Afrofuturist Musical Conﬁgurations

Contributors Ron Eglash is an assistant professor of science and technology studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and has published in journals ranging from American Anthropologist to Complexity. He is the author of African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design (Rutgers University Press, 1999). His anthology Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. His educational software for culturally based mathematics learning in African American, Native American, Pacific Islander, and Latino com- munities is available for free on-line at www.rpi.edu/~eglash/eglash.htm. Anna Everett is an associate professor of film, TV history and theory, and new media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criti- cism, 1909–1949 (Duke University Press, 2001) and of Digital Diasporas: A Race for Cyberspace (forthcoming from the State University of New York Press). She was a co-organizer of the 2001 “Race in Digital Space” conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tana Hargest is an artist and curator whose work has been exhibited at the Walker Art Center as part of the screening and exhibition of Women in the Director’s Chair, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s List Visual Art Center as part of the exhibition and conference “Race in Dig- ital Space,” and at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Santa Monica Museum of Art as part of the exhibition Freestyle. Tracie Morris is a multidisciplinary performance poet who has worked in theater, dance, music, and film and teaches performance poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. She has toured extensively throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Primarily known as a musical poet, she has worked with an extensive range of artists including Donald Byrd, Graham Haynes, Melvin Gibbs, Mark Batson, Leon Parker, Vernon Reid, DD Jackson, Cecilia Smith, the Oliver Lake Quintet, and the David Mur- ray Big Band. Her poetry has been extensively anthologized in literary magazines, newspapers, and books, including 360 Degrees: A Revolution of Black Poets, Listen Up!, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, and Soul. Alondra Nelson is a doctoral candidate in the graduate program in American studies at New York University and coeditor with Thuy Linh N. Tu and Alicia Headlam Hines of Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Every- day Life (New York University Press, 2001). Kalí Tal’s scholarship spans a wide range of subjects, from African Amer- ican literary and critical theory, to trauma studies, to post–World War II U.S. cultural studies, to cyberculture. In addition to her scholarly work, she is an antiracist activist dedicated to merging theory and practice. Cur- rently she is working on a two-volume study comparing African American futurist visions to the representation of Africans and African Americans in futurist works by white fiction writers and critics. Kalí Tal is a professor of humanities at the University of Arizona. Fatimah Tuggar is a New York–based multidisciplinary artist who com- bines images and sounds from African and Western life to comment on how technology diversely impacts global and local realities. Her work has been widely exhibited at national and international venues, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, P.S. 1 Institute for Contemporary Art, and the Johannesburg Biennale. Alexander G. Weheliye is assistant professor of English and African American studies at Northwestern University. He is currently working on a manuscript entitled “Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity,” which analyzes the interface of black culture with sound recording and reproduction technologies in the twentieth century. Introduction FUTURE TEXTS We will make our own future Text. Alondra Nelson —Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo and on to post now post new —Amiri Baraka, “Time Factor a Perfect Non-Gap” In popular mythology, the early years of the late-1990s digital boom were characterized by the rags-to-riches stories of dot-com millionaires and the promise of a placeless, raceless, bodiless near future enabled by technological progress. As more pragmatic assessments of the industry sur- faced, so too did talk of the myriad inequities that were exacerbated by the information economy—most notably, the digital divide, a phrase that has been used to describe gaps in technological access that fall along lines of race, gender, region, and ability but has mostly become a code word for the tech inequities that exist between blacks and whites. Forecasts of a utopian (to some) race-free future and pronouncements of the dystopian digital divide are the predominant discourses of blackness and technology in the public sphere. What matters is less a choice between these two narratives, which fall into conventional libertarian and conservative frame- works, and more what they have in common: namely, the assumption that race is a liability in the twenty-first century—is either negligible or evi- dence of negligence. In these politics of the future, supposedly