• Anonymous Student–Hinduizing the University: Academic (Un)Freedom on the Indian Campus

    Anonymous Student–Hinduizing the University: Academic (Un)Freedom on the Indian Campus

    Downloaded from New York Times. Student protests at the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus, New Delhi in 2020.

    Hinduizing the University: Academic (Un)Freedom on the Indian Campus

    Anonymous Student

    Downloaded from Al Jazeera. Damaged parts of Jamia Millia Islamia’s campus in New Delhi after a raid by the Delhi Police following student-led protests against the CAA/NRC bills. 

    At the core of autocratizing democracies is a systematic targeting of its campuses. An erosion of the university’s liberal animus is essential to the culling of any progressive thought. The Indian campus is no stranger to political strife since the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2014. Its leader and India’s now three-time Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has brought to the fore an ideology of hypernationalism. Hindutva or Hindu nationalism is an ideology espoused by the BJP and its parent-paramilitary organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS). It imagines India as a Hindu supremacist and ethnonationalist nation (South Asia Scholar Activist Collective, n.d.).

    The Indian campus space has been a site of political genesis for national movements and a laboratory for its greatest and even most contentious leaders. Its protection largely stood the test of time since its Independence in 1947. However, the ascendance of the BJP since the 2014 national elections, its ideological coda of Hindu nationalism, and its mobilizational strength outside the electoral sphere have restricted and assaulted the freedom of thought on​​ the Indian campus. The Scholars at Risk Network found that between 2023 and 2024, India’s academic freedom was at an all-time low since the “mid-1940s” (Scholars at Risk Network 2024). India ranks 161 out of 179 countries on the academic freedom index, highlighting the deteriorating state of the world’s largest democracy (Pradhan 2024).

    Late Manmohan Singh, former Prime Minister and leader of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) from the Indian National Congress (INC) party, visited the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in 2005. He was greeted by a body of students waving black flags. Despite the university taking action against the students involved, Manmohan Singh intervened directly and asked​​ the administration to respect the students’ right to express their opinions (The Tribune 2020). JNU’s image, one that I remember newspapers recurringly projecting throughout my life in India, is of a rebellious student body dedicated to leftist politics. With the strong presence of Communist and leftist student groups such as the All India Students Association (AISA) as well as groups representing the historically marginalised castes and tribes of India like the All India Backward Students Forum (AIBSF), the university’s ‘anti establishment’ sentiments have been central to concretising its fortitude in protecting minority rights, freedom of expression and on-campus intersectional representation.

    The CAA/NRC experience at Jamia Millia Islamia University

    “Inside (the library) they broke everything, beat students without any care and regard for standard operating procedure. They beat students on their heads and mostly the upper part of the body,” an anonymous student at JMI (Al Jazeera 2020).

    In 2019, the BJP government pushed​ through a legislation in both houses of India’s parliament, amending the citizenship law in India. The Citizenship Amendment Act (2019) (CAA) fast-tracked refugee applications for non-Muslims from India’s neighbouring countries while reserving the category of “illegal immigrants” for Muslims (USCIRF 2020). The law engendered the Hindu nationalist belief of ghar wapasi (homecoming). A manifestation of the Hindutva imaginary that South Asian Hindus oppressed in the Muslim majority neighborhood of India, must be saved and brought back home (Grane 2024). Protests erupted in all metropolitan areas in India. One of the epicentres became the Jamia Milia Islamia University (JMI) in New Delhi. The predominantly Muslim univers​​ity that also offers scholarships and affirmative action programs for students from India’s largest minority community was subjected to a br​​utal police crackdown. On December 15, 2019, the Delhi Police stormed​​ the campus. Amidst baton charges and evidence of 25 CCTV cameras being deliberately destroyed, students reported being brutally injured and repeatedly stressed that the Police aimed for the upper bodies of students (The Wire Staff 2020). The main video that went viral shows students barricading the doors of a library as the Police break them down and start attacking all students in sight, leaving hundreds injured (The Wire Staff 2020). Tear gas and smoke bombs were fired indoors on campus premises. Multiple students reported being attacked as Islamophobic slurs were hurled at them by police officers. Videos show no attempts by police officers to arrest the students (Kaushal 2020).

    Downloaded from The News Minute. CCTV footage of Delhi Police’s attack on Jamia Millia Islamia Campus in 2019

    The aftermath of the CAA protests saw an administration concertedly targeting student groups. Delhi Police, which comes under the federal jurisdiction of India’s Home Ministry, is run by top Modi aide Amit Shah and has been pulled up by several tranches of India’s court systems for its apparent incompetence. Chargesheets filed by the police have failed to corroborate First Information Reports (FIR) filed by victims and civil society groups established fact-finding patterns of brazen and unlawful use of excessive force by the Delhi Police. Students were arrested and charged under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention (Amended) Act (UAPA) (Sharma 2023). Some of them remain in prison. Of these, the cases of Umar Khalid, a PhD student at JNU (USCIRF, n.d.); Shafi-ur Rehman, the President of the Alumni Association at JMI (USCIRF, n.d.); and Sharjeel Imam, another PhD student (USCIRF, n.d.), have become testaments to the campaign of denial surrounding justice in the aftermath of the anti-CAA protests in New Delhi. They languish in prison under a barrage of fabricated cases without having seen a fair trial.

    Denial has also taken the form of oppressing commemoration. The JMI admin has censured successive anniversaries of the brutal police crackdown on campus by sealing the campus premises. Often using reasons such as “maintenance” (PTI 2024). In October 2024, the President of India appointed Professor Mazhar Asif as the new Vice Chancellor of JMI. Student bodies were quick to point out his affiliations with the Hindu right-wing. Asif had been a part of the Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the RSS, a paramilitary and extrapolitical group that serves as the parent organization of the Hindu right-wing in India. Asif has previously expressed views in support of the CAA and has also previously been a part of the Muslim Rashtriya Manch, an RSS-affiliated group (Faris and Jain 2024). His appointment seems like a deliberate attempt to stifle the politics on campus or appoint a government-friendly VC to reposture campus administration and recalibrate priorities and repress political studentry. The VC’s office is also seeking to affect the makeup of admissions. The university offers 50% reservation for PhD slots to Muslim students. Using a change in regulation language, the administration has permitted itself to overlook this reservation and grant higher than 50% admissions to non-Muslim candidates (Faris and Ramanarayanan 2025).

    The government of India has been able to utilize its provisions by appointing the VC of a university to interfere directly with the campus’s political dynamic. It is important to clarify here that the appointment of the President of India, who chooses the VC of JMI, as with some other federal universities, is nominal. Their role customarily falls in line with the ruling party’s politics and, in the recent past, has not offered challenging opinions.

    Saffronizing Private Universities: O.P. Jindal Global University and Ashoka University

    “You were found to have been putting up posters and engaging in conversation that involved extremely derogatory and provocative words…aimed at affecting the integrity and tranquility of the university space,” – university statement to students (The Wire Staff 2024).

    O.P. Jindal and Ashoka University are both situated in remote parts of North India. These private liberal arts universities have sought to invigorate the social sciences in India by bringing large sums of funding from private and international donors. However, their high fee structures largely limit access to students from privileged backgrounds. Their existence in the countryside causes an architectural aberration – students from economically privileged backgrounds are atomized in the middle of rural communities and economically poorer surroundings. This restricts campus politics within its physical walls. Students shared content and testimonies recounting the growth of Hindutva on the campus of O.P. Jindal Global University. Student-led vigilantism through groups, as well as readily available mobilizations available through social media platforms like ‘X’ have offered right-wing nationalists a frenzied vehicle of intimidation against academics.

    In 2024, Indian PM Narendra Modi inaugurated the Ram Temple at Ayodhya. The inauguration came after decades of controversy over an unlawful demolition of a historic mosque by a right-wing mob in 1992 (Pandey and Limaye 2024). The national mobilization that led to the demolition of the mosque is consecrated in the memory of the BJP and the RSS as a movement. Opposition toward the inauguration of the temple in 2024 was led by the intelligentsia as well as student-led groups, predominantly from the left (Krishnan 2024). On the O.P. Jindal campus, the Revolutionary Students League (RSL) organized a program titled “Ram Mandir: a Farcical Project of Brahminical Hindutva Fascism”. The event was attended by over 20 members of a right-wing student group called Abhinav Bharat. Members of this student group interrupted the session with chants of “Jai Shri Ram” (Hail Lord Ram), a slogan co-opted by the Hindu right-wing as a rally cry in the public and, in this case, the university-scape (Howale 2024). Despite Abhinav Bharat’s interruption of the programme, student organizers from RSL were suspended and held accountable for their “derogatory” and “provocative language”. Pro-Hindutva students posted doctored and heavily edited portions of recordings from the programme on social media platforms, which led to a campaign of harassment against the two students forcefully evicted from the campus.

    This medium of moral policing and ideological vigilantism is given life by a nocturnal network of Hindutva pages across social media platforms that command immense followings. The fear of impetuous narrative-building against the university’s reputation​​ drives administrators’ decisions to take punitive action against students–the low-hanging fruit. This network, however, does not spare a campus’s academics. Another incident from the same university in September 2023 brought the classroom under the direct scrutiny of prevailing political narratives (Aafaq 2024). A professor’s class practices were que​​stioned by a section of her students, who took to social media to display their disaffection with their professor using a dating app as a means of live experimentation. Pro-Hindutva students in her class were quick to point out her earlier opposition to students chanting “Jai Shree Ram”. She was soon targeted online for spreading hatred against Hindus, and the university’s chancellor was visited by the state’s women’s rights commission as a means of public reprimand for her actions in the classroom.

    Downloaded from Newslaundry. A copy of the poster circulated at the O.P. Jindal campus

    At Ashoka University, the most telling sign of Hindutva on campus was a professor’s research into alleged electoral manipulations targeting the Muslim community in the 2019 national elections (Das, n.d.). The paper, which Professor Sabyasachi Das himself shared online, received backlash from the BJP’s supporters, and the university distanced itself from his findings, calling its review process “incomplete” (Sarkar 2023). Officials from the Intelligence Bureau, India’s domestic intelligence agency, also visited the campus to speak to Das’s colleagues (Varadrajan 2023). Professor Das was forced to resign despite vocal backing from the faculty and students. This invited scrutiny into Ashoka’s other projects. Less than a month later, the university’s award-winning Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD) was “hollowed out” and shut down. Its founder, Gilles Verniers, was forced to resign, and a months-long drain on their resources imposed by the university meant they shut shop (Mittal and Sidharth 2023). Verniers appears to have been forced out as a result of failing to achieve requirements for a tenure track, which he says he did (with the documents to prove it). It may very well be assumed that the university decided to reformulate its research imperatives in light of the scrutiny its work was attracting.

    Conclusion

    The Jamia example provides an institutional blueprint for the current government’s viewing of Muslims as a problem. Their political collectivization appears as an issue that must be pacified using all institutional levers available. Thus, a loyalist must be appointed to both, report on, and suppress the campus politics in a multidirectional undoing of an affirmative action institution for India’s largest minority. The Indian university campus is a rare exception for campus politics because of the presence of student parapolitical outfits that have direct institutional ties to parties in power. This mandates not just the need to maintain power amongst student bodies as a means of control but also acting as moral and political ombudsmen towards their peers’ actions. Where enough social capital is lacking for these groups to affect their peers, they use the social media troll-factories that are quick to propel single instances to national news.

    Through these examples, one can tell that anecdotal cases are purposely magnified to achieve the “punishment puzzle” across classrooms in t​​he country; this also sets a precedent for universities looking​​ for ways to fall in line. Provisions of means to acquiesce thus become the primary format for universities to remain compliant. No consistent lawmaking is requested of them in so far as ideological fear-mongering is concerned. Because that sustains the limitlessness of the punishme​​nt game.

    References

    Aafaq, Zafar. 2024. “From IIT Bombay to Jindal university, student videos used to target faculty on Israel-Palestine war.” The Scroll, November Sunday, 2024. https://scroll.in/article/1059193/from-jindal-university-to-iit-bombay-student-videos-used-to-target-faculty-on-israel-palestine-war.

    Al Jazeera. 2020. “India: Footage appears to show police attack on Jamia students.” Al Jazeera, February 16, 2020. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/2/16/india-footage-appears-to-show-police-attack-on-jamia-students.

    Das, Sabyasachi. n.d. “Democratic Backsliding in the World’s Largest Democracy.” Social Sciences Research Network. https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4512936.

    Faris, Sahid, and Nikita Jain. 2024. “Students say new Jamia Millia Islamia VC Mazhar Asif has ties to RSS, raising concerns.” Maktoob Media, October 25, 2024. https://maktoobmedia.com/india/students-say-new-jamia-millia-islamia-vc-mazhar-asif-has-ties-to-rss-raising-concerns/.

    Faris, Sahid, and Nikita Ramanarayanan. 2025. “Sabotaging Muslim reservation?: Quota rules flouted in Jamia Millia PhD admissions.” Maktoob Media, February 27, 2025. https://maktoobmedia.com/india/sabotaging-muslim-reservation-quota-rules-flouted-in-jamia-millia-phd-admissions/.

    Grane, Kevin. 2024. “Dangerous Ramifications of Recent Ghar Wapsi Efforts.” Religion in Transition 7 (April).

    Howale, Atul. 2024. “Students, Alumni of Jindal University Protest Suspension of Organisers of Ram Mandir Discussion.” The Wire, February Wednesday, 2024. https://thewire.in/education/students-alumni-of-jindal-university-protest-suspension-of-organisers-of-ram-mandir-discussion.

    Kaushal, Ravi. 2020. “Jamia Students Recount Night of Terror as CCTV Footage Demolishes Police Claims.” NewsClick, February Monday, 2020. https://www.newsclick.in/Jamia-Millia-Islamia-Delhi-Police-Violence-Brutality.

    Krishnan, Murali. 2024. “India: Ram Temple inauguration stokes political controversy – DW – 01/22/2024.” DW, January 22, 2024. https://www.dw.com/en/india-ram-temple-inauguration-stokes-political-controversy/a-68030692.

    Mittal, Devansh, and Jyotsna Sidharth. 2023. “How Ashoka University’s Award-Winning Trivedi Centre for Political Data Was Hollowed Out.” The Wire, September Tuesday, 2023. https://thewire.in/education/how-ashoka-universitys-award-winning-tcpd-was-hollowed-out.

    Pandey, Geeta, and Yogita Limaye. 2024. “Ayodhya Ram Mandir: India PM Modi inaugurates Hindu temple on razed Babri mosque site.” BBC, January 22, 2024. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-68003095.

    Pradhan, Saloni. 2024. “India’s Academic Freedom is at Stake.” the Loop: ECPR. https://theloop.ecpr.eu/indias-academic-freedom-is-at-stake/.

    PTI. 2024. “Jamia shuts classes, library on anti-CAA protest anniversary; Student outfit AISA hits out.” Indian Express, December Sunday, 2024. https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/jamia-shuts-classes-library-anti-caa-protest-anniversary-9726436/.

    Sarkar, Sonia. 2023. “Row at India’s premier private university sparks debate on academic freedom.” Al Jazeera, August Monday, 2023. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/28/row-at-indias-premier-private-university-sparks-debate-on-academic-freedom.

    Scholars at Risk Network. 2024. “Free to Think Report of the Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Monitoring Project.” Scholars at Risk. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/resources/free-to-think-2024/#section1.

    Sharma, Betwa. 2023. “3 Years Since Delhi Police Accused Jamia Students Of Rioting, Chargesheets Reveal They May Have No Case.” Article 14, February Friday, 2023. https://article-14.com/post/3-years-since-delhi-police-accused-jamia-students-of-rioting-chargesheets-reveal-they-may-have-no-case-63dc69ca28c56.

    South Asia Scholar Activist Collective. n.d. “What is Hindutva?” Hindutva Harassment Field Manual. Accessed March 10, 2025. https://www.hindutvaharassmentfieldmanual.org/defininghindutva.

    The Wire Staff. 2020. “Police Action Damaged 25 CCTV Cameras on Campus, Jamia Tells MHRD.” The Wire, February Wednesday, 2020. https://thewire.in/rights/police-action-damaged-25-cctv-cameras-on-campus-jamia-tells-mhrd.

    The Wire Staff. 2024. “OP Jindal Global University Suspends Two Students Over Ram Mandir Discussion.” The Wire, February Friday, 2024. https://thewire.in/rights/op-jindal-global-university-suspends-two-students-over-ram-mandir-discussion.

    The Tribune. 2020. “When then PM Manmohan Singh stepped in to get JNU protesters off the hook.” The Tribune, January Monday, 2020. https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/nation/when-then-pm-manmohan-singh-stepped-in-to-get-jnu-protesters-off-the-hook-25633/.

    United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. 2020. “Legislation Factsheet: India.” USCIRF. https://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/2020%20Legislation%20Factsheet%20-%20India_0_0.pdf.

    USCIRF. n.d. “Sharjeel Imam | USCIRF.” US Commission on International Religious Freedom. Accessed March 10, 2025. https://www.uscirf.gov/religious-prisoners-conscience/forb-victims-database/sharjeel-imam.

    USCIRF. n.d. “Shifa ur-Rehman | USCIRF.” US Commission on International Religious Freedom. Accessed March 10, 2025. https://www.uscirf.gov/religious-prisoners-conscience/forb-victims-database/shifa-ur-rehman.

    USCIRF. n.d. “Umar Khalid | USCIRF.” US Commission on International Religious Freedom. Accessed March 10, 2025. https://www.uscirf.gov/religious-prisoners-conscience/forb-victims-database/umar-khalid.

    Varadrajan, Siddharth. 2023. “Intelligence Bureau At Ashoka University, Wants To Probe ‘Democratic Backsliding’ Paper ( The Wire ).” Hindutva Watch, August Tuesday, 2023. https://www.hindutvawatch.org/intelligence-bureau-at-ashoka-university-wants-to-probe-democratic-backsliding-paper-the-wire/.

  • Oded Nir–Palestine, Israel and the Problem of Naming

    Oded Nir–Palestine, Israel and the Problem of Naming

    Palestine, Israel, and the Problem of Naming

    Oded Nir

    Problems of naming are many times seen as moral issues: we try to fix a bias hardcoded into the way we write or speak by inventing new names for people and things. But names are also historical problems disguised as simple words, problems that are sometimes much more intractable than what can be fixed by naming itself. I would like here to offer a brief example for the problem of naming which recently plagues any mention of Palestine and Israel in writing on the left: that slight hesitation, about whether to write “Palestine”, “Israel/Palestine”, or some other combination. One tends to swallow that hesitation and move on to whatever one had been planning to write. But this is clearly a case of repression, of however minor a kind. The act of naming in this case threatens to open up a hornet’s nest: a host of narratives and ideological positions that don’t quite fit what one means to say. The name one chooses seems constantly in danger of failing to capture its object—a kind of approximation that ends up letting what it names slip away.

    I use here the Greimassian rectangle, as Fredric Jameson and Phillip Wegner developed it, to propose a structure for thinking about this problem of naming “Israel-Palestine”. The Greimassian rectangle allows us to think of binary oppositions as opening up to include two kinds of negation: A primary one, in which one term is the strong, determinate negation of its opposite; this kind of opposition operates between our initial two terms. And a second negation for each one of these terms, a weaker and more general one, that indicates what is simply not-it.  In the following diagram, S and -S designate the initial two terms; while the terms  designate, diagonally, the weaker negations of each of the initial terms of the opposition:

    At its best, the Greimassian rectangle can help us discern the structure of categories that underpin a narrative or discursive scene. This discerning does not necessarily solve anything, but should help us formulate new problems and redefine situations. To do that, the terms of the initial opposition and their weaker negations must be polyvalent enough to generate different kinds of synonyms and opposites.

    Here I would like to plot the different, common enough, possibilities for naming “Israel/Palestine” on the square. It should be emphasized that there is nothing frivolous about using the square in the context of an urgent political problem. Political urgency should never trump thinking. The last few years surely teach us that there is nothing obvious about how to fight rising fascism or how to overcome the liberal capitalism from which the former emerges (and with which fascism entertains deeper affinities, as Adorno and Horkheimer argue in Dialectic of Enlightenment). And to repress thinking with moralization doesn’t seem like a useful option either. My use of the square here is an attempt to think through a political situation; maybe it is a failed attempt, but there is nothing frivolous about the effort itself.

    As a point of departure, each one of these name-combinations for Israel/Palestine should be seen as a historical narrative in reified form. To turn a name back into a narrative means to be able to see it as self-contradictory, or as having a gap or discontinuity at its core. The Greimassian rectangle’s power resides precisely in that it operates somewhat like Walter Benjamin’s constellation: the seemingly arbitrary process of contrasting different names, as if they were external to each other, ends up exposing each name’s internal contradictions. That said, to narrativize each term is not just to recount the history of its use. The task, rather, is to eke out the narrative that each term seems to insinuate in the current situation. Teasing these out is a matter for intuition, an operation that remains outside any empirical verifiability, though it may be complemented later with a more dialectical form of historical inquiry, in which terms come to take on retroactively different meaning as time moves and paradigms shift. Insofar as each name will come to designate a narrative form, this is where History, and futurity, will be articulated with all their urgency.

    For the initial opposition, I suggest we take the two names “Israel/Palestine” and “Israel-Palestine”. What distinguishes these is only the difference between a separator and a hyphen. But this small change designates a crucial difference of historical and narrative relationship. “Israel/Palestine”, I think, designates today a narrative in which an antagonism is affirmed between Israel and Palestine. Palestine is here narrated as Israel’s other, some resistant element to it, while Israel itself is seen as a positive geopolitical unit. This antagonism may be regarded as either external, with Palestine constituting some external threat, or as internal, with Palestine serving as constitutive aberration, the “concrete universal” exception to Israel, on which the latter’s wholeness actually depends. Here belong both Golda Meir’s paradoxical “there is no such thing as Palestinian people”, and, on the more literary side, Amos Oz’s early stories, in which the Kibbutz is spatially threatened by external Palestinian presence.

    As its opposite, “Israel-Palestine” is where the antagonism between the two is either denied or reconciled (after its assertion), in favor of a flat equivalence or continuity, either in an idealistic-humanist terms or in some cynical assertion that national difference is mere illusion. This continuity and equivalence is an important element in the horizon of the Oslo and 1990s peace process, in which, of course, the hope for peace was unfortunately constructed through a completely uneven (future) arrangement: the establishment of a Palestinian state subservient to Israel. Negativity itself is banished here: the continuity and equivalence are asserted immediately, with no labor of negation. Here belong, as well, sundry humanistic pronouncements on the “Israeli-Palestinian” conflict, ones whose explicit or implicit message is general regret over the loss of life and an ideological commitment to “balanced perspectives”—which, of course, is another name for supporting the status quo. This continuity between or equivalence of “Israel-Palestine” is politically shunned today on the left, as some well-meaning but ultimately misguided and thoughtless lip-service to peace.

