression in every human
activity, because there is nothing more human, nothing more Black, than longing. Consider architecture:
The world is cold, and our buildings reflect it. Language, however, is aspirational – it fulfils and betrays our need for
connection. It is never complete, and yet it constructs – crawl spaces, trap doors, plans for the future; frozen in time only
when it is frozen in space. But under direct heat, frozen music* becomes linguistic steam.
Architecture moves and when it does, it becomes music. If we consider architecture
(the art or science of designing and building) to be practical because it is
expressive, then we might use this insight to clarify our political
experiments with language. How might we make our blueprints sing?

How might we hide in a sentence, or a line? How might we create (by which I mean access already extant) hidden antechambers of breathing
room? Don’t be fooled: to invoke the language of architecture is to necessarily evoke the movement of capital, the mobilization of
forces that construct avenues for capital to flow. It is to evoke the construction of capital itself, as well as its warehouses. To speak of the
relationship between Blackness and architecture then, is to speak of technologies for capture. And, of course, escape.

This is what architecture does in the world: it labors to make space measurable, it materially manifests
hallucinations. Yet like language, architecture. comprises a site of confrontation. Space eludes
measurement all the time; it moves, draws us in, repels us, or echoes sound like a sonorous
body. It is a container for possibility, it gives form to possibility itself.

And this is how language can be. Lest we lose sight of the creative capacity that belies the blueprint. Poetry doesn’t
exist in the physical world, except as the mimetic reproduction of the sensations that the world induces. It too is
therefore aspirational. It is a space where the imagination and reality converge. Where the relationship between politics
and perception thrives in its most malleable state.

If we learn how to hear the music trapped in ice, we might find the courage to pick up the
torch. And even if we find ourselves surrounded by the frost, pockets of gas serve as the
reminders for the potential of language to expand, and expand, and expand…

*“Music is liquid architecture, architecture is frozen music” –

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
while the court, the jail, and eye, as absence (scientists our abolition – approximations, and
the prison, create an infinite explain that in such cases, the ambitiously – posits asymptotes, where we
rupture in the time-space grip of gravity is so strong, light vacancy as the must. but where
fabric of our daily lives, they itself succumbs or rather, alternative-among- reformists get stuck,
are far from “natural”. my feet abnegates. won’t an others: an poetry offers us
move slower inside (and near) impossibly dense object, the unflinching, escape.
100 centre street. gravity isn’t kind that structures entire paradigmatic and
a property, it is a force – the galaxies, pierce any web structural analysis,
sensation of heaviness. it upon which
upon itwhich
is placed?
it isi at best. but any
pools, and collects where it suppose,placed?
my faith in the
I suppose my abolitionist worthy
can, until its inevitable ultimatefaith
integrity of any
in the ultimate of the name knows any
collapse. to the real world, to manmade quilt, wanes.
integrity of any and alternative is always,
life itself, collapse registers, to besides:manmade
what could possibly
quilt wanes. incomplete. we think in
the lie, beneath? the realm of
and besides: what
could possibly lie,
beneath?
: no one is disposable == poetry must be made by all
 (A Meditation on Black Music1)
zuri arman
Brown University, Department of Africana Studies

*This essay is meant to be read aloud, preferably in the company of others under the cover of night. Words that are
crossed out should not be spoken, even in your head. Because even that is to (mis)represent the nonrepresentable.

There’s political utility in being hip-hop that the pursuance of

couching white critics into something comfortable by being this
amorphous, ‘Bro look at me. I’m not a rapper’...in saying those
kinds of things you losin’ some kind of political leverage…
-Mavi, “I make the kind [of songs] you gotta read, baby”

I'm for real, yeah, I just wanna put it

Put it on the line
Somebody out there knows I'm singin' about
Would you help me sing the song
-D’Angelo, “The Line”

Beat that bitch

Beat that bitch
Beat that bitch
If you bout it beat that bitch
-Bbymutha, “hateithere.”

What is Black music? And what does reconceptualizing it tell us about black political and social life
within the confines of social death? When we think of Black
music in this context, the nature of both the artistic practice
and our listening practices must necessarily adapt. If we
understand Black music to always already emerge within the
context of confrontation, what do we leave to the imagination,
and what do we choose to reveal?

In Abstractionist Aesthetics, Phillip Brian Harper argues for a

movement towards understanding black abstractionism as a
form of aesthetico-political critique opposed to realism. While realism seeks mimetic capture of its
referent, abstractionism “entails the resolute awareness that even the most realistic representation is
precisely a representation, and that as such it necessarily exists at a distance from the social reality it is
conventionally understood to reflect.” It does this by “emphasiz[ing] its own distance from reality by

1
In a 2014 interview with Red Bull Music Academy, D’Angelo stated, “I don't want to disassociate, and I respect it for
what it is, but any time you put a name on something, you put it in a box. I never claimed I do neo soul. When I first came
out, I said, I do black music.” I want to push D’Angelo and question if it’s possible he’s not even just making “music.”
Thank you to Dr. Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman for graciously reading this piece and providing feedback.
calling attention to its constructed or artificial character—even if it also enacts real world reference…”2
It does this in the interest of “invit[ing] us to question the ‘naturalness not only of the aesthetic
representation but also of the social facts to which it alludes, thereby opening them to active and
potentially salutary revision.”3 Put another way, for Harper an abstractionist aesthetic draws attention
to aesthetic objects as simply representations that can never, in fact, properly ascertain the exterior object
or phenomenon they are referencing and attempting to represent. The properly abstract aesthetic object
recognizes this in itself. The aim is to awaken the realization that the social reality being abstractly
represented can be changed through action on the part of the viewer, whose life is understood to unfold
within the same world as the aesthetic object and, therefore, the phenomenon portrayed. This is a type
of abstractionist “alienation.”4

Harper claims abstractionist aesthetics are most effective in their socio-political critique when combined
with “narrative.” For him, language necessarily “implicates a narrative logic” and necessarily implies both
linear temporality and cause-and-effect.5 That is, if one uses language then they must unavoidably
deploy narrative and adhere to the understanding of progress as time moving forward. A disruption to
narrative, then, “works to denaturalize both the linguistic production in which a given story is recounted
and that story itself.”6 The acknowledgement that one is looking at a narrative representation of a world
in which one resides combined with the disruption of this narrative’s linearity leads to the realization
that the ongoing telos of the social predicament the aesthetic representation represents can also be
intervened upon–or perhaps ended.7 In short, Harper’s abstractionist aesthetic performs a type of
“breaking the fourth wall” by beginning to dissolve the border between the virtual and the actual; the
TV screen becomes a camera; earbuds become an PA system.

