Black and Queer, Music on Screen: Distanced Derivations

Abstract

While Black Studies and Queer Studies have offered a range of terms and methods for considering sound, music, and musicality in audiovisual work over the last half century, studies of sound and music in audiovisual media that have attempted to define these latter disciplines have tended to neglect or simply ignore those innovations. The result is a lack of attention and analysis given to key forces and voices at important moments of media transition. This editor's introduction surveys relevant methods and exemplars to demonstrate this problem of disciplinary blind spots and suggests ways that contributions to this special issue help to address and reorient it.

Distant Disciplines

In Shikeith's 2014 documentary #blackmendream, a man sits, facing away, at the edge of his, or another's, bed—site of dreams not projected on the white walls before him (fig. 1; a photograph produced from this sequence is featured in stef torralba's interview with Alexander Weheliye in this volume). His gaze seems certain, but it is not shared with the viewer of the photograph. The image suggests a kind of refutation of the dynamics of portraiture whereby the gaze encoding the photographic subject prepares the rhythmic montage of cinema's shot/reverse shot formation. Here that rhythm is suspended in a way that perhaps suggests the man, with his attention elsewhere, is hearing other voices, other musics. A misalignment of visual and visible registers requires, simply, repositioning on our part regarding the “visualization” of the image, as Keith Harris puts it, “a mode of discursivity as well as a mode of making visible,” foregrounding “a sight of historical affect and effect.”¹

Artist Shikeith's photographic redirection continues in our cover image, The Adoration (never knew love like this before) (2020; fig. 2). Here blue-tinted hands embrace a man from behind. His eyes are closed and his head tilted slightly back in pleasure, perhaps combined with relief, his natural hair shading into the black background in the penumbra of a chiaroscuro halo, as if a properly historical need were articulated and satisfied, surprising and familiar in the manner that a club anthem can come as pleasure and relief at the moment of its recognition and recall rather than in some erotic spectacle. We might, as Tina Campt suggests for vernacular photography, listen to these fine art images for conveying “a quiet, quotidian practice” on the part of the artist, projecting “affective registers” that “enunciate alternate accounts of their subjects.”² The registers we might discern, then, are those of the spiritual and the embodied, here experienced in visual supplication of a tenderness between black men, and of black popular musics. In The Adoration the photograph transcribes the love song, perhaps—or lifts the music from the registers of listening, knowing, and becoming that in 1980, the year Stephanie Mills's hit began its journey to canon in queer clubs, faced a different set of limits than black and queer musics do today.

Perhaps it would be better to say that the image transmediates the song, archiving it anew, moving to it again, asking of it some new questions: for instance, about how black and queer musics move through the complex processes of mediation and transmediation that bring this photo to you. This special issue of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies began with a critical observation about scholarly work in the academy, but it ends with questions like these: How do black and queer cultures work through erotics of mediation such that these mediations may become determined under their own terms and conditions, and without giving away powers they don't necessarily choose to? Below, I will return to these questions and suggest that images like these function as the powerful refutation of works like Shirley Clarke's now-canonical documentary Portrait of Jason (1967). But before we get there, some disciplinary recordkeeping is in order.

Recent studies of video music, music in digital media, sound technology, or interactive audio tend to prioritize questions of form, are usefully attendant to issues of production and reception, and have prioritized in limited ways questions of media change or transition. Yet they do so at the expense of questions stemming from critiques of the human animals who produce, distribute, and consume the audiovisual form, and at the expense of central concerns in popular culture disseminated through changing technical platforms, on one hand, and, on the other, questions of postimperial, decolonial intellectual integrity that we might have imagined could have become default points of coverage by, say, 1970, if not in the current moment of complex, polyvalent historical time. Blackness understood as metacritical engagement threaded through contemporary semio-capitalism; antiblackness understood as historical repetition of multiform racializing violences underlying both institutional power and processes of embodiment and subjectification; and sex-gender-disciplining violence—arguably, as I will tend to treat it here, the counterface of racializing violences—simply have little “purchasing power” when it comes to making a dent on the shopping list of approved problems for intellectual labor engaged in these fields to take home. Whiteness and Eurocentrisms remain dominant by default and unquestioned by design, leavened at times with cautions regarding or causalities attributed to new or changing technological media and the odd homage to Beyoncé. This scholarly legacy means little beyond the academy, though, and in that sense appears to simply present the cost of disciplinary maintenance.

