marlo david/WRITING:: samples
Afrofuturism, Neo-Soul Identity, and Black Popular MusicConsidering the relative lack of scholarship on contemporary R&B music, especially in terms of its engagement with any sort of futuristic projection, this paper seeks to stimulate discourse around issues of identity and the information age, especially in regards to the hotly contested category of R&B popularly called neo-soul. In fact, neo-soul – particularly the music and aesthetics of Erykah Badu – perform what Alexander G. Weheliye calls a very specific “coarticulation of black subjectivity and information technologies.” What connects Badu’s neo-soul identity to theories of Afrofuturism are a series of futuristic counternarratives embedded within her music and visual presence. These counternarratives, which can be traced from George Clinton to Andre 3000, speak to the intersections of history and progress, tradition and innovation, technology and memory, the authentic and engineered, analog and digital within spaces of African diasporic culture.
More than Baby Mamas:Black Women, Hip Hop, and Procreative Power in the 21st Century
Early hip-hop critics from Tricia Rose, Nancy Guevara, and Cheryl L. Keyes to relative new-jacks such as Joan Morgan, Imani Perry, and Gwendolyn Pough have explored the ways in which black women carve a progressive, feminist space within hip hop’s hyper-masculine universe. They intervene on behalf of complexity in order to analyze black women’s embrace of hip-hop identity. They sharply critique the misogyny, violence, and materialism of hip hop. Meanwhile, they also show how black women navigate the conflicting, inconsistent gray areas of hip hop to stand up and be heard. Each of these voices, often in harmony and discord with traditional black feminist theory, contribute to what we can now confidently call hip-hop feminism.
Realization, Augusta Savage (1938)
I think that Aime Carillo Rowe’s notion of “be longing” along with Samira Kawash’s “together-touching” provide a useful intervention into Gayl Jones’ enigmatic novel Corregidora. This particular text has often been situated on the outside of the thematic spectrum of “community” in black women’s texts, perhaps because of its ambivalence toward the traditionally idealized notions of black community. Melissa Walker, for example, strategically omits all of Gayl Jones’ work in her study on community because they are “narratives focusing primarily on personal and sexual themes divorced from larger social issues” (4). Indeed, Corregidora does what Walker suggests, but I would argue that Jones’ attention to so-called personal and sexual themes provides insight into “together-touching” and its radical potential for destabilizing the subject, mitigating difference and thereby reconstituting how community is conceived. Jones’ Corregidora has been mistakenly cast aside in the deliberations on black women’s fiction and its engagement with “community.”
Alternative readings of novels like Corregidora can offer a deeper insight into the ways black women have argued against the individuated subject as the integral unit of community building thus responding to social movements of the late 20th century that relied on this construction to thrive. These two theoretical interventions are suggestive of a way of reading post-Civil Rights era texts that attempts to incorporate difference in remarkable ways. Through the synthesis of Kawash’s idea of “together-touching” and Rowe’s “be longing,” a new vision of community emerges, that approaches what Iris Marion Young calls “positively heterogeneous and sensual public life” (52). Together these theoretical tools provide a useful lens through which to see the intrasubjective expression of community in these texts, and articulates a new vision of freedom as community.