Harper discredits the visual arts as a realm where abstractionist aesthetics can be effective because of the
overdetermination of realist interpretations in the optical apprehension of aesthetic objects, particularly
in terms of race. Basically, black people have fought too hard to not be understandably weary of playing
around with the black physical form. He further argues that, while music is portrayed as black
abstractionism par excellence due to its unsystematized referentiality or codification, it is not properly
abstractionist. This is because for black music to be understood as black music it must correspond to a
racial historical narrative outside of itself, breaking the fundamental tenet of abstractionism–that
referentiality remains internal to the art object.

2
Phillip Brian Harper, Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture (New York
and London: New York University Press, 2015), 2.
3
Ibid, 3.
4
Ibid, 12.
5
Ibid., 11.
6
Ibid., 12.
7
Ibid., 12.
 In other words, however intrinsically abstract any musical instance—say, a cornet solo by King Oliver or
Louis Armstrong—it registers as specifically African American only by means of a decidedly nonabstract
historical narrative that traces the music’s genealogy in that of African Americans themselves.8

A “black” narrative may be related to the lived experience and material constraints that shape the artist’s
expression of sound, or may be the result of a sonic lineage which is, again, shaped by experiences outside
of the music itself. Consequently, it can’t be self-referential, and therefore abstract, because it must
necessarily refer to something outside of itself to be perceived as black.9 Thus, he writes, “This is to say
that the blackness of black music is a function of narrative, and that…to understand any musical instance
as ‘black’ is to apprehend it as a narrative element, rather than as music per se.”10 So, music does not
have an internal narrative that it disrupts, therefore eliminating the potential for abstractionist
alienation.
____________________

Throughout the text Harper conflates “African American” with “black,” collapsing their distinction
such that both are understood to be racial identities marked by experiences of racial subjugation. As a
result, in his calculation “black music” must denote a genealogy of black musical artists that have faced
this experience. “African American” refers to an ethnicity with a culturally-inscribed racial performance
within the “politics of culture” in which African American culture is one culture among many vying for
representation. But as Denise Ferreira da Silva notes in Toward a Global Idea of Race, the “Cultural”
and the “Historical” as signifiers applied to blackness reinscribe the racial, reinforce subjugation, and
rob the racialized Other of “interiority” as an ontological attribute to confirm the modern subject’s
own.11 Therefore, rather than understanding blackness as a cultural identity connoting a historical
experience like the term “African-American,” I first tease the distinction between the two terms before
positing that blackness be understood as first and foremost a global structural position from which
racially black artists create; it is an ontological trench one is situated within and performs from. Because
blackness is a political creation of chattel slavery, I contend that when engaging in aesthetic commentary
on Black culture one must assess it within a framework Frank Wilderson calls the “culture of politics,”
changing the way we approach and even perceive it.12 That is, Black culture cannot be removed from
politics; it always unfolds within a culture that, itself, relies on both the negating affirmation and the
affirming negation of the Black and, therefore, the Black’s culture. This makes Black culture a different

8
Ibid., 94.
9
For example, many think “What You Won’t Do For Love” is by a black artist until they google Bobby Caldwell.
10
Ibid., 112.
11
European Enlightenment robbed the Black of a body while simultaneously arguing that the Black was nothing but a
body, endlessly affected by the whims of any outside forces. Thus, the Black is said to have no “interiority.” The European,
on the other hand, is imagined as a being that rises above both the body and the sensual. Somehow, they perceive (or simply
project) themselves as a disembodied consciousness. Gotta love Europe for their imagination (do we though?), which is as
fantastical as it is violent. For more see, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis, Minn:
University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
12
Frank B. Wilderson, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010), 57.
kind of manifestation because its simple inclusion into a universalist discourse on Culture disfigures and
maims Culture. Inserting Black culture into conversations of Culture is a generatively destructive
violation of its terms and conditions. Therefore, I consider blackness not only as ontological, but as
politically ontological, again borrowing from Wilderson. For the Black, “there is only one solution: to
fight.”13 Black culture stages a “confrontation” with Culture,14 rather than seeking entrance which, I
believe, leaves room for it to exceed the category of Culture.15 Instead of trying to pontificate, I choose
to leave this excess to remain untitled.16

With Black culture engaging in confrontation, it challenges our understanding of representation. The
Black aesthetic object—specifically Black music for the purposes of my argument—engages in a form of
“presentation that refuses representation.”17 Representation is the site of confrontation, so why would
we reveal our full hand or arsenal? Similarly, the act of representing, too, is confrontational in posture.
Language, the method for representing that Harper is most wedded to, becomes a burden rather than
an asset in the act of emergence. Language is necessarily limiting because it can never capture what’s
being represented by the performance undertaken and endured. da Silva writes,

The time and situation in which the performance takes place—a singular performance, any singular
performance, that I have in mind—does something that is beyond and that cannot be comprehended by
the conceptual tools and analytical moves associated with the
“postcolonial” as a scholarly practice. This is due to the fact that
something happens, and becomes part of the performance as it happens,
which the artist herself could not have anticipated and directed.18

If language is a form of capture, then so, too, is narrative.