To take only a few of the more polished and relevant examples of this kind, the field-defining series of “handbook” volumes published in the last decade by Oxford University Press, including The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media , or The Oxford Handbook of Interactive Audio  (to take just three volumes in the series), rarely mentions any critical methods related to work in queer theory even very broadly understood, perhaps with the exception of a glancing reference, in Lawrence Kramer's contribution to the New Audiovisual Aesthetics volume, to Foucault's The Order of Things, which supplies one of the “pressure points” establishing the theoretical ley lines of that volume's extensive offerings. “Black music” is defined unfortunately more by neglect than by substance, appearing in a discussion on two pages of the Sound and Image in Digital Media volume, which is also peppered here and there with brief discussions of Destiny's Child or Detroit techno. Given the significant transnational attention in reception to Black female vocalists’ bodies of work over recent decades, and the fervent social media usage by fan “armies” in response to music releases, and especially the ways in which, in these dynamics, revisions of “the digital divide” and sexual politics intersect precisely both in terms of sound and image in digital media and in terms of historically reshaped audiovisual aesthetics—to name just one cluster of problem areas for productive research—the omissions are glaring. But an additional result is that extensive, apparently authoritative, and of course expensive field-defining guides also provide little capacity for emerging researchers to engage with the outpouring of queer of color digital music production further challenging regimes of cultural and technocultural norms over the last approximately fifteen years. It seems clear to me that, here, significant opportunities to provide useful guides to contemporary audiovisual technocultures have been missed.

The leaving out is damage done. Black and queer expression in audiovisual musics in contemporary media make clear the kind of complex work that rearticulations of class, race, gender, sexuality, subculture, diaspora, and aesthetico-political interventions perform. As contemporary scholarship makes clear, too, they require critical frameworks to cut across not simply histories and critiques of racialization and racial capital, of sex-gendering and sexed capital but also histories of the avant-garde, popular audiovisuality, and intersections of commerce and celebrity, even as these expressions also make substantive claims about the meanings and identities of the technologies at work in moments of technological change and media transition. Conversely, the results in this volume are scholarly works engaging close readings of specific performers or media texts in specific historical moments as well as reviews of critical frameworks and contingent practices for understanding not simply the intersectional and disidentificatory aspects of sexed and raced belonging but also, more generally, tensions between personhood and collectivity, between media change and media memory, and between discursive and media histories disturbing hegemony's false memories. The results are both transnational and—in critical, smart ways—transhistorical. The hope (against hope) of this issue is to provide a few keys and keywords for working across an admittedly jagged and open-ended survey of black and queer musicality in recent musical media so as to value appropriately the multiplex contemporary where interventionisms do salient work. And the keys and keywords here may also suggest noncontemporaneous dialogues between and across social or historical registers and media forms and platforms, so that the critical expressive power of nonconforming persons of color in the hyperindustrial present become, and remain, a default position rather than an alibi, an absence, or a symptomatic projection.

Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals names a critical method required for her excavation and interpretation of radical Black women's history: “close narration.” She proposes this method of reading precisely because there are no extensive archival materials to study and question regarding the young women she is interested in; for the most part, their lives were documented only in the interests of confining their experiments in enacting desire and remaking themselves as modern and agentive subjects. In a narrative “written from nowhere, from the nowhere of the ghetto and the nowhere of utopia,” Hartman fashions “close narration” as “a style which places the voice of the narrator and character in inseparable relation”; the resulting wayward vision, language, and rhythms then “shape and arrange the text.”³ Perhaps what works across the disparate contributions in this volume, as the essays position themselves as more distanced from or more closely engaged with some scholarly disciplines than others, is a corollary effort at or interest in something that might be called “distanced derivation.” Distanced derivation is no less interested in the wayward but also requires a suspension of the pornotropic classically identified by Hortense Spillers so that the tendency toward violent othering as alibi or projection is détourned in favor of tracing the demonstrative powers of the mediatic work, that is, its force—the ways in which its aura, if you will, neither entirely decays nor shines beyond its penumbral glow, even as it is relayed through comment, link, post, tweet and retweet, forum discussion, email thread, scholarly transmission, or other such telematic embrace and relinquishment.⁴

Once Again, with Feeling

As we observed in the call for papers proposing this journal issue, from early sound cinema to the present, queer or gender-nonconforming black artists have voiced a complex series of claims, propositions, demands, and desires, from the introduction of sound to the cinematic screen to the introduction of social media video in networked digital cultures. Despite the neglect in disciplines oriented around dominant industrial histories and products, and as a host of scholars have demonstrated, blues women gave voice to the emerging industries of sound recording and cinema in the 1920s. Yet when scholars speak in general terms about “the voice in cinema,” as we see, they are almost by definition not speaking of the dialogue of antiphonal voicing that is thinly, at best stenographically, captured in Bessie Smith's St. Louis Blues (Dudley Murphy, 1929), nor of its almost reflexive silencing in the shaping of song for the general audiences imagined as paying customers. Black feminist and queer scholarship has engaged deeply with the meanings and powers expressed in these works, or in musical artists indebted to them or referencing them, from Angela Davis's reading of transformations of historical memory in Smith's St. Louis Blues to Lindon Barrett's study of Billie Holiday, to Hartman's discussion of errancy in relation to woman-identified women singers in the early years of recording in Wayward Lives, and to Daphne Brooks's study of black women's use of arrangement, sonic curation, and blackness as affective technology, articulating not simply a politics of being and becoming but also, we should observe, genealogies of the media histories, theories, and praxes thereof, and based on the arguments made in sound and image by queer and Black artists.⁵ And, too, in a historical moment when it is a commonplace to claim that rock and roll was “founded” by “a Black drag queen” (as John Cameron Mitchell recently insisted in an August 24, 2022 radio interview in advance of a concert of his own soundtrack tunes for Hedwig and the Angry Inch), it seems all the more necessary to work through some of the complications of the recurring tendencies of those disciplinary reductionisms, however well-meaning they may be.⁶

