Alexander G. Weheliye

Feenin: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music

“The Man Who Was a Thing.” In 1910 appeared a book by Mary White Ovington called Half a Man. Over one hundred years after the appearance of Stowe’s book, The Man Who Cried I Am, by John A. Williams, was published. Quickskill thought of all the changes that would happen to make a “Thing” into an “I Am.” Tons of paper. An Atlantic of blood. Repressed energy of anger that would form enough sun to light a solar system. A burntout black hole. A cosmic slave hole. —Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada

I Am I Be: The Subject of Sonic Afro-modernity

This essay forms part of a book-length manuscript in progress entitled Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-modernity. Earlier versions were presented in the context of ‘‘Ralph Ellison: The Next Fifty Years,’’ a boundary 2 conference at the University of Pittsburgh, and the Fellows’ Workshop of the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern University. I extend gratitude to Kevin Bell, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Jillana Enteen, Ronald Judy, and Michael Hanchard for comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

The Grooves of Temporality

his essay takes W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as a model of modern black temporality and cultural practice rooted in and routed through the sonic. While Souls blends together history, eulogy, sociology, personal anecdote, economics, lyricism, ethnography, fi ction, and cultural criticism of black music, Du Bois’s central aesthetic achievement in this epochal text appears in bars of music placed before each chapter. The way the “Sorrow Songs” are threaded throughout the text is the key to Souls’s sonorous ignition. Besides the musical epigraphs, references to hearing and the “Sorrow Songs” close both the “Forethought” and “Afterthought,” underpinning the manuscript both graphically—through musical notes—and in its content—through Du Bois’s theorization of black music’s place in U.S. and world culture. When Du Bois ([1903] 1989: 2; emphasis mine) fi rst introduces the “Sorrow Songs” in the “Forethought,” he links them directly to the souls of black folk: “Before each chapter, as now printed, stands a bar of the Sorrow Songs—some echo of haunting melody from the only American music, which welled up from black souls in the dark past.” Moreover, in the “Afterthought” to Souls, Du Bois ([1903] 1989: 217) asks his readers to “Hear [his] cry,” and the best way to hear the souls of black folk, as Du Bois remarks at the end of chapter 1 (“Of Our Spiritual Strivings”), is to listen to the “Sorrow Songs.” Du Bois ([1903] 1989: 12) does not ask his readers to view or see the souls of black folk, but instead he writes so “that men may listen to the souls of black folk.” Much in the same way that Du Bois appeals to the ear in his

Engendering Phonographies: Sonic Technologies of Blackness

This short essay responds to Tavia Nyong’o’s insightful “Afro-philo-sonic Fictions,” a discussion of Weheliye’s Phonographies and Julian Henriques’s Sonic Bodies, concentrating in particular on the analytics of blackness in Western modernity, the place of Africa in diaspora discourse, and the conceptual provenances of black feminist approaches.

Introduction: Black Studies and Black Life

Given the recent attacks on black and ethnic studies, representing correlatives of the ongoing disqualification of black studies as an intellectual enterprise and the continued disregard for black life in the Western world, we do well to persistently ask about the scope of black studies, especially its over-determined relationship to black life, and affirm its necessity now more than ever. Clearly the expandabi I ity of black I ife such as the murders of Aiyana Stanley-Jones,Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride, Oscar Grant, lslan Nettles, and Jordan Davis and the deriding of black studies are not the same. Nevertheless, there remains a strong recursive loop between these two domains that should not be submerged, and black studies has served as an important safeguard against this brutal tendency. Black life is that which must be constitutively abjected-and as such has represented the negative ontological ground for the Western order of things at least for the last five hundred years-but can never be included in the Western world order, especially the category of Man.2 Phrased differently, there can be no black life in the territory of Western, humanist Man, which is why the existence of black life disenchants Western humanism. Claiming, though not owning, the centrality of blackness to the creation of the occident is as important as it is necessary for the particular decolonizing critique developed within black studies.

Review of "Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness", edited by Trica Danielle Keaton, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Tyler Stovall: Special Issue: In Memoriam: Robert Chrisman, 1937-2013

An incident erupts: perhaps an atrocity against a black youth by the police or racists, or corrupt prosecutors and judges convict yet another innocent black defendant, or the US bombs, invades, or otherwise joins in suppressing a foreign nation fighting a USsupported dictator. Now imagine that in response to such events, celebrities like Jay-Z, Beyonce, Derek Jeter, Denzel Washington, Gabby Douglas, Bernard Hopkins, Oprah Winfrey, Jamie Foxx, Henry Louis Gates, Gwen Ifill, Wynton Marsalis, and Walter Mosley participated in a progressive popular front that held rallies attended by 30,000 to 100,000 in strategic major cities to demand justice and combat abuses of power. That sort of fight-back was the norm in many Afro-American communities for much of the 1930s into the 1950s, and it took the weight of the bourgeois political, economic, and police machine to disrupt the unity that progressives had forged. Few high school or college courses provide any details about that epoch in US history. Concealing and/ or distorting information about the era in which fronts played key roles has become part of the opinion-molding techniques of the neoliberal and right-wing establishment.