Sensing Afrofuturism: A Posthuman Happening
This week I went a different route from my reading schedule by taking in a number of the short fiction pieces in the Afrofuturist genre. Twelve of little worlds, where I felt and spent lifetimes with generations of characters, sucked into their subjectivity to only to be slurped up into a new one after scrolling to the next page. I also read a monograph I had been meaning to get to all school year long, Justin Adam Burton’s Posthuman Rap. Although I intended for this text to be one that I spent most of my week ruminating on, something happened. I think affectual Afrofuturism happened to me.
Dark Matter Anthology: A Century of Speculative Fiction of the African Diaspora
Edited by Sheree R. Thomas.
In “A Locus of Control and the Erasure,” Aziza Barnes differentiates between “a mentality that ‘things happen to me’” as opposed to “‘I happen to things’” (Ars Poeticas, 312). Initially, I wanted to happen upon Afrofuturism in Posthuman Rap, but it didn’t materialize this week. I had to go to the sources themselves, to spend time fighting with the worlds constructed by many authors in a way that didn’t involve reproduction of citations to show intellectual theories. And I have been meditating on happening to things, to sounds and memories, all week. I was haunted by Octavia Butler’s self- mutilating disease in “The Evening and The Morning and the Night.” I was swept into the ticking time bomb of a love affair between Alan and Lynn as inheritors of Duryea-Gode disease. Lynn’s power to manage the urges of her roommates to mutilate their flesh was interesting. I felt the reverence for Loanna’s remembering what it means to exist in between spiritual realms, one an ancestral plane and another the portal of her mother’s womb in “The Huts of Ajala.” Loanna remembers what it meant for her to negotiate the experience of two-headedness. I was struck by the beauty of her shifting experience of Ajala while searching for a head, he is a God, he is angry and a responsible lover. And “Buddy Bolden” gave me pause, expecting lines upon lines of rhythmic and trumpet metaphors. Instead I happened to astral travel into Billie Holliday’s body as the spirit communicated a condition of sonic Blackness beyond the recollection of an Earth-bound music industry. Time is moves differently in the motherwomb, and the beings you meet are all on individual missions and mysterious quests, but the main project is for everyone to keep from forgetting.
Posthuman Rap
Justin Adams Burton
Some of these ideas cross over into the Posthuman Rap. Burton does mention at the outset that he argues from a narrow position about popular musics, specifically trap music’s ability to vibrate “queerly out of range” (10). The “Pre- Echo” chapter starts with an analysis of Nicki Minaj’s positionality as a monstrous rapper whose queerness presents a new manner of listening for humanity outside of neoliberal humanism. The first chapter, “Posthuman,” sets the theoretical tone by presenting an array of perspectives on humanism, antihumanism, NoFuturism, Afrofuturism, and most importantly, neoliberal humanism. He doesn’t quite get to the posthumanism he hopes to unveil through modern trap music, but he does provide an interesting description of Afrofuturism. Using the canonical figure of Sun Ra’s abduction, as told by Mark Sinker, it is almost as if Burton speeds up the pitch of Afrofuturism’s depth in posthuman expressions, citing Sinker’s reductive depiction as the “basic premise: [of Sun Ra] [surveys Earth, turns to whomever can hear] ‘Look at this dump. Let’s get out of here’” (20). Bypassing Afrofuturism, Burton does a disservice to of the genre and its Afro-centric theoretical futurist perspective that he claims is important to use for critiquing sonic Blackness. But again, he does announce that his interest is quite narrow. The specificity of posthuman reality Burton gets at requires transparency about the intellectual work he does as the chapters unfold to be an indefinite unit of musical introspection.
In fact, Burton is quite upfront about the ideas he leafs through, prepping the reader for each step along the way. Filled with intention, I want, I want, I want, there is always some sort of preface about the scholars and theories that he extends his major analysis to: first comes the discourse of Kendrick Lamar’s legibility in a post-racial sonic culture; then the trap irony of fearing Black bodies and sounds as the genre reuses to refuse upward mobility; next a building of the posthuman vestibule where the childlike timbres and Crunk +Trap sensations of Rae Sremmurd’s “Safe Sex, Pay Checks,” they rock in concert with L.H. Stallings “Black ratchet imagination”; and summed up in brief afterthoughts of Big K.R.I.T’s subwoofer full of dirty power in claiming its country roots and the southern sonic Houston cruisin’ car culture to subvert humanity’s expectation of Black people. While I enjoyed Burton’s narrowed posthumanity, it certainly was not what I expected. He works with scholars whose texts I admire, and resonate deeply with the intellectual knowing I grow more and more frustrated at trying to articulate. L.H. Stallings and Nina Sun Eidsheim, make appearances in ways that are both predictable and unpredictable, neoliberalist post-racial list and posthuman to me, . And maybe that’s the beauty of this particular reading of posthumanity, it’s happening to me in my first focused study of what the lack of humanity can look like on Black musicians in the U.S. popular music scene. Posthumanity Rap happening to me somehow felt like writing about inhumanity with a clear transparency that is trapped in a close but not quite eloquence of Afrofuturism.
Logo for Pharrell and Chad’s record label Star Track.
“Now Star Trak is here. We’ve come to save the day”
Luckily, I get this from another source in the meantime. But I’m running out of material. All at once I recognize what my fate as scholar may be if I should not find more Afrofuturist Sci-Fi to live in. I want to explain what is closer to my own experience of knowing sound and Black musicultural production. I think it lies in between the many pages of Dark (Posthuman?) Matter I’ve read this week, as mystical and methodical as they may be. I asked myself: What would it mean for me to happen to Pharrell William’s music and cultural production? Will I be politically correct? Could my thoughts exist in a sonic vestibule that is so narrow and specific that it undercuts the realities reverberating from experiencing Tyler, the Creator’s concert crowds, all for a series of book deals? Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. In the process of writing scholarship, I privilege the intellectual work before the art of communicating the feeling. The frustration of wanting to write something worthwhile about the worlds in which William’s music transports me to, and I know it is felt by others. There is magic sounded here, an other worldly feeling, an ethereality that doesn’t belong to this world. And yet it is tied to the earthly perception of rain and water; think the Neptunes, an Afro-Asian pop music production duo prominent in the cusp of 21st century, existing in a sonic-galactic future belonging at once to both to outerspace and the Tidewater. So why am I still waiting for one text, an all-encompassing epistemological turn, to give me all the theories to the answers of the questions that I’ve felt intrinsically at each beat of William’s signature four count start?