Working through a range of critical innovations, we may productively identify discontinuities in terms of technical medium and mode of distribution, from film projected with music, to Hollywood musical set piece, to soundie, to film promotional clips, music television clips, to music video, to fine art film or video, to viral clips made for social media circulation, and to musical narrative in long-form media. Rejecting a continuous contour for media history, and instead insisting on the role of racialized and sexed-gendered labor in both their invested and devalued forms and potentials, we can also observe the ways in which concepts like Christina Sharpe's orthographic “wake work,” “fugitivity” in Fred Moten's critical aesthetics, “opacity” in Amber Musser, “boiz” or non-normative sex-gender identities in Harris, the expressive technics of “queer OS” in Kara Keeling, or “ontological terror” in Calvin Warren—only a few of many generative formulations appearing in recent Black Studies—help gloss the gestures, meanings, and forces at work in voice and action indexed in technical mediation.⁷ For our focus in this volume, the resulting histories and futures of audiovisual media in these terms—say, investigating modes of memory informing and being transformed in the video work of Missy Elliot in the 1990s—can help to explore and valorize the dynamic work of artists over the last decade ranging from, say, Zebra Katz to Janelle Monae, Odd Future et al., Mykki Blanco, Moses Sumney, and Lil Nas X, to mention a few artists working inventively in the medium of the music video, but also to explore major independent works of digital cinema that finally do interlocate sex-gender disciplining and antiblackness in a clear articulation of anticolonial resistance that also restlessly provides a critique of technological capital and semio-capitalism. We see it in 2021’s “science fiction musical” Neptune Frost, in which Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman thoughtfully co-locate, for these purposes, the site of musical imagining of black and queer struggle with the sites of resource mining and militarized corporate policing in east central Africa.

So this special issue of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies is less about “centering” and more about deriving distanced demonstrations of value in histories and theories of black and queer music on-screen. It both identifies and reorients the grave, even damaging, limitations inhering in current audiovisual media scholarship described above. It also specifies those limitations in historical and historiographical dimensions. Thus, typically, attention to medium and historical specificities in studies of onscreen musicality have so prioritized the form/medium problem in cinema, video, or digital media studies, such that attention to “film,” “video,” or “digital” formats preempts the observation of continuities or conversations across historical periods or transitioning media. One result is that even as black and sex- or gender-nonconforming subjects are “rediscovered” in “early sound film,” black and sex- or gender-nonconforming innovations in later moments and in the contemporary moment are cordoned off from one another, safely consigned to some futural fate of what will be a belated rediscovery, or held apart as “alternatives” to the dominant rather than continuing a long-standing historical critique. The result is that here we won't engage specifically problems of erasure or recovery. These problems are important, but for those who know, remember, or do the work, queer and Black figures never disappeared. Bayard Rustin and James Baldwin, for example, both figured prominently in the photographic record of The Movement, the 1964 montage essay on the Civil Rights movement featuring an elliptical essay in the form of captions by Lorraine Hansberry.⁸ Liberation and decolonial movements have been, too often, fissioned in terms of racialization and sex-gendering, all the better to minimize the transformative historical work done by raced and sexed agents—but that fissioning is the work of all manner of hegemonies, and the scholarly and engaged preoccupations of cinema and media studies should be by default invested in not beginning with their projected effects as historical conditions. And while the scholarly preoccupations of cinema and media studies with regard to medium specificity and nation-period configurations have made it unlikely that concerns and problems expressed in the technical mediation of Black and queer expression as musical, mediatic expression can surface as primary problems in those larger areas of cinema and media studies primarily concerned with updating given epistemological positions in order to reiterate their own historical and disciplinary value, it is nevertheless obvious by this point that some of the most affecting and influential works of recent cinema—Isaac Julien's 1989 Looking for Langston, for example—have clearly problematized and made substance of these aesthetic and political histories precisely in doubling down on disciplinary problematics that require rethinking of media technics as well as black and queer memory—and thus, too, the ways in which Black and queer disciplinarities in intellectual production are formative yet devalued in the hyperindustrial culture industries and in the academies alike. Of course, reading across Looking for Langston toward Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied (1989) and back again reveals a dedisciplined, poetic essayism that is fully historical as much as it is complexly rhythmic, dialogical, and antiphonic, in sound and image and in historical work and futural demand. Why would the dialogical embrace achieved by mutual sampling be irrelevant to the advent of sampling and its post hoc historicization?