    These, then, form our initial opposition, in which an initial recognition of antagonism is replaced by arbitrary equivalence. The third term will then also be a negation of the first term, “Israel/Palestine” (diagonally represented in the square), but a more general one, designating what is simply not-it. I would like to suggest the name “Palestine/Israel” for exactly this term. It may seem like a simple transposition, in which the terms just switch places around the divider, which still affirms the antagonism between them. But the order here matters qualitatively, and neither “Palestine” nor “Israel” in “Palestine/Israel” mean the same thing as they do in “Israel/Palestine.” What “Palestine/Israel” invokes, I think, is a narrative in which Israel is a contingent, historical imposition on a preexisting Palestine. But Palestine here does not immediately designate an existing geopolitical entity, on which political scientists can wax boringly. Rather, it opens up the way to imagining a past collectivity that must impossibly be recovered, or a speculative collective project to come, free from external oppression. Meanwhile, Israel in this option is not some internal exception, but an external imposition, a dominant and oppressive one. This is the place of the colonial or settler-colonial narrative, in which the settler’s eliminationist tendencies must be defeated at all costs, as a precondition for any recovery of collectivity. Thus, we get the following basic square:

    Once we place these options in the rectangle, what becomes clear is that there is one corner that remains yet unnamed: the bottom-left one. This fourth narrative option is the one that, for Jameson and Phil Wegner, is reserved for the Hegelian negation of the negation. It cannot be determined simply by a logical procedure out of the other three names, which are relatively easy to isolate, as Jameson notes. Positing it requires an imaginative leap and a wager of thought. It is a term that is not only the general negation of “Israel-Palestine” but also of the imaginative space opened up by the other two names: it is impossibly self-contradictory and unstable. In the context of our square, it is a term that requires something like a negation on two fronts: it subtracts itself from the easy continuity of “Israel-Palestine”, but it also refuses both the splitting of Palestine from Israel, or the past or future projection of a whole Palestine, free of Israel.

    I want to suggest that what names this fourth option is to be found in our relationship to the aftermath to the horrible events of October 7, 2023. That these have come to mark in our symbolic order some decisive shift, some end of a previous status quo (itself hideously oppressive to Palestinians), should be clear enough, even if the precise contours of a new narrative have not yet fully emerged. One can see the signs of this potential shift in our responses to the new situation. The student encampment movement is a good example: its emergence seems to mark some new imaginary relationship to Palestinian struggle and Israel, the uncompromising demands for decolonizing Palestine and US institutions now seem to hold some stronger, more direct possibilities for identification. Institutional responses to these new challenges also seem to have something new about them: the crackdown on the protesters, the suspicion that any criticism of Israel is somehow antisemitic—a suspicion not dispelled by insistence on the difference between the two—all attest to the emergence of some new allegorical structuring to the events in our imagination (their signifying of something more than just themselves).  Intellectual responses within the left also seem to signal some new situation waiting to be named, insofar as they waver between a condemnation of the Palestinian attacks and of the Israeli response, to a doubling down on an established narrative of anti-colonial struggle, itself borrowed from mid-20th century struggles. What I argue below is that the contradictory historical options opened up by this newness are the ones that inspire in us simultaneously both genuine hope and terrible fear: on the one hand, the symbolic revival of the possibility of Palestinian—and universal—liberation invoked by the October 7 attacks, expressed for example in Jodi Dean’s commentary. And on the other, the genocide of Palestinians by Israel, already underway, and the stemming of all hope for Palestinian liberation; but also the genuine Israeli or Jewish fear of elimination (unjustifiable, perhaps, but a real fear even so).

    Thus, “The aftermath of October 7” comes to designate, impossibly, both negations that I mentioned: it decisively subtracts from the list of available categories the flat, unproblematic, continuity or equivalence of “Israel-Palestine” – the very antagonism (the Palestinian attacks or the genocidal Israeli response) cannot be plausibly contained in some notion of “business as usual.”  But on the other hand, “October 7” also takes its distance from “Israel/Palestine” and “Palestine/Israel”: overt Israeli eliminationist glee towards Palestinian suffering cannot possibly anymore designate a repressed, Palestinian, “concrete universal” exception to supposedly universal Israeli law; it is instead Israel’s retreat into unapologetic particularism. Meanwhile, the celebration of the October 7 attacks threatens to collapse into an eliminationism of its own: misgivings about the emancipatory horizon of Hamas and about the denial of Jewish self-determination, and hesitation over whether to support of the attack itself—all of which mark the current moment’s distance from the “Palestine/Israel” option. Thus, “October 7’s aftermath” is, if anything, a figure for insistent negativity, one to which the previous names have trouble adhering. In other words, it is a textbook eruption of the Real into the Symbolic.

    But what can this eruption mean? Since a new symbolic code has yet to emerge, the answer to this question requires us willfully to arrest the play of synonyms that fuels any process of naming—requires, indeed, that reification be allowed to take hold again, but hopefully in a novel and suggestive way, making concrete some new Historical horizons. Thus, as a way of answering this question, I return to the rectangle. So far, I’ve only charted the internal terms of the rectangle. But it offers us four other positions, external ones, as my initial chart discloses. These four external options allow us to position different combinations of the four initial terms, as contradictory as these initial terms may seem. And so I would like to suggest the following full Greimassan rectangle:

    Of particular importance in this chart is the status of the top and bottom terms, called the complex and the neutral term, respectively. The top term is reserved for the operation of ideology: the imagined reconciliation of contradiction (a formulation that has its roots both in Levi-Strauss and Althusser). This is where “Israel/Palestine” and “Israel-Palestine” find their symbolic reconciliation: admitting a historical antagonism between Israel and Palestine, but asserting too quickly and idealistically the possibility of their equivalent coexistence as separate states. This is precisely the imagined reconciliation of the 1990s failed peace effort, which still functions as some hollow “common ground” to signal peaceful intentions. It is clear, today, that such splitting into two states is not really possible any longer, considering Israeli land theft, and that its implicit content is nothing but a formalization of a relation of subordination of Palestine to Israel—as it did back in the 1990s. That today world leaders can overtly express their support for the peace of a two-state solution, yet directly contribute to Israeli oppression, is perhaps the best demonstration of this position’s quintessentially ideological function.

    But a new option has recently emerged to occupy this reconciliatory position: the confederation, which has gained some support in recent months. The confederative solution, in its many variants, seems to be even a more effective reconciliatory (or ideological) option than the two-state solution.  The way core issues are addressed—territory, the Palestinian right of return and reparations, the degree of Palestine’s independence, etc.—is immediately revealed to be no different than how they’re imagined in either a two-state or that option on which I haven’t touched yet, that of the one-state framework (as for example in one variant’s positing of an open border, which is borrowed from the one-state paradigm, but with each state deciding on the differential rights of the various  groups in its territory, which again returns us to all the familiar problems of the two-state solution). The confederation’s main novelty seems to reside in the establishment of a common governmental order, which in fact becomes its sole characteristic in the documents of The Israeli Palestinian Confederacy.[1] [2]

    Here, only the coordinating governmental order is elaborated in a proposed constitution, and engagement with any important disagreements is refused and deferred to the future. Here, then, we have nothing but the last turning of the screw of an eternal present, extending from the oppression of Palestinians into what was supposed to end it—peace negotiations. To put it bluntly, in this confederated non-solution, we are permitted to have the dessert of eternal oppression as long as we eat the heaped up greens of eternal negotiation—the governmental institutions of the confederation.

    But perhaps the biggest problem with the proposed confederation, one not addressed by any of its adherents or critics, is the absence in it of what Jameson calls collective feeling or Ibn Khaldun’s asabiyya: federalism “does not seem to work as a concept, as a value. Perhaps it still carries a little too much of the atmosphere of tolerance and altruism and too little of a vital narcissism to be viscerally attractive.”[3] In An American Utopia, Jameson offers a more sustained discussion of federalism as a solution and a problem in its own right, thematized precisely as one of envy and the theft of jouissance (which is just another way to get at the absence of collective feeling). He then offers a Fourieresque “non-solution” for it: the “Psychoanalytic Placement Bureau,”[4] which allows for people to chance occupations  and forms of life as well as absorbing of therapy, both individual and collective, into a centralized state apparatus.[5] Yet, such an ambitious centralized supplement to federalism is precisely what is barred in Palestine/Israel confederation proposals, in positing differential rights of residents and citizens. My point here is that to the degree that one is able to imagine libidinal investment in a confederation (as a properly utopian narrative might do), it would become indistinguishable from the truly Utopian possibility, both threatening and promising, haunting our ideologues today: that of the single-state solution. The speculative rise of a different “collective feeling,” then, immediately implies a commonality of fate that today is still hard to imagine except as a single nation-state.

    But before I address this option, which appears in the bottom corner of the outer square, a few words are in order about its outer left and right corners: “Israel without Palestine” and “Palestine without Israel.” One should remember here that “Israel” is not identical to “Israel without Palestine”: to mark an absence is itself a presence in the latter case. The latter differs from the former in that it introduces the exclusion of Palestine into the very notion of Israel. Such barring of Palestine is clearly a solution of sorts for the combination of “Israel/Palestine” and “October 7 Aftermath”: the continued genocide of Palestinians—murderous oppression, slow or fast, of a kind that no longer pays even symbolic homage to a just, peaceful, resolution, becomes part of what Israel means. It signifies the eradication of the Palestinian “exception” to Israel, implied by Israel/Palestine. Trump’s “peace plan,” which includes the barbaric intention of the forcing Palestinians into exile from Gaza, also belongs in this outer right corner.

    But the opposite corner, that of “Palestine without Israel” as the combination of “Israel-Palestine” and “Palestine/Israel,” is less self-explanatory. This possibility may be counterintuitive, since it operates through a different valence of the equivalence asserted by “Israel-Palestine.” (In passing it should be noted that such switching of valences takes place in any Greimassian square worth its salt). Here, instead of the too-quick equivalence of an unjust peace, equivalence designates an equivalence of struggle, borrowed from the underlying materialism of “Palestine/Israel,” in which what is insisted upon is Israel’s continued “struggle” against the very existence of Palestine. The equivalence is then an assertion of continued struggle against Israel as such, when we see the latter’s entire existence as one predicated on the oppression of Palestine. Hence we get “Palestine without Israel”: the refusal of Israel’s “right to exist” or even the use of its name.

    But the most interesting option is the bottom corner of the square, usually called the neutral term. Here, one is no longer dealing with a reconciliation, but with an uneasy shifting between irreconcilable options, which is identified by Jameson as the Utopian itself, and by Wegner as an equivalent of the Lacanian Real. The Utopian—“solutions without problems”—is the place of the possibility of a single state: that still hard-to-imagine, both material and ideological, decolonization of Israel (a cultural revolution would be the precise term here). It spells the symbolic end of Israel as such, already predicted by Ilan Pappe, Shir Hever, and others;[6] but at the same time, impossibly, it spells the end of a future return to indigeneity, as well—to a whole, self-identical Palestine. It weakly promises Palestinian emancipation without an independent Palestine; but also Jewish self-determination without a state predicted on Jewish exceptionalism. To be sure, the one-state solution poses a challenge to our imagination, challenging our ability to construct something new while simultaneously flushing out the limitations of what we can currently imagine. As a properly Utopian term, all existing historical tendencies seem to work against its realization, making far more likely that the sharpening contradictions collapse this Utopian possibility into one of its horrific doppelgangers: the fascist Israeli right’s “Greater Israel” vision,[7] in which not only does the genocide of Palestinians continues, alongside the annexation of Palestinian territory, but Israel seizes territory from adjacent countries, as well.

    Maintaining’s one’s fidelity to the Utopian option of a One State has another name: a belief in a communist collective horizon, and its necessary insistence on a confrontation with the capitalist system that conditions the current situation in the aftermath of October 7 (a proposition that I will not be able to defend here). If there is a final referent to our response to the eruption of the Real on October 7, it can be speculatively identified with the sudden appearance of the anxieties produced by life under capitalism, overlaying the violent events and investing them with our most intimate fears. Whether such sudden eruption can turn into a revolutionary political program—whether it becomes a genuine Event—is still to be seen. It should be insisted that one should not forsake this horizon because of the general anti-utopianism that still has its ideological chokehold over our collective imaginations. Rather, we live in a time in which what was considered ideologically impossible until recently can suddenly become real options again (the global rise of authoritarianism, but also of flashes of socialist politics, are obvious examples). Thus, to insist on this utopian horizon is to take part in this slow, hesitant and anti-anti-utopian trend. 

    Oded Nir is the author of Signatures of Struggle, a 2018 book on “the figuration of collectivity in Israeli fiction.” He has edited volumes on Marxist approaches to Israel/Palestine and on the literatures of the capitalist periphery. He teaches courses on Israeli culture and literature at Queens College.

    [1] “Israeli Palestinian Confederation Mission Statement,” Israeli Palestinian Confederation, accessed March 19, 2025, https://ipconfederation.org/mission/.

    [2] https://ipconfederation.org/

    [3] Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (London; New York: Verso, 2019), 195.

    [4] Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army (London; New York: Verso, 2016), 81.

    [5] Jameson, 82–85.

    [6] Ilan Pappe, “The Collapse of Zionism,” Sidecar (blog), June 21, 2024, https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-collapse-of-zionism; Shir Hever, “The End of Israel’s Economy,” Mondoweiss, July 19, 2024, https://mondoweiss.net/2024/07/the-end-of-israels-economy/.

    [7] Qassam Muaddi, “Inside ‘Greater Israel’: Myths and Truths behind the Long-Time Zionist Fantasy,” Mondoweiss, December 17, 2024, https://mondoweiss.net/2024/12/inside-greater-israel-myths-and-truths-behind-the-long-time-zionist-fantasy/.

  • Caddie Alford–Witnessing Corecore as an Epideictic Call to Care

    Caddie Alford–Witnessing Corecore as an Epideictic Call to Care

    This text is published as part of a special b2o issue titled “Critique as Care”, edited by Norberto Gomez, Frankie Mastrangelo, Jonathan Nichols, and Paul Robertson, and published in honor of our b2o and b2 colleague and friend, the late David Golumbia.

    Witnessing Corecore as an Epideictic Call to Care

    Caddie Alford 

    It’s early January 2023. You’re on TikTok. Comedian Bo Burnham’s song “Microwave Popcorn” has become viral audio.[1] Banking on that virality, user @sebastianvalencia.mp4’s video starts with Burnham’s unmistakable “I put the,” but before “packet on the glass” plays, the video skips to another “Microwave Popcorn” video, then another, then another, and then a high-pitched buzzing gets louder over a scrolling blur of videos from a “sad Family Guy edits” playlist. The video cuts to black and the words “Wake up” appear. Some lilting piano notes begin to play over a shot from the 1998 film The Truman Show, which transitions into an interview with comedian Hasan Minhaj saying, “The internet and technology created an idea of infinity. And the reason why life is beautiful is because it is fundamentally limited.” That quote tees up animations from the 2008 Disney Pixar film WALL-E of humans glued to devices and media, spliced with clips of actual humans walking around head down with their phones in front of them. Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous 2021 brand change announcement starts playing—“Today, we’re gonna talk about the Metaverse”—but only long enough to cut back in time to his somber and shaky 2018 testimony to Congress: “it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well.” More from Minhaj’s interview rounds everything out before cutting back to black. The video—this stew of obvious yet idiosyncratic contrasts—has 2.1 million likes.

    Screenshots of two cuts in sequential order from @sebastianvalencia.mp4’s corecore TikTok video, 2023.

    The above style of editing on TikTok is called “corecore,” which is a genre that dramatizes a fraught relationship with TikTok’s -cores, or suffix tags that index micro aesthetics. Corecores elicit the platformization of feeling—“vibes”—ranging from poignant to maudlin. Corecore edits can be disorienting like other odd editing trends, but they’re somewhat outside trend categories. Since #corecore is, as post-disciplinary duo Y7 explain, “a category defined by the very act of categorization,” there isn’t the same “immediate implication of an aesthetic” as you might see with a weirdcore edit or meme, which is an aesthetic that consistently pulls from early internet graphics (Y7 2023). No, corecore “took trends and trending as its subject” (Y7 2023).

    On January 1, 2021, user @masonoelle may have been the first to create a corecore with, as always, a fairly slapdash compilation of clips on “the climate crisis (polar ice caps melting, deforestation, major flooding), critiques of the United States Army, and the oversaturation of media” (Mendez 2023). By late 2022, corecore videos had amassed enough of a following and recognition that journalists started reporting on it. Kiernan Press-Reynolds’ account became the blueprint, describing the “anti-trend” trend of corecore as an “algorithmically-generated craze that boils down to an amorphous intangible “vibe,” a free-floating aesthetic with no roots outside TikTok” (Press-Reynolds 2022). Cultural critics, journalists, and everyday TikTok users have debated whether corecore was a profound aesthetic intervention or just elementary shitposting.[2] Press-Reynolds notes that the discourse surrounding corecore has almost been more interesting than the videos themselves: “people argue corecore is more than memes: it’s a politically charged art movement critical of capitalism and technology’s atomizing effect on society. The other camp says the videos are all about surreal humor and vibes; the amorphous essence of subjective interpretation; intangible emotions” (Press-Reynolds 2023). Corecore videos often make either niche sense or too much polemic sense.

    Eventually, as is the way of all trends on TikTok, corecore slowly ran its course. Offshoots like #hopecore emerged and they, too, ran their course. Both gave way in late 2024 to a mutt aesthetic—“hopelesscore”—which is known for depicting negative, anti-social, and/or depressive quote animations via fonts and over visuals typically associated with motivation, like footage of a sunset at a beach.[3] As I develop in this essay, corecore gave way to a significant lifeworld, full of substantial audience interest as well as aesthetic appropriation. This ongoing lifeworld suggests that corecore is less a question of signification, or a question of “content” and meaning, and more a rhetorical question of effect and reception: a critical mass of these unruly “anti-trend” aesthetics indicate rhetorical heft and cultural significance at a time when the future of TikTok in the US both as a platform and a political topos remains unclear.

    This interdisciplinary essay draws from rhetorical studies, tech reporting, and media studies to argue that corecore could be productively thought of as a contemporary version of the epideictic, which is the rhetorical genre of praising or blaming. In Debra Hawhee’s words, the main objective of the epideictic is “to render explicit something already known, and then to intensify preexisting commitments” (2023, 27). One of the three Aristotelian genres of rhetoric, the epideictic is demonstrative and often ceremonial oratory. The epideictic helps shape “the basic codes of value and belief by which a society or culture lives” (Walker 2000, 9). Common scenes for the epideictic are funerals, weddings, roasts, holidays, and so on. A typical example is someone giving a retirement speech for their colleague. By collectively honoring their colleague’s attributes and past actions, the retirement speech also solidifies that specific community’s (surface-level) majority values vis-à-vis work, career paths, expressions of collegiality, and so on. The conventions and strategies of the epideictic genre are in the service of all parties walking away feeling at least affirmed in their convictions.

    For the purposes of this essay, however, I am most interested in the connections between the epideictic and the act of witnessing. Hawhee defines witnessing as “weighty assertions of material presence that lay bare injustices and demand a reckoning” (2023, 8). Witnessing “foregrounds justice and morality,” so “keeping witnessing front and center” is crucial for addressing ecological breakdown (2023, 8). She uses the word “keeping” there deliberately, to be in line with arguments that “identify witnessing as the defining act of our time” (2023, 154). In the face of ecocide and the widespread denial of that ecocide, the act of witnessing is an increasingly salient process by which to respond to—and emphasize—precarity. Witnessing is front of mind for scholars responding to precarity. Current scholarship like Michael Richardson’s Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology After the End of the World (2024), for instance, expands the scope of traditional articulations of witnessing to include nonhuman witnesses like image recognition systems. In this conception, witnessing is a relational project that necessarily exceeds the “capacity to “know” inherited from Western epistemologies” (2024, 8). The genre of the epideictic both ritualizes and mobilizes that relational project through memorializing, capturing, eulogizing, and bearing responsibility,[4] all of which are essential to witnessing.

    Each corecore can be thought of as a witnessing because each corecore is an attempt to make “a core out of the collective consciousness” (Townsend 2023). Aesthetics scholar Mitch Therieau comments that the videos ‘“have a sheen of smoothness and detachment, but it’s like people are screaming underneath”’ (Glossop 2023). Corecore is the dark, ironic -core, documenting and making salient the ecocidal fallout from, in corecore’s POV, digitality: “racial capitalism” (Robinson 1983; Kelley 2017), techno-solutionism (Kneese 2023), cyberlibertarianism (Golumbia 2024), and all the other asymmetries that inhere in how the internet and digital technologies have been both symptoms and drivers of crisis.

    And still, while corecore videos are tender, often scrambled efforts, reframing corecore as epideictic witnessing reveals a key yet obscured component: platforms. For this special issue “Critique as Care” in memory of my dearly missed former colleague David Golumbia, “to hold space,” as the CFP asked, “for simultaneity and contradiction,” I want to posit that the opposite of corecore—TikTok LIVE and its commercial livestream program—is a window into how the platform witnesses us witnessing it through such “disobedient aesthetics” as corecore.[5] After all, it would not be a piece in honor of Golumbia without an interrogation of the antidemocratic politics of the technics themselves. I felt strongly about critiquing TikTok LIVE when I wrote this piece in 2024, but in 2025, after the law banning TikTok did not go into effect and US users received not one, but two notifications of shameless propaganda, I feel compelled. Through an analysis of livestream by way of leaked documents, reporting, and outputs, I will suggest that TikTok witnessed corecore through what Anna Munster and Adrian Mackenzie term “platform seeing” (2019), or a platform’s modality of perception “produced through the distributive events and technocultural processes performed by, on and as image collections are engaged by deep learning assemblages” (2019, 10). Through these assemblages, TikTok observed corecore and continues to turn those values back onto themselves. Moreover, these platform-seeing assemblages will always bear witness and therefore always absorb and warp user-generated epideictic truths, which confirms the need to protect platformed epideictic witnessing. In this essay, I articulate the epideictic functionality of aesthetic interventions to claim that they are acts of witnessing. Ultimately, in doing so, I reach for connections between a praxis of care, critique, and scholarly witnessing.

    The Epideictic Witnessing of Corecore: Fatigue

    Writing about the development of twenty-first century art and performance as they’ve been shaped by digital technology, Claire Bishop states that there are new conditions of spectatorship (2024, 4). Bishop attends to those terrains through examining how attention has been historically and culturally defined as a normative value and practice in relation to art and artistic interventions.[6] Just like media and technologies, we know that art structures ways of seeing that support and run counter to dominant expectations for how to express and cultivate aesthetic taste.[7] “Spectatorial conventions” form from repeated interactions with artistic strategies, “individual inclinations, and unforeseen contextual eventualities” (2024, 35). With this appreciation for the rhetorical contingencies of mediated and distributed attention, Bishop questions whether there is a hierarchical difference between attentional modes. She cites dance theorist André Lepecki (2016) who argues that the “spectators” of social media are more passive than “witnesses:” “only the witness sees the whole performance and is embodied and emotionally in touch with what they are seeing” (2024, 79). With fluctuating conditions of spectatorship, however, it is just not that simple.

    Within digitality, hierarchical paradigms of observing do not apply, if they ever did. Social media users are constantly toggling between modes of spectating, from platform specific modes to occasion specific modes, through and beside interfaces. We are at once spectators and Lepecki’s witnesses: such distinctions break down in participatory publics where we are all performing and negotiating multiple appeals to ethos, only for algorithmic visibility filtering to displace or gather views. While detachment is a part of these modalities, social media spectatorship is not reducible to detachment or distraction.

    Part of why I was drawn to put the epideictic into conversation with corecore and witnessing is that it offers a figuration of spectating that anticipates these fluid conditions of spectatorship. Intriguingly, the figuration that the epideictic offers is related to theory and theorizing. As Sharon Crowley explains, in ancient Greek the verb theorein meant ‘“to observe from afar”; it refers to someone sitting in the topmost row of the theater. A theorist is the spectator who is most distant from the scene being enacted on stage and whose body is thus in one sense the least involved in the production but who nonetheless affects and is affected by it” (2006, 27). The implication is that distance—distraction, perhaps, or mediation—does not necessarily entail a lessened audience experience. This hybrid, bodily, and slightly detached theorein was precisely what was expected from epideictic audiences. Christine Oravec confirms that theoria—observation—was the “function assigned to the epideictic audience” (1976, 164). The epideictic audience were there to receive the disclosed values and unearthed truths from rhetorics of display: “theoroi means one who looks at, views, beholds, contemplates, speculates, or theorizes. These various translations indicate a kind of insight or power of generalization, as well as a passive viewing” (1976, 164). There were three different varieties of theoria and all invoked a journey: Andrea Wilson Nightingale explains that “the first two involved pilgrimages to religious oracles or festivals and, in the third, the theoros travelled abroad as a researcher or tourist” (2001, 29). Distance and detachment are crucial to all three versions of what Nightingale calls these “envoys” of meaning. Audiences for the epideictic weren’t given an immediate call to arms so much as primed to feel—the warm camaraderie from mutual recognition, certainly, but also an appreciation, both analytic and intuitive, for the artistry of what they were observing.

