Early scholarship on black music took an orthodox approach, privileging the work of historians and musicologists. More recently, scholars in the field (most significantly, those engaged in black study) have implored that humanistic and social science discourses sharpen their critical reflexes; these scholars have taken the intellectual chance of aligning critical theory and black music. New studies on black music have fundamentally questioned the role of Western knowledge systems in producing theoretical approaches to the study of black music and its filial aesthetics and cultures. To conduct this research, many scholars have ventured to think more vastly about the aesthetic approaches related to black music and black sound cultures, to think about the significance of black music outside “black music studies.”
Both L. H. Stallings’s Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures and Louis Chude-Sokei’s The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics provide imaginative frameworks for theorizing the...
