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*For a limited time, you can read a draft of the independent paper I have been working on about electricity and percussiveness in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Just go to the products/special items page here. Enjoy!
Watching veteran actor Clint Eastwood’s “act” with an invisible President Obama in a chair may have been the highlight of the Republican National Convention, but as several commentators have mentioned, it ironically represented the Republican platform and treatment of Obama in this election. Through their words and actions, this is what I have heard from the Republicans: “I don’t matter.”
To be rendered invisible is to be treated as if one doesn’t exist and the issues that matter in that life doesn’t exist. Jamil Smith writes in his article, “The President, rendered invisible in a chair,” part of the right-wing’s agenda had been to call out in any way possible the illegitimacy of Obama’s presidency; basically to erase his presence as the president of the United States. But it has also been about erasing the realities of “others” in general. Instead of caring about the people who live down here on earth, I feel as if right-wingers’ heads are always in the sky or at least their noses are so turned-up that they fail to see the rest of us.
Most of the issues that republicans either ignore or want to legislate in their favor will greatly affect the material lives of people of color, women, LGTBQ communities, poor people, elderly, immigrants, the sick, the disabled, students and the unemployed. I am included in this. I am a poor, right now unemployed, post-grad, black woman. All of this will affect me, but all I saw at the republican convention were people who were not speaking to someone like me. I was rendered invisible as well.
Rockwell- Somebody’s Watching Me
With the recent death of Rodney King, I wanted to reflect on the gaze or surveillance in our society and how it has manifested itself during this year so far. The gaze has implied that the bodies of others, like Black bodies, should always be under scrupulous examination because we are threats to dominant groups. Theological philosopher James W. Perkinson said that one of the main modi operandi of Western culture has been technologies of the eye. In their superficial use, much destruction has occurred in the world. I would also add that our own eyes as a kind of technology themselves have been just as harmful. The world we see is not actually what we see – images are flipped, there are perceptual errors and the brain creates illusions to fill in gaps. Yet entire cultures for centuries were and still are built off of what we see only, and it has had dangerous and paralyzing effects on people of color.
In Black Skin, White Masks, Franz Fanon describes himself like the wave that becomes a particle under observation: “The white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me. I am fixed. Once their mircrotomes [used in microscopy] are sharpened, the Whites objectively cut sections of my reality. I have been betrayed” (95). As Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man also exposes the simultaneous hyper-visibility and hyper-invisibility that people of color face. For their eyes do not see the full spectrum of all, but only what they wants to see of others and it is stifling.
This year, the gaze still has shown itself in a variety of ways. We have seen Black men and women watched, stalked and killed for just being, as in the killings of Trayvon Martin, Kenneth Chamberlain, Ramarley Graham, Rekia Boyd, and Darius Simmons. We have families who are threatened because they look different in a community as with the Kalonji family who were held at gunpoint in their home by neighbors in Georgia. The debates and protests over “stop-and-frisk,” which happens to males of color more often, is reaching a peak in New York, London and other cities as well. Although statistics show Black and Latino people do not use drugs more than other groups, they are actually stopped and frisked way more than their actual percentage in the population. While we suffer at the hands of this practice, we have people who have the nerve, like NY mayor Bloomberg, to obnoxiously tell us that it is for our own good.
Not only is it governmental and penal policing, but also institutional and media policing. We do not have access to or it is viewed as insignificant for us to have control of the information and images given to us and that depict us. The most recent example is the Erykah Badu and Flaming Lips controversy over the video for “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Whether this is a real feud or publicity stunt, Badu’s claim that her rights in collaborating on the creation of the video were taken away in favor of her and her sister, Nayrok’s sexual objectification highlights the manipulation of images of people of color in general. The killings, police beatings, stop-and-frisk, and media dehumanization are continuous parts of a system that denigrates, criminalizes and hyper-sexualizes us on sight. Our blackness implies our inhumanity to the greater society that refuses to question why when they look us, they do not really see us. Maybe its time for another Invisible Man.
Louis Armstrong – “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue”
For Black Music History Month, I decided to write my own views on Afrofuturism:
A few days ago, I finally started reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and within the first few pages, I could see how Ellison used musicality with his literary work. In fact, Ellison trained to be a musician before becoming a writer. The main character in his book describes his appreciation of Louis Armstrong’s “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue” in the prologue:
“Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes you’re behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, the points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’ music…the unheard sounds came through, and each melodic line existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece, and waited patiently for the other voices to speak. That night I found myself hearing not only in time, but in space as well…” (page 8).
Within the prologue of his book, Ellison speaks not just of music, but how elements of music like off-beat phrasing, syncopation, breaks, and call and response, are manifested in life in general. Other writers and scholars, like Tricia Rose, Jon Spencer and Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., have said that in order to study the elements of diasporic cultures, music should be the foundation or connecting feature to study them. As a music and journalism major, I tend to agree. I even wrote a thesis involving that idea, which was how percussion and rhythm in hip-hop is not just part of the music, but in the language, movement, spirituality, identity, politics and philosophy of hip-hop. Music is also how I approach afrofuturism.
For example, in Music, Society, Education, musicologist Christopher Small said, “The repetitions of African music have a function in time which is the reverse of [Western classical] music — to dissolve the past and the future into one eternal present, in which the passing of time is no longer noticed.” Thus, it is not just the music, but the cosmology, the philosophy and the perceptions behind the music. I do not see afrofuturism as just speculating about the future, but also as the future as a revisionism. The present and future are only revisions, which means seeing again, of the past. The future becomes the present and the past and what is modern becomes ancient (one reason I have a problem calling our time modernism and post-modernism). This relates to the common practice of “versioning” in our cultures. Another way to put is Amiri Baraka’s “changing same” or Ron Eglash’s “iterative transformations.” The changes develop from a common bases, another element that we emphasize in the music.