    Scores of scholars have pointed out that the epideictic is a unique and slippery force—it compels engagement with its strange temporality, for instance[8]—but I mainly want to focus on its connection to aesthetics. Dale Sullivan accounts for at least four purposes of the epideictic: “preservation, education, celebration, and aesthetic creation” (1993, 116). Each of these purposes require attention to style; the epideictic rhetor was expected to use “many kinds of amplification” and magnification (Aristotle 1368a). In fact, part of the audience’s job in fulfilling theorein was to observe the rhetor’s skill: was the rhetoric effective at being affective? The audience was invited to “respond to the speech itself as an aesthetic object” (Oravec 1976, 168) by opening themselves up to “the sensory qualities of the speech itself” (Oravec 1976, 163)—the qualities and strategies that most stimulate “through the senses” (Oravec 1976, 171). This nexus of disinterested detachment, sensitized senses, and judgment speaks to a lineage of aesthetics as sensory persuasion, in the doubled passive and active act of beholding: as Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman elaborate, “aesthetics is not only about sensation or receiving information understood as a passive act; it is also about perception, the making sense of what is sensed” (2021, 34). Sensory persuasion encompasses how epideictic amplification makes values and revelations matter.

    In sum, the epideictic aims to surface commitments by creating an occasion wherein audiences re-view these commitments through aesthetic sense-making. Aesthetic sense-making is a significant modality for uncovering value paradigms even as they potentially emerge from, or refuse, hegemonic value paradigms. The tension from that relationality produces ambient anxieties and the aesthetic sense-making of the contemporary epideictic are how we might witness those anxieties. Platforms are indeed technologies of control as well as extractive systems—a “hellscape of dreary stimuli”—and still, user-generated epideictic efforts—“an oasis of unthinking vibes” (Press-Reynolds 2022)—bring to light misdeeds and unease.

    In response to that “hellscape,” many of us have no other recourse but to bear witness. And in the context of TikTok as in the tradition of the epideictic, bearing witness will always be aestheticized. For example, the main rhetorical strategy across corecore videos is aesthetic juxtaposition. Take this popular corecore video, bookmarked 266 thousand times. It begins with a kid being asked about how much money they want to make when they grow up to which they respond they want to help people feel okay. That innocence influences the viewer to receive every other clip as evidence that we are not, in fact, OK: sped-up footage of a traffic intersection, Ryan Gosling’s character in Blade Runner 2049 screaming, a row of elderly people monotonously pressing slot machines in a casino, and a violent crowd pushing into some big box retail store. The drone of an organ pad orchestrates a melancholic vibe.

    The comments on this corecore, as with many corecores, express mutuality—a chorus of users commenting “real” or “thank you” or “this is why…”—because in the truest sense of the epideictic everyone gathered and compelled to receive the display enters a “timeless, consubstantial space carved out by their mutual contemplation of reality” (Sullivan 1993, 128). Although the phrasing of “consubstantial space” might imply a flattening of difference, Jodie Nicotra clarifies that platformed epideictic “does not issue from and to an already-constituted community; rather, by virtue of a process, it enacts a community” (Nicotra 2016). The corecore contrasts are aesthetic stimulants that work to unravel a new-old value, some heretofore muted or jumbled realization on the tip of our tongues. Even with all the alterity of a shifting online “audience,” corecore edits initiate aesthetic sense-making that discover, over and over, one particularly salient shared truth: fatigue.

    Fatigue sounds about right because it is right. Broadly, Sianne Ngai notes, “aesthetic experience has been transformed by the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism” (Ngai 2015, 1). As a result, aesthetic categories and aestheticization are, as McKenzie Wark summarizes, “in-between play and labor, and they signal an era in which work becomes play and play becomes work” (2020, 16). The imperative to self-optimize while negotiating an overwhelming lack of boundaries, infrastructure, trust—the list goes on—is exhausting. Indiscriminate monetization levels all content, and that leveling is traumatizing when political and economic hierarchies could not be more pronounced in most contexts. The constant transmission of Black trauma through the “trope” and “trap” of what Legacy Russell calls the “Black meme” remains especially unbearable (2024, 8). And for a while we spoke to and out of this despair, relying on what Nathan Schneider terms “affective voice,” or the feeling that you are speaking truth to power, which platforms purposefully confuse with “effective voice,” or the actual “instrumental power to change something” (2024, 20). But given years of outrage and never seeing much happen, years of hyper-algorithmic feeds that prioritize hot takes amid the capitalist fracturing of communities and relationships, we’re now plagued with, to borrow from Kate Lindsay, “opinion fatigue:” users are increasingly making “the choice to opt out or otherwise radically alter how they post their thoughts online” (Lindsay 2023). Lindsay speculates that context collapse has been a part of this shift because “Public opinion around a topic can shift but is then sometimes retroactively applied to internet opinions formed long before this new consensus” (Lindsay 2023). It’s all too much. We’re tired.

    The aesthetic collisions of efforts like corecore inclined us to witness this ambient anxiety. It’s not that the young and the online are sensitive, triggered by every politically incorrect message. Not even close. Their fatigue is an existential kind of fatigue. Witnessing this fatigue—displaying and holding this fatigue in common—should have been the start of us coming together to agree on one simple point: never again will we let tech companies perform historical reenactments of feudalisms at the expense of our health, our environment, our institutions, our democracies—again, the list goes on. And while fatigue doesn’t seem like the most effective tool for profound witnessing, I’m reminded of Tamika L. Carey’s 2023 Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference keynote in which she draws from Black feminist thought and narratives to trace and reimagine the concept of fatigue. Carey argues that “conversations about fatigue invite us to refine our approaches to listening, to deepen our understanding of relationships, and to invest in reparative practices” (2023, 3). Fatigue, Carey points out, can be marshalled into a resistant form of impatience, or a productive refusal to participate in harmful practices and systems. Fatigue can help us find an in-road into repair: Carey perceives the potential to allow fatigue to orient praxis toward restorative justice, rest, and community-oriented self-care. Witnessing fatigue—really coming to terms with what this fatigue means and how it was wrought—might have been the first rhetorical step toward emancipation from Big Tech. The problem is, they witnessed us witnessing fatigue and they also said: never again.

    The Platform Witnessing of Corecore: Engagement

    In October 2024, the public was given a rare window into internal TikTok research findings and communications, including information about the degree of effectiveness of remedial measures, how the app more than appeals to young users, content regulation practices, and so on. Fourteen attorneys general led an investigation into TikTok; attendant lawsuits from more than a dozen states claim that the app knowingly hooks children and younger users. Each lawsuit contained redactions due to confidentiality agreements with TikTok. However, the lawsuit filed by the Kentucky Attorney’s General used digital redactions that Kentucky Public Radio could read. These redactions “appeared to primarily quote and summarize findings from internal TikTok documents and communications” (Goodman 2024).

    These documents say the quiet part out loud. TikTok’s own research “states that “compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety”’ (Allyn et al. 2024). The NPR report continues: the time limit tool, which lets parents set daily screen time limits, was not implemented to help teens reduce their time on the app. TikTok was curious whether the tool could, in their words, improve “public trust”’ (Allyn et al. 2024). Kentucky investigators also found that TikTok made changes to their algorithm to address ‘“a high volume of…not attractive subjects”’ (Allyn et al. 2024). The algorithm had been retooled to boost content from creators the company deemed attractive. TikTok’s content moderation is faulty and inconsistent. They rely on artificial intelligence for the first go around and human moderators come in “only if the video has a certain amount of views” (Allyn et al. 2024). Internally, TikTok acknowledges “substantial “leakage” rates of violating content that’s not removed. Those leakage rates include: 35.71% of “Normalization of Pedophilia;” 33.33% of “Minor Sexual Solicitation;” 39.13% of “Minor Physical Abuse;” 30.36% of “leading minors off platform;” 50% of “Glorification of Minor Sexual Assault;” and “100% of “Fetishizing Minors” (Allyn et al. 2024). And yet, a presentation for top company officials “revealed that an internal document “instructed moderators to not take action on reports on underage users unless their bio specifically states they are 13 or younger” (Allyn et al. 2024). An unnamed TikTok executive said the reason kids are on TikTok is because the app’s algorithm is so powerful that it “keeps them from “sleep, and eating, and moving around the room, and looking at someone in the eyes” (Allyn et al. 2024).

    The technicity of this platform—how it moderates and curates content, how its algorithm (micro)manages what users encounter, and how the interface is designed to prioritize video and deprioritize everything else, including context—is a technicity inseparable from cyberlibertarianism in that those logics have afforded this technicity just as much as this technicity furthers those logics. Golumbia specifies that cyberlibertarianism is not a coherent dogma: just like fascism, many of its tenants and appeals are contradictory. Cyberlibertarianism is, however, a useful concept for identifying doctrine based on “anti-democracy” and pro-corporate foundations (2024, 16): a cyberlibertarian faith in tech wants to reconfigure “social and cultural phenomena into free market terms” (2024, 36) so that it can do away with democratic institutions, expertise, and governments even while claiming such ideals as “democratization,” “community,” “voice,” “access,” and “engagement” (2024, 46). Golumbia explains that this rhetoric looks both ways: “we seem to be talking about copyright, freedom of speech, or the “democratization” of information or some technology. But if we listen closely, we hear a different conversation that questions our right and ability to govern ourselves” (xxiii). Are the conditions on TikTok, for example, democratic if its algorithm places users into “‘filter bubbles’ after 30 minutes of use in one sitting”’ (Allyn et al. 2024)? Can we claim democratic conditions after “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!” was broadcast on every US TikTok user’s interface?[9]

    As I see it, cyberlibertarianism is of a piece of other naming projects that attempt to capture how digitality promotes a deregulated market that will somehow take care of hate speech, disinformation, doxing, AI sludge—everything. Schneider, for instance, argues that the design of platforms is feudalistic because the politics of this design increasingly nudges users “toward autocratic or oligarchic forms of community governance” while simultaneously profiting off their habits and behaviors (2024, 44). I also think of Damien Smith Pfister and Misti Yang’s conceptualization of technoliberalism (2018), which they define as a governing rationality in which digital technologies assume complete democratic and epistemic power to siphon technical expertise and resources while jettisoning democratic opportunities for deliberation. While these concepts have precise histories and trajectories, all three illuminate digitality’s translation of democratic principles into economic imperatives and concentrations of power.

    The technicity of TikTok is a product of this twisted cyberlibertarianism x feudalism x technoliberalism collab. It’s the same collab that corecore bore witness to, but it’s also the same collab that witnessed and reabsorbed corecore. Both Hawhee and Richardson note in their work on witnessing that in both senses of the word “arts and acts of witnessing, fortified with the clarifying power of insistence that they gathered over the course of the last century, are expanding to include nonhumans as well as humans” (Hawhee 2024, 4). Witnessing is not a singular project, but something that multiple agents enact. “The human viewpoint,” Joanna Zylinska reminds us, is “precisely a viewpoint”—one of and through many (Zylinska 2023, 129). The transformation and industrialization of vision during the twentieth century turned “vision” into what it is in the twenty-first century: “machine-based process” (Zylinska 2023, 10). Platforms like TikTok “see” through what Munster and Mackenzie call “observation events” that are “distributed throughout and across devices, hardware, human agents and artificial networked architectures such as deep learning networks” (2019, 5). Even without humans and even without datasets of visuals, platforms deploy observation to collect, process, and analyze data. These “observation events” bear witness, a form of “computational spectatorship” (Heras 2019, 180).

    Corecore edits were perceived by platform observation assemblages. Composites of cylberlibertarian-feudal-technoliberal logics repurposed corecore creations into acts of platform witnessing. The fruits of the original epideictic witnessing—the value of really dwelling with what collective fatigue might mean, for instance—were seen for what they were only to be absorbed to serve antithetical purposes. As one of the original corecore creators wrote on an Instagram story: “The whole point of this stuff is to create something that can’t be categorized, commodified, made into clickbait, or moderated—something immune to the functions of control that dictate the content we consume and the ideas we are allowed to hold” (Mendez 2023). Although the effects of creating, witnessing, engaging, and circulating corecore can’t all be commodified, these acts of witnessing were still subject to platform seeing. The closest existing theorization of platformed epideictic is Nicotra’s in which she attends to the architecture of mid 2000s Twitter to argue that “epideictic acts of public shaming demonstrate the inexorably technological nature of all rhetorical acts—that the technologies are not separate or supplemental to the rhetorical acts, but are rather co-constitutive” (Nicotra 2016). Attention to technologies is the reason Nicotra refashioned the epideictic, turning what was mostly considered a rhetorical genre into a potential. Unfortunately, the algorithmic systems of platform architectures “tam[e] potential into probability” (Richardson 2024, 87).

    If corecore presents one end of a spectrum of TikTok content—as radical as the moderation is going to allow—the opposite end of that same spectrum is TikTok Live and its livestream program, which is widely experienced as the “unregulated underbelly of the app” (Press-Reynolds 2023). For example, Forbes reporter Alexandra S. Levine released a damning account of TikTok Live in 2022—“How TikTok Live Became ‘A Strip Club Filled with 15-Year-Olds”—exposing how the livestream function has enabled predatory behaviors toward vulnerable users. Live is “one of the darker manifestations of the gig economy to date” (Press-Reynolds 2023). Creators want “gifts”—money—and TikTok doesn’t care how they earn that money because TikTok will take a huge cut from every transaction. Press-Reynolds explains that this structure is different from a structure like Twitch where creators build up a fanbase. Fanbases can be built on TikTok, too, but mostly live-streaming creators just throw everything under the kitchen sink to “hook viewers and coax donations” (Press-Reynolds 2023). It is no accident that these “donations” are designed to look like things rather than money: hearts, cars, flowers, animals…many of them are AI slop, from “money gun” for 500 coins to “naughty chicken” for 299 coins. Viewers buy and give these “gifts” for all kinds of reasons, but you can see how the habit of giving could result in chemical responses: will the creator acknowledge me if I send a gift? What about now? What if I send a gift to this creator? Livestream banks on a tempting—and sometimes expensive—mode of parasociality.

    Since creators do receive some funds from “gifts,” the BBC reported in 2022 that displaced people and families in Syrian camps were begging for hours at a time on livestream. This begging created a mini economy, with people in the middle supported by “live agencies” in China working directly with TikTok to help unblock accounts while the agents in the middle take a cut of the profits by providing streaming equipment (Gelbart et al. 2022). BBC monitored gift streams of $1,000 an hour, but creators only received a fraction. The reporters note that “TikTok said it would take prompt action against “exploitative begging” (Gelbart et al. 2022), diverting attention away from the real problem. 

    Users have wildly different experiences on Live, which has produced a variety of what Motahhare Eslami et al. term “folk theories” (2016), or sense-making narratives that social media users form from their experiences on black-boxed platforms. On one YouTube video about the “dark side” of Lives, a user comments that they’ve “seen other types of streams, where a man forces a disabled man who lives in what looks like a hut, to dance to tiktok audios in a dress.”[10] Another writes about one that was streaming, without context, a baby with macrocephaly. One person confirms in the comment section: “I’m from Syria, and yes the situation there is very very very rough, money, jobs, food, water, and electricity are in very very short supply.”[11] In the subreddit r/changemyview, a user writes a post titled “TikTok’s live feature is immoral. It gets clicks by putting disabled people on the feed like animals at a zoo.”[12] This “folk theory” is an attempt to bear witness to what they’re observing. However, someone responded, “this isn’t how that works; the application you were speaking about tends to display content that associates to your previous history/what it thinks you may have interest in.” Someone else writes: “On my TikTok all my lives are musicians and anime cosplayers.”[13] While this particular subreddit is designed to expand and often correct the original poster, such countering and sometimes moralizing of “folk theories” from other users is part of why “disobedient aesthetics” like corecore edits are so vital: they provide another layer of mediation to “folk theories,” toward honoring the ambiguities of platformed living. The long and short of it is that no one has any real idea about how Live works, in general and for other people: it’s sometimes neat (musicians playing the piano) and sometimes cozy (work from home employees inviting body doubling). It’s also unexpected (“Yea this shit is hella weird, i saw one where some guy was just slowly peeling away boiled eggs and kept spamming “tap tap tap tap thank you thank you send gift”) or gives dystopic vibes (“I keep seeing one [sic] with people laying on clinical beds, rocking side to side. My mind takes me to weird places”).[14] Given the structure, we cannot control where we will end up. As one TikTok official stated in the redacted documents, “a major challenge with Live business is that the content that gets the highest engagement may not be the content we want on our platform” (Allyn et al. 2024). Sexualization of teens…refugees begging…babies with macrocephaly—I think I’ve seen this corecore before.

    Corecore used aesthetic juxtapositions to reveal fatigue with Big Tech platformization. Those aesthetic collisions intended aestheticism—a more sensitive orientation—through the shock of dissonance and layers of mediation. TikTok used platform seeing to digest these aesthetic collisions, spitting them back out as more monetized livestreams. Those events, however, intended anesthetizing, or the kind of numbing that keeps you transferring funds and doomscrolling. TikTok’s livestreams took the chaotic user-generated epideictic witnessing of fatigue and forced it to become a witnessing of the Big Tech value of engagement. In a turn of events that writes itself, Tim Cook announced the “newest iPad Air” in March 2025 by showing a mock-up “trend report” on, you guessed it, #corecore.[15] Years later and Big Tech continues to commodify what was never meant to be commodified.

    Scholarly Witnessing: Care

    The 2024 Oxford Word of the Year was “brain rot,” defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”[16] At a moment in time when platforms are rolling out AI features that no one asked for and that no one is really ready for, only for AI generated images to become “evidence” of falsehoods,[17] “brain rot” encapsulates a growing, but ironicized concern about the content we’re taking in. “Technolibertarian notions that technologies are value neutral and that information wants to be free,” Jonathan Carter and Misti Yang emphasize, position “the general intellect as a boundless frontier to be exploited” (2023, 367). For “brain rot” to get chosen as the 2024 Oxford Word of the Year means that there is now a much broader recognition of that exploitation. Since aesthetics stick around longer than trends, we’re surrounded by the remnants of witnessing that were unceremoniously churned into revenue streams. Where epideictic content like corecore might have rhetorically positioned us as observers—theoroi—social media rhetorics like the functionality of LIVE position us to rot.

    This special issue asked us to bring nuance to critique—to perform scholarly critique from a place of care or caring even while actively discrediting computational solutionism, as Golumbia stressed time and time again. Critique as care is my effort to come to terms with the original display of corecore for what users wanted it to be, not for how the algorithmic systems witnessed and twisted them. Critique as care, then, is an articulation of the scholarly version of witnessing that can bear out from observing—theorizing—user-generated rhetorics as meaningful attempts to navigate unfair power dynamics. By attending to corecore, I extend theories of epideictic rhetoric to better accommodate platformization and its effects on rhetorical acts. By forwarding “platform seeing,” I think alongside Richardson’s question: “If algorithms are themselves witnessing, making knowledge, and forging worlds of their own design, what might it mean to witness their workings?” (2024, 81). In calling attention to leaked documents demonstrating TikTok’s internal culture and praxis, I take seriously Shannon Vallor’s provocation that if Big Tech ultimately remakes our world in its image, scholars might pay for our “habit of epistemic caution with our lives and our children’s futures” (2024, 162). By that she does not mean to undermine best practices for responsible scholarship as much as she means to encourage scholars to, once ready, inhabit force, passion, and courage—to just say, “this is cyberlibertarianism.” And it is fucked. Romeo García and coauthors echo that provocation, writing that “scholars are also guilty—sometimes unconsciously—of re-subjecting those they write and think about to the same epistemic violence they wish to trace, critique, and/or unsettle” (2024, 294). It is not, they write, that the scholar is “the observer merely observing.” Rather, “because the scholar engages in human work (wording) and human projects (worlding), they are indeed active actor-agents who have the capacity to engage in doings otherwise” (2024, 294).

    Now would be a good time to quote Golumbia’s close friend, George Justice, who wrote the forward for Cyberlibertarianism. Justice calls Golumbia the “most optimistic pessimist you could ever meet” (2024, ix). He goes on to say that the pages of Cyberlibertarianism “are dark in their insistence that the technologies we deploy in nearly all aspects of our lives have been built on fundamentally antidemocratic, antihuman premises,” and yet the “richness of his thought betrays an essentially hopeful belief in powers of the human mind to contemplate, understand, and attempt to change the world for the better” (2024, ix-x). As a scholar, I have not always understood that you can do both: you can hold these systems accountable and you can still be curious. You can practice sound citational politics and you can hone a unique voice and you can seek traditional venues and you can innovate. Something I have always appreciated about rhetorical training is that it exercises your capacity to find nuance, but in the past that training has prevented me from also finding certainties. I came to Virginia Commonwealth University in 2018, attempting to start a book project that was curious—not certain—about what was happening to opinions vis-à-vis social media. Golumbia, on the other hand, had just published a  article earlier that year titled “Social Media Has Hijacked Our Brains and Threatens Global Democracy.”[18] He had already predicted brain rot.

    I’m reminded of that expression of two ships passing in the night. But I eventually arrived to a place still informed by care, but very certain that things were as bad as Golumbia had known them to be. My last correspondence with him was to thank him for a talk he did on fascisms and to send a book review I had just written of a rhetorical studies collection on fascism. He was thrilled that I was doing research and teaching about these topics. He wrote, “I would love to talk some of these things over when we both have a free second…,” because while fascism is certain, scholarly care is boundless.

    Caddie Alford (she/her/hers) is associate professor of rhetoric and writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is a digital rhetoric scholar whose interdisciplinary research examines emergent forms of information, communication, and sociality. Her recent book—Entitled Opinions: Doxa After Digitality—addresses social media rhetorics by creating an affirmative theory of opinions to identify and repurpose a spectrum of truths. Some of her work has appeared in The Quarterly Journal of SpeechRhetoric Review; and enculturation.

    Bibliography

    Allyn, Bobby, Sylvia Goodman, and Dara Kerr. 2024. “TikTok Executives Know about App’s Effect on Teens, Lawsuit Documents Allege.” NPR, October 22, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/10/11/g-s1-27676/tiktok-redacted-documents-in-teen-safety-lawsuit-revealed.

    Allyn, Bobby, Sylvia Goodman, and Dara Kerr. 2024. “Inside the TikTok Documents: Stripping Teens and Boosting ‘Attractive’ People.” NPR, October 16, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/10/12/g-s1-28040/teens-tiktok-addiction-lawsuit-investigation-documents.

    Aristotle. On Rhetoric. Translated by George Kennedy. 1991. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Bishop, Claire. 2024. Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today. Verso.

    Carey, Tamika L. 2023. “The Uses of Fatigue: Invitations, Impatience, and Investments.” Keynote Address, Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference. https://cfshrc.org/article/the-uses-of-fatigue-invitations-impatience-and-investments/.

    Carter, Jonathan S. and Misti Yang. 2023. “Sophie vs. the Machine: Neo-Luddism as Response to Technical-Colonial Corruption of the General Intellect.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 53:3: 366-378. https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2023.2200699.

    Crowley, Sharon. 2006. Toward A Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

    Eslami, Motahhare, Karrie Karaholios, Christian Sandvig, Kristen Vaccaro, Aimee Rickman, Kevin Hamilton, Alex Kirlik. 2016. “First I “Like” it, then I Hide it: Folk Theories of Social Feeds.” In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2371–2382. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858494.