novel paradigms for understanding technology smack of old racial ideologies. In each scenario, racial identity, and blackness in particular, is the anti-avatar of digital life. Blackness gets constructed as always oppositional to tech- nologically driven chronicles of progress. That race (and gender) distinctions would be eliminated with technology was perhaps the founding fiction of the digital age. The raceless future paradigm, an adjunct of Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” metaphor, was widely supported by (and made strange bedfellows of) pop visionaries, scholars, and corporations from Timothy Leary to Alluc- quère Rosanne Stone to MCI. Spurred by “revolutions” in technoscience, social and cultural theorists looked increasingly to information technology, especially the Internet and the World Wide Web, for new paradigms. We Social Text 71, Vol. 20, No. 2, Summer 2002. Copyright © 2002 by Duke University Press. might call this cadre of analysts and boosters of technoculture, who stressed the unequivocal novelty of identity in the digital age, neocritics. Seemingly working in tandem with corporate advertisers, neocritics argued that the information age ushered in a new era of subjectivity and insisted that in the future the body wouldn’t bother us any longer. There was a peculiar capitalist logic to these claims, as if writers had taken up the marketing argot of “new and improved.” There was also much that was familiar in this rhetoric. As rapturous proclamations of the Internet’s ability to connect everyone, everywhere echoed the predictions that greeted the age of the telephone, so did neocriticism’s imperative to embrace the new and transform the body fall neatly in line with older narratives of technology and forgetting—most notably, the futurism movement of the turn of the twentieth century. In 1909 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an Italian artist, published “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism,” in which he called for a new aes- thetic that could properly represent the sensation of living in a rapidly modernizing world. Marinetti glorified the creative destruction of war, exalted the beauty of “eternal, omnipresent speed,” and promised to sing of the revolutionary potential of factories, shipyards, locomotives, and airplanes. He called for the end of the old, proclaiming, “But we want no part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists!”1 In constructing his vision of the future, Marinetti implicitly evoked a subjectivity that was decidedly male, young, and carved out in relation to the past and the “feminine.” While neocriticism’s take on identity tended more toward the glorifi- cation of the self’s dissolving than its hardening, it was propelled by a similar impetus to understand the technological transformations that characterized the beginning of a new era. Technoevangelist Timothy Leary pro- claimed that advances in technology augured the end of burdensome social identities. Out with those old categories from the social movements of the 1960s, in with the new. Leary predicted that “in the future, the methods of information technology, molecular engineering, biotechnol- ogy, nanotechnology (atom stacking), and quantum-digital programming could make the human form a matter totally determined by individual whim, style, and seasonal choice.”2 Leary’s prediction was social science fiction, a rendering of the not-now, a possible future without a certain end but loaded with assumptions. He assumed that “ever-loosening physical constraints” would free us from our cumbersome bodies and imagined that in the future identity would be driven by the consumer imperatives of whim and choice. Technology offered a future of wholly new human beings—unfettered not only from the physical body but from past human experience as well. Leary presupposed that such freedom would be widely 2 Alondra Nelson available and universally sought after. Yet as Andrew Ross cautioned, “radical humanism” of the sort Leary advocated would, by choice or cir- cumstance, “only free a minority of humans.”3 Bodies carry different social weights that unevenly mediate access to the freely constructed identity that Leary advocated. To be sure, his theory is an extreme example of the neocriticism that characterizes much writing about the social impact of computer technology. And yet the spirit of Leary’s discourse of disem- bodiment, which fit an unrelentingly progressive and libertarian vision of the future, became an important inspiration for theories of identity in the digital age. For others, technological change was the catalyst for a transformation of conceptions of the self.4 In the influential work The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, Allucquère Rosanne Stone marshaled theory, observation, and fictionalized anecdote to describe the nature of contemporary identity. According to Stone, in the “virtual age” our awareness of the fragmented self is heightened by computer-mediated communication.5 In crafting her argument, Stone was influenced by two theories of identity and multiplicity.

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