My point is simply that, at the outset, we can say that a certain character if not of form then of signal and messaging, a certain question if not of identity but indeed of style in its material derivation, does in fact define in part black and queer musical cinemas and the innovations these cinemas have undertaken beyond their own forms and identities. They become, reflexively, essayistic, in fact, demonstrative in their configuring of often improvisational stylistics of sound and image in relation to assertions of historical value as well as new or revised goals for understanding liberatory transformation in the messaging apparatus of hyperindustrial culture. This special issue surveys critical approaches to both historical and recent upsurges in the aesthetic and critical powers of black and queer musical screens that disturb or play against hegemonies of racialized and sex-gendered value in contemporary hyperindustrial culture but that also promise critical discovery along with the call to disobey value regimes predicated on the historical conscription of labor and the contemporary revisions of historical labor theft.

This issue provides a draft answer to the question of what happens when we understand, as Marquis Bey has argued, “the history of blackness as a history of disruption,” so that disrupting racializations along with sex-gender nonconformity become productive of the labor animating audiovisual music's meaning and effects.⁹ The critical innovations of Black Studies over the last half century have been crucial to the vitality of the kind of work we present here—work that reengages histories of destruction with histories and futures of disturbance, complication, elaboration, repudiation, and renovation. In this collection we can clearly see the antinomian critical tendencies of Afrofuturism, with its attention to speculative production, and Afropessimism, with its capacities for trenchant refutation of simulated critical hope. But if there's a through line, it's one that develops the post–Civil Rights period interests in both articulating and differentiating intersectional and disidentificatory politics of racialization and sex-gender, in problematizing any given inhering of cultural form within aesthetic experience where the counterfacing dynamics of racializing capital and sex-gendering capital are concerned, and in determinedly following up on questions of aesthetic experience and political form and formation.

Archival Matters

A rough pass on formulating the historiography and bibliography informing black queer musics voiced in their own right, and the aesthetics of the mediation thereof, is that these begin to be articulated in fragmentary form by figures like Hansberry at the height of the Civil Rights era, in the sequence of A Raisin in the Sun, where concerns of the queer and black aesthetic and political avant-gardes are subvocalized with Beneatha's “faggoty” boyfriend George Murchison's cutting insult of Walter: “Good night, Prometheus.”¹⁰ The passing slight, and Walter's clueless response, make clear that for Hansberry there's an implied technophilia animating the romantic search for African firsts that Walter has been chanting on about, firsts that for some intellectuals would refute suprematist imaginations conflating technical development and Western economic domination. What's implied here is complex: if the black and queer intellectual avant-garde both lent text and image to the photographic documentation of The Movement, still, the movement as such could not quite admit the complexity of the experience and the analysis they brought to it, and not simply for its nationalisms but also for its technically bent genealogies or myths.

Again, regarding understandings of racialization, racial capital, and sex-gendered capital—these are visualized and composed in the montage text featuring images of Baldwin and Rustin captioned by Hansberry in The Movement, and related concerns also appear in the infrequent investments in women of color queer feminist point of view appearing in The Ladder.¹¹ Here the question of musical figuring of black and queer selfhood as such becomes the very subject matter of Clarke's Portrait of Jason, which is typically described as an interview portrait of a gay black hustler but could just as easily be described as a portrait of a black and queer man who aspires to sing and is made to suffer for it—at Shirley Clarke's and Carl Lee's hands as much as anyone else's. The film moves from asking Jason/Aaron to sing, to provide a demonstration of his voice, and finally, by its conclusion, reveals that the whole film is essentially an alibi for Carl and Shirley to out Jason not simply as queer but as, as Carl puts it, “a rotten queen” who can't do or say anything honestly. By the end of this ordeal, when we see Jason/Aaron reduced to intoxicated tears as he is made to take responsibility for some minor slight he had done to Carl previously, we might rather understand the film as a primer in something else: as Jason/Aaron puts it in the film, he should be more definitively defined as someone who finally has refused to be afraid of being afraid.