    Fuller, Matthew and Eyal Weizman. 2021. Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth. Verso.

    García, Romeo, Jenna Zan, Muath Qadous, Mitzi Ceballos, Keith L. McDonald, and Sabita Bastakoti. 2024. “Collective Rewor(l)ding in the Wreckage of Hauntings and Haunting Situations.” In The Routledge Handbook of Rhetoric and Power. Edited by Nathan Crick. Routledge. 293-310.

    Gelbart, Hannah, Mamdouh Akbiek, and Ziad Al-Qattan. 2022. “TikTok Profits from Livestreams of Families Begging.” BBC, October 11, 2022. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-63213567.

    Glossup, Ella. 2023. “Corecore is the Screaming-Into-Void TikTok Trend We Deserve.” Vice, January 23, 2023. https://www.vice.com/en/article/corecore-tiktok-trend-explained/.

    Golumbia, David. 2024. Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Goodman, Sylvia. 2024. “AG Coleman Sues TikTok, Says Internal Documents Show Company Knowingly Addicted KY Youth.” Kentucky Public Radio, October 9, 2024. https://www.lpm.org/news/2024-10-09/ag-coleman-sues-tiktok-says-internal-documents-show-company-knowingly-addicted-ky-youth.

    Hawhee, Debra. 2023. A Sense of Urgency: How the Climate Change is Changing Rhetoric. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Heras, Daniel Chávez. 2019. “Spectacular Machinery and Encrypted Spectatorship.” Machine Feeling, 8(1), 170-182. https://doi.org/10.7146/aprja.v8i1.115423.

    Kelley, Robin D. G. 2017. “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?” Boston Review, January 12, 2017. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/robin-d-g-kelley-introduction-race-capitalism-justice/.

    Kneese, Tamara. 2023. Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in this Life and Beyond. New Haven: Yale University Press.

    Lepecki, André. 2016. Singularities. Dance in the Age of Performance. London: Routledge. 

    Levine, Alexandra S. 2022. “How TikTok Live Became ‘A Strip Club Filled with 15-Year-Olds.” Forbes, April 27, 2022. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2022/04/27/how-tiktok-live-became-a-strip-club-filled-with-15-year-olds/.

    Lindsay, Kate. 2023. “Is it Time to Embrace “Opinion Fatigue”?” Bustle, August 8, 2023. https://www.bustle.com/entertainment/online-takes-twitter-debates-opinion-fatigue.

    MacKenzie, Adrian and Anna Munster. 2019. “Platform Seeing: Image Ensembles and Their Invisualities.” Theory, Culture & Society, 36(5), 3-22. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276419847508

    Mendez, Moises II. 2023. “What to Know About Corecore, the Latest Aesthetic Taking Over.” Time, January 20, 2023. https://time.com/6248637/corecore-tiktok-aesthetic/.

    Nayyar, Rhea. 2023. “What Does TikTok’s “Corecore” Have to Do with Dada?” Hyperallergic, January 26, 2023. https://hyperallergic.com/795957/what-does-tiktoks-corecore-have-to-do-with-dada/.

    Ngai, Sianne. 2015. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Nicotra, Jodie. 2016. “Disgust, Distributed: Virtual Public Shaming as Epideictic Assemblage.” Enculturation, July 6, 2016. https://enculturation.net/disgust-distributed.

    Nightingale, Andrea Wilson. 2001. “On Wandering and Wondering: ‘Theôria’ in Greek Philosophy and Culture.” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 9, no. 2: 23–58. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20163840.

    Oravec, Christine. 1976. “‘Observation’ in Aristotle’s Theory of Epideictic.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 9, no. 3: 162–74. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40236982.

    Ore, Ersula J. 2019. Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi.

    Pfister, Damien Smith and Misti Yang. 2018. “Five Theses on Technoliberalism and the Networked Public Sphere.” Communication and the Public3(3), 247-262. https://doi.org/10.1177/2057047318794963

    Press-Reynolds, Kieran. 2022. “This is Corecore (We’re not Kidding).” Nobells, November 29, 2022. https://nobells.blog/corecore/.

    Press-Reynolds, Kieran. 2023. “Is Corecore Radical Art or Gibberish Shitposts?” Nobells, January 20, 2023. https://nobells.blog/what-is-corecore/.

    Press-Reynolds, Kieran. 2023. “I Spent All Night on TikTok Live, and Discovered a Wasteland of Clickbait, Scams, and Other Oddities. It got Stranger and Darker by the Hour.” Business Insider, February 22, 2023. https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-live-all-night-clickbait-grifts-scams-sleep-streamers-twitch-2023-2.

    Richardson, Michael. 2024. Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology After the End of the World. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Robinson, Cedric J. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

    Russell, Legacy. 2024. Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us. Verso.

    Schneider, Nathan. 2024. Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Sheard, Cynthia Miecznikowski. 1996. “The Public Value of Epideictic Rhetoric.” College English 58, no. 7: 765–94. https://doi.org/10.2307/378414.

    Sullivan, Dale L. 1993. “The Ethos of Epideictic Encounter.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 26, no. 2: 113–33. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40237759.

    Townsend, Chase. 2024. “Explaining Corecore: How TikTok’s Newest Trend may be a Genuine Gen-Z Art Form.” Mashable, January 14, 2023. https://mashable.com/article/explaining-corecore-tiktok https://mashable.com/article/explaining-corecore-tiktok.

    Vallor, Shannon. 2024. The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Vallor, Shannon. 2024. “The Danger of Superhuman AI is not What You Think.” Noema, May 23, 2024. https://www.noemamag.com/the-danger-of-superhuman-ai-is-not-what-you-think/.

    Vivian, Bradford J. 2012. “Up from Memory: Epideictic Forgetting in Booker T. Washington’s Cotton States Exposition Address.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 45, no. 2: 189-212. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/475261.

    Walker, Jeffrey. 2000. Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Wark, McKenzie. 2020. Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century. Verso.

    Y7. 2023. “A Postmortem of #corecore.” Flash Art, Summer 2023. https://flash—art.com/article/corecore/.

    Zylinska, Joanna. 2023. The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future Between the Eye and AI. Boston: MIT Press.

    [1] Creators were making lip dub videos with the moment in the song when Burnham stages an increasingly frustrated dialogue with himself: 

    I put the packet on the glass (What glass?)
    The little glass dish in the microwave (Got it)
    I close the door (Which door?)
    The door to the microwave! What is wrong with you?!

    [2] “To me, Corecore’s “aesthetic” reads as an art school freshman’s first found-footage project in Adobe Premiere Pro (no, I’m not projecting) presented with the societal dread induced from doom-scrolling on one’s phone at 2am after one too many bong rips on a weeknight (again, not projecting …)” (Nayyar 2023).

    [3] For a smart analysis of hopelesscore, see Adam Aleksic’s 2025 substack essay, “How Hopelesscore Became even More Hopeless.” https://etymology.substack.com/p/how-hopelesscore-became-even-more.

    [4] Bradford Vivian confirms that witnessing as a mode of communication and rhetorical goal is “generally epideictic in nature” (2012, 191). And as Hawhee writes: “the documentary work endemic to the epideictic genre, in short, serves the rhetorical purpose of witnessing” (2023, 28).

    [5] Borrowing apt language here from Anthony Stagliano’s Disobedient Aesthetics: Surveillance, Bodies, Control (Alabama University Press, 2024).

    [6] The book’s main project “aims to move beyond the moralizing binary of attention/distraction, to dispense with attention’s economic framing to jettison plenitudinous modern attention as an impossible ideal, and to rethink contemporary spectatorship as neither good nor bad but perpetually hybrid and collective” (2024, 35).

    [7] To start, John Berger Ways of Seeing (1972).

    [8] As Cynthia Miecznikowski Sheard articulates, “By bringing together images of both the real—what is or at least appears to be—and the fictive or imaginary—what might be—epideictic discourse allows speaker and audience to envision possible, new, or at least different worlds” (1996, 770).

    [9] Quote is from the second notification that US TikTok users received on January 19.

    [10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5Cb6bznQYI&t=319s

    [11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5Cb6bznQYI&t=319s

    [12]https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/p95po4/cmv_tiktoks_live_feature_is_immoral_it_gets/

    [13] https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/p95po4/cmv_tiktoks_live_feature_is_immoral_it_gets/

    [14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5Cb6bznQYI&t=319s

    [15] https://x.com/tim_cook/status/1896951716517662999

    [16] https://corp.oup.com/news/brain-rot-named-oxford-word-of-the-year-2024/

    [17] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/ai-girl-maga-hurricane-helene-1235125285/

    [18] https://www.vice.com/en/article/social-media-threatens-global-democracy/ 

  • Bareesh Hasan Chowdhury, Shrobona Shafique Dipti and Naveeda Khan–How to Reclaim a University:  Further Lessons from Dhaka

    Bareesh Hasan Chowdhury, Shrobona Shafique Dipti and Naveeda Khan–How to Reclaim a University: Further Lessons from Dhaka

    Figure 1, © Reesham Shahab Tirtho, Calendric Rendition of the Events of July 2024

    This post is Part Four of “The Bangladesh Chapter” of the b2o review’s “The University in Turmoil: Global Perspectives” dossier.

    How to Reclaim a University: Further Lessons from Dhaka

    Bareesh Hasan Chowdhury, Shrobona Shafique Dipti and Naveeda Khan 

    Introduction 

    On 5 August 2024, the student-led Anti-Quota Movement that lasted the “36 days” of July culminated in a large gathering of people in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.[1] The Long March to Dhaka (as it was called) indicated the tremendous support that the students had from ordinary Bangladeshis. It effectively brought about the fall of the Awami League-led government that had ruled Bangladesh with an iron fist since 2009. Sheikh Hasina, the then Prime Minister, was compelled by the military to flee the country, fearing the force of popular anger against her. The July Uprising has since gone down in Bangladesh’s short history as one of the most important student-led movements. Whether it has changed or will change the course of the nation’s history is still being deliberated. 

    Several points are important to underline with respect to this movement. The movement took shape and built momentum within Dhaka University, the premier public university of Bangladesh, which (as we showed in our earlier installment) was thoroughly captured by the student wing of the ruling party, the Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL). The university-based origin of the movement might surprise us given the extent to which party hacks and thugs were entrenched within the university administration and the student body. However, it ought not to be surprising given the long history of general student dissatisfaction with the intrusion of national politics into the university. Furthermore, student commitment to collective action had been repeatedly demonstrated from the 1990s onwards. The real surprise, rather, lay in the movement’s successful toppling of a political regime, an outcome which went well beyond the movement’s seemingly modest intent of reforming the quota system for government jobs.[2]

    In this fourth installment of the “Bangladesh Chapter” of the b2o review’s “University in Turmoil” dossier, we provide a careful plotting of the events marking the month of July leading to the August 5 denouement to track how the movement built momentum, how it spread to other educational institutions, and how Dhaka University was ultimately reclaimed. As we will show, attention to the micropolitics of organizing, including the mobilization of symbols and symbolic behavior, can shed light on the success of this movement, while nevertheless retaining the perspective that the movement’s ultimate success was a surprise to all. We want to emphasize how different sections of the population came to exert ownership over the movement even if the issue which launched it was not theirs. After all, the issue of getting government jobs was surely of remote interest to the young secondary school children or working-class people who came to be involved in the protests. The enthusiastic participation of female university students in the Anti-Quota Movement was even more paradoxical, as they were effectively asking for the removal of gender-based quotas, a mode of affirmative action long vaunted for ensuring women’s participation in the workforce; their removal could only harm those women students. While we have written about these women’s understanding of their participation earlier and will dive deeper into it in a future installment, in this submission we focus on certain events and deaths during the movement that produced pathos and an inadvertent alignment of sympathies across different constituencies of Bangladeshi society, leading to broad based support for an initially more limited movement.

    Figure 2, Downloaded from Facebook “Medha Chottor,” Quota Movement 2013

    Figure 3, ©Rahat Chowdhury, Quota Movement 2018

    Figure 4, ©Palash Khan, Quota Movement 2024 

    Grounds of Protest

    The 2024 Anti-Quota Movement was the third of its kind. The first in 2013 was entirely scuttled by government forces. The second in 2018 also encountered state violence but eked out a concession from the government to scale back quotas from 56% to 35% and to scrap the quota for freedom fighters, a decision that was announced through a governmental circular. However, following the High Court of Bangladesh’s 2024 decision to “revert” the government circular and reinstate quotas on government jobs, including the controversial 30% quota for freedom fighters and their children and grandchildren, the students again took to the streets.  

    An entrenched quota system deprived youth in the general population of access to desired governmental jobs. A quarter of Bangladesh’s population of 171.5 million people are youth, that is, 45.9 million people are between the ages of 15 and 29. The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics’ 2023 Labor Force Survey estimates that there were almost 2 million unemployed youth in the country. As not all youth sought employment in the formal sector, with many in agriculture and the informal economy, this number of unemployed youths was considered very high. Of this number, 31.5% had completed higher education beyond the secondary level. The percentage of those with higher education indexed aspiration to employment either in government or the private sector, with a preference for governmental jobs, as these have typically provided job security and benefits.[3] 

    Governmental jobs were also desirable for being endowed with a high status that derived from the Bangladesh Civil Service (BCS) originating in the Imperial Civil Service in colonial India. The British put into effect an elaborate structure by which to bring Indians into government, investing the bureaucracy and its competitive entrance exam with considerable exclusivity and entitlement. It effectively produced a new class of Muslims within Indian society deemed the salariat, a class whose aura surrounds government employees even today. Consequently, the exam for entry into BCS exerted tremendous attraction and pressure on the youth population as a means of upward mobility, with many taking years out of their lives to prepare for the test, taking the exam repeatedly, if necessary, in order to keep alive the opportunity of entering government service.[4] 

    To compound youth unemployment rates at this moment, there were several worrying trends that undermined the ruling party’s long-standing narrative of development, growth and prosperity, suggesting, indeed, that the Awami League’s much vaunted economic development was illusory. Until this point, the AL government had extolled 6% annual growth, positioning itself as the party of development, with its development agenda heavy in infrastructural works, specifically bridges and tunnels, to improve the interconnectivity of the country. However, inequality had risen over the past few decades, followed by a cost-of-living crisis since 2022, itself intensified by rising food and energy prices, all of which the government had failed to so much as acknowledge. And Bangladesh was not immune from the global economic slowdown in the aftermath of the Covid 19 pandemic. Those in the middle class who had experienced prosperity and higher standards of living suddenly felt themselves banging against a hard ceiling. Those who had come out of poverty fell back into it. Beggars whose presence on the streets of Dhaka had waned once again grew in numbers. It appeared that the AL’s economic miracle was on shaky ground.

    In the University and Outwards: The Events of 2024

    The students who led the 2024 Anti-Quota Movement began as a group calling themselves the Students Against Discrimination (SAD). While the leadership of the prior 2018 Anti-Quota movement had moved on to national politics, the young who had participated in that earlier movement now provided the leadership of SAD. SAD came to be reinforced by more youth who had been exposed to other social movements throughout their young lives, often against the inadequacies and injustices of the authoritarian state. Notable among these was the Road Safety Movement of 2018. SAD operated with a new understanding of organization, that there would be no centralized structure or leadership hierarchy within the movement. These reforms came out of the movement prior experience of state violence. As we have explored in an earlier installment, this decentralization may have been the key to sustaining the movement in the face of heavy repression. In the rest of this section, we explore, by recounting the events of the summer of 2024, the other elements that also came into play when scaling up the movement into a mass protest.[5]  

    Figure 5, ©Debashish Chakrabarty, Poster used by Protestors, “Who am I Who are you Razakar, Razakar Who Said This? Who Said This? The Dictator, The Dictator”

    Figure 6, ©Debashish Chakrabarty, Poster used by Protestors, “Upon Asking [You] for Rights, You Say, Razakar”

    Figure 7, ©Debashish Chakrabarty, Poster used by Protestors, “Accused by Command” 

    Following the High Court’s decision in early June, university students across the country took part in peaceful protests, with Dhaka University serving as the center of dissent. Female students at Dhaka University took the lead here. The protests gradually escalated over the course of the month until in early July, SAD called for the “Bangla Blockade,” the name given to the street sit-ins that blocked roads. Among other sites, this blockage took place on the Shahbagh intersection adjacent to the university campus. On 14 July, at a press conference held to mark her return from a state visit to China, which had ended none too well, with the prime minister returning early on the pretext that her adult daughter was sick at home, Sheikh Hasina was asked her opinion about the student unrest, specifically about the fact that the students were seeking to scrap the quota for freedom fighters. Hasina exasperatedly said “Why do they have so much resentment towards freedom fighters? If the grandchildren of the freedom fighters don’t get quota benefits, should the grandchildren of Razakars get the benefit?” In Bangladesh, the term “razakar” (literally collaborator) is used as a pejorative term to mean “traitor” in order to refer to those who collaborated with the Pakistan Army during the 1971 War of Liberation. Hasina’s trivializing of the protests enraged the students, and in a remarkable reversal of the usual repulsion felt towards the category of the “razakar,” they decided to embrace it. They demonstrated with the slogan “Tumi ke, Ami ke, Rajakar, Rajakar,” (Who are you, Who am I, Razakar, Razakar), followed by the slogan “Key Bolechey, Key Bolechey, Shoyirachar, Shoyirachar” (Who said this, Who said this, The Dictator, the Dictator). In taking on the label of razakar, in defiance of its bad associations, they marked Sheikh Hasina as a capricious authoritarian figure who delegitimized her opponents and dissidents by calling them razakars. Their words also questioned the right of the Awami League to serve as the custodian of the Liberation War if it was going to instrumentalize the liberation struggle to stifle criticism. Hasina’s thoughtless comments recruited a new round of protestors, and soon the above slogan unfurled everywhere.  

    In a clear indication that the standing government conflated the party’s muscle with the nation’s police forces, the General Secretary of Awami League (Obaidul Quader) and the President of BCL (Saddam Hossain) called on Dhaka University BCL students to control the student protestors. BCL members openly declared their intent to teach a lesson to the student protestors for what they claimed was their disrespect towards Sheikh Hasina, freedom fighters and “the spirit” of the war of independence.  

    On 15 July, quota reform protesters gathered and set off from the Raju Memorial Sculpture near the Teachers Students Center (TSC) on campus.  This memorial was erected in 1997 in memory of the 1992 student protests against the political capture of their campus. Consequently, the gathering around it at this moment was seen to reanimate the call for an education without political interference. The location and organization of the protest were redolent with choreographed symbolism.

    Figure 8, Downloaded from Jamhoor, Image of BCL Violence on Women that Went Viral

    The student protestors were ambushed by BCL members who carried sticks, hockey sticks, rods, GI pipes, and other weapons. At least five individuals were observed firing pistols on campus. Student protestors received beatings at various locations of the university. In flagrant disregard for university governance, beatings occurred in full view of the Vice Chancellor’s residence. BCL members even stood outside of nearby hospitals, such as the Dhaka Medical College, attacking wounded demonstrators as they were taken there for treatment, at one point even entering the emergency department to attack protesters and eject them from the premises. Although both men and women protestors were hurt, the images of women being attacked were most shocking for onlookers. An image went viral showing a young woman wincing, her face covered in blood, while a BCL member raised a stick to beat her. This incident, along with others at which mostly women were beaten by the BCL, sparked public outrage and incited strong sentiment against the group.

    On 16 July, the protesters came prepared to fight back, gathering at the Shahid Minar, the memorial to the martyred student activists of the 1952 language movement, also on the Dhaka University campus. This choice of memorial may be seen as communicating a symbolism different from the Raju Memorial’s, as it expressed resistance to foreign occupation, indicating a growing sense of the Awami League government as an occupying force. The police, who had finally joined the fray, stood between the students gathered at the Shahid Minar and the BCL members who held the area around the Raju Memorial, having seized it from the student protestors the day before. They were gathered to stop the students from marching on the Raju Memorial and to prevent further bloodshed, since the protesting students were by now resolved to return the beating that they had been getting. However, the police were soon causing the very bloodshed they had been deployed to prevent.

    Figure 9, ©Zabed Hasnain Chowdhury, Women of Ruqayyah Hall, Dhaka University                                                                   

    Figure 10, ©Zabed Hasnain Chowdhury, Women of Ruqayyah Hall, Dhaka University

    On the night of 16 July, the women students took the lead in the pushback against BCL. In one instance, the women residents of Dhaka University’s Ruqayyah Hall chased BCL leaders out of their “halls,” as their dormitories on campus were called. Once vacated, the rooms occupied by BCL student leaders showed the luxury in which they had been living while subjecting their fellow students to deprivation and intimidation. Students enraged by this sight destroyed the rooms. Whereas they had up until this point engaged historic sites and symbols (razakar, Raju Memorial, Shahid Minar) to place their movement on a continuum with known history, their mode of protest now shifted into an iconoclastic mode—instead of mobilizing symbols and images, the protestors began destroying symbols of power and desecrating images.

    Typically, such women’s halls maintained strict curfews, with the gates to their halls locked by a certain time at night. On that night, the residents of Ruqayyah Hall also broke the locks to pour out into the streets to protest. Other halls soon followed in chasing out BCL leaders and taking their protests to the streets, joined by their male counterparts. 

    Student protests spread and intensified across the country. Jahangirnagar University, the University of Rajshahi, Begum Rokeya University in Rangpur, and many other universities joined. And reports of fatalities began to surface of students either killed at the hands of the BCL or the police.[6] In the city of Rangpur, Abu Sayeed, a student of English at Begum Rokeya University, was shot dead while he stood with his arms spread, clearly unarmed, as if daring the police to shoot. He was killed by rubber bullets shot at close range. He was the first to be martyred in the Anti-Quota Movement, which was quickly earning the moniker of the July Uprising or Bloody July. A total of six people across the country were killed that day.

    Figure 11, ©Faysal Zaman, Gayebana Janaza

    On 17 July, in keeping with the use of symbolism to affect a politics of protest, the Anti-Quota Movement organized a gayebi janaza, an absentee funeral for those who had disappeared or were killed to draw attention to the deaths of protestors. In Dhaka University, it was performed in front of the Vice Chancellor’s residence to shame the university administration for its failure to protect its wards. In many places the police prevented this service from being performed, which was taken to be a stark act of erasure. And in a show of yet more shameful dereliction of its duties towards its students, the university administration announced the shutdown of Dhaka University, ordering students to vacate their residential halls. The students tried to resist by barricading the gates to the dormitories. In a now familiar modality of mocking through mimicking, they sent a counter-notice to all university administrators requesting them to vacate their official housing on the grounds of failing to uphold their duty as guardian. Ultimately, sound grenades and tear gas were mobilized to force students to vacate, with many seen leaving in a hurry with their bags and baggage. If previously the government had merely attempted to swat away the movement using their student forces, now their efforts to dismantle the Anti-Quota Movement were in full swing, with the police, the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB, an elite paramilitary force), and the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) stationed in major cities around the country. The army was not brought in until later.  

    From 18 July onwards, the scene of action shifted from Dhaka University, vacated of students, to other sites of confrontation. For instance, we have already seen how students in major cities such as Chittagong and Rajshahi were involved. They were now joined by students in tertiary cities such as Rangpur, Khulna, Comilla, and Sylhet. It is notable that the universities initially central to the movement in Dhaka, Chittagong and Rajshahi were public institutions. But now students from smaller, private universities joined the protest wave.  

