Afrofuturism And Black Sound Studies

This book interrogates the meeting point between Afrofuturism and Black Sound Studies. Whereas Afrofuturism is often understood primarily in relation to science fiction and speculative fiction, it can also be examined from a sonic perspective. The sounds of Afrofuturism are deeply embedded in the speculative – demonstrated in mythmaking – in frameworks for songs and compositions, in the personas of the artists, and in how the sounds are produced. In highlighting the place of music within the lived experiences of African Americans, the author analyses how the perspectives of Black Sound Studies complement and overlap with the discussion of sonic Afrofuturism. Focusing upon blackness, technology, and sound, this unique text offers key insights in how music partakes in imagining and constructing the future. This innovative volume will appeal to students and scholars of sound studies, musicology and African American studies.

This book examines Black Panther not only as a film grounded in Afro-futurism, but also as an invitation for viewers to think about relevant real-world social questions about identity, liberation, and racial justice, ultimately posing the question of how Black Panther invites a reimagining of Blackness.

In Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women’s Cultural Critiques of Nation, Andrea Davis imagines new reciprocal relationships beyond the competitive forms of belonging suggested by the nation-state. The book employs the tropes of horizon, sea, and sound as a critique of nation-state discourses and formations, including multicultural citizenship, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and the hierarchical nuclear family. Drawing on Tina Campt’s discussion of Black feminist futurity, Davis offers the concept future now, which is both central to Black freedom and a joint social justice project that rejects existing structures of white supremacy. Calling for new affiliations of community among Black, Indigenous, and other racialized women, and offering new reflections on the relationship between the Caribbean and Canada, she articulates a diaspora poetics that privileges our shared humanity. In advancing these claims, Davis turns to the expressive cultures (novels, poetry, theater, and music) of Caribbean and African women artists in Canada, including work by Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Esi Edugyan, Ramabai Espinet, Nalo Hopkinson, Amai Kuda, and Djanet Sears. Davis considers the ways in which the diasporic characters these artists create redraw the boundaries of their horizons, invoke the fluid histories of the Caribbean Sea to overcome the brutalization of plantation histories, use sound to enter and reenter archives, and shapeshift to survive in the face of conquest. The book will interest readers of literary and cultural studies, critical race theories, and Black diasporic studies.

Vector 1 : Afrofuturism -- Vector 2 : Black Feminism -- Vector 3 : Intersectionality -- Vector 4 : Posthumanism -- Vector 5 : Postcapitalism.

The future is a contested terrain and one that has in recent years been debated, theorized and imaginatively constructed with an unprecedented, albeit unsurprising, sense of urgency. The recent Afrofuturist imaginary is an increasingly noticeable field in these debates and manifestations, requesting as it does the envisioning of a future through an artistic, scientific and technological African or Black lens. Afrofuturism is not a new term, but it seems to have broadened and developed in different directions. The recent Afrofuturist engagements, which oscillate between narratives of empowerment and tech-wise superheroes on the one hand and dystopian agendas on the other, raise questions about earlier futurist accounts, about historical Black visions of the future that precede the establishment even of the term “Afrofuturism”. This volume contextualizes Afrofuturism’s diverse approaches in the past and present through investigations into overlapping horizons between Afrofuturist agendas and other intellectual and/or artistic movements (e.g., Pan-Africanism, debates about Civil Rights, decolonial debates and transcultural modernisms), as well as through explorations of Afrofuturist approaches in the 21st century across media cultures and in a transcultural perspective. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Studies in Media Communication.

Sonic fiction is everywhere: in conversations about vernacular culture, in music videos, sound art compositions and on record sleeves, in everyday encounters with sonic experiences and in every single piece of writing about sound. Where one can find sounds one will also detect bits of fiction. In 1998 music critic, DJ and video essayist Kodwo Eshun proposed this concept in his book “More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction”. Originally, he did so in order to explicate the manifold connections between Afrofuturism and Techno, connecting them to Jazz, Breakbeat and Electronica. His argument, his narrations and his explorative language operations however inspired researchers, artists, and scholars since then. Sonic Fiction became a myth and a mantra, a keyword and a magical spell. This book provides a basic introduction to sonic fiction. In six chapters it explicates the inspirations for and the transformations of this concept; it explores applications and extrapolations in sound art and sonic theory, in musicology, epistemology, in critical and political theory. Sonic fiction is presented in this book as a heuristic for critique and activism.

The Sound of Culture explores the histories of race and technology in a world made by slavery, colonialism, and industrialization. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and moving through to the twenty-first, the book argues for the dependent nature of those histories. Looking at American, British, and Caribbean literature, it distills a diverse range of subject matter: minstrelsy, Victorian science fiction, cybertheory, and artificial intelligence. All of these facets, according to Louis Chude-Sokei, are part of a history in which music has been central to the equation that links blacks and machines. As Chude-Sokei shows, science fiction itself has roots in racial anxieties and he traces those anxieties across two centuries and a range of writers and thinkers—from Samuel Butler, Herman Melville, and Edgar Rice Burroughs to Sigmund Freud, William Gibson, and Donna Haraway, to Norbert Weiner, Sylvia Wynter, and Samuel R. Delany.

In today’s culture, popular music is a vital site where ideas about gender and sexuality are imagined and disseminated. Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions explores what that means with a wide-ranging collection of chapters that consider the many ways in which contemporary pop music performances of gender and sexuality are politically engaged and even radical. With analyses rooted in feminist and queer thought, contributors explore music from different genres and locations, including Beyoncé’s Lemonade, A Tribe Called Red’s We Are the Halluci Nation, and celebrations of Vera Lynn’s 100th Birthday. At a bleak moment in global politics, this collection focuses on the concept of critical hope: the chapters consider making and consuming popular music as activities that encourage individuals to imagine and work toward a better, more just world. Addressing race, class, aging, disability, and colonialism along with gender and sexuality, the authors articulate the diverse ways popular music can contribute to the collective political projects of queerness and feminism. With voices from senior and emerging scholars, this volume offers a snapshot of today’s queer and feminist scholarship on popular music that is an essential read for students and scholars of music and cultural studies.