Between and since Hansberry and Clarke, projects and programs for articulating black and queer identities proliferate in “anthological” imaginations, as Jafari S. Allen summarizes, but often with a recurring concern for musicality and memory.¹² There were, of course, projects and programs for articulating, say, black lesbian self-representation in the 1970s, such as the now more-studied Combahee River Collective, and the range of anthological work that Allen reviews. There were also bibliographic and archival projects like the pamphlet Black Lesbians or small press anthologies like The Lavender Herring (1976), which collected and renewed essays that had originally appeared in The Ladder; numerous self-published works by now legendary figures like SDiane Bogus, in addition to alternative press then increasingly academic publication of now-canonical figures like Audre Lorde.¹³ One of Lorde's most-cited essays, “The Uses of the Erotic,” defined creative action as covalent with the erotic and with radical political action, arguing that these forces worked against capitalized falsifications in the form of pornography.¹⁴ Literary interventions in what are less frequently read novels engaging second-wave feminist limits from a black lesbian feminist point of view emphasized musical experience as erotic and creative experience in much the way Lorde described in works like Ann Allen Shockley's Loving Her, in which a Black female pianist falls in love with a white feminist writer.¹⁵ These stories were rarely translated to the screen.

Meanwhile, small press publications, particularly anthologies like Home Girls, In the Life, and Brother to Brother,¹⁶ both surveyed the vital scene of cultural production and reflected efforts at diversifying the academy from the 1970s into the 1980s. As Allen shows, their force and necessity then help to set the stage, in turn, for the twin concerns of historical models and historiographic methods as well as futural demand and engaged activism in the cinematic dialogue of Looking for Langston and Tongues Untied, which variously use poetic narration, musical sequences, and narratives of musical sites in gay black life to document and argue for the value of black gay life as their central concern. By the time Barbara Hammer's seminal Nitrate Kisses was released in 1992, the trope of a blues woman providing the backing track to a scene of multiracial lesbian socializing would need destabilizing. The problems of historiography, memory, and self-articulation in audiovisual media were then thoroughly revised and refigured in Cheryl Dunye's Watermelon Woman (1996), which presents itself as a fictive search for a lost Black actress, only to reveal that Fae Richardson was not forgotten and rather has been held as a revered and intimate memory of a Philadelphia jazz singer who lived fully “in the life.” Her voice is never heard, but two other women's voices are: that of Shirley, who relates Fae's history to Cheryl; and that of a black female busker (folk singer Toshi Reagon) whom Cheryl passes on the street, randomly singing of “fascination” as Cheryl attempts to move on from her failed attempt to make contact with the last living link of the black lesbian archive she is attempting to turn into a documentary feature. It's the woman making street music in passing that is the real legacy, though; the history Dunye has concocted for us to know Fae is invented. Thus, it's not Hollywood history that grounds Dunye's becoming a black lesbian filmmaker; it's black women's voices, black women's song, both historically and in the present.

The affects and temporalities put in question in Dunye's allegory are in a way made clear here too: “fascination” is no clear hope, but perhaps suggests a conflicted and jagged path toward “messy” histories whose resolving puzzles always lead to the need to recognize our own limits, and futures of self- and community-making that don't always allow both private and collective identities to cohere—apart, perhaps, from that moment of musical recognition Cheryl seems to have in passing.¹⁷ A key observation is that since novels like Loving Her and Lorde's influential “The Uses of the Erotic,” black and queer interventions in expressive culture routinely have spoken to the concerns of racialization and sex-gendering without reducing each one to the other, and in terms precisely of conceptualizing creative and aesthetic experience in order to understand an erotics of the labor of self-making and social-making.

Subsequent films like Patrick-Ian Polk's Punks (2000)—and more significantly woven through the narrative of Dee Rees's Pariah (2011), with its opening sequence depicting club life—the narrative of sharing of musical taste between Alike and her romantic interest, and the closing montage with Alike's lyrical voice-over reading a poem of her own departure for a distant university—continue to emphasize musical self-fashioning as key modes of figuring selfhood and social being in terms of uses of the erotic. Given these varied histories, it is not surprising that, with the advent of social video and more accessible tools of digital video production, an outpouring of black and queer music video has been so enormously salient in speaking to the concerns of racialization and sex-gendering in terms precisely of the erotics of the labor of selfhood and collective making. Here, though, rather than club performance or poetic self-imagining, memory, self-writing, the erotic and its uses within histories of racialization and sex-gendering are instrumentalized instead in an analytic of labor and subject to being refashioned as tools for instrumentalizing the mediation of everyday life.

We can understand not only Janelle Monae's early music video work in this regard but also the recent transmedia works associated with her Dirty Computer project (2018): sound and video encodings, but also the short stories populating that album's notional universe in the collection written with Alaya Dawn Johnson, Danny Lore, Eve L. Ewing, Yohanca Delgado, and Sheree Renée Thomas, The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer (2022). Monae's expansive body of transmedia work tends to routinely conjure relations, nonrelations and contradictions, and fugitive subvocalizations among the technological, the historical, and the erotic, and in ways that hold these as at times overdetermined in terms of one another—a complex mode of racializing and sex-gendering violence. But these also become complex modes of self- and other-fashioning if we pull them apart to some greater or lesser degree, to insist on remaking memory and modes for doing so, remaking modes of embodying the future and desires for doing so, and refiguring self-image as mirror or as mask, or alternately forging face from mirror or mask. The cyborg guise or the costume of the media avatar we see across Monae's invented scenarios and worlds put notions of pleasure to tests whereby on one hand the singing, dancing body's powerful use of the erotic is modeled, while at the same time it is protected or given refuge from the pornotroping gaze. These musical screens of facial or corporeal guise deploy opacities of expression that become expressively powerful in the algorithmic dissemination of black and queer poetics put to the purposes of self- and collective-fashioning in rhythmic contemporary and noncontemporary alternation.