    On 18 July, the big private universities in the Rampura-Badda area of Dhaka brought out large solidarity protests, congregating in front of BRAC University.  Universities serving the children of the country’s elite came out in solidarity with public university students.  The private universities, having outlawed political parties from their premises, were historically known for their apolitical nature. And the students themselves were seen as largely apolitical, more oriented towards starting international careers than the less privileged students, who were both more committed and more entrenched within the Bangladeshi context. This congregation of private university students was met with police violence and threats of open fire – an unprecedented attack on the children of wealth, who had previously been exempt from this type of state brutality. While other private schools in the area kept their gates closed to student protestors, BRAC University opened its gates to them and converted their space into a makeshift medical bay. One protester from the nearby Imperial College died on the BRAC University campus, one of at least 30 who were reported dead on that day from across the country.

    How do we understand the spread of the movement from DU to other institutions and across the country? As we have pointed out earlier, one reason the was able to fan out when faced with blockages from the state was its decentralized organization, with multiple coordinators stationed autonomously across the country. However, this cannot be the full story. For how are we to understand the coming on board of the students of private, elite institutions, who were not part of the initial planning of the movement? How, too, can we explain the participation of children from secondary schools?  It was in all likelihood the graphic death and martyrdom of Abu Sayeed and the others who soon followed him that fueled the expansion of the movement to include many more students and ultimately ordinary working people. 

    Figure 12, Downloaded from Wikipedia “Abu Sayeed”, Artistic Rendition of Abu Sayeed, one of 100s                    

    Figure 13, Downloaded from Mahadi Mishu Instagram, Artistic Rendition of Mir Mughdo, one of scores

    Figure 14, Downloaded from Reform Bangla, Artistic Rendition of Shaykh Ashabul Yamin

    Figure 15, ©Hrifat Mollik, Artistic Rendition of a Member of the Security Force, Whose Green Blood Shows Him to be an Alien

    Abu Sayeed was killed in Rangpur on 16 July. The video of his murder went viral in no time: it showed him being shot repeatedly by police in riot gear, with him flinching, yet stretching out his arms several times, falling into a crouch on the ground, and finally having his prone, presumably dead body hauled off by a group of young men. This video had a profound impact on the minds of people, including the young. Almost immediately the students at secondary schools, such as the Residential Model College in Mohammadpur in Dhaka, came out in protest. And the shock and pathos of Abu Sayeed’s unprovoked death was amplified by the death of one of these young students, Farhan Faiyaz, on 18 July. Farhan Faiyaz’s death was followed by the death of a university student activist Mir Mugdho, a student at the Bangladesh University of Professionals (BUP), who was killed in the act of handing out water to protestors in Dhaka. Dhaka’s Military Institute of Science and Technology student, Shaykh Ashabul Yamin’s death in several parts is probably seared in people’s minds as the most terrifying display of state violence in recent memory. In videos and photographs we see how he was thrown from the top of an armored personnel carrier. He fell on the road with his arms outstretched, and his legs folded behind him, still visibly alive. The police then dragged him across the road and hurled him across the divider onto the service lane at which point he likely died. As mentioned above, this was the most brutal day of the movement thus far, with thirty dead the country over.

    Figure 16, ©Doha Chowdhury, The Daily Star.  Students Renaming the Gate Rudro Arcade

    These deaths galvanized the country into reacting with tremendous grief and anger openly voiced. Of course, Bangladeshi society was no stranger to the deaths of its citizens in the hands of state forces. To understand why these deaths would produce such outpourings it may be necessary to investigate the antipathy that had built against Sheikh Hasina’s repressive and violent regime but most immediately it would appear to be the senselessness of the deaths. Student protesters immediately started to give gates and streets the names of those killed, as if to restore meaning to these deaths. On 17 July, right after Abu Sayeed’s death, students demanded that Rangpur Park be renamed Abu Sayeed Chottor (Square). At Shahjalal University of Science and Technology (SUST), a gate was renamed Rudro Toron (Arcade) for Rudra Sen, killed on 18 July, while Bangladesh University of Professionals (BUP) renamed a floating bridge Shaheed (Martyr) Mir Mughdo Bridge. These were not just tributes. They were refusals to let the state dictate who was to be mourned and how. On 30 July, when Sheikh Hasina attempted to grasp the reigns of memorialization by declaring it the day of mourning or “Jatiya Shokh,” students rejected her bit outright, saying “Rokter daag ekhono shukay ni,” (the stains of blood have not yet dried) and turning all their profile pictures on various social media platforms red in protest.

    By this time, it was clear that social media was by far the most important media element within the movement, getting images, videos and commentary out before news media were even alerted. On the evening of 18 July, the government imposed a shutdown on social media and internet access, which extended to mobile and broadband internet, and platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and WhatsApp. However, through various technical workarounds and diasporic connections, videos of protests and state violence continued to be distributed abroad, although inaccessible to those within the country. At home, all one could do was watch TV and read the dailies, which reported assiduously, though given the extent of censorship in the country, official coverage was treated skeptically. Many reported feeling that the established media made them doubt the veracity of what they were themselves seeing and experiencing at the time.  

    The international media gave the events some sputtering attention, being more captivated by the transfer of candidacy from Biden to Harris in the United States. However, a few reporters of Bangladesh origin such as Tanvir Chowdury of Al Jazeera and Shafiqul Alam of Agence France Press (AFP) Press kept their focus on the country.  Al Jazeera covered Yamin’s brutal death, for one thing. Offshore news outlets, such as Netra News, and overseas bloggers, such as David Bergman, Zulkarnaen Saer and Tasneem Khalil, kept snippets of news flowing.  

    Diaspora Bangladeshis, including students, came out in the hundreds to draw attention to the death-dealing activities of the AL government. There were massive protests in front of the Bangladesh consulates in New York City, London and Berlin. Some risked punishment to protest, such as a group of migrant workers in the UAE who were promptly put to jail (they were later released upon the intervention of Muhammad Yunus, the head of the interim government that came to replace the AL-led government). Migrant workers stopped sending remittances through official channels to express their anger against the government, effectively compounding the pressure on the government, making its survival even less likely. 

    Figure 17, ©Mehedi Haque

    In Bangladesh, opposition political parties, such as BNP and Jamaat-i Islami called for general protests. Civil war raged in the cities, with the burning of several official establishments. Newspapers reported Sheikh Hasina’s eyes tearing up seeing the damage done to a Dhaka Metro Station newly inaugurated by her regime. These tears prompted many rebukes and jokes about her love for property over people. The police effort to dismantle the movement now took the shape of intimidating student leaders. Nahid Islam, a student coordinator who had been particularly visible in the press, was picked up on 19 July and found unconscious with clear marks of abuse on his body on 25 July. He was again detained and kept in police custody with five others between 26 July and 2 August. The army was deployed on 19 July, but it was reported that the army would not shoot; instead, it would provide protection to the police and RAB. This effectively allowed the security forces to use lethal force without fear of being overwhelmed by the increasingly angry masses as the army stood guard over them. The police took to the skies in helicopters and snipers to the tops of skyscrapers to shoot indiscriminately upon gathered protestors, even hitting those sheltering in their homes, including young children.[7]

    On 21 July, a rattled Awami League government began to seek compromise, saying that they would abide by whatever the Supreme Court decided regarding quota reforms. On 22 July, the appellate division of the Supreme Court reduced quotas from a total of 56% to 7%, with 5% reserved for freedom fighters and 2% for ethnic minorities, transgender people and those with disabilities. But by this time many more people had died.[8]   

    The sense of the moment was that quota reform could no longer be an adequate appeasement for the sheer numbers who had given their lives in protest. The nine-point demands that were articulated at this moment were: PM taking blame and formally apologizing for the mass killings, the resignation of various ministers who were also in the AL leadership, the firing of police officers present at the areas where students were killed, the resignation of the Vice Chancellors of Dhaka University, Jahangiranagar University and Rajshahi University, the arrest of those police and individuals who attacked or instigated attacks on students, compensation for families of those who were killed or injured, the banning of BCL, the opening of university halls, and an end to the harassment of protestors.

    At the same time, SAD announced a suspension of the movement after the appellate decision on 22 July, while demanding the lifting of the ban on the internet. Between 22 and 28 July, there were no student protests. Instead, there was an efflorescence of many small protests by teachers, lawyers, artists, and other members of civil society, including actors and celebrities. Various figures called press conferences asking for student leaders to be released and student demands to be heard and constructively engaged. Between 22 and 26 July, the government declared that the student movement had been infiltrated by external forces, hinting that the USA was inciting the protests. It turned its focus on opposition parties, such as BNP, Jatiyo Party, even the small parties, such as Gono Odhikar, that had emerged from the 2018 Anti-Quota Movement. It declared a ban on the religious party Jamaat-i Islami. Everyone in the leadership of these parties was picked up and jailed through dramatic and terrifying block raids at their places of residence and neighborhoods. The government imposed a curfew from 26 July onwards, with street traffic allowed for just a few hours each day to allow people to get necessities.

    From 29 July onwards the momentum of the movement, which had left Dhaka University to enter the streets, returned to the university, this time through the agency of teachers.  On 29 July, teachers across campuses and political divides organized as the Teachers Platform Against Oppression to hold a rally at the foot of the Aparajeyo Bangla monument on the campus of Dhaka University. The choice of this monument commemorating the 1971 Liberation War struggle as the place of gathering and criticism of the government suggested that no one, much less the Awami League, could claim a monopoly over the Liberation War. One teacher even gave the example of a teacher, Professor Shamsuzzoha, who had died protecting his students in 1969, claiming him as their inspiration, thus putting this rally in a direct line of continuity with the struggle against Pakistan. Teacher after teacher gave moving speeches on the right of students to protest, excoriated the inordinate violence against them, and demanded the release of those detained. And, most significantly, they called on ordinary people to fight their fear and come onto the streets.  

    On 2 August, thousands convened in front of the National Press Club close to the university before slowly marching to the Shahid Minar as part of the Droho Jatra (literally, Rebellion/Revolt Journey). Here the variously changing demands coalesced into one calling for Sheikh Hasina’s resignation. On 3 August, the gathering at the Shahid Minar was even bigger. The student anti-quota movement originating in Dhaka University had met with state violence, been forcefully evicted from the campus, and now returned to the premises with tens of thousands from all sections of society behind the students. 

    Figure 18, ©Abdul Karim Khan, Gathering for the Long March

    On 4 August, there was a nationwide call for a Long March to Dhaka for 6 August, later brought forward to 5 August. The Awami League government continued its violence against protestors, which now included more ordinary people than students. The BCL famously took to social media to declare it would take “7 minutes” to clear the protesters in a defiant last stand. The battle raged on the streets across Dhaka and the country. A 100 people lost their lives on 4 August, more than half of whom were BCL and AL activists and the police.  

    Ultimately the public turned to burning police stations to express their anger at the indiscriminate use of lethal force against those unarmed and the cruel disposal of the dead and in some cases yet living bodies. On 5 August, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the city of Dhaka despite attempts to prevent entry, an imposition of curfew and a short internet blackout in the morning. The army refrained from shooting, despite Sheikh Hasina’s pleading for it to do so. Instead, the Head of Army Staff and Hasina’s family persuaded her to get into a helicopter that flew her and her sister to India, her departure leading to the fall of the AL government. 

    Conclusion

    Through plotting the events of July 2024, we hope to have shown how a student led movement, which started within a university thoroughly captured by the state, and with only a limited goal of winning a few compromises from the state, ended up overturning the state. At each point as the students encountered state violence where they expected state engagement, their demands ratcheted up to keep faith with those amongst them who died simply trying to get the state’s attention. The strategic arrangement of student leaders across the country ensured that the movement continued even as the most visible figures within it were taken into “safe custody” by the security forces. The pathos surrounding those killed unprovoked and senselessly brought more and more students and ultimately the general populace into the protests. And, at one point, the sacrifice in human lives became so steep as to make nonsense of the initial demand for quota reform, bringing on the demand for Sheikh Hasina’s resignation. 

    A further set of perspectives on the nature of Sheikh Hasina’s regime may be culled from our focus on Dhaka University as the site of capture by the ruling party’s student wing, the BCL, and the subsequent efforts to reclaim it. In some respects, by trying to establish their authority within the university and take control over its resources, the BCL was only doing what student groups associated with national level political parties had always done. Afterall, it was assumed that the ruling party, any ruling party, and their affiliates would engage in extortion as a benefit of being in power.[9] But what was different in this instance of Sheikh Hasina’s rule was her determination that AL would rule in perpetuity and that its control over all resources and opportunities would be absolute. And the BCL in Dhaka University projected this sense of permanence in its thoroughness of extortion, providing an important vantage on the thinking and workings of the government. It also made the BCL not only the object of fear and loathing but a proxy for the government. Thus, attacking the BCL was felt to be tantamount to launching an attack at the state, with the defeat of the BCL making the downfall of the state a real possibility. 

    The student-BCL inter-dynamics and conflicts within the university played out in miniature relations between civil society and state, going so far as to provide a template for how civil society may resist an oppressive state. As the capture of the university had taken place one site after another, one cherished student tradition after another, so was its reclamation site by site, starting with the female students throwing the BCL out of residence halls to be followed by others. Some within the BCL even flipped sides, while others who stayed loyal targeted for reprisals after 5 August. After the fall of the government, it was disclosed that several members of BCL’s leadership were students of other political groups who had infiltrated the group to undermine it from within, but that is a story for another time.

    The students, first seeking to advocate for administrative reform and later to withstand the force of the state embodied by the BCL and then the police and RAB, deployed a range of well-known techniques within the activist’s toolkit. For instance, they undertook peaceful demonstrations and marches. They took advantage of the symbolic importance of monuments and other historic sites within their campus at which to express themselves, associating their struggles with prior moments and struggles. They maintained a unified voice albeit refracted through many different leaders and coordinators. And in a venerable tactic, not only did they resort to violence to defend themselves, they, along with the general populace instigated destruction, including the burning of police stations and the killing of the police, to express their anger at the violence directed at them.   

    They also introduced new elements into the revolutionary’s toolkit by ventriloquizing those who sought to discredit them, a risky discursive strategy in the best of times, such as when they took on the slur of razakar. They performed funeral services for those who had been disappeared, giving their movement not just the ebullience of resistance but also a funereal affect. They widely used social media not just for the purposes of reportage but for bearing witness and bringing onlookers into the tragedy of death and the proliferation of martyrs, which had the effect of drawing sympathizers into the protests.  

    Since 5 August 2024, Dhaka University has once again become the political center of the city. Shortly after the fall of the government, there have been many Bijoy Michil or victory marches in Shahbag. Chobir Hat, a place of gathering of progressive students, reopened after being shut for over a decade with a concert honoring those who had died. There have been enumerable academic and journalistic events hosted on campus inquiring into different dimensions of the uprising, such as enforced disappearances or the art of the uprising. There has even been a concert by the rap artist who had been persecuted by the regime because he was an early and vocal supporter of the Anti-Quota Movement. Most importantly, it has become a place where everyone returns to stage their protests directed at the current interim government. The protests are to be found at the base of the Raju Memorial. 

    Bareesh Hasan Chowdhury is a campaigner working for the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association on climate, policy, renewable energy and human rights. 

    Shrobona Shafique Dipti, a graduate of the University of Dhaka, is an urban anthropologist and lecturer at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh with an interest in environmental humanities and multi-species entanglements. 

    Naveeda Khan is professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She has worked on religious violence and everyday life in urban Pakistan. Her more recent work is on riverine lives in Bangladesh and UN-led global climate negotiations. Her field dispatches from Dhaka in the middle of the July Uprising may be found here.

    [1] It was colloquially said that July did not end until the movement ended and, as such, 5 August has come to be referred to as 36 July.

    [2] To remind the reader, this demand was brought on by the criticism of the large quota for the freedom fighters associated with the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh and their family members, one considered to be widely abused to favor Sheikh Hasina’s party members. Despite the increasing authoritarianism of the AL government, previous student movements had been able to eke out limited compromises from the government, which spurred the 2024 Anti-Quota Movement.

    [3]  It is noteworthy that there had been a meteoric rise of private educational institutions across the country to manage the rising numbers of people desirous of social mobility through education and employment, particularly as public education systems had either started failing due to governmental disinvestment or being structurally unable to absorb the growing numbers.

    [4] Among the reforms the interim government, in place after the fall of Hasina’s government, has undertaken to the BCS exam is to raise the age cap to 32 from 30 but to restrict the number of times a candidate may take the exam to three. See: https://www.thedailystar.net/news/bangladesh/news/exams-public-jobs-govt-raise-age-limit-32-years-3735386?fbclid=IwY2xjawGG8P9leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHe2vaTdmMKINRzH8CFYZYD5EbAMmfx6UbgzFoUMLux5sqr12-VZT_Y3zRg_aem_dl61jR5NJn2sdGRHtAn7lg

    [5] There are by now several important accounts with timelines of the July Uprising. Our intention in providing yet another one is to more self-consciously center the Dhaka University in these accounts and timelines in order to ultimately show how the university was reclaimed. 

    [6] It is notable that several BCL activists were also killed in retaliation, which led them to be outraged at the leaders of Awami League who they felt had effectively set them up.

    [7] The deaths in the July Uprising included a disproportionate number of young people, including very young children. 

    [8] Later speculation about the numbers killed over the course of long July would bring the number to 1000, later marked up to 1400+ by the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner and 1500+ by the Students Against Discrimination.

    [9] And in keeping with that practice, no sooner did the AL led government collapse, than BNP members stepped into the extortion rackets abandoned by fleeing AL party members.

  • (Rhy)pistemologies–A b2o Special Issue

    (Rhy)pistemologies–A b2o Special Issue

    b2o is pleased to announce the publication of a special issue titled “(Rhy)pistemologies–Thinking Through Rhythm”, which is inspired by multidisciplinary tap dance artist and scholar Michael J. Love’s concept of “(rhy)pistemology”. The special issue, for which Love provides the lead essay, is edited by b2o and b2 friend Erin Graff Zivin, and developed out of a two-day event at Art Share L.A. in May 2024; an earlier conversation about similar topics at the American Comparative Literature Association meeting in Montreal in March 2024; and the monthly meetings of the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab “Thinking Through Rhythm” study group. Contributors include: Erin Graff Zivin and Jonathan Leal, Maya Kronfeld, Michael E. Sawyer, Jamal Batts, Seth Brodsky, Eyal Peretz, Naomi Waltham-Smith, Alex E. Chávez, and Michael Gallope and Edwin C. Hill. Erin has recently collaborated with Arne De Boever, Kara Keeling, and Michael Pisaro-Liu on b2‘s “Experiments in Listening” conference (January 2025), and a special issue related to that event is in the works. 

    Additional video from the Art Share L.A. event in May 2024 has been posted on our sounds page.

     

  • Erin Graff Zivin and Jonathan Leal–Introduction: (Rhy)pistemologies–Thinking Through Rhythm

    Erin Graff Zivin and Jonathan Leal–Introduction: (Rhy)pistemologies–Thinking Through Rhythm

    Revuelta. Photo credit Inger Flem Soto. 

    This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin.

    Introduction: (Rhy)pistemologies–Thinking Through Rhythm

    Erin Graff Zivin and Jonathan Leal

    “It is the philosophy of [Black] music that is most important.”

    Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Black Music

    “You listen to it, the concept might break you.”

                                                                Eric B. and Rakim, “I Know You Got Soul”

    An experiment: what would happen if a group of academics from fields as varied as, say, philosophy, anthropology, comparative literature, musicology, and dance–many of whom are professional or amateur practitioners of rhythmic artistic forms themselves–thought collectively about the problem of conceptual and theoretical work and its relation to rhythm? How does rhythm—and its attendant art forms—allow us to produce philosophical or conceptual thought? What concepts (ethical, political, aesthetic, or otherwise) emerge from music, dance, sound, motion, and vibration? What began as a series of questions, a collective conceptual and methodological risk, yielded results that could not have been anticipated: an ensemble of theories and insights, in and out of sync, harmonious and discordant.

    As a category, rhythm names a sensory interface with the world, an entry point into temporal unfolding across scales: the rapid revolutions of electrons around nuclei, the immeasurably slow deaths of distant galaxies, the ebb and flow of human breathing, the seasonal migrations of birds, the steady build of a tropical storm. Rhythm implies cyclicalities, departures and returns, dramatic interconnections of bodies and systems. Artists who focus attention on rhythm—musicians, dancers, poets, filmmakers—do so in ways that can draw receivers’ attention back to their own bodies, their own senses, their own perceptions of movements, changes, event boundaries.

    To think and make through rhythm is to unsettle many of the philosophical inheritances of the imperial West—the atomized, liberal thinking subject divorced from dependency or human relation; the epistemology of the zero point, a thinking that emerges miraculously, without geographic or embodied context; even, and especially, conceptions of “the human” that presume a universal subject devoid of locational or experiential specificity; or, more accurately, implicitly demand accordance to a colonialist hierarchy that measures humanness by way of proximity to an imposed ideal.[1] With that in mind, the concepts that can emerge from a focus on rhythm promise engagements with people, environments, and their attendant histories, promise concepts that can defamiliarize and unsettle knowledge presupposing of a totalizing universal subject, if for no other reason than that they openly emerge from sensory experience, from bodies in and of motion. Rooted in and expressive of the particular—sensoria, situation, movement—such concepts reach for the kinds of integrative and provisional knowledge perhaps only available through relation: what Glissant once called an “open totality.”[2]

    Inspired by multidisciplinary tap dance artist and scholar Michael J. Love’s concept of “(rhy)pistemology,” which he understands as “the wealth of cultural knowledge stored in Black American forms of movement and music,” this special issue aims to expand the labor of critical theory and philosophical thought to include embodied forms of knowledge across intellectual, artistic, and cultural traditions. Rather than taking rhythm, music, or dance as an object of theory or thought, we emphasize theory and thought that emerges from or through rhythm. Fumi Okiji’s work on “jazz as critique,” Alexander Weheliye’s commitment to “thinking sound,” Jonathan Leal’s “thought-forms,” and Maya Kronfeld’s notion of spontaneity as political concept are only a few examples of the transdisciplinary and trans-sensory lines of inquiry that inspired this collective conversation.[3]

    Drawing together artist practitioners and theorists from a range of disciplinary positions and critical traditions—comparative literature and media, critical theory, philosophy, global Black thought, anthropology, Latinx and Latin American studies, dance, music and sound studies—this special issue pursues the promise of (rhy)pistemological inquiry. Whether through the temporal elasticities of beat tapes, or in-the-moment creative improvisations, or the slow arcs of dancing bodies in midair, or the linearities exploded by language artists, or the interplay of narrative storytelling and shot intercutting in film, and much more, we asked these scholars to consider what happens to extant concepts when stress tested against rhythms across scales, as well as in what concepts can emerge when we attune ourselves more fully to our contexts and, fundamentally, foreground that we always think from our bodies, one breath at a time.

    The present collection of work is one result of a series of collaborations and conversations in which a broad, porous community of thinkers and artists have participated. Since 2023, the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab “Thinking Through Rhythm” study group–which includes graduate students and faculty from Comparative Literature, Latin American and Iberian Cultures, French and Italian, English, American Studies and Ethnicity, Roski School of Art and Design, Kaufman School of Dance, Thornton School of Music, School of Cinematic Arts, and Annenberg School of Communication–has met monthly to read and discuss scholarship on music and rhythm, eat and drink, and to listen to music together. We then convened a seminar at the March 2024 American Comparative Literature Association meeting in Montreal with colleagues from across the country. Yet another variation of the group met at Art Share L.A. in May 2024, where rhythmic performances met academic presentations. Each of these experimental encounters felt both subversive and joyful: presenters and members of the public remarked on the liberating experience of thinking with one’s senses, pushing back against the compartmentalization we often impose on our “professional” selves.

    Indeed, each of the participants in this ensemble of thinkers has a unique, eccentric relationship with the conceptual work that often goes by the name “philosophy” or “critical theory” as well as dance, music, and experimental sound. Theorists and practitioners, writers, dancers, music-makers, and listeners, we share a frustration with the way that rhythmic art forms remain objects of study rather than being considered sources of knowledge or sites of conceptual work in themselves. In addition to those whose writing is included here, Natalie Belisle, Gabrielle Civil, Arne De Boever, Jonathan Gómez, d. sabela grimes, Stathis Gourgouris, Edwin Hill, Jane Kassavin, Kara Keeling, Leah King, Josh Kun, Fumi Okiji, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Mlondi Zondi and others have participated in prior and subsequent conversations and gatherings. At the Art Share L.A. event, we were fortunate to count on the participation of artivista Quetzal Flores and composer/pianist Paris Nicole Strother, who accompanied Alex Chávez, Maya Kronfeld, and Michael J. Love in their music-making. The interventions are both conceptual and methodological; indeed, the conceptual underpinnings of artistic practice and expression are laid bare through the troubling of the boundary between what is often categorized as “theory” and “practice.” Thinking through rhythm is necessarily performative, embodied, and transmedial, sonic, visual, and verbal, some of which will be captured through images and links to sound and video in what follows.

    The first trio of interventions detail concepts mined from Black American improvisational and rhythmic music and dance: (rhy)pistemologies. In the lead essay, Michael J. Love introduces us to the term he coined to evoke and name the knowledge conveyed through material practices in the Black American vernacular tradition: call and response, active listening, and producing rhythms in real time (what often goes by the name “improvisation”). For Love, (rhy)pistemology—knowing through the rhythm—is inseparable from these traditions. It is also a practice of liberation: similar to Nina Simone’s recollection of brief instances of freedom while making music, Love theorizes the rhythmic, percussive-corporeal practice of tap as a mode of “getting caught up,” accessing a Black queer “elsewhere” (Nadia Ellis)—a utopian future that (as Kara Keeling reminded us in Los Angeles, citing the late José Esteban Muñoz) just might always already exist. Love’s duet with Maya Kronfeld—which they created for the May 2024 meeting—incorporates sampling and looping, improvisational rhythms and theoretical arguments.

    Kronfeld’s “Rhythmic Concepts and New Knowledge” argues that rhythmic form produces concepts that are “inchoative knowledge,” drawing upon the work of Immanuel Kant, James Baldwin, and Angela Davis. This not-yet-knowledge does not drive rhythmic practices, but rather emerges from forms-in-motion. She takes Thelonious Monk’s polyrhythmic vernacular in “Straight No Chaser” as an instance of Black experimental rhythmic practice that is “about to be knowledge.” Such insights do not necessarily negate concepts in the Western philosophical tradition, but rather shed crucial light on that for which this tradition fails to account, as well as that which it has violently eclipsed or suppressed. Kronfeld “puts it together” (Elvin Jones’s term for spontaneous composition) in her transmedial theorization: logical argument supplemented, displaced, and oxygenated by her own engagement on keys with the questions posited.

    In “So What: Kind of More or Less Than All Blue(s),” Michael Sawyer, for whom Kronfeld is a crucial interlocutor, takes up Toni Morrison’s ekphrastic challenge—“how can I say things that are pictures”—by asking, “how can I write things that are sounds?” Drawing upon the ancient Japanese art form Kintsugi, Sawyer develops a theory of reparative “rememory” (Morrison) in Black cultural expression. Bringing together jagged shards of a broken whole—namely, the generative disruption of the blues in Sonny Rollins’s The Saxophone Colossus and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, themselves fragments of other broken, beautiful objects—Sawyer’s close reading of sound is at once shattering and restorative.

    We tend to think of rhythm primarily in sonic forms; yet what happens when we are to consider images as possessing their own rhythms? Presented initially at the 2024 American Comparative Literature Association convention in Montreal, the interventions by Jamal Batts, Seth Brodsky, and Eyal Peretz evaluate rhythms of the moving image. In “Black Queer Cadence: Hearing as Diasporic Seeing,” Jamal Batts advances a theory of sound in and as film, specifically, Black queer diasporic cinema in the final decades of the last century. Through close readings of Marlon Riggs’s short film/music video Anthem (1991), as well as the incorporation of poet Essex Hemphill’s voice in Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989) and Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989), Batts identifies Afro-diasporic, non-linear queer continuities in visual rhythm, sound, and voice. Drawing on Black experimental film theory (Michael B. Gillespie, Robeson Taj Frazier, Arthur Jafa), philosophy of Black music (Fumi Okiji), and others, he demonstrates the ways in which rhythms work to disrupt the violence of racialized representation, introducing gendered difference into the “unruly intramural sociality of blackness and queerness” which he understands as “entangled, relational, and stereophonic.”

    Invoking Fred Moten’s fugitive, fleeting statement to Harmony Holiday about music’s genesis—“in the absence of time, we made rhythm”—Seth Brodsky’s “Losing and Finding Death Drive’s Beat” argues that Freud’s notion has been mischaracterized as a nihilistic death cult, suggesting that music points to a distinct dimension of the drive, beyond nihilism. Through a close reading of the music video to Brittany Howard’s “Stay High,” Brodsky highlights Howard’s rhythmic syncopation, a rhythmic displacement that is untimely in its time travel to past “happy” rhythms (Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” rather than his “A Change is Gonna Come”) and future bleak horizons: in its visualization of the rhythm and repetition of the workday, the music video would serve as consolation to essential workers toiling long hours in the early months of the pandemic. Yet Brodsky wants to insist upon something more complicated at work. Although the eye can only perceive one rhythmic fact at a time, the ear can process multiple elements of sonic information simultaneously: music fabricates, dilates, and sutures gaps. Brodsky’s theory of music as “a foundational practice of driven beings” exposes the fallacy at the heart of contemporary misreadings of the death drive, inseparable from the pulse of life.

    Eyal Peretz’s “Oppenheimer’s Arrhythmia – Between the Cinematic Image and the Atomic Bomb” explores the activation of a new form of time in Christopher Nolan’s film. Distinct from Batts’ analysis of “queer cadence” in experimental cinema, and Brodsky’s consideration of the folding of image into rhythm in Howard’s music video, Peretz’s intervention focuses upon the formal elements of the 2023 film, what he describes as “rhythmic editing.” Identifying the activation of a new temporality set in motion by the conception and detonation of the atomic bomb, he asks whether the rhythmic editing of the cinematic image represents, extends, or interrupts this new temporality. What constative or performative intervention is carried out by Nolan’s arrythmias?

    Naomi Waltham-Smith joins Peretz in taking up the relation between rhythm and arrythmia in “Deconstruction’s Hemiolas.” Presented initially as part of the “(Rhy)pistemologies” seminar at ACLA, Waltham-Smith’s essay evaluates the role of rhythm in the work of deconstruction. A scholar of music and philosophy as well as a musician herself, Waltham-Smith demonstrates how the concept’s arrhythmia can be “most passionately moved by” the labor of deconstruction. Indeed, deconstruction’s arrhythmias expose the anarchic concepts as always already more than one: deconstructions. Owed to its syncopated remarking, deconstruction bears affinities with decolonial, Black-radical, anarchist, and queer thought. Incorporating a structure not unlike the 3-against-2 of musical hemiola, she advances a theory of deconstruction’s arrhythmia through close readings of five texts: Derrida’s Glas, Moten’s In the Break, Lacoue-Labarthe’s “L’echo du sujet,” Cixous’s “Le théâtre surpris par les marionettes,” and Bennington’s response to Nancy.

    The two concluding pieces return us to the performative, rhythmic thinking tested in Los Angeles. Musician and anthropologist Alex Chávez opened the Art Share L.A. meeting with a performance and talk (“Sonorous Present”), the written component of which has been included in the present issue. During the live event, in conversation with Quetzal Flores and Jonathan Leal, Chávez explored the contemporary conditions of possibility for sonic mourning in a bordered world. Through multimedia performances of selections from his acclaimed 2024 album, Sonorous Present, Chávez elaborated on the rhythms of artistic and scholarly process, highlighting the necessary imbrication of (auto)ethnographic research and related music composition for the type of introspective and community-driven praxis he pursues. His written piece expands these ideas across its three sections—“break,” “qualia,” and “cómplices de luto (accomplices in mourning)”—using a poetics of grief to map contemporary logics of nationalist (American) containments, and in effect, to meditate on political and conceptual possibility. In doing so, Chávez’s work begets questions that resonate across Black studies, border studies, anthropology, and Latinx studies, as well as with the offerings across this special issue: what are the rhythms of our mourning? And how might focusing on them amid the repeating violences of nation-states lead to increased conceptual, political, and artistic freedom?

    Finally, “Drone, Groove, and the Specificity of Musical Sound” documents a conversation held between Michael Gallope and Edwin Hill following Gallope’s drone performance, “Region.” Gallope’s electronic, multisensory presentation invited the public into a transformative experience of deep listening, a voyage through space and emptiness. Trained as a musicologist, Gallope has kept his scholarly and artistic lives largely separate until now. Yet the shift of focus from his first book to his second is significant: while the first (Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable), details philosophical reflections on music, the second (The Musician as Philosopher: New York’s Vernacular Avant-Garde, 1958–1978) understands philosophy as emerging from music-making itself. After the performance, Gallope and Hill discussed what it meant for Gallope to perform for the first time in an academic setting, how disciplines and institutions allow for or foreclose the possibility of musical thinking, as well as taking up the central question of “(Rhy)pistemologies”: how are concepts fashioned through rhythmic practices?

    Pursuing these questions—enacting this collective experiment across repertoires, methods, and disciplinary structures—has reminded us of the promise and urgency of humanistic inquiry at once artistically engaged and communally rooted. What if? What now, then? At each turn, the project has, in effect, foregrounded the conceptual possibilities of expressive forms that reach beyond insular, rarified knowledge circulation, centering instead those registers of criticism, theory, and multimedial expression that center bodies and minds in motion, alive to the sinew of experience. Our work together produced its own rhythms, its own cycles of affect and analogy, critique and convergence, and this, in its way, has been a reminder of what has long been the case in those increasingly necessary spaces where conscious relation is held in high esteem. Provisionally, then: to think through rhythm is to attend to relation and greet the world as it has been, is now, and hope it can be—at distance from those forms of thought that would deny the world.

    Listen to it. The concept might break you.

    [1] See Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Vijay Iyer, Fred Moten, among many others. For a recent example, see Iyer’s 2025 lecture at the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab, “Musicalities: Scenes of Sonic Social Life.”

    [2] Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. (University of Michigan Press 1997), 171.

    [3] In recent decades, scholarship in Black studies, cultural history, and music studies has expanded the conversation around these issues immensely. For a few immediate touchstones, see Fred Moten’s In the Break, Alexander Weheliye’s Phonographies, Shana Redmond’s Anthem, Josh Kun’s Audiotopia, R.A. Judy’s Sentient Flesh, Brent Hayes Edwards’ Epistrophes, Emily J. Lordi’s The Meaning of Soul, and Nina Sun Eidsheim’s Sensing Sound.

  • Michael J. Love–Introduction to a Term: (Rhy)pistemology

    Michael J. Love–Introduction to a Term: (Rhy)pistemology

    “(RHY)PISTEMOLOGY! (OR, TO KNOW THROUGH THE RHYTHM). Michael J. Love at Fusebox Festival (4-12-23) by Sarah Annie Navarrete. 

    This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin.

    Introduction to a Term: (Rhy)pistemology

    Michael J. Love

    Introduction

    (Rhy)pistemology. Noun. Knowledge and/ or knowledge verification through rhythm, especially through the embodied practice of rhythm tap dance (and related movement and music forms) in the Black American vernacular tradition.

    I created the term “(rhy)pistemology” around 2019. It was, at first, just a mental exercise in etymology—a portmanteau I was trying out in my head. In a graduate seminar on performance studies led by Rebecca Rossen at The University of Texas at Austin, several colleagues and I spent an afternoon attempting to articulate our understandings of “phenomenology,” “epistemology,” and “ontology.” One colleague created a sort of mnemonic device, a silly song to assist us in that moment—we all indulged and worked to add gestures to the song. In retrospect, I can recognize how profound it was that we were using rhythm and movement to work our way through dense texts.

    Engaging in this physical-intellectual exercise got me to thinking about my genealogy as a tap dance artist. I spent my adolescence gathering oral histories tied to specific passed-down routines and rhythms and learned tap techniques, approaches, and choreography through an active back-and-forth process of scatting, singing, and dancing with and to my teachers, mentors, peers, and eventually my students. My ongoing creative research and writing is deeply informed by this system of verifying knowledge that I have inherited by way of a lifelong dedication to rhythm tap dance. 

    With this in mind, and for the purpose of framing the essays in this special issue of b2o, I want to state that (rhy)pistemology is about naming something that continues to be invisibilized: the complexities and possibilities of rhythm as an aural and embodied system of cultural knowledge and history. The fact that (rhy)pistemology is an idea that I have articulated through the rigorous practice of a Black vernacular form cannot be separated from the term, concept, or system itself. (Rhy)pistemology is about knowledge verified through Black American methods of doing, calling-and-responding, actively listening, and producing rhythms in real time.

    Aptly, (RHY)PISTEMOLOGY! (OR, TO KNOW THROUGH THE RHYTHM) is also the title of my current full-length work, the third installment in The AURALVISUAL MIXTAPE Collection, my triptych of interdisciplinary rhythm tap dance performances. With (RHY)PISTEMOLOGY!, I lead an ensemble of collaborators in a process of mapping the foundational Black histories of techno and house music onto improvisation and choreography that envisions an “elsewhere” of liberatory possibilities. Tap artists Benae Beamon, Jeffrey Clark Jr., Kaleena Miller, Adriana J. Ray, Robyn Watson, and I work our way through an original electronic music soundscape composed and performed by rhythmanalyst DeForrest Brown Jr. and traverse a multimedia installation by anti-disciplinary artist Aryel René Jackson. With these components, (RHY)PISTEMOLOGY! stands as an embodied testimony of the wealth of cultural knowledge stored in Black American forms of movement and music and the generative, life-giving potential available to those of us who engage in the labor necessary to honor and carry such forms forward. Ultimately, the piece has become about dropping down into the body and sitting in rhythm to eke out the “how” and “why” of the affective and intellectual opportunities that open up when my collaborators and I “lock in” together at one hundred and twenty beats per minute.

    I first presented (RHY)PISTEMOLOGY! as a work-in-progress during my time as a Princeton University Arts Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts. The full version of the work premiered in April 2023 at Fusebox Festival, an international performance festival which takes place each spring in Austin, TX. My future plans for the work include a presentation of the entire performance triptych as well as an exhibition catalog. Additionally, I have begun work on an epilogue to the triptych, a performance installation with the working title, rhy/ntology (or, to be the rhythm). This new piece is a dynamic synesthetic engagement with video projection, sound capturing, and live-composition technologies that allow an ensemble of tap dancers, an electronic music artist, and I to arrange and play original house and techno music that is heard, seen, and felt by witnessers. During each presentation of rhy/ntology, our rhythms and melodies fill and shake the room and are displayed on the walls, floor, and ceiling. After each presentation of rhy/ntology, aural and visual remnants of our performance linger in the space until we return.

    This essay is a sharing of some of my “field notes,” if you will—brief reflections on and references to some of my recent work and research to demonstrate how, after creating the term and conceptualizing (rhy)pistemology as a system of knowledge, I have put it to use. I include such notes, reflections, and references here beside stage directions, performance descriptions, and embedded videos to illustrate how I have presented on (rhy)pistemology and shared my work during the “‘(Rhy)pistemologies’: Thinking Through Rhythm” seminar, inspired by my concept and organized by Erin Graff Zivin and Jonathan Leal at the March 2024 conference meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association in Montreal, QC, CA and the two-day event by the same name in May 2024 in Los Angeles, CA which Graff Zivin curated in her role as director of the Experimental Humanities Lab at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at University of Southern California together with Leal. Below, I’ve included footage of the May 2024 presentation of these ideas which took the shape of a collaborative lecture demonstration I presented alongside scholar of literature and philosophy and jazz pianist Maya Kronfeld.

    Track One

    Throughout winter 2020 and spring 2021, I presented the first iteration of LIVE From The BEATBOX as a series of monthly virtual performances. The series consisted of seven total “livestreams,” each presented from my personal artist studio and rhythm workspace, a converted warehouse I rented from a small North Austin, TX sparkling water start-up at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

    While I shaped livestreams “No. 001,” “No. 002,” “No. 003,” and later “No. 007,” to be presentations of my rhythm-based research on various popular media expressions of Afrofuturism throughout the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, I used livestreams “No. 004,” “No. 005,” and “No. 006” to lean into, what I call, a “rhythm dreaming” of an inaugural commercial airline-like trip to a Black queer “elsewhere.” During these three particular livestreams, I wondered: what would such a trip feel and sound like? What might I find or encounter once arriving to this “elsewhere?” What would it be like to return to the present, collect my loved ones, and then transport them to this “elsewhere?”

    LIVE From the BEATBOX is a demonstration of my method of “mix(tap)ing”—a Black, queer, and feminist aesthetic-intellectual referencing practice which drives my performance-based research. As I explain in my 2021 Choreographic Practices article, “‘mix(tap)ing’ is a spiritual and tactical process of revisiting past times, moments, and temporalities to address current realities” (Love 2021: 32). It involves “tak[ing] multiple pieces, loop[ing] (or rhythmically repeat[ing]) them as distinct samples and layer[ing] them in configurations and understandings different from their original contexts” (32). When I “mix(tap)e,”

    [I] use [literary scholar Nadia] Ellis’ concept of the Black queer diasporic ‘elsewhere’ to dream of a future time and space of Black sociopolitical liberation (Ellis 2015: 4–6). As Ellis joins Stuart Hall’s sense of Black diasporic aesthetic possibility with José Esteban Muñoz’s definition of ‘queerness’ as a mark of the space ‘between the ground on which one stands and a compelling place beyond,’ I use my work to research possible ways of moving beyond a present ‘insufficient’ for Black queerness to a future that is ideal for Black queer prosperity (3)… I often think about reaching an Ellisian ‘elsewhere’ through ‘getting caught up,’ as Marlon M. Bailey describes (Bailey 2013: 154)—an expression of the Ballroom concept of what scholar Jonathan David Jackson also calls ‘becoming possessed’ (Jackson 2002: 36). To me, ‘getting caught up’ or ‘becoming possessed’ is the type of transcendent, out-of-body experience necessary for accessing the ‘elsewhere’ Ellis theorizes. And most importantly, as Bailey explains, ‘getting caught up’ has to do with becoming entranced in repeated, layered rhythms (Bailey 2013: 154). Ultimately, I am interested in Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s idea of polycentricity (Gottschild 1998 [1996]: 14) as a guiding principle for layering theories, references of personal and Black collective moments, sounds, technologies and theatrical conventions as separate but connected rhythms so that I am able to have a healing spiritual experience. (Love 2021: 33)

    Figure 1. Excerpts of my virtual performance, “LIVE From The Beatbox— Livestream No. 005” as presented outdoors at Ground Floor Theatre in Austin, TX in front of a small, socially-distanced audience on Saturday, March 20, 2021. During the performance, I dance to recorded music including selections from Larry Heard’s 1994 album Sceneries Not Songs, Volume One including, “Caribbean Coast,” “Midnight Movement,” and “One, Three, Five, Seven, Eight.”

    Performance: “Caribbean Coast”—At this point in the most current iteration of this essay, as presented at “‘(Rhy)pistemologies’: Thinking Through Rhythm,” a two-day event at the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab, I move from the podium and onto a small, paneled tap floor to present an improvisational rhythm tap dance performance to Larry Heard’s “Caribbean Coast”(1994). Throughout this short performance, I search for ways to bury my dancing between the layers of Heard’s composition by playing rhythms that lock in step with and counter the ticking, click-track-like hi-hat loop and the long, wavy, sustained notes of the tune’s melodic backdrop. I also demonstrate my own adaptation of what dramaturg and choreographer Katerine Profeta names “the Miles Davis turn” (2015: 88–138) by “spend[ing] a considerable amount of time facing upstage or towards either stage left or right” and playing phrases and movements “I can execute with my eyes closed” or with my gaze towards the floor so that my “focus can be on my rhythms and the music” instead of on and towards witnessers (Love 2021: 32–33). This is a tactic I use throughout my solo work to reconfigure performer-audience power dynamics and address the racist histories of tap dance and American performance (33). Once I have completed this short solo, I return to the podium.

    Interlude

    It was while working on and presenting LIVE From The BEATBOX, that I first developed a deep love for the work of house music composer Larry Heard. His mid-1990s synth playing and drum programming on Sceneries Not Songs, Volume One is otherworldly. There is an affective push and pull that is especially palpable—lots of potent, open space for tap dance improvisation with and against the various percussive layers, but also lush instrumental solos that weave an inherent jazz melodic sensibility through ever-present four-on-the-floor house rhythms.

    On “Distant Planet,” a seminal track on Another Side, the 1988 album by the trio known as “Fingers Inc.,” Heard, Robert Owens, and Ron Wilson lock into a generative chant while sustained synth notes, twinkling melodic embellishments, echoing hi-hats, and a grounding, bass-heavy kick conjure up images of the exact type of intergalactic travel to the “elsewhere” I “rhythm dream” of:

    “Life on this distant planet/ Far, far away from here

    Where anyone can walk/ Without a thing to fear

    Caring and sharing is a day-to-day chore

    You can eat the fruit around you, you’ll hunger never more

    On this planet/ Distant planet

    On this planet/ Distant planet…” (Dennis et al. 1988)

     

    Track Two

    In September 2022, I had the incredible honor of being one of four subjects profiled by visual artist, filmmaker, and curator Tiona Nekkia McClodden in the film portraits that anchored The Trace of an Implied Presence, her multidisciplinary installation at The Shed in New York, NY. As a “meditation on the living history and influence of contemporary Black dance in the United States,” Trace stemmed from McClodden’s extensive research on Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 1983 Dance Black America festival and her interviewing of and engagement with original festival co-curator and presenter Mikki Shepard.

    McClodden invited me to present a performance as part of her exhibition and so, I shared “Calls To/ About ‘Elsewhere,’” a fifty-minute solo I used to layer recordings of personal phone conversations with close friends and loved ones and tunes by foundational and contemporary Black electronic music artists over my own live, improvised tap rhythms in an effort to, again, create a space for my own “rhythm dreaming” of a futuristic Black queer “elsewhere.”

    Since presenting the solo, I have been thinking about one of the recorded phone calls in particular—a chat between curator and writer Jamal Batts, geographer Brittany Meché, and me, during which I found myself especially enchanted as two scholars I especially admire mused on the prospective spatio-temporal locations of such an “elsewhere.” From the transcript:

    Meché: “It strikes me that both of us, kind of feel… like the making of an ‘elsewhere’ with things that we have at the ready… there’s something kind of material in the present that we… are sort of making our ‘elsewheres’ from…”

    Batts: “There’s always been, like… this sneaking suspicion about the desire for space… Space that you have to pay a billion dollars to get to, at least in our moment… There’s a refusal in me to go to space…”

    Meché: “We’re not going to space. We’re not going to space!”

    Batts: “Yeah, we’re not going to space…”

    Meché: “We’re going to work it out right here.” (pers. comm., August 2022)

    Ellis’ concept of the Black queer diasporic “elsewhere” (2015) has continued to inspire and inform much of my thinking on futurity. My hypothesis was still that if I could manage to lose myself in the dance and the rhythms for and of the dance, or give myself to the physical labor of the dance, that I would be able to “get caught up” (Bailey 2013: 154) and eventually see the “elsewhere.”