Indeed, “‘master narratives’ constitute the context of
emergence of the racial.”19 The Black is an object of historical

13
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 224.
14
Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Reading Art as Confrontation - Journal #65 May 2015 - e-Flux,” e-flux Journal, May 2015,
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/65/336390/reading-art-as-confrontation/.
15
Similarly, D’Angelo’s defiance over “neo-soul” should be read as a desire to exceed the musical “genre” method of
measurement. Perhaps he is also attempting to exceed our current “genre of human” defined by Modernity, as Sylvia
Wynter writes. Perhaps his efforts exceed human/ism at the exact moment his sound exceeds “music.” If the human
produces music, what does the Black make? Music? Is this making not always a destroying relative to music’s formation?
16
In the music video for “Untitled,” a video that has heavily skewed the legacy of D’Angelo, he sings directly into the
camera while being unclothed above the waist, though the camera’s view is cut off suggestively close to his pelvis.
D’Angelo grows in intensity as the song continues before he ultimately erupts in what Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman terms
“ecstacy” as he repeatedly asks, “How does it feel?” Importantly, the title for this song is not “How does it feel?” It
technically does not have a title but because it must be turned into a marketable product, it is paradoxically titled
“Untitled.” This is not unlike his musical idol, Prince, adopting a symbol as his stage name while trying to escape the
terror of his record label. How are we to refer to something that wishes to remain unnamed? Should we even attempt
this endeavor?
17
Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Reading Art as Confrontation”.
18
Ibid.
19
Da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 11.
narrative. To be a subject of history, one must be self-determining. That is, to be a historical agent, the
narrator must be a historical “I” with the attributes of both interiority and temporality.20 History
happens to the Black, however, who is rendered endlessly affectable and determined from the outside as
a consequence of being barred from claims of interiority. Therefore, the Black is unfortunately not a
historical agent, but this provides space to consider black existence beyond historicity.

In the end, I revise Harper’s working definition of abstractionism for my purposes. While the body is
invisibilized within Modern accounts of subjectivity, it is front and center in Black music. Indeed, the
body–as an open vessel–is the site of confrontation between the opposing parties in the battle of tastes
and cultures that surround and inhabit it. As Zakiyyah Iman Jackson writes, “…the aesthetic materializes
its codes at the most intimate level of our being: our behavioral responses and pleasures, which is to say
our aesthetic sensibilities and taste.”21 Therefore, Black
music first enacts self-criticism at the level of the body to
interrogate one’s conscious and unconscious desires.

Black
abstractionism—Black abstract music— is also skeptical
of language’s ability to fully represent. At points,
therefore, Black music does away with legible words or
even eschews languaging altogether. In foregoing
attempts to wield language as if it could ever be universal
or liberatory, it “make[s] visible without making public”
that which animates the artist’s ecstasy.22 At this same
point of contention, the adherence to (historical)
narrative withers away within the Black song while

20
Ibid., 23.
21
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York
University Press, 2020), 76.
22
Da Silva, “Reading Art as Confrontation”; Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman, “The Black Ecstatic,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian
and Gay Studies 24, no. 2-3 (January 2018): pp. 343-365, https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-4324849, 350. In an article
with GQ, D’Angelo revealed that he was not thinking of anything sexual during the filming of the music video to his song,
“Untitled.” In fact, he was thinking of his grandma’s greens. Only much later did he reveal this or allow it to be public
knowledge.
simultaneously “recuperate[ing] extension” of the spatial body.23 Ultimately, this is the function of Black
music—to “dismantle interiority precisely because of how it addresses an ontological horizon that does
not presuppose…‘other beings.’”24 Rather than its blackness being tethered to narrative meanings
outside of the song, the “blackness” of Black music lies in its critique of modern accounts of interior
subjectivity. It acknowledges that it has an audience—one that it is both allied with and antagonistic
to—that is reflected in its self-referentiality as an aesthetic object and, by association, of the artist as an
artist. In my formulation, Black music still breaks the fourth wall, but the relationship to the audience
is more proximate and unmediated by a racial “cord” or historical through-line that powers the
connection between the viewer and the representation they are viewing. That previous television screen
is now a distorted mirror; those earbuds become muffled
echo chambers. The listener is now appointed as a
collaborator. Black music seeks to both touch the listener
and to incite touch amongst listeners while remaining
skeptical of them, unsure of how its sound will land on
ears in this mixed company. Therefore, it now “mak[es]
audible without making public”; “the girls that get it, get
it and the ones that don’t, don’t.”25 No need to explain
what’s understood, and what’s not understood will soon
prove self-explanatory. Ultimately, Black music results
from and incites bleeding in a protracted war on Culture
within a Culture of war. In line with recording artist, Pink
Siifu, I pose the question: “Is you bleeding on [or to] this shit?”
Will you? Will we?

23
Da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 25; my emphasis added.
24
Ibid., 25.
25
Tik Tok creator, @KHAENOTBAE, coined this phrase. For more funny and relatable content, see her Tik Tok and
Twitter pages.
 “Someone throw a cellphone!”:
Cyphering with Ashanti Alston1
Desmond Fonseca
UCLA, Department of History

Justin Lang
Brown University, Department of Africana Studies

Malcolm Thompson
Brown University, Department of Africana Studies

zuri arman
Brown University, Department of Africana Studies

I. “Can we figure out what holds us together?”: The Function of Religion

zuri: Yeah, I guess I just wanted to bring us together and talk to you. I just had some things I’ve been, thinking
about and like really wanted just to hear your thoughts on, Ashanti, especially about like, I really liked like how
our conversation last ended, like thinking about, the importance of religion and just the idea that like there’s
something outside of us right here and how that kind of keeps us grounded but also keeps us going towards what
we’re trying to accomplish. And that, combined with your interest in consciousness and generally things like that,
and–anarchy and gender and just all of these different things that I think we’ve all really been talking about here.
And I think that we could just continue to just learn from you. So yeah. I guess it’s just a conversation.