Good Night, Prometheus

Here, at the point of one of the prompts for our work, I can loop back to the call for papers I wrote with coeditors stef torralba and Ïxkári Estelle. We began our thinking specifically with regard to the kind of jagged tributaries of black and queer poesis via technocultural production so often historically deferred but recently insurgent. We first identified “Black queer practices of exceeding and disabling technological limits on expression in the form of musical, audiovisual technics”; we placed digitality, diaspora, and musicality at the center of our call, so to speak; and we concluded, through a series of spacings, with the problematic of generational noncontemporaneity: “Black voice carrying over and beyond period [and across nation] and across medium.”¹⁸ In finding that way limited, the scope and specificity we identified delineates a lateral but distinct one from the literary and political history of Black gay life delineated by Allen in There's a Disco Ball between Us. Richardson argued, “The Enlightenment framing of Blacks as the sign of sexual excess continues to affect Black collective memory,” so “queers threaten mainstream Black political and cultural narratives of racial uplift and achievement, respectability and civility.”¹⁹ Yet Allen reminds us, too, that what appeared to be a breaking down of Black political deinstitutionalization in the 1980s may rather be thought of as a moment of rupture whereby past frameworks were “subsequently reconstituted by Black gay (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) activists, artists, and organizations.” And, further, “the lack of an organized, broad-based, global Black/queer political movement does not constitute a lack of a Black/queer politics.” Still, if the project of creating an autonomous Black gay “political direction and agenda seems to have stalled out,” the resulting question as to whether “a transnational agenda covering all of the ways homosexual, bisexual, transgender, gender-variant, gay, non-gender-conforming, lesbian, two-spirit, same-gender-loving . . . folks identify themselves in various languages, and hold a number of ways of being and identifying as Black, is a useful goal to aspire to reach” leads Allen to consider “whither Black LGBTQ movement”?²⁰

For our more limited purposes, and perhaps problematically instrumentally, we wanted to ask how the contemporary assemblage of Black and queer musics on contemporary screen resonate through the theoretical problems and ethical conundra that Allen sees inhering in that larger question. At stake, then, is a more limited inquiry into, again, the ways in which in audiovisual screen cultures, music relays the questions of the erotic, creativity, and insurgency explored by Lorde, and does so in the transfigured temporalities of synchronous and asynchronous networks and in reception mediographies that bustle up against the historiographies and futural moves of Black LGBTQ movements as such.

Raisin in the Sun's pivotal scene—which in its composition begins to give voice to what had been overlooked, folded in, subvocalized, denied, excluded, or silenced potentials of black queer self-fashioning as and in terms of audiovisual musicality—and its concerns are, interestingly, thoroughly revamped with a film like Williams and Uzeyman's Neptune Frost, which centers an intersex insurgent's struggle for self- and collective-fashioning in terms very precisely coextensive with a critical analysis of the contemporary labor and resource exploitation and its technologically intensive policing in today's central-east Africa. Here the critique of Promethean, or technological, capitalism goes hand in hand with contemporary imaginings of sexuality and connectivity, where nonbinary embodiment enables and enhances the richly autonomous future this collective-cum-network is capable of dreaming (they greet each other with the phrase “unanimous goldmine”). Crucially, too, where Walter's performance of a pseudo-African fantasia follows Beneatha's rejection of blues as “assimilationist” only for George to dismiss them both as deluded, a synthesis of black popular musics and traditional drum song is precisely the creative script for Neptune Frost. Neptune Frost is a musical “disintegrating” (after Arthur Knight's 2002 study) popular music, spoken word, and central African drumming in a paragrammatics of science fiction and musical genres that rehearses arguments for Afro-diasporic liberation along with a certain “Afropolitanism” working counter to hyperindustrial resource exploitation, but with a call for nonbinary, Black sex-gender identity that mediates the two.²¹ Its narrative argument begins with a musical montage turning a scene of precarious miners’ labor into a men's work chant of solidarity and potential autonomy. The film ends with a closing sequence transmediating that opening song—at this point in the film, completely transmuted into a narrative variant centering on nonbinary identity and collective resistance defying “Mr. Google.” The devastating ending conveying that collective as a temporary autonomous zone destined to become a paradise lost to militarized policing segues into a wordless argument consisting of the thrum and thunder of the rhythm of the drummers of Burundi—but Neptune herself moves on before the police move in, pointing to a different future. I have not noticed this string of arguments before being presented in the form of a science fiction musical: the critique of mining and labor, yoked to the critique of sex-gender violence, in the elaboration of a diasporic autonomous zone, centered on an intersex insurgent. The film suggests a feature-length seriation of those “interruptions of the absurd” that Erica Edwards analyzed in Lee Daniels's 2009 Precious—musical gestures constantly upending the ways absurdist narrative form, critiqued by Hansberry herself, get mapped to industrial narrative conventions and to hegemonic discourses at once in a default mode of symbolic violence.²² Good night, Prometheus: Williams and Uzeyman's film transports their audience to a realm of critical feeling as affective technology via a musical critique of digital capitalism that Hansberry might have dreamed up if she were here today—well, perhaps she is, through these kinds of interventions. Neptune Frost's contingent, Afropolitan collectivity is perhaps a version of Keeling's “queer OS” derived in the form of musical cinema set in Rwanda.²³

At any rate, what we were trying to articulate in our call was something on the order of a prefatory treatment of Black and queer musical cinemas very broadly understood, and across divergent forms and platforms, broadly understood to be a complex form of writing that undertakes, rather than a politics of transcription as Brent Hayes Edwards wrote of the problem of “writing swing,” a politics of transmediation.²⁴ The transcription of schema, histories, processes of creative self- and other-fashioning in the face of antiblackness and antiqueerness into audiovisual musics that may source the informal archives of blues music's “mood of distance” to articulate and activate chosen-kindred dynamics in disseminated reception would similarly reject dichotomies of form and content in the ways Hayes Edwards observed in the literatures and performances of blues and jazz.²⁵ But instead of constituting a “counterculture of modernity,” as Gilroy saw Black music in diaspora doing, Black and queer transmediation of critical creativity, with its varied and jagged ethico-political potentials, articulate what Hayes Edwards called a “mixtery” of orality and writing but, here, of technocultural messaging and hyperindustrial style.²⁶

The Cuts

Jasmine Moore's essay begins the mixtery of messaging and style that follows. Moore foregrounds the work of Missy Elliott, whose video work in the mid-1990s helped set the stage for a melding of glam self-figuration, rhythmic conjuring, and radical recall and refiguring of Black demonstrative power. Just as we seek in this volume to see how new critical methods for engaging or supplementing critical fabulation or close narration for their historiographic potentials, Moore suggests that we can perhaps derive these as glimpsed in the afterlives of blues women mediated by the black and queer music video star. Moore identifies this modality, in which past and present are mediated in and beyond medium, as “reverberative memory.” Moore highlights this mode of conjure upending music video expectation by convoking black musical aesthetics together with a queering of horror tropes in Elliott's video work. Moore's work thus suggests ways of understanding Elliott's insistence on self-producing her musical output and on close directorial collaboration, two tactics that support greater artist and collective autonomy in highly controlled digital production sites and practices. Elliott's work, seen in terms of reverberative memory, helps set a mold for crossing black and queer feminist aesthetic notions in contemporary digital media networks at a key moment of global media transition, and Elliott does so with salient and still sly rhymings of the ludic and the erotic in her musical cinema. Moore follows on recent insights from Black feminist work, including that of The Lemonade Reader, as she curates an analytical playlist for reading Elliott's tactics of suspending pornotropic mediation. These gestures use horror aesthetics to refute antiqueer projection in Elliott's melding of rap and soul histories but also encode Elliott and her musical cinema as one of the futures of blues conjuring.

Concerns with memory also orient the critical interests of the next cut. Rudi Kraeher's study of Looking for Langston revisits Isaac Julien's by now much-studied poetic film essay for our own moment. Kraeher's argument is that we revisit the debates and problematics of sampling less in terms of the technical imaginary that provides the dominant and typical vocabulary for defining it, and more in terms of the ways in which a film like Looking for Langston cultivates shared desire for a black queer archive. Of particular interest is how Julien's film visualizes a poetic text by modernist poet Richard Bruce Nugent. The concern here echoes Hayes Edwards's interests in orality and literacy as “mixtery” discussed above, although that concern for Kraeher is shifted in the interest of reconceptualizing the technics of sampling in relation to black and queer remediations of their own invented or rediscovered archival past: affective technology as much as digital technology, to again invoke Brooks. Kraeher writes that the visualization of Nugent's poetry in the film is “more of a spoken performance and scoring, showing us how what is cut in a remix is no less important than what is inserted or moved. This understanding of removal suggests that strategic cutting is a powerful remixing technique for forging new connections with the past by modifying archival source material.”²⁷

Concern with the archival is, now as it was for Dunye or Julien, coeval with concerns over historical sites of Black and queer life. Alix Chapman provides a kind of exception to the tendency toward what might be called contemporary plague journaling seeking “renaissance” or “renewal” even within unrelenting conditions of economic and biomedical precarity. In articulating “limbologics,” Chapman describes both the sense of pandemic limbo and the sense of risk and joy that we may seek in grieving loss of life or restrictions of even precarious prior movement during the height of pandemic measures, as well as the desire to return to the experiences supporting self- and collective-fashioning that musical events have provided. Chapman defines limbologics not simply in terms of Afro-Caribbean discourse after Braithwaite but also for Black musicians whose points of view are also informed by the contexts and cultures of that zone where the Caribbean gives way to the Southwest, as they make clear in their interview of musician friend Alli. The limbologics concept refers to the “performance of indeterminate ontologies, temporal and spatial imaginaries that, however figurative, generate alternative ways of being and more livable conditions within terrains of encroachment, violence, and neglect.”²⁸ Here, clearly, it is historical conditionality that is broken and is experienced as limbo. Putting “limbo” and “logic” together as if shards of broken conditionality helps Chapman to argue for “a counterintuitive approach to struggle where subjective indeterminacy rather than fixed objectivism forms systems, methodologies, and practices.”²⁹ Chapman's work here helps to clarify some of the concerns around the transmediation of message and style in insurgent Black and queer contexts.

It is as much in historical as in aesthetic experience that brokenness may be transmediated as montage, as assembly. Crucially, we are asking, in distinct versions of Allen's question, Whither pleasure next? Daren Fowler's study of Tourmaline's (f.k.a. Reina Gossett's) Salacia, their 2020 digital video reinscription of Mary Jones, in the light of recent black queer and trans accountings of Jones's memory, suggests one limited but no less potent response: the pleasure of reconnecting aesthetic experience with the politics of media form. Fowler puts Tavia Nyong'o's (2019) and Riley Snorton's (2017) accounts in conversation to show the ways that Tourmaline's audiovisual approach works with an aesthetics of brokenness. Fowler is not suggesting, I think, a “brokenness after” some historical event, and certainly works brokenness forward in ways clearly opposed to dominant discourses of black families as broken. Rather, this take on queer aesthetics presents a way of reading queer and trans theories in Black study for the analysis of medium and narrative form such that the problematics of origin and copy, and of copies without originals, that is, a substantive critical vernacular in theories of performativity after Judith Butler, give way to understandings of perpetual relation and nonrelation in a larger series of histories that communicate with one another in their disruption of hegemonic gatekeeping.

We next cut to a recent conversation between Marquis Bey and Andrew Cutrone to situate our work in “distanced derivations” alongside and engaged with black trans feminisms that remind us of the need for critical reading in everyday scholarly work shared across disparate spaces and moments. This conversation suggests that we also distance ourselves from a normative sense of “the expected,” as Cutrone puts it in opening their conversation with Bey. Here, for Bey, black and trans reading models scholarly engagements in critical practices of everyday life, calling us toward a “fugitive biblio-praxis,” a “reading, listening, and revision practice animated by the notion of fugitivity” after Moten's explorations of that term, and following Spillers, Cathy Cohen, Jennifer Nash, and other voices.

Concluding the issue is Alexander Weheliye's interview by stef torralba, which offers a kind of studio or working visit with the critic-scholar Weheliye as they explore recent takes on texture and texturality, among other ideas for relating ethics, aesthetics, and media composition or form. The interview gives some first-person handles to ways of thinking and feeling for, and along with, Black and queer cultural production in the contemporary transmedia context. Here, as is often the case, Weheliye is inspired by Afro-sonic temporalities. Weheliye's work has provocatively brought Spillers's insights on “pornotroping” into conversation with Giorgio Agamben's work on states of exception, and in forging that nexus, they clarified the stakes for legal theories of the subject of sovereignty for theories of body, flesh, and corporeality, and thereby modulated those theories for understandings of the subject with crucial reference to Black feminist work. This interview gives us an update on where that project has since come and where it may head next.

Taken together, these are theoretical and practical cuts in the formatting of racialization and sexuality in terms of technical mediation: cutting theories and praxes in queer and black audiovisual screen cultures suggest further work to be done on the histories and futures of both audiovisuality and on black and queer cultures of media composition, distribution, and reception. We hope this jagged and jumping survey provides useful matter for cutting through gatekeeping media, forces, and institutions so that the sound, voice, or gesture of radical ethical demand articulated in black and queer voices may land all the more powerfully when it hits the poetics, aesthetics, and technics of musical audiovisuality, and its power to convey memories, concepts, figures, and implications of acts of self-making in and through social screens. Contemporary queer and black musical cinemas range more broadly than what is included here. What insurgencies, in retrospect or in prospect, can we carry forward once we align the relevant critical frameworks and exemplars that have been more typically demoted, placed outside the frames of music video and audio media study, or simply erased in order to recoup the labor thereof? Recovering memories of conjure in audiovisual media through new proposals for audiovisual technics of song as self will, in time, tell more. ^■■

Notes

Works Cited