    Admittedly, as I gazed towards and imagined the “elsewhere,” I was a bit naive in my disengagement with Ellis’ assertation that such longing “is at its most potent when it is, so to speak, unconsummated” (Ellis 2015: 2). Or, as she writes, such longing “gives rise” to “a potential that suspends rather than resolves at the arrival at some new and satisfying space of exile” (4). You could say that by purposefully ignoring this aspect of Ellis’ theory—that the potential lies in the unreciprocated—I proved it to be, well, true. My own longing for an “elsewhere” distant from “here” has, so far, generated over four to five years of artistic and intellectual output. And, for all intents and purposes, I am still in the ‘here’ attempting to get to the ‘elsewhere,’ much to my chagrin. But, there is relief, even if only temporary, in the attempts.

    Something about my phone conversation with Batts and Meché in late August finally made this all click. From the transcript:

    Batts: “…I think that there is something… embedded in Black culture that is very much based in fantastical visions of an otherwise that are necessary and are grounded… and that do envision space, the extra-terrestrial… [as] a mode for thinking about how to do things differently here.”

    Later, Meché adds: “And, Angela Davis saying, you know, ‘What does it mean to work towards something that… you may not actually… get to see,’ right? …Is it still kind of worth… doing the work if you yourself will not, benefit from it?”

    Later, I say: “You know, obviously this is based upon, Nadia Ellis’ Territories of the Soul, right? And I think one of the things she says is exactly what you’re saying… um, babe… Where she’s like… it’s more productive… Or, maybe she’s quoting Stuart Hall, or… You know, but, one of the things she talks about is, the productivity in imagining the ‘elsewhere,’ right?… And then once… Like, actually reaching it… is not…you know… A: either not possible, or… B: just not worth it… actually?… Because, the project is imagining it, right?” (pers. comm., August 2022)

    My focus has shifted since this conversation. In the Ellis metaphor of there being “a call from afar that one keeps trying to answer,” I am more attuned to the “potent[ness]” of what I identify as the between, the space that extends from the end of here to just before the threshold of there, or “elsewhere” (Ellis 2015: 2–3). I am more open to what I may discover as I try to answer the proverbial call from afar, what I may reveal to myself as I try to send out my own calls, and what my attempts to reach the “elsewhere,” and subsequently my journeying into the between, may produce.

    Here—Between—Elsewhere is a metaphysical geography I am forming, a theory based on Ellis’ concept, that identifies the “potent,” area of “potential” after here and before elsewhere as a third space of productive exploration (2–3).  

    I am interested in how I may join my theorizing of a third space with ideas around measuring and demonstrating volume and the presence or absence of matter in these spaces. With just a cursory knowledge of how beings in the natural world use processes of echolocation to navigate deep waters, I am embracing the use of echo and reverb, or the intentional delay of sound, in my artistic work to perform the vastness that may exist in this third or between space after here and before there, or “elsewhere.” To do this, I have begun using a delay pedal in certain performances. I spent many years experimenting with a looping pedal to build tap compositions in real time. Adding an additional piece of technology has enabled me to play and dance through abstracted, manipulated, and delayed loops.

    I have turned to scholar Peter Doyle who theorizes on the use of echo and reverb in popular music by music artists and producers, to construct “sonic spatialities” and place different aspects of music recordings into and out of aural focus to offer lyric-narrative context, shape various affective moments, or fashion acoustic statements of self (2005: 4). Additionally, Doyle posits that echo and reverb in early to mid-century blues, country, and rock and roll recordings also tell of the conditions of such recording processes and therefore speak to access, class, and identity embedded in such recordings (6-7).

    I am also sitting with theories of third space and ideas on how we may enter and traverse such space that I have learned from various Black poets, musicians, and performance artists. I often turn to two in particular. First, in video excerpts of Planet Rock: Techno, House Music, and Afrofuturism, her 2013 lecture at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta, GA, DJ Lynnée Denise can be heard explaining some of the theoretical components of her embodied hip hop practice: “And then there’s this third space—I don’t know if you noticed that I was playing non-stop music, right? It was continuous. There’s a third space that happens when you mix two songs: that’s Afrofuturism. That’s another song that the producers had nothing to do with…” (2013). Second, in Blackspace: On The Poetics Of An Afrofuture, poet, curator, and artist Anaïs Duplan writes, “Should we, ‘post-bondage,’ focus on the ways in which we’re free (free to move, free to buy, free to breathe) or the ways we’re not free (free to move but displaced and shuffled around, free to buy but within a capitalist system in which one used to exist as commodity free to breathe but in especial danger at all times)? Neither. In order to locate liberation, one has to locate a third space. This alter-space is not ‘outside of,’ ‘away from’ or ‘other than’ our present world. Instead, it is an intensification, or deepening, of mundane reality” (2020: 67–68).

    Figure 2. An excerpt of my September 2022 performance, “Calls To/ About ‘Elsewhere,’” presented at the invitation of Tiona Nekkia McClodden as part of her multidisciplinary installation, The Trace of an Implied Presence, at The Shed in New York, NY. Footage courtesy of Tiona Nekkia McClodden/TNM STUDIOS LLC.

    Interlude

    Rochelle Fearon (publicly known as “Rochelle Jordan”) opens her 2021 song “All Along” with vibrant, ethereal piano chords that seem to be situated amidst a recognizable New Jack Swing breakbeat. But then, there is a shift. A house kick comes crashing into place as we also hear machines begin to boot up (or a rocket begin to take off). Suddenly, the sonic floor falls out from under us and Jordan’s audible inhale pulls us deep into an entirely unexpected context: A third space where a New Jack is Swinging and straight simultaneously—the two genres are somehow, comfortably and smoothly, thumping and bumping along together in the same space as Jordan glides us right into the chorus:

    “Yeah, I did many miles (yeah, yeah)

    Tell you what I found

    That’s what it takes to know (what it takes to know)

    Stop searching all around, oh

    ‘Cause I’ve been all over the world

    Trying to find something that’s been here all along

    You’ve been here all along

    ‘Cause I’ve been all over the world

    Trying to find something that’s been here all along

    You’ve been here all along…” (Fearon and Montgomery 2021)

     

    Track Three

    “An intensification, or deepening, of mundane reality.”

    “We’re going to work it out right here.”

    “Trying to find something that’s been here all along…”

    I am committed to making a case for the deep study of the music emerging from contemporary artists who, I posit, have happened onto an aural/ rhythmic aesthetic that expresses a particular Black (woman) electronic-rhythm-and-blues futurism. This group of artists includes Fearon, Dawn Richard, Tinashe Jørgensen Kachingwe (publicly known as “Tinashe”), and other black women vocalists who are using R&B methods to engage in a high-affect layering of their voices before diffracting and wrapping their stacked melodies and ad-libs around the percussive-electronic whirring, zipping, smacking, popping, and banging of their male producer-collaborators. These women slink between genre lines, slipping into (and out of) house, hip hop, and techno (and related sub genres) that transposes 1990s rhythm-and-blues sensibilities into a distant future.

    Jordan and Richard, in particular, have continued to compose such aural texts with white artists such as Travis “Machindedrum” Stewart and James “Jimmy” Edgar. I bring up identity here to consider how these texts may or may not be “multicultural” in the Gottschildean sense (1998 [1996]: 143). Can we consider these collaborations as instances in which separate cultures or identity contexts are equitably intertwined?

    I am now studying how Jordan, Richard, Kachingwe, and others approach composing such texts. What makes these compositions feel so “of the ‘elsewhere?’” Why and how do they so richly illustrate a certain futurity? Is it in, or about, how these women build expansive environments between the layers of their manipulated vocals, send rippling and delayed echoes seemingly out into vast territories, or position themselves so confidently, comfortably, and wisely among the aggressive and cold sounds of the men who they work with? Or is it more about the ideas, concepts, and expectations that we project onto these women, their artistic personas, their presence, and their performances?

    In November 2023, my friend and colleague, artist-scholar Benae Beamon, curated an edition of OPEN STUDIOS at the Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn, NY and invited me to share some of these questions and ideas through performance as part of an evening of dance and film. I have since continued to develop an “embodied essay” format by experimenting with projecting my writing onto performance space walls, curtains, and screens while I improvise tap rhythms to, for example, process Jordan, Richard, and Kachingwe’s artistic theory-making.

    Performance: “CRANK”—At this point in the most current iteration of this essay, as presented by the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab, I move from the podium and onto a small, paneled tap floor to present an improvisational rhythm tap dance performance which employs “the Miles Davis turn” (Profeta 2015), this time to “CRANK” by “Jimmy” Edgar, featuring Fearon, or “Rochelle Jordan” (2021). As I dance and work to respond to the aural textures of Edgar and Fearon’s recorded performance, written portions of what I include here in this essay as “Track Three” are projected on the upstage screen. Once the music ends, I spend a few minutes dancing a cappella to play, revisit, and indulge in rhythms reflective of Edgar and Fearon’s aural textures.

    Eventually, I begin using my delay pedal to layer sampled sound clips—the same bit of audio from the Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy-led 1983 film Trading Places that house music duo Masters At Work (producer-DJs “Little” Louie Vega and Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez) have made ubiquitous throughout ballroom culture as the foundational “ha” sound and a brief moment of Dorian Corey’s outlining of the definition of “reading” from Jennie Livingston’s 1990 film Paris Is Burning—over my a cappella dancing. Each time I trigger these samples, I allow the delay pedal to regenerate and echo them until they loop and become distorted and unrecognizable. To end this performance, I disengage my delay pedal by turning it off.

    This is where my (rhy)pistemological exploration, or my practice-based honoring of the complexities and possibilities of rhythm as an aural and embodied system of cultural knowledge and history, has led me so far. With each of these performances, including (RHY)PISTEMOLOGY! (OR, TO KNOW THROUGH THE RHYTHM) (2023), LIVE From The Beatbox (2020-2021), “Calls To/ About ‘Elsewhere’” (2022), and current experiments such as my “embodied essay” (2024-2025) and rhy/ntology (or, to be the rhythm) (2025), I engage in a process of listening to, calling-and-responding, and making corporeal rhythms in real time to verify and employ inherited knowledge and demonstrate possibilities. The performances I discuss here are concerned with articulating theories of liberation through expressing a queer Afrofuturist aesthetic. Overall, my conceptualization of (rhy)pistemology deals with knowledge stored and encoded in Black music, sound movements, and vernacular traditions—specifically, rhythm tap dance. (Rhy)pistemology, however, is activated through practice and performance. The verification of ideas or the answering and refinement of questions can be done through personal social engagement (dancing alone or with others informally) and/ or formal presentation. In short, (rhy)pistemology is about using rhythm tap dance and the knowledge it holds to wonder and discover on a range of topics. I am excited to see where my own continued experiments lead me and what themes and questions others may be able to think through by employing (rhy)pistemology.

    Figure 3. Maya Kronfeld & Michael J. Love: ‘(Rhy)pistemologies: A Duet’”. Footage of the May 2024 presentation of these ideas in the form of a collaborative lecture demonstration with scholar of literature and philosophy and jazz pianist Maya Kronfeld during “‘(Rhy)pistemologies’: Thinking Through Rhythm,” a two-day conference event organized and curated by Erin Graff Zivin in her role as director of the Experimental Humanities Lab at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at University of Southern California. 

    References

    Bailey, Marlon M. 2013. Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

    Dennis, Harold and Larry Heard, Robert Owens, Ron Wilson as “Fingers Inc.” 1988. “Distant Planet.” Another Side. Chicago: Alleviated Records and Music.

    DJ Lynnée Denise. 2014. “DJ Lynnée Denise Performance Lecture.” Vimeo. www.vimeo.com/110731119#t=311s (accessed August 31, 2024).

    Doyle, Peter. 2005. Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900–1960. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

    Duplan, Anaïs. 2020. Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture. Boston and Chicago: Black Ocean.

    Ellis, Nadia. 2015. Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

    Edgar, Jimmy. 2021. “CRANK.” CHEETAH BEND. Los Angeles: Innovative Leisure.

    Fearon, Rochelle as “Rochelle Jordan” and Kelvin Montgomery. 2021. “All Along.” Play With The Changes. Los Angeles: Young Art Records.

    Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. 1998. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Westport, CT and London: Praeger.

    Heard, Larry. 1994. Sceneries Not Songs, Volume One. Chicago: Alleviated Records and Music.

    Jackson, Jonathan David. 2002. “The Social World of Voguing.” Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement 12, no. 2: 26–42.

    Landis, John. 1983. Trading Places. Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures.

    Livingston, Jennie. 1990. Paris Is Burning. Los Angeles: Miramax.

    Love, Michael J. 2020–2021. “Livestream No. 005.” LIVE From The BEATBOX. Virtual performance, Austin, TX, March 20.

    Love, Michael J. 2021. “Mix(tap)ing: A Method for Sampling the Past to Envision the Future.” Choreographic Practices 12, no. 1: 29–45. doi.org/10.1386/chor_00027_1.

    Love, Michael J. 2022. Author interview with Jamal Batts and Brittany Meché, Princeton, NJ, August 28.

    Love, Michael J. 2022. “Calls To/ About ‘Elsewhere.’” Tiona Nekkia McClodden, The Trace Of An Implied Presence. Live solo performance, The Shed, New York, NY, September 10.

    Love, Michael J. 2023. “How to Rhythm Dream: An Embodied/ AuralVisual Essay.” OPEN STUDIOS – Benae Beamon. Live solo performance, Center for Performance Research, Brooklyn, NY, November 5.

    Profeta, Katherine. 2015. Dramaturgy in Motion: At Work on Dance and Movement Performance. Madison, WI and London: University of Wisconsin Press. 

    Acknowledgements

    Many thanks to Erin Graff Zivin and Jonathan Leal for generously organizing around these ideas at both the March 2024 conference meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association and the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab; Maya Kronfeld for engaging in an inspiring and formative collaborative process; and to my dear partner, Jamal Batts, for unwavering love, affirmation, and support.

  • Maya Kronfeld–Rhythmic Concepts and New Knowledge

    Maya Kronfeld–Rhythmic Concepts and New Knowledge

    Image taken by author. 

    This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin.

    Rhythmic Concepts and New Knowledge

    Maya Kronfeld

    My collaboration with Michael J. Love (see video below) is an attempt to work against the all-too-common backgrounding of rhythmic forms and their epistemic contributions.* Rhythm in jazz and Black music more generally is often trivialized and denigrated even when it is being applauded – the proverbial “damning with faint praise.” Specifically, when the complexities of polyrhythm and swing are admired, they are increasingly treated as decontextualized, ready-made ratios to be labeled and then implemented according to some “cheat code.” Unlike melodic and harmonic virtuosity, the rhythmic language that takes decades of study to acquire, develop and master often does not even register as a zone of competence. Reducing or denying rhythmic knowledge-making and the central role it plays in the music has always formed part and parcel of the fear and control of blackness and black form, especially as jazz gains what Rey Chow calls “cultural legitimation” (Chow 2010; E. Davis 2025; Ramsey 2004; Lewis 1996).[1]

    “One of the most malevolent characteristics of racist thought,” Toni Morrison writes in her foreword to the novel Paradise, is “that it never produces new knowledge… It seems able to merely reformulate and refigure itself in multiple but static assertions” (Morrison 1998: xv).  In a photo from Morrison’s 1994 collaboration with Max Roach at the Festival d’Automne in Paris in 1994, one glimpses the new forms of inquiry that emerge from the interplay between verbal and rhythmic art.[2] 

    I elaborate the literary dimension of my argument elsewhere (Kronfeld 2025), but I include Morrison’s critical observation here to clarify what’s at stake for Love and me in our artistic and scholarly practice and help us shake off some tired old binaries about the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Jazz’s emphasis on the new emerges precisely in the context that Morrison describes: jazz and other experimental art forms are not inherently radical (a fact which is crucial to their radical potential) but rather contain the prerequisites for radical action and change, namely to be able to produce new knowledge, in contradistinction to self-replicating discourses. Not having had the luxury of resting well with conventional meanings, Black musical aesthetics continue to be necessary for clarifying the sociohistorical and racial contexts that make modernist crisises of referentiality so salient (Best 2018; Moten 2018; Gilroy 1995).

    Elsewhere I have discussed the elision of jazz drummers’ epistemic contributions within the context of modernist aesthetics and critical theory (Kronfeld 2019, 2025). But as Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. reminds his readers in The Power of Black Music, “Rhythms… are not solely situated within the confines of drums” (Floyd, 2017: xxvi). Here I focus on the rhythmic contributions of pianists in order to de-essentialize the rhythmic imaginary while simultaneously emphasizing time’s primacy as jazz’s most salient text. These pianistic traditions can be seen as the afterlife of those “other percussive devices” named by Baraka in the wake of the criminalization of the drums and their communicative power (Baraka 1963: 27). In what follows, I draw on theorizations of swing by Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk and Georgia Anne Muldrow, and of the blues by James Baldwin and Ahmad Jamal.

    It bears reminding here that rhythm qua aesthetic dimension provides space for the recovery of past forbidden, as well as the discovery of new, not-yet-available concepts, for past/future thoughts not yet thinkable (cf. A. Davis 1997: 163-64). This emphasis on process carries affinities both with Frankfurt School aesthetics (Kaufman 2005, 2000) and with Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s characterization of Africanist aesthetics (Gottschild 1996; Love 2021); but it also sets into sharp relief the divergences between these critical traditions. Angela Davis navigates this critical juncture between Frankfurt School and Black aesthetics in her Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, which remains ever salient: “My use of…the aesthetic dimension rejects its association with ‘transhistorical,’ ‘universal’ truths. I propose instead a conceptualization of ‘aesthetic dimension’ that fundamentally historicizes and collectivizes it.” (A­­. Davis 1997: 164).  In a section from her Billie’s Bent Elbow (2025) entitled “Aesthetic Form in the New Thing,” Fumi Okiji draws a distinction between aesthetic form and musical form: “aesthetic form is ultimately processual even when it is encountered in the objectified work thing” (84). Okiji continues: “Aesthetic form is as much the means toward our congregating in performance or rehearsal, practice, or listening as our (co)habitation of musical space is the means to aesthetic form” (85).[3]

    The potentialities that swing encodes in jazz and Black music more generally are never finished being known, rendering them answerable to unforeseen future circumstances, as well as to past and present experiences that have been occluded from view by structures of oppression, domination and appropriation (Okiji 2025, Kronfeld 2025). As jazz musicians have always taught, the innovative spatio-tempo/ral building blocks of Black music are attuned to the now precisely by virtue of being historically saturated, encoding what Georgia Anne Muldrow calls “new paths of articulation” (pers. comm 2023; cf. Ramsey 2004; Floyd 1996). [4]

    Think of the way that Thelonious Monk’s rhythmic phrasing disrupts racialized aesthetic conventions of beauty qua the “pleasant” or “agreeable” while opening new, disruptive possibilities within the beautiful, what Monk called “ugly beauty” (Monk 1968). It is, in fact, this capacity for disruption that is beauty’s philosophical legacy (Ginsborg 2015, Moten 2017).  In the process of his simultaneous rejection and illumination of the beauty ideal, Monk repurposes and radicalizes Charles Baudelaire’s postromantic metaphor in Les fleurs du mal  (Baudelaire 1994 [1857]).

    It is crucial to theorize from what rhythm artists say and do before “applying” theory to them (Defrantz 2001:43). As Dizzy Gillespie maintains in Notes and Tones, the landmark musician-to-musician collection of interviews, the history of Black music in recorded form – the sound – ought to be the primary text of jazz studies:  “We are documented in records, and the truth will stand” (A. Taylor 1977:127). That primary text can be fruitfully interpreted and put into dialogue with any number of theoretical frameworks – if, that is, the sonic text itself has not been erased by being conflated ontologically with its transcriptions.[5] Increasingly, as musician-educators around the world can attest, jazz theory and even the widely-circulating jazz transcriptions of recorded standards and original compositions (e.g., The Real Book) not only pre-empt but often replace entirely the listener’s (and musician’s!) direct encounter with the musical text itself, cancelling out the epistemic interventions embedded within rhythmic, harmonic and melodic form.[6] This has created an unhappy correspondence between what Barbara Christian called “The Race for Theory” and the racist exclusion of the musicians from the study of the music (Christian 1987).

    So what does it mean to theorize new categories from Monk, from Ahmad Jamal, etc.?

    Let’s attune ourselves to the new forms of knowledge embedded, for example, in the first bar of Monk’s twelve-bar blues “Straight No Chaser.” One aesthetic theory perspective here might see Monk as producing inchoative knowledge (knowledge-in-process), or as engaged in a negative mimesis that encodes the violent attempts at the erasure of earlier Afrodiasporic rhythmic traditions of communication (Adorno 1997; for critiques see Okiji 2018 and Kronfeld 2019).[7] But does this sit comfortably with the epistemic theories embedded within Monk’s left hand and the traditions it both registers and transcends?  In contradistinction and perhaps even in challenge to the interpretive framework of inchoative knowledge that I have gestured at above, the term jazz musicians often use for what the music offers –without invoking the usual positivist-empiricist baggage – is information. More accurately, the positivist-empiricist connotations of the term are both ironized and re-signified. This is how pianist Fred Hirsch, quoted in Paul Berliner (1994) puts it: “A Charlie Parker tune like ‘Confirmation’ should give you information” (231). And Amiri Baraka explains, invoking a Black Music epistemology that dismantles the alienating distinction between life and art: “Music is a living creature…The sounds carry whatever information rests in those frequencies and rhythms and harmonies” (Baraka 1996:141).[8] As Monkish re-imaginings and critical analyses by contemporary pianists continue to attest, the beginning of  “Straight No Chaser” is replete with information (Jason Moran 2015; Eric Reed 2011; Fred Hirsch 1998).  On the 1960 recording of “Straight No Chaser,” there is a flat-9 (a B-natural in the key of Bb) in Monk’s left hand that destabilizes the later oversimplified popular reception of the tune (listen to the accents at 0:00, 0:02, 0:08 and 0:13). Monk sounds like he is playing a G, Ab and a B-natural – the kind of “closed-position voicing” with a minor-second interval on the bottom that Robin D. G. Kelley rightly characterizes as a Monkish signature (R.D.G. Kelley 1999). As I have described elsewhere (Kronfeld 2021), the kind of listening that jazz practitioners engage in often runs counter to what Monk disciple Steve Lacy once described as “the bad habit of thinking in chords” (Eiland 2019, 95; R.D.G. Kelley 2009: 291).[9] Now, I love chords as much as the next piano player, but I understand why they have come to represent a characteristically American paint-by-numbers epistemology.[10] The “chord” applied as a pre-conceived, static generality (as in “Oh, just play a Bb7 chord in the first bar of ‘Straight No Chaser’”) risks obscuring the singularity of these notes, these intervals and voicings that need to be given credence and discrete attention. A Monkish theory of knowledge warns against allowing a pre-determined category to co-opt or occlude what’s in front of us. It may not be too much to read this as an allegory against white supremacy that is embedded in jazz listening practice – and offered to all listeners.

    Just as Monk’s harmony requires unlearning the “bad habit of thinking in chords,” fully internalizing his rhythmic language calls for acquiring a new episteme, even as this language in turn sets the terms for basic fluency after Monk. Prof. Thomas Taylor, who instructs his drum students to study Monk’s piano comping, describes the studious listening required for such language acquisition when it comes to Monk’s rhythm: “If you haven’t listened to this 200 times, you don’t know it. And 200 is actually really on the short end.” [11] Even Miles Davis famously commented that it took him ages to properly learn “Round Midnight”: “I used to ask [Monk] every night after I got through playing [‘Round Midnight’], ‘Monk, how did I play it tonight?’ And he’d say, looking all serious, ‘You didn’t play it right.’ The next night, the same thing and the next and the next and the next” (M. Davis 1989: 78).