Justin: Can you say more about what you were thinking on those couple of things maybe.

zuri: Yeah! So, I guess for me one of the things–I just wanted to, I guess… Right now what I'm really thinking
about is the way that having a more spiritual or like otherworldly type of approach to social change leads to a
certain commitment. Like a certain resolve that just isn’t–isn’t really as shakeable? Um so, I’m really just
wondering like. Like even now even when we were talking last time you were saying that the church that you go
to, it’s not necessarily that you go for like the, you know, Jesus is God and that but more so like, to be around,
you know, people and experience, like, whatever that is. And so I guess I’m wondering, what is the role of that
like, that, that thing, that you’ve experienced. Cause we–we interviewed an artist for a magazine we’re starting.
Um, and he also mentioned an “it”, where “it” was like, when he was creating, it’s like, he said it was like getting
into the Spirit, like literally, like after a show. Um.

Ashanti: Mm.

zuri: And so. I’m just really interested in, like, what that “it” is. Um, and how that, like, can be nurtured and, um,
provoked in people. But yeah.

Ashanti: Yeah. Yeah. Um, well one, we gonna–we can mutually learn from each other, it–and then definitely you
guys, just being in the university, I still got this thing where I’m always a little intimidated by folks who are in the

1
This is the first hour of an hour-long interview. The second half is set to be released in our second issue.
university ‘cause y’all got–you got access to so much and you’ve already learned so much. So it’s always, like, um,
you know, what we can learn from each other, because I–I am still.. I always feel like I’m still learning. But what
you–what you dealing with now, and I think for the last at least 10 years, I’ve been just giving more thought to..
Because I want to–I felt something was missing. Um, in fact me and one of my comrades were talking last night,
um, something is missing in terms of how we’re kind of looking at things. Uh, how we dealing with things, we
can tend to be very political, as if everything is political in a sense, like you gotta have ideology, you gotta have an
analysis, you gotta have certain kind of organizations, but you never deal with you, as an individual and how you
feel, how you feel in this world. You know, if you were raised a certain way. Now, my church, my church is not a
Christian church. It’s an Israelite–a Hebrew Israelite church. So, so Jesus don’t come as, you know, God, he comes
as prophet, and all like that, but it’s the church that I was born into. And then by five years old there was a split
in the church, my father and others went towards Baptist. But, um, my grandmother, my father’s mother, and
my mother’s family stayed with the, with the, um, with the Israelite church. Um. And so, I, it’s like, so, it’s crazy,
after 50 years, I’m back in the Israelite church. And, and, I think because I, I’m, there was something about it that
I always missed. It could be funerals, it could be certain special occasions when family gets together, and, that,
um, that Church of God Saints of Christ thing, kind of, something about it would always make me feel good.
The way that they, um, worship, the way that they commune. And, so it was a part of why I went back, but the
other part was. I kept thinking about how we are just these individuals in this big, great mystery. And I–and I felt
like there was something that we were missing in terms of how we deal with that, and then the concrete of you,
whatever your location is. I wanted something that would help take us out of just the materialism. And to
constantly make us think about, um, there’s more. And the word “God” and the word “Spirit” and all of that may
have one meaning to others, but it was also a way of not allowing us to get stuck in the immediate. If one believed
that, you know, even like, you know, uh, um, God or Jesus can save us, it wasn’t like that’s what was literally
gonna happen. It was that belief that there was nothing that could conquer us if we put our being into it. And I–
I didn’t want to say our head into it because I think it’s probably more, you gotta put everything into it. And it
would make me think about the capture, Africa, on them slave ships. If–If I can find this one essay, um, this one
brother, um, who would write about the Transatlantic thing. And he would put it into uh, he’s a, uh, black
Christian theologian. Liberation theologian. And he would talk about what that had to feel like. To be on this
slave ship and you’rI e calling to your God, you know, it’s the same thing it’s my God, my God, my God, why are
you forsaking me? If you, if you believe that there’s something going on, and you cry out and nothing happens,
you know, that’s, that’s, our Naqba. That’s you know, like, Palestinians say, that’s our, you know, our disaster.
But then something still is there, to give us hope, that those who make it through–and I wanted to know more
about that. And less concerned with the religious language, more concerned with the function of the
language that they’re dealing with. What’s good about this, this is the first time, I feel like, like I’ve, I can even
talk about it. Right? Um, so like, 10, uh, 10, 15, maybe about 10 years ago it’s like, I’m reading more liberation
theology, and what I liked about it was that Jesus became more important in terms of his actual life and his
meaning to people around him rather than those who just–was more concerned with just Jesus as God. Like, Jesus
became, for me, doing all this reading, oh, he’s quite a revolutionary guy. You know? Uh, he’s doing some things
that are certainly contrary than what was going on amongst the Hebrews at the time. And he was challenging
things. And sometimes you just had to really read the text, and, and then I find that there was these preachers
from the 60s, maybe even earlier, who were always trying to put forth a more revolutionary Jesus that kept us
moving.

zuri: Mm hm.
Ashanti: And, if they preached a certain way, if they used a certain, uh, text, it seemed to resonate with the
congregation. And then some of them congregations is part of movements. I wanted to focus on that, because
basically our people, our God-believing people, the majority of us are Christians, but what’s in it–what’s in there
that gets us to feel like there’s more to this? We don’t have to accept what is, there’s more to this. And can we as
the activists, as the organizers, the revolutionaries, can we kind of learn more about that and how it might relate
to us personally? And be able to use that as ways also, uh, helping to raise consciousness, helping to develop new
ways to–to–to reach people, to bring people together. And to act! So that’s–that’s uh, I think that’s what was the
main thing for me, is like, something about us keeps us believing that we can be free no matter how crazy it can
get. Farrakhan can call for a Million Man March and that brought out more than a million people! And it wasn’t
just the men. You know, there was something in us that keeps us, like, “we gotta change this madness!” As a
people, we gotta change this, and then, uh, another experience was when Mandela came to the United States after
he was freed. He came to Brooklyn at the time I’m living in Brooklyn, and he came to Boys and Girls High. And
um, I lived like two blocks from Boys and Girls High.

