Congo Square: Afrofuturism as a Space of Confrontation Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master in Fine Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Jameel Paulin, B.A. Graduate Program in Art The Ohio State University 2020 Thesis Committee: George Rush, Adviser Gina Osterloh Jared Thorne Copyrighted by Jameel Paulin 2020 Abstract Congo Square is an audio-visual album set in virtual reality. Through the digital immersion of virtual reality, I explore afrofuturism as a project of world-building and liberating subjectivity by centering the afro-diasporic experience in the development of both the symbolism and visual language of the work. ii Dedication This thesis is dedicated to the many ancestors and martyrs without whom my life and work would not exist. To mention a few: Kenneth Dixson Sr., Ernest “Doc” Paulin, Fr. James Nakamura, John T. Scott, Elizabeth Catlett, Dorothy Day, St. Oscar Romero, Thomas Merton, James Yancey, Alton Sterling, Tamir Rice, and Tyre King. iii Acknowledgments To George Rush, my thesis advisor, and the rest of my committee, Gina Osterloh and Jared Thorne, I extend my deepest gratitude. Your consistent support and challenging engagement with my evolving work over the last several years has been invaluable. I wish also to thank the faculty at Ohio State’s Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design: Vita Berezina-Blackburn, Alex Oliszewski, and Shadrick Addy, for introducing me to the realm of virtual reality. To Fr. Phillip J. Linden Jr. S.S.J, I thank you for inspiring me and teaching me the perspective of the underside of history. To my grandfather Kenneth, I love and miss you dearly and wish you a peaceful rest. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my wife, Samantha. Your love and encouragement has sustained me during the best and worst parts of this journey. iv Vita May 2008……………………………………………………….....Centennial High School 2013…………………………………..........B.A. Fine Art, Xavier University of Louisiana 2017 to present……………………………….Graduate Fellow, the Ohio State University Publications Paulin, Jameel. “Ekphrastic Poetry.” Xavier Review, (April, 2012): 1-5. Fields of Study Major Field: Art v Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Dedication .......................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgments .............................................................................................................. iv Vita ...................................................................................................................................... v List of Figures ................................................................................................................... vii Chapter 1: Introduction ........................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 2: Congo Square ................................................................................................... 18 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 32 vi List of Figures Figure 1. Installation view of Congo Square ..................................................................... 20 Figure 2. Virtual Reality Headsets .................................................................................... 21 Figure 3. Congo Square initial virtual scene ..................................................................... 23 Figure 4. Detail view of manilla artifact ............................................................................ 24 vii Chapter 1: Introduction My primary education in afrofuturism took place across two very different contexts of racial segregation, New Orleans, Louisiana and Madison, Wisconsin. The first school was Uptown, a then mostly black neighborhood in the Greater New Orleans area. Sandwiched between the ‘old money’ aristocratic St. Charles and the commercial Claiborne Avenue stood the aging black middle class neighborhood where my grandparents lived, across the street from the famed Magnolia housing projects (the birthplace of Cash Money records). My grandfather, Ernest ‘Doc’ Paulin, was the patriarch of a jazz tradition. Born in 1907 he was part of the first generation of musicians who would define the traditional New Orleans jazz sound, combining European military instrumentation with West African rhythms and worship rituals. He would pass this tradition on to my father and uncles. Prior to Katrina and the resulting gentrification of most black neighborhoods, in New Orleans jazz, like segregation, was a part of everyday life. It seemed every other day a new jazz group would form out of the remnants of old ones, as any opportunity for social gathering was an opportunity to hire a group for the festivities accompanying funerals, birthdays, Saints games, Catholic holidays, just-because days. Each activity became associated with the sound of New Orleans jazz. These scenes are segregated insofar as the racial divide was clearly defined and taken for granted. It was a given, for example, that white people in Uptown lived on Carondelet and eastward, while Baronne, 1 the next street over, was the beginning of ‘the hood’ wherein my grandparents lived on Seventh and Liberty. In contrast to the typical view of racial segregation, which posits integration into the dominant as liberation from racialized oppression, the communal perspective of integration perceives the politics of integration as a project that undermined the self-sufficient economy of black neighborhoods. Pre-Katrina, this Uptown enclave fought to maintain a political economy that supported black musicians entrepreneurs and small business owners, hired for communal events by other black professionals. And with the exception of the people who lived in the projects, the majority of the homes in the 3rd ward region of Uptown were black owned. Living in New Orleans, I was never conscious of being black. Blackness was normalized since everyone in my family and neighborhood were. It wasn’t until my family moved to Madison, Wisconsin that I would learn what it truly meant to be black in America, and this move would provide my secondary education in afrofuturism. Suddenly, we moved from a black owned house in a majority black neighborhood, to the University of Wisconsin’s version of public housing. In Madison, I was one of three black children in my entire grade level, and one of eight in the entire school. The other two children in my grade didn’t provide much solace or companionship, as they were recent immigrants from Ghana and spent most of the day separated in ESL. It was here that my blackness became a sin, as I was seemingly unable to find any space where I was not identified as an unredeemable problem, and treated as such. From the constancy of in-school suspensions and parent-teacher meetings, to the constant threat of violence from various groups of white children, to continuous 2 surveillance by every white business owner who would follow me in their stores, the whiteness of liberal-minded Wisconsinites slowly and effectively colonized every part of my life. My salvation would come in the form of the Walkman tape player, cable TV, and the Source magazine. The first tape I got to christen my new Walkman was Louis Armstrong’s Greatest hits. By this time, Manny Fresh, the main record producer for Cash Money, would bring the sound of New Orleans bounce to the hip-hop scene and usher in the so-called ‘bling era’ that would redefine the genre. My second tape, which I would buy with several months’ worth of allowance, was the radio-safe edited version of Juvenile’s 400 Degreez. Soon, I would make special trips to the record store or the library and spend hours consoling myself with a mixture of old jazz standards and hip-hop. Also during this time, my nascent interest in science fiction would be sparked thanks in large part to Star Trek Deep Space Nine, where every week I would watch Cpt. Benjamin Sisko, a black single father and former jazz musician from New Orleans, raise his son and engage in interstellar battle on behalf of the oppressed Bajorans. Whereas the New Orleanian context was an immersive embodied experience, the techno-immersion of the tape player and TV was more transient, but just as necessary for my psychological survival. Thus, I ground my discourse on Afrofuturism in this tension between the need to construct an Afrocentric subjectivity and political economy, for the purpose of bodily and psychological survival, over and against the specter of white supremacy. Looking back on this period, I am aware of how I and other people of color used technology as a tool of world building and cultural transmission. 3 Against the backdrop of afrofuturism, Congo Square is a project of transformations. These transformations entail new worlds, new relations, and new forms of being. It is about how descendants of the African diaspora have transformed the very grounds of being, meaning and relatedness. Through the framework of afrofuturism (as situated in a long history of black liberatory aesthetics), these descendants opened an ontological and epistemological space within which colonized bodies can find identity and belonging over-against the ‘forced context’1 of coloniality. My research, reflections, and resulting works have engaged in a