    In the piano intro to “Straight No Chaser,” before being joined by the rest of the band, Monk plays through one chorus (12 bars) of the melody (from 0:00 to 0:14).  Monk’s left-hand chord (a cluster more than a chord), with its modernist flat-9 harmonic intervention expressed as if it were a simple statement, alternately reinforces and plays off of the right hand’s melody by first accenting beat 1, then the “and” of beat 2, then beat 1 again, then beat 4, then the “and” of beat 4, then beat 2, then beat 2 again, finally landing on the “and” of beat 2. Thomas Taylor observes about Monk’s spatialization of rhythm: “He is a master at playing in unpredictable places. So unless you really know this version, you won’t ever put your left hand where he’s playing. It is as if Monk is doing an exercise where he plays every possible beat, but you don’t know which will come when.”[12] The spaces generated in between the accents are, of course, a crucial component of the rhythmic structure. John Edgar Wideman writes, letting his own elisions do the talking: “Silence one of Monk’s languages, everything he says laced with it… An extra something not supposed to be there, or an empty space where something usually is” (Wideman 1999: 551; cf. Sawyer 2025; Holiday 2023; Moran 2015). After this Intro, Monk plays the changes under “Straight No Chaser”’s melody in a more conventional way. But because we have become attuned to those dissonant clusters and accents in the Intro, now the expected itself sounds unexpected (T. Taylor, pers. comm. March 2, 2025).  

    From a drummer’s perspective, Thomas Taylor criticizes the overwhelming tendency to flatten out Monk’s rhythmic concepts. Take Monk’s comping under Charlie Rouse in “Bright Mississippi,” for example. The bouncing right-hand figure that Monk plays high up on the piano in response to the melody is neither swung eighth notes, nor straight eighths, nor triplets. “Maybe they are triplets that get slower, stretched and straighten out,” offers Taylor. The drummer’s perspective demonstrates the inchoative, in-process forms that real rhythmic concepts take – as opposed to the cookie-cutter molds and oversimplifying labels that prevent such rhythmic phrases from being heard accurately.

    The very idea that harmonic analysis can be pursued independently of rhythmic phrasing is one of the fallacies that we need to shine a light on, and it’s a deeply ingrained problem in institutionalized jazz pedagogy (Murray 2017: 118; Wilf 2014; McMullen 2021; Baraka [Jones] 1967). Monk’s swing is the refutation of the “straight” in his title “Straight No Chaser” – even and especially when the left-hand harmonic accent lands squarely on the 1 –akin to what Amiri Baraka calls a “negation of a negation” (Baraka 1996: 22).  Thus, it is not just that Monk swings what is straight, but rather that his rhythmic phrasing undoes the binary between swung time and straight time. As composer Anthony Kelley (pers. comm., May 6, 2023) pointed out to me, Monk’s composition “Misterioso” and its left-hand phrasing is an excellent example of the way in which the straight is also swung—is in effect reclaimed by swing as a parody of rigid conventionality. (Monk 2012 [1958]; A. Kelley 2024).[13] Monk shows the connection between rhythmic syncopation and harmonic dissonance. They operate in tandem. Rather than taking for granted syncopation as rhythm manqué (displaced rhythm; rhythm ‘minus’ something), Monk’s polyrhythmic vernacular lays bare the distortion that results from the presupposition that something called “straight time” is primary. As saxophonist Howard Wiley suggests, the construct of syncopation itself is perpetually in the process of being freed by its practitioners, although, by the same token, this generates the ever-present danger that it can be “‘taken back’ [by hegemonic powers] at any time” (Wiley, pers. comm, 2019; Kronfeld, 2019: 35)[14].

    Just as Morrison rhetorically asks in relation to Ralph Ellison’s novel—“Invisible to whom?”, one may ask about Monk’s fame for his off-beat syncopations—syncopated to whom?[15] In other words, what is perfectly logical, to quote Monk himself (Kelley 2009, 2020), only appears as a deviation when going out of one’s way to negate and ignore the epistemologies embedded in Black Musical Space (in James Gordon Williams’ terms; Williams 2021). Thus, contrary to popular belief, what makes jazz unpredictable is precisely what makes it a language (cf. Moten 2018 on Chomsky 1986). Monk’s unpredictability becomes the language one needs to know. Monk’s swing is the refutation of the “straight” in his title “Straight No Chaser” – even and especially when the left-hand harmonic accent lands squarely on the 1 –akin to what Amiri Baraka calls a “negation of a negation” (Baraka 1996: 22).

    I center Monk in the context of this issue on R(hy)pistemologies because Monk’s rhythmic prowess on the piano has been vastly underacknowledged by critics.[16] To put it bluntly, Monk’s harmonic interventions have fit more comfortably within modernism as it is traditionally construed than has his sense of rhythmic groove, swing and danceability.[17]  In contrast, Robin D.G. Kelley offers a key discussion of the racial politics of “swing” and their impact on Monk’s conditional acceptance into the avant-garde (RDG Kelley 1999:52). Indeed, musicians have always emphasized the primacy of Monk’s time.[18]  James Gordon Williams writes that Monk “encapsulated Black musical space” (Williams 2021: 15).  Williams describes the profound impact of Monk’s teaching on the master drummers of his generation and after: “From Monk, [Billy] Higgins received observational lessons about space and time” (Williams 2021:54). Williams “view[s] African American improvisation as a deployment of oppositional spatial knowledge that reflects the material conditions and imaginations that shape Black lives on a daily basis” (Williams 2021: 9). Williams’ theorization of “musical place-making,” the improvisational mapping, even the “spatial insubordination” of Black music draws on Katherine McKittrick’s Black Geographies and bell hooks’ “radical creative space” (Williams 2021:6). The black sense of place reflected and generated in “African-American improvisatory and compositional practices” both indexes and calls into question the “spatial domination” and “hegemonic spaces that have displaced Black people” (Williams 2021:6-8).[19] Black musical space becomes especially salient in the context of policing and the racialized state violence inflicted on Monk himself.[20]

    In his solo piano recording of “Evidence” (Monk 1954). Monk’s rigorous implication of the “one,” [i.e. beat 1], evoked via negation, becomes particularly salient.[21] A complete rhythm section unto himself, Monk breaks the silence on the “and” of beat 1, opening up the possibility of a half-time feel – the kind of implied time that evokes the clave and a whole past and future of progressive Afro-Cuban music. As is well known, Monk’s composition was based on the standard tune “Just You Just Me,” which he later retitled “Justice” spelled “JUST – US” – an ironic criticism of the Justice that is “just” for the racially unmarked (Edwards 2001; Leal 2023). His new title, “Evidence” takes apart rhythmically the feigned coherence of dominant evidentiary norms.[22]

    But Monk’s use of time and rhythmic form, as we have seen, also points—both ways, as it were—to past and future transnational developments within Black American music from timba to funk to R&B and hip-hop. Here is Miles Davis in 1989:

     I think a lot about Monk these days because all the music that he wrote can be put into these new rhythms that are being played today by a lot of young musicians – Prince, my new music… a lot of his music reminds me of the West Indian music being played today”… You could adapt some of his music to what’s going on now in fusion and in some of the more popular veins; maybe not all of them, but the ones that got the pop in the motherfucking head, you could. You know, that black rhythmic thing that James Brown could do so good, Monk had that thing and it’s all up in his compositions (80).

    Davis’ remarks toward the end of his life foreshadow emerging theoretical paradigms drawing on Black musical aesthetics in recent years to theorize non-linear, trans-generational temporality (Okiji 2017; Sawyer 2025). They also resonate with recent intergenerational jazz practice by contemporary drummers like Kendrick Scott, who during COVID organized thirty-eight drummers to perform a virtual communal version of Monk’s “Evidence” (Scott 2020).[23]

    In my dialogue with Michael J. Love about this, inspired by Love’s own work on the marginalization of the rhythmic vernacular within contemporary dance, I shared that an issue closely related to Monk’s often misunderstood rhythmic syncopation are the “grace notes” that are often illegible because they are taken as mistakes and sometimes kept out of the transcriptions, rather than attended to in their complexity as being where the music is actually happening.[24] This has to do with the idea that the rhythmic vernacular is the core text; but as Love has shown, drawing on Brenda Dixon Gottschild, it is precisely this Africanist dimension that is repressed (Love 2021, Gottschild 1996). Love and I have both witnessed with frustration from the dance and piano sides of jazz performance that in mass culture, extensive, convoluted maneuvers are often performed to avoid acknowledging the existence of Afrodiasporic rhythmic intelligence on its own terms.

    In his important but still underappreciated 1936 philosophical monograph on the music of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke writes that “jazz is in constant danger” from commercialization (Locke 1936: 174). In fact, this is one of the main preoccupations of his book on the Black music of his time (Porter 2002:45-47).[25] Locke quotes at length from Louis Armstrong’s own book Swing that Music, which was also published in 1936. Armstrong’s Swing that Music has frequently been mistaken for “mere” biography or memoir, rather than offering the radical theoretical and historiographical critique of the music that he in fact contributes in this work (Veneciano 2004: 272; O’Meally 2022). Armstrong writes: “The reason swing musicians insist upon calling their music ‘swing music’ is because they know how different it is from the stale brand of jazz they’ve got so sick of hearing. But in the early days, when jazz was born, jazz wasn’t that way at all… We can now look back [remember, he is saying this in 1936!] and see where jazz got side-tracked. We won’t have many excuses… if we let today’s swing music go the same way” (Armstrong 1993 [1936]:122, qtd. in Locke 1936: 110). Armstrong anticipates the critical stance Baraka takes as LeRoi Jones in his 1963 Blues People in the chapter “Swing: From Verb to Noun,” where the noun is the grammatical correlate of reification.  But already for Armstrong, “swing music” is itself the name of the attempt to wrest jazz back from the co-opting forces that dilute it and threaten its newness. Margo Natalie Crawford’s readings of “anticipatory, liminal” texts of the Harlem Renaissance provide an important context for Armstong’s observations. Crawford demonstrates that Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston “anticipate” (a technical notion Crawford imbues with both historiographical and rhythmic aesthetic valences) the Black Arts Movement in their trenchant critiques of black music’s commercialization (Crawford 2017).[26] Enriching the dialogue with the verbal art of his day, Armstrong draws an analogy in Swing that Music between the linear plots of pulp fiction and the commercialized versions of jazz. He writes: “I do know that a musician who plays in ‘sweet’ orchestras must be like a writer who writes stories for some popular magazines. He has to follow along the same kind of line all the time” (29). Armstrong continues: “[The conventional writer] has to write what he thinks the readers want just because they’re used to it. But a real swing musician never does that” (29).  He speaks here from the center of the Afromodernist call for experimental renewal, for a novel musical language that will continually resist the stultifying linear progressions demanded by white commercial markets.

    After drawing on Louis Armstrong’s critical poetics of swing, there is another artist Alain Locke specifically identifies as being able to preserve his art in an unadulterated way – Jimmie Lunceford. In the 1935 recording entitled “The Melody Man” (Lunceford 1935) you can hear a syncopation that evades capture. Propelled by drummer Jimmy Crawford’s brushes, the tightness between the horns and rhythm section prefigures James Brown’s band. I take this to be an example of the swing under the swing that continues to inform contemporary creative practice.

     

    Mama, You Can Bet! (2020); Denderah (2013). Written, produced, arranged & performed by Georgia Anne Muldrow. 

    Georgia Anne Muldrow (b. 1983) is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer whose works brings together rhythmic and harmonic innovation, new epistemologies, and community-based activism. She recorded the 2013 album Denderah and the 2020 Mama, You Can Bet! as Jyoti, the pseudonym given to her by Alice Coltrane and reserved for what Muldrow calls her “one-woman jazz ensemble.” Here, as on all her studio albums, Muldrow plays every instrument. On Denderah’s fourth track, “Sup,” which echoes the BPM (beats per minute, or tempo) of “Melody Man,” listen for the drum language of the brushes – done on synthesizer. Muldrow is taking apart the syncopation even further. Peeling back the swing behind the (co-opted) swing, she layers her brushes over existing syntax of the 1920s and 30s, disclosing that era’s own repudiation of the commercialized “pulp fiction” music diagnosed by Louis Armstrong. Her brushwork on synthesized drums here illustrates the avant-garde reach of both past and present: “The syntax is there for you to be able to create a new path of articulation, but there always comes a time when it comes back to where it began” (Muldrow, pers. comm, October 30, 2023).

    Georgia Anne Muldrow with Maya Kronfeld on keyboards as part of Justin Brown’s NYEUSI. 2018 Nublu Jazz Festival at SESC Pompeia in São Paulo, Brazil. Featuring Josh Hari, Chad Selph, Nadia Washington, Jaime Woods, Josh Hari. Photo courtesy of the author.  

    This intergenerational focus on rhythm lays bare the shortcomings of critical discussions of improvisation that center exclusively on melodic instruments, rather than on rhythm section instruments (drums, piano, bass) in their rhythmic functions. These trends are related to the willful misperception that blues is merely jazz’s more simple precursor, an erroneous historiography that is all too often used to justify the exclusion of Black artists and teachers from educational spaces. Counteracting these tendencies, Rhonda Benin reminds us in her vocal performance course of the same name that “Jazz Ain’t Nothing but the Blues” (Benin 2024). Benin, a vocal artist-educator and member of the Linda Tillery Cultural Heritage Choir makes clear that Blues as avant-garde roots music is precisely jazz’s chief template for ongoing revision, mutation and innovation (Tillery 1999, 2014; cf. Hunter 1998).

    In James Baldwin’s essay “On the Uses of the Blues” (1964), he argues that black music is engaged in a form of direct truth-telling that makes good on the very communicative function that hegemonic language has abandoned. Baldwin makes the surprising move of correlating blues singer Bessie Smith with fiction writer Henry James, arguing that both artists fulfill the promise of creating non-reductive, non-deadening knowledge in a dominant culture whose expertise lies in the “distinctly American inability (like a frozen place somewhere)…to perceive the reality of others” (Baldwin 1986: 14). This provocatively interracial, trans-disciplinary rewriting of the American canon is based on black music as the irreplaceable model for truth-telling (“information” in the language of jazz artists) in a culture of evasion and denial. Baldwin writes: “‘Gin House Blues’ is a real gin house. ‘Backwater Flood’ is a real flood. This is what happened, this is what happened, this is what it is” (59). Baldwin’s own rhythmic reiteration asks us to grapple with the idea that the blues song is a real gin house, rather than a reference to one—flying in the face of the sacrosanct use-mention distinction in Anglo-American analytic philosophy of language (Cappelen, Herman, Lepore, & McKeever, 2023). But we can correlate Baldwin’s astonishing claim (his subsumption of the mere mention of the blues to the uses of the blues) with an idea shared across Frankfurt School and Afro-modernist aesthetics that art works, particularly in social contexts of violent erasure, must embody rather than describe (M. Davis 1998; Kaufman 2005). Baldwin’s twist, however, is to insist on the primacy of these acts of artistic embodiment, claiming—from the standpoint of Black music—that the possibility of literal truth-telling hinges on such artistic acts.

    The modernist trope of exhaustion with available descriptions is greatly clarified by its Black critique of referentiality. But this critique is only possible thanks to the complex legacies of Black rhythmic forms in the music itself, legacies which are still often feared by and excluded from academically-codified philosophical aesthetics (and we can argue, are not fully theorized even in Baldwin’s essay, where discussions of lyric and lyricization are most prominent).

    Baldwin’s own use of “the blues” would have been invoking a holistic notion of the oneness of Black music (Wiley, pers. comm. May 15, 2009) that even now emphasizes the continuities among and between jazz, blues, gospel, R&B, funk, hip-hop and even those genres later coded as white, such as rock n’ roll and punk. Genre distinctions between jazz and blues are widely regarded among practitioners of the music as artificial, and too often marshalled to perform a colonizing function (Baraka 1963).  I’ve suggested that Black music according to Baldwin catalyzes the modernist critique of descriptive, propositional knowing. At the same time, however Baldwin also calls into question Kantian/Frankfurt School notions of aesthetic autonomy by insisting on the claim that in a coercive society, Black music is literal description. 

    The salience of rhythm in the U.S. and other regions of the African diaspora is due not only to the textural – and indeed textual! – richness and complexity of Black rhythmic forms but also to the systemic racism that has prevented descriptive content from being encoded in other channels; for example, in the lyrics, as Tyfahra Singleton has shown (Singleton 2011). James Baldwin writes: Americans are able to admire Black music only to the extent that “a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it” (Baldwin 1951; my emphasis). And what is being protected, he’s saying, is the white sense of self. The sentimental in American culture, we might say, is a defense against the tragic and the critical. 

    As a closing counterpoint, I’d like to offer an example from Ahmad Jamal’s album Happy Moods (Jamal, 1960). I’ve selected the track “Excerpts of the Blues” because we are often taught harmony on the model of a binary cliché between major chords as happy and minor chords as sad; but applying that false binary to the blues make the innovations of the blues form illegible (recall that Monk’s “Straight No Chaser” is also a blues!) The blues take us behind that notion of major as opposed to minor thirds, but more importantly, they take us beyond the emotional binaries that Baldwin diagnoses as so uniquely American, where “happiness” is a vapid, saccharine substitute for real joy. This is what makes Ahmad Jamal’s Happy Moods so interesting. In the piece entitled “Excerpts from the Blues,” Jamal demonstrates that major seven chords are part of the blues (whereas in codified jazz pedagogy, blues harmony is most frequently associated with dominant-seven chords). This then becomes a point of departure for other colors and hues, as when he lets C major 7 (the piece’s tonic or “home” key) get inflected by its minor 4 (F minor). Like Monk’s swinging of straight time, Jamal reclaims this major 7 sound not as empty optimism but as containing within it all the emotional complexities of the blues.  The form of the composition itself holds all that together: the A section is built on a 1 chord that is a major seven; then the B section is a traditional blues as we might expect it to be, based on the dominant sound.

    Every bar of “Excerpts of the Blues” is a masterclass; indeed, it is sometimes observed that one bar of Ahmad Jamal contains within it the whole future of recorded music. I have created a two-bar loop out of the material from 0:11-0:14, which I have notated (imperfectly!) as a bar of 4/4 followed by a bar of 2/4. At the “(Rhy)pistemologies: Thinking Through Rhythm” Conference, I improvised on the piano along with this six-beat loop, joined by Paris Nicole Strother, founder of the group We Are KING.[27] 

    Along with trio mates Israel Crosby on bass and Vernel Fournier on drums (brushes), Ahmad Jamal expands existing concepts of rhythm and harmony, but does so out of a capacious sense of spaciousness.  The array of interlocking parts means that it’s never just one thing. There is 1) the relationship between the drums and bass; 2) the relationship between Jamal’s two hands at the piano (note the unexpected accent on the triplet in the left-hand chord just as the harmony darkens and deepens); 3) the change in rhythmic feel within a single line in the right hand, where Jamal’s melodic phrase switches mid-stream from triplet time (swung) to march time (straight), and back again. With Ahmad Jamal, you feel the “both/and” of it all. The trio is playing different facets of the blues simultaneously, just as Jamal himself is showing us so many different facets of the harmony and rhythm, all at the same time. 

    Many thanks to Thomas Taylor and Tobin Chodos for help with notation-interpretation.

    References

    Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Armstrong, Louis. 1993 [1936]. Swing That Music. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.

    Atkinson,Daniel E. 2016. “‘Feets Don’t Fail Me Now”: Navigating an Unpaved, Rocky Road to, through and from the Last Slave Plantation’, in Civic Labours: Scholar Activism and Working-Class Studies, eds. Dennis A. Deslippe, Eric Fure-Slocum, and John W. McKerley. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

    Baldwin, James. 1986. Interview with David Adams Leeming. “An Interview with James Baldwin on Henry James,” The Henry James Review 8, no. 1: 47-56.

    Baldwin, James. 2011 [1964]. “The Uses of the Blues.” In The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, ed. Randall Kenan. New York: Vintage International.

    Baraka, Amiri. [LeRoi Jones].1963. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. Wesport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.  

    Baraka, Amiri. 2009. Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Baraka, Amiri [LeRoi Jones]. 2010 [1967]. “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music).” In Black Music. New York: Da Capo Press.

    Baraka, Amiri [LeRoi Jones]. 2010 [1963]. “Jazz and the White Critic.” In Black Music. New York: Da Capo Press.

    Batiste, Jon. 2021. “Jon Batiste on THELONIOUS MONK: STRAIGHT, NO CHASER.” Turner Classic Movies: TCM. Juneteenth – 6/19. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=868065477121956

    Baudelaire, Charles. 1994 [1857/1869]. Flowers of Evil & Paris Spleen, trans. William H. Crosby. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions.

    Benin, Rhonda. “Jazz Ain’t Nothing But the Blues.” The Jazzschool and California Jazz Conservatory. https://jazzschool.cjc.edu/event/jazz-aint-nothing-but-the-blues/ Accessed August 31, 2024.

    Berliner, Paul. 1994.The Infinite Art of Improvisation. London & Chicago: Chicago University Press.

    Best, Stephen. 2018. None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging and Aesthetic Life. Durham, NC.: Duke University Press.

    Cappelen, Herman, Ernest Lepore, and Matthew McKeever. 2023. “Quotation.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, eds. Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman. <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/quotation/>.

    Carr, Raymond. 2023. “The Dancing Monk and the Rhythm of Divine Life.” Harvard Divinity Bulletin. https://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/the-dancing-monk-and-the-rhythm-of-divine-life/.

    Christian, Barbara. 1987. “The Race for Theory.” Cultural Critique 6: 51-63.

    Chomsky, Noam. 1986. Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use. New York: Praeger.

    Chow, Rey. 2010 [1998]. “The Postcolonial Difference: Lessons in Cultural Legitimation.” In The Rey Chow Reader, edited by Paul Bowman. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Cobo-Piñero, Rocío. 2022. “Beyond Literature: Toni Morrison ‘s Musical and Visual Legacy for Black Women Artists.” Feminismo/s 40: 27-51.

    Coleman, Kwami. “Free Jazz and the ‘New Thing’: Aesthetics, Identity, and Texture, 1960-1966.” The Journal of Musicology 38 no.3: 261-295.

    Crawford, Margo Natalie. 2017. Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First Century Aesthetics. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.

    Davis, Miles. With. 1989. Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.  

    Davis, Angela Y. 1998 Blues Legacies and Black Feminisn: Gertrude “Ma”Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Pantheon Books.

    Davis, Eisa. 2025. The Essentialisn’t (paperback). New York: Theatre Communications Group.

    Defrantz, Thomas F. 2001. Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

    Deveaux, Scott. 1999. “The Jazzman’s True Academy.” In Bebop: A Social and Musical History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 202-235.

    DiPiero, Dan. 2021. “Race, Gender, and Jazz School: Chord-Scale Theory as White Masculine Technology,” Jazz and Culture 6, no.1: 52-77.

    Dunning, Jennifer. 1985. “DANCE REVIEW; 3 Icons Exploring Life’s Horrors and Joys.” The New York Times, July 27.

    Eiland, Howard. 2019. Notes on Literature, Film and Jazz. New York: Spuyten Duyvil.

    Edwards, Brent Hayes. 2001. “Evidence.” Transition, no. 90: 42-67.

    Feurzig, David. 2011 “The Right Mistakes: Confronting the ‘Old Question’ of Thelonious Monk’s Chops.” Jazz Perspectives 5, no. 1: 29-59.

    Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. with Melanie L. Zeck and Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. 2017. The Transformation of Black Music: The Rhythms, the Songs, and the Ships of the African Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University, Press.

    Floyd, Samuel A. The Power of Black Music: Interpreting its History from Africa to the United States. 1996. Oxford: Oxford Universeity Press.

    Gilroy, Paul. 1995. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. 1996. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Westport, Connecticut & London: Praeger.

    Greenfield-Sanders, Timothy. 2019. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. Magnolia Pictures.

    Hirsch, Fred.  1998. Thelonious: Fred Hirsch