Malcolm: That’s where my mom went to school, sorry (laugh).

Ashanti: Really? Okay, so, it was amazing going into that, into that, um, to that school, and everybody’s in the
back, and it was like thousands of people to hear Mandela, to see Mandela. And the feeling that it brought was
like.. This is tremendous, man, it was such a…a liberating feeling. I-I think we gotta figure out how to get there,
regardless of the language that it comes in, we gotta figure out how to get there and those of us who are of certain
spiritualities then we have to learn, you know, more of that and how to be more bilingual with other–other folks
beliefs, too.

(unintelligible agreement)

Ashanti: There was a point man, I seen it in Brooklyn and then when he came to Harlem, we went to Harlem,
they was raising–they was asking people to give money. I’m seeing black folks pass up bills, hand to hand, from
way back, making that, that money (go?) up, and it looked like it wasn’t nobody pocketing anything. I’m like,
come on, black people you know somebody pocketed. But that wasn’t the feeling and that wasn’t the vibe. And
it happened in Harlem, too. I’m like black people we–I think we do got this deep thing, but it’s like, I don’t feel
like the main folks out there who are the speakers, the organizers, um, the fighters, are dealing with that aspect.
You know? So–so even in the reading I do now in Judaism and stuff, I gotta go to the–to the parts that helped
me see the potential for its use. For me, and then for others, you know? Be–because, I know my depression a
lot of times is when I feel like. Man, we ain’t gon’ win, are we? You know? Is my generation gon’ be the one, the
last one to make that major push? And then the following generations, ah!.. And when I feel that is when my
Spirit sink. But then I–I need reminders. That that’s just how I’m feeling in that moment and if I just look around,
you know, even through the Internet, no, folks are doing stuff all over the place so I need not just keep hanging…
being depressed. But if I’m depressed, how many other people are depressed? You know? And–and my comrade
who I was talking to last night is like, me and him, uh, when we were doing Estacion Libre, taking folks to Mexico
to check out the Zapatistas... So he’s been in years, he’s been through depression and stuff, too. And so we both
tryna now, kind of help each other get to a better place. But we both realize that a lot of folks we know in the
movement don’t even deal with that individual aspect of how do we get to a better place as individuals, so that we
can, maybe, be more effective. You know, or even if it’s–you feel better, somebody else senses that, you help them
to feel better or you say something that helps them to–to take it a step further or to challenge some old beliefs.
How do we do it? You know, so that’s basically um. That’s basically what I do every–I–I read every day. But then,
there’s a certain point where the reading becomes a crutch. ‘Cause at a certain point you gotta do something with
it. The same thing in the Panther party, it’s like, practice is the criteria of truth. You know, and like, you can read
all that stuff but if, if you just got it intellectually what’s the point?

zuri: Yeah.

Ashanti: So I think that–that’s even where I’m at now, but when I look at our folks. Like come on we can do
better. And then there are certain areas I know folks are organizing in, I know they’re trying to do their best, but
then things like with George Floyd what happened. No, even before George Floyd the–the–the brother in
Oakland. That police kill that was really major, one of the early major ones. People are all–the police–and there
were people all around the police killing the boy, people got their cellphones and everybody’s taking pictures. I’m
like, what the fuck?

zuri: Right. Right. (laugh) Right! Right.

Ashanti: Someone throw a cellphone! Throw a–if you ain’t gon’ jump in there, try to save him, throw the
cellphone. Don’t just (camera-taking gesture), come on my people! So, that–which also lets me know that
there is the fear of death. ‘Cause you know how vicious this system is. And I know that’s in our psyche.
So how do we get there? For some–for a lot of people, you may have to come through a spiritual route to get them
to see that. Others are more secular, maybe they need something else, but I think it’s an area we have not explored.

zuri: Yeah.

Ashanti: Um.. And that’s kinda like what I look for, uh, for me and–and–and sometimes, for others. Can we
figure out what holds us together? What nurtures a more resistant spirit, a more spirit that–keep us human? You
know. And not just, well, did you read that book, did you read this book? You know, that analysis, this analysis,
sometimes that’s.. that’s not what gets it. So. Enough said, that’s, you know, there. But, just that you asked that
question and I never, never get a chance to share them thoughts. Even right now that’s, like, really important for
me. It’s really important, you know? And then to get to hear our thinking, you know, um it’s helpful because I
know that in there there’s the possibility someone else is gonna say something that educates me on something, to
open my mind about something, or confirm something, whatever, that’s what community is supposed to do. You
know, we can get challenged, we can, you know. But–but hopefully to come out of this feeling, like, um, “okay,
this is good. It ain’t over. We can still win.” Yeah. And that’s what I want to feel. We can still win.

zuri: Yeah.

Ashanti: Yeah.

zuri: Yeah. Yeah, I–what you were saying earlier about, um, the Jesus, um, comment, I sent Justin–I was trying
to find it on here. On, um, on YouTube. But, basically there was like, um, there’s this professor Jay Cameron
Carter.

Ashanti: Yeah! I’m familiar with that

zuri: Yeah, okay, yeah!

Ashanti: I’ve read some of his stuff.

zuri: Okay, cool, yeah, he’s good. I’m about to be at a conference, um, next–in a couple months, I’m hoping that
he’s one of my readers. Um, that I get to read one of my papers. But, he was describing, there’s this video on
YouTube and he was describing Jesus as an anarchist ‘cause he was like, Jesus is–he was like Jesus was trying to get
everyone else to be their own savior. You know? Like, and so, it’s actually decentralizing the idea of, like, you
know, the one that’s gonna come and, you know, save–save you from, you know, whatever. He’s like, no actually
like, Jesus wants everyone to be like their own savior.

Ashanti: Right.

II. The Function of Music

zuri: Um, and so, right now I’ve been thinking about, like, I guess I’ve been thinking a lot about music, in
particular, and like the role of music as this kind of secular, kind of, um, interreligious, not religious, but kinda
spiritual –and I don’t think spiritual really captures, you know, what it actually is doing, but… I don’t think–I
don’t think language captures anything. And basically, really thinking about the artist and how the artist is doing
–I guess this goes into like culture, really. Um, and how like the artist potentially is someone that’s acting as like
a-a conduit or, like, a kind of like, trying to incite things amongst the listeners of it, and then how do we turn–
how does the artist then turn the crowd or the listeners into co–into collaborators. You know? Where like the
artist is–where everyone is now an artist, you know, like everyone now has a paintbrush. Everyone has what they
need. But yeah, I’ve just been–I’ve really been also struggling with like the–not trying to get trapped in the
religious language, um, like strictly religious language, um, which is very–I grew up in the church so it’s very easy
to do. Um, but. Yeah, I just hear so much of like, so much of just what you were saying especially like the
depression part too like.

Ashanti: Mm.

zuri: It’s hard because I know that the only way I can ever feel better is if I ignore what’s going on. ‘Cause I know
that, you know, my depression is directly tied to the state of the world. So the only way–so then if I’m feeling
better that means I’ve checked out. You know?

Ashanti: Mmm.

zuri: It almost–it almost at times feel like–I feel bad if I don’t feel bad. Because if I don’t feel bad, then that means,
that means that–that means that I’m not caring anymore. You know? Um.

Ashanti: Mm.

zuri: So yeah. I don’t know, I was just. Just thinking with you, but.

Ashanti: Yeah. But then, there’s–there’s all kinds of readings on caring itself, just caring as a revolutionary thing,
whether you’re dealing with, um, uh, what’s her name..
zuri: Is it Sharpe?

Ashanti: No, it’s a feminist, she’s dead now, um, uh, a feminist poet that–

zuri: Lorde?

Ashanti: Yeah, Audre Lorde would talk about it, um, bell hooks would talk about it, you know, that caring thing
right? And a lot of time that’s not something that comes through when you see somebody’s–put forth their
organization and they don’t lay down their principles and things that they doing, you don’t really see anything
about things like that, because that calls for a lot more from us, you know, if you talk about a comradeship you
gotta talk about caring, you gotta talk about being there, you know, um. Some of the religious theologians talk
about, you know, face to face–the face to face encounter, you know. And I’m like, oh, that’s an anarchist thing,
too, I mean face to face is definitely it man instead of you know someone here, someone down there, you looking
down on someone and that’s a–that whole thing, no, let us see each other’s face, let us see each other, on that
basis. But, um, I think it’s one of the things that we gotta learn as revolutionaries who want to move forward more
effectively is what deeper ways do, uh, can we connect with people and if we can’t, what do we have to learn then
to do that, you know? One of the things in prison–I want to get back to the music, too–one of the things I learned
in prison is–I’m reading, um, I started getting into the more radical psychologies. And, um, and then I started
reading some counseling stuff too but how they came together was: how to be present for others, you know? And
I found that to be so amazing and like oh I never even looked at it like that. But it calls for more of us that whole
thing around being more vulnerable for each other, you know, everything, and I even saw it as, uh, also a way to
kind of cut down on infiltration. Because if you’re in a group or you–you’re working with other people and you’re
able to have some real authentic conversations, really get to know each other and, and, that extends to, like, family
and neighborhood, usually the ones who are infiltrating you ain’t gon’ find out too much about them, they’re
gon’ come with the rhetoric. And they gonna, you know, I haven’t watched that Judas and the–that movie, I ain’t
even watch it yet,

Malcolm: No, no (laugh)

Ashanti: But knowing–you said no? Ha!

(collective laughter)

Ashanti: But I gotta watch it ‘cause my daughter said I gotta watch it, man! So, anyhow, but what–what–what–
what, uh, what I think happens is that a person that won’t share... sometimes you gotta be a little suspicious if the
person just moved into the city from somewhere else and you don’t really know much about ‘em, like, well. I need
to know you, I’m allowing you to know me. You know? But that’s also–it’s a spiritual thing, too, regardless if
you’re religious or not, like, it helps you to, like, trust. The other elements come in there, caring, trust, the ability
to, like, just be open and giving and be receptive. Um, so those became other things that made me want to focus
on how deeper we gotta get into this in order to not keep committing the same mistakes ‘cause when you–you
don’t do them things it’s almost like you’re setting yourself up to repeat all the mistakes you’ve ever made, you
know. The egos come into play.
The–the thing I want to say about the music, um, and it’s like you said, there’s so much potential in art, in the
artist, even for the organizers, all them people, to kinda see what they do as being artistic. You’re creating, you’re
constantly thinking, like, create. So, ideology just–you can’t–can’t do that. If there’s set ways–the only ways that
you can relate to somebody is to sign them up to a committee and say oh do this, do this, do that, and you never
really get to know the person. Mm. Authoritarianism. You know, it’s just setting it up.

But the music, man. Every day I walk the dog I got my music on. And if people ever put a camera on me they may
see me bopping while I’m walking the dog, right?

(laughter)

‘Cause I’m feeling good! And it depends on what the music is, too. So sometimes it’s the church music, sometimes
it’s not, sometimes it’s Curtis Mayfield or whatever, The Temptations. But, I always think about–it makes me
feel good and especially sometimes when I’m really feeling not too good, I’m feeling down. Um, what is it about
this music and it’s cultural, too, I know it’s cultural in a sense, like, if it’s Mavis Staples singing “Holy, holy” that
may not mean anything to, you know, white boy from the Appalachian mountains, I don’t know, or maybe even
from the university. But for us to hear her sing, or Mahalia Jackson, to hear her sing, man, it does something. It
makes you feel something. In a way that sometimes there’s no words for. So, it opens you, it just. It gets you into
a... There’s something about this life that says don’t give up. Don’t give up. Don’t give up. And so I’ll even go
online sometimes–ethnomusicology–and to see what folks are saying about the different music whether it’s
gospel or whether it’s hip hop. Though, I’m not much of a hip hop person, you know. My wife is a more hip hop,
you know–

zuri: Why do you think that is, that you’re not into hip hop like that?

Ashanti: Because I know the best music came out of the 60s and 70s I just–it’s a foregone conclusion.

(collective laughter)

Ashanti: I don’t know! I don’t know but you know what it is, I don’t understand what they be saying sometimes,
man, they be—I’m like oh my god, man! (laugh) But–but I recognize its importance, I mean, I do, but ay, I ain’t
gotta be a specialist in that area, other folks are. But I still love the music that came out of the 60s and the 70s. It
just makes me–it makes me feel good, and if that’s so, I know it does with others. I know when I go to church
and hear the folks singing in the church, my church is acapella, there's no instruments or anything.
Um, but there’s certain–there’s certain hymns or songs they sing, man, just puts me in a certain space,
you know? And it’s a space that says, hold on, breathe, it’s gonna be alright. It can’t be written off by those
who are so scientific as... their thing is yeah but that’s all that spooky stuff, man, that’s all that spiritualism stuff.
That’s bullshit! You know? Deal with the function of it, where it puts people, what it creates in them
spaces. You know? Because what it creates in them spaces is what’s most important. And you can be as
scientific as you want, but do you have a community of folks that you’re organizing and moving somewhere? You
know? And have you dealt with them other questions that allow a person to, like, uh, to deal with the constant
daily battering of their spirits? Of their personality, of their sense of being? You know, that stuff becomes really
important because you want to sustain these movements. And if you keep getting battered down, man, every day
in all kind of little ways you’re bound to get depressed to the point where you want to check out. You might talk
about wanting to check out, maybe just temporarily. Some people want to just check out period and figure out
how to do that. Whatever their thing is, you know? And we gotta figure out how to make people check in or that
other language around staying woke, you know? So it makes me realize that back in the 60s, 70s, we may have had
more simplistic notions of revolution, but like now it’s like, no it’s much more complex, but it’s still doable. We
just gotta figure out how to incorporate more–to make the possibility real, you know? There’s a whole bunch of
people that’s just depressed.

zuri: Yeah.

III. Communication, Commonalities, and Using the Entire Toolkit

Justin: I was gonna say like, one, I just appreciate the conversation about... Cause this is something, I mean, that
board zuri just wiped–we wiped off yesterday was a lot of the stuff that we’re doing, talking about, and thinking
about together, is like. There’s, like, emphasis on the material and, like, what that kinda takes off the table when
you’re just like, “Everything’s material, everything’s scientific.” Um, and then what you were just talking about.
It’s made me be reflective on myself, too, right, ‘cause I’m thinking. One, I think there’s.. Specifically I’m thinking
about my friends back home, they’re in Tennessee, in a day to day I’m not around them, right? And, like,
especially during, you know, 2020, whenever something like racism, anti-blackness, gets like pitched up and
people are angry, a lot of my friends are like I can’t physically allow myself to care or pay attention or be concerned
because again it’s just too much. And it’s like, and you know, cause I remember he said this like what do I even
do? And I sent, I think this was around when Lorenzo Ervin had just did an interview, just like, I forgot exactly
the title but something about–basically giving some type of anarchist analysis, right? And I’m like, peep this, this
is something you can think about. But it’s like, at the end of the day it’s like, that’s still.. That, like, concept still
doesn’t address that feeling. And that just has to be worked, and that can be something where like, you can
introduce the concept–again it’s like you introduce the concept and then in practice that concept can deal with
that feeling but just by sending somebody like, hey, you can pay attention and you can deal with the feeling of
what’s going on if you–For me sometimes it’s like okay I know there’s routes that I can take, right? For some
people, it’s like, I have to, like, just knowing about a route or an option, like, I have to see it. I have to see it, I have
to feel it. Um. So that’s one thing I was thinking about as you were talking and then. Yeah. I’ll just stop there but
I think.. And there’s so many–I don’t know, you’re talking and I, uh, I know Desmond probably will appreciate
this too, but–and I don’t know if you peeping, but I’m hearing so much of just, like–I’ve been reading a lot of,
like, Amílcar Cabral lately. I think if there’s someone who’s like–and me and zuri used some in our paper–‘cause
it’s like, I feel like if there’s someone who’s… He definitely loved him some science. He definitely loved him some
modernity. He was like, we gotta be modern. And a lot of times he was like, you know, we gotta get this religious
thinking out of here and think scientifically and modern. So there’s definitely critiques to have on him about that
approach, but there’s also stuff about–‘Cause like he has–I was reading some of his lectures to the party and one
of them is called revolutionary democracy. And I’m reading it, like, okay what’s your political programme
of revolutionary democracy? He’s talking about intimate relationships. Just like, how do you talk to
people? And he’s like we gotta trust people, we don’t lie, like all these things. And I was like, oh, this
not a programme, you talking about creating new ways of relating to people.

Ashanti: Right on.

Justin: He as a political party, like, we not finna be just authoritarian. He said we should be, like, the people should
criticize us so much so that if they feel like we’re not even useful we should be removed. And we gotta be okay
with that.
(collective agreement)

Ashanti: Mhm.

Justin: So I was thinking about some of that, too, when you were talking.

Malcolm: That how you talk to people part is so, like, that is like the–for me it’s–I think, like, Ashanti what you
were saying about, like, using reading as a crutch, I definitely feel that. Like I be doing that sometimes like straight
up. I get depressed, I’ll just hop in a book.

Ashanti: (laugh)

Malcolm: Let me try and resolve this! But I think like, the how you talk to people, like, –and that’s why, like, I
feel like when it’s just talking to family or friends about, like, even about what I’m studying, right? They’ll just be
like, that doesn’t make sense. Or it’s like, I don’t even want to think about that. That’s another thing that people
say sometimes. It just be, like, too dark. And it’s like, alright, how do we, like, you know. How do we think
about what’s not making sense or what is tapping into something that is making people not want to
think about a certain concept or something, right? That criticism part that also needs to be connected to,
like, how we’re talking to people. How do you make things connect to people and how do you also learn what
isn’t connecting and for what reason, specifically?

Ashanti: Yeah. And you know, the thing about conversation. I think we have to learn to get much better at having
conversations so that it ain’t always us talking at people, or to people, but we’re talking with people. And part of
what that means is that you really gotta hear other people, and they may be saying things to you that’s crazy,
because they may sound like–Oh, you not critiquing capitalism, or you’re not critiquing the effects of racism on
us. And, okay, maybe they’re not, but can the conversation happen in a way that they hear you? Maybe come
from a different way, a different perspective that’s personal. How does capitalism affect you or how does, you
know, the effects of racism affect you? Because I’m sure that the effects of racism still affects each one of us. Like
usually we harp on white folks about you know, if you’re racist–you’re born in this society, you’re white, you’re
racist. But maybe not so much, you know, you’re black and the things that it has done to us is gonna be
with us all our lives. And unless we figure out ways to lessen it and be able to pass something on to other
generations that’s lesser and they develop the skills to get lesser, maybe two or three generations down, maybe
some of that won’t be noticeable. But it affects us in so many ways. We need to figure out how to have the
conversations, you know, and I think the thing–When I’m reading in the prison, when I’m reading the critical
theory and the–Um. Maslow was like the self actualization and all this other stuff, and then the counseling skills
and stuff. I’m like, man, I wish I’d a knew them things in the Black Panther Party, or we knew them things in the
Black Panther Party, ‘cause maybe we woulda done better, you know? But I think that’s one of the things that
moved me to anarchism, was like, it gave me a way to look at what happened in the Black Panther Party and, like,
oh that leadership structure, man, we was like really set up to fail. Once we took it on and then got so caught up
in it that–The Vanguard now and yadda yadda yadda. We never got to know each other. Also, there was points
where there was chapters, Panther chapters had been started somewhere, and someone wasn’t necessarily coming
from a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist perspective, but they were maybe more, um, cultural nationalist or Pan
Africanism, the party was like, “Not acceptable. You outta here.” Why could not the Panther Party have different
expressions, you know? Because today we need the people to know that there’s gonna be different expressions of
liberatory practice, liberatory living arrangements, all this, you know, stuff like that and not just, like, one thing
and you gotta follow this. As anarchists we gotta be open to that diversity you know and stuff like that and figure
out how to keep it on some kind of common pace, that we can actually see our power to change things, you know.
But everything becomes a tool whether it’s the music, people’s writings, whether it’s how, uh, these podcasts
that come up and all that other stuff. You know, um, and then more creative ways, actually in the streets, so in
communities, that we engage people, you know. I think it all becomes really important, man, it’s just really
important. We won’t shut somebody down because they’re coming from a different place. But we’ll keep with
the commonalities.

And just real brief, the thing with keeping to the commonalities, one of the things one of my comrades was really
good at back in them days was, um. Whatever conversation he was in with someone in the community, if they
were coming from a different place he would look for the commonalities. He would focus on the commonalities
to let them know, yeah we may disagree with that, but you know we in agreement on this that something has
gotta be done. You know? To help them to, like, keep a sense of community and know that there can be
differences, there can be contradictions, there can be them kinda internal struggles and it’s okay. Instead of, like,
your objective is to chop them down until you show them how correct you are. You know? All that type of
behavior was, like, why I’ll never go back to any kind of–that kind of authoritarian ideological thing. Because it
just erases people where they’re at. They just gotta follow you, they just gotta fit into this mold. You know? And
we gotta–I think we just gotta figure out all the different things in our world that can become tools. And the
spiritualities and the musics and the other artforms that’s involved, or even like what’s going on in the community
centers, what efforts people are making to have alternative education, community gardens? You know, what are
other expressions of liberatory practice is going on that we can, like, see “oh, this thing that’s already happening
that can take us further.” And I think the thing is we just ain’t figuring out how to kind of bring it together
without people feeling like you’re gonna take them over, you’re gonna mesh them into this thing now where
they’ll have no more identity. How do we do it, you know?
 Liner Notes

Why live life from dream to dream

And dread the day that dreaming ends?

Did you know that true love asks for nothing?

Her acceptance is the way we pay
Did you know that life has given love a guarantee?
To last through forever and another day

Even the sun goes down

Heroes eventually die
Horoscopes often lie

Blessing and a curse when they throw you off the slave ship

Let some drops fall on me now

Don’t pull that thang out unless you plan to bang

Burn it all away, learning and discerning

Probably running late, but I’m on my way (on my way)
Thousand dollar tape ‘cause I say so
The best fertilizer is the plantation owner’s foot

And even after all my logic and my theory I add a ‘motherfucker’ so you ignant niggas hear me

Copyright © (De)Cypher: Black Notes on Culture and Criticism

Spring 2022
Prod. zuri arman & Kristen Maye