This cycling and repetition is not dull, but always dynamic. It has swing and rhythm to push us forward to the future. Paul Watkins describes this in his paper, “Disruptive Dialogics: Improvised Dissonance in Thelonious Monk and Wu-Tang Clan’s 36 Chambers“ As mentioned in the previous post on afrofuturism, William Gibson said that the future is already here, but unevenly distributed. Again, that is in our music; our various music genres are multi-rhythmic and multi-metric. They are uneven, or as Zora Neale Hurston said “asymmetrical.” There are breaks, displacements, dissonance, and fragmentation and those are why the music is exciting. That describes the future as well; it is relative and broken up, flying into different directions. And what is future now will become past, vanishing like sound, and what is ancient now was once modern. It is why calling our periods of time “modernism” and “post-modernism” are misnomers.
These ideas within the music can be applied to other fields of study. Afrofuturist artist Turtel Onli also described his own visual artwork as Rhythmism.”Modern art“, like Picasso’s Cubism, would not have existed if it were not for the almost-living, surreal and rhythmic nature of West and Central African sculptures, textiles and masks from groups like the Dogon, Beti-Pahuin, Bwa, Bambara, and the Baoule. In Black Noise, Tricia Rose said that graffiti art and hip-hop has the same characteristics of layering, flow and rupture. Moreover, in the area of social and cultural theory, W.E.B. Du Bois’ “double consciousness” is rhythmic as writers like Paul Gilroy and Paul D. Miller have acknowledged; it was only new in the context that he was speaking about the plight of being Black in America. Our concept of rhythm can be applied to science and technology as well. We learn of cycling of elements in nature and the transformation of energy, which cannot be created nor destroyed, and we have used those ideas of cycling and transformation in a musical and cultural sense. Within the diaspora, we have invented musical technology to create new genres out of the older ones. Our cultures- from our music to our philosophies- has always been afrofuturistic.
… aka my reading list for the summer. I heard before the words used as a backronym for the Bible, so I thought I would use it here because it sounds like a phrase that could be used in science fiction.
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (Finished)
The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
The Black Atlantic by Paul Gilroy
Beloved by Toni Morrison (Read about Margaret Garner who inspired the book and the NPR story about ghosts)
More Brilliant Than the Sun by Kodwo Eshun
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston
"Octavia, Dear", 2008, Krista Franklin and D. Denenge Akpem
This is an article on Afrofuturism by Lisa Yaszek from The Journal of the Research Group on Socialism and Democracy. The focus of the article is Ralph Ellison’s speculative fiction novel Invisible Man.
In his introduction to the 1989 re-issue of Invisible Man Ralph Ellison provocatively notes, “a piece of science fiction is the last thing I expected to write” (xv). Both this claim and the way Ellison phrases it are striking. Literary scholars usually talk about Invisible Man as a prime example of the Great American Novel, but throughout his career Ellison carefully distanced himself from that phrase. Indeed, when he accepted the National Book Award for this work in 1953 he rather cheerfully described it as a failed example of the Great American Novel. But Ellison does not just flip the script and call Invisible Mana work of science fiction, either — at most he implies that there is something fantastic about it. Thus it seems that Ellison could not make sense of his own novel because he did not have a name for a literature predicated upon both realist and speculative modes of storytelling.
Recently, however, artists and scholars have indeed coined a name for this kind of storytelling: Afrofuturism. Over the past three decades both science fiction and Afrodiasporic scholars have become increasingly interested in what Sheree R. Thomas calls “speculative fiction from the African diaspora.” Leading science fiction journals such as Extrapolation and Science Fiction Studies regularly include essays about black authors in their pages, and as early as the summer of 1984, Black American Literature Forum devoted an entire special issue to the subject of race in science fiction. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, however, there was little discussion of this fiction as a literary mode with its own distinct themes, techniques, and relations to other kinds of black cultural production…
Read the rest here
Another article is about Afrofuturist culture in Chicago, and artist D. Denenge Akpem discusses Chicago’s history in the liberation struggle as well as figures like Octavia Butler, John Coltrane, Amiri Baraka, Curtis Mayfield, Sun Ra and George Clinton.
…Afro-Futurism is an exploration and methodology of liberation, simultaneously both a location and a journey. The creative ability to manifest action and transformation has been essential to the survival of Blacks in the Diaspora. “Black Secret Technology (The Whitey on the Moon Dub)” Julian Jonker writes, “Black Americans have literally lived in an alien(-n)ation for hundreds of years. The viscerality of their abduction is equaled only by the ephemerality of the bonds which the disciplinary state has since imposed on them.” Similarly, Boykin notes that in this context, “freedom is futurist.”
Chicago’s history is rooted in liberation struggles; the concrete jungle gives rise to a fiesty, rag-tag, Mad-Maxian, blue-collar style that respects hard work and survival of the fittest. We are alchemists in this city of steel, akin to the Yoruba god Ogun, fusing metal to metal. We claim a real space traveler astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison, the first Black woman in space and graduate of Chicago’s Morgan Park High School. In the tradition of grand-forefather Sun Ra who graced our lake shores with his mystical genius, Chicago “shows out” with the sanctification of conduit avery r. young’s sweet nectar sweat as he navigates between states of being in his signature Sunday Mornin’ Juke Joint performance style. Chicago Afro-Futurism is revolutionary discopoet Khari B. levitating at the HotHouse long before will.i.am teleported from Grant Park to CNN headquarters on November 4, 2008. It is Krista Franklin’s multi-layered visual planes with giant children spinning LPs on oceans; spliced figures from antique photos become extra-terrestrial as she coaxes new stories from their faded mysteries…
Read the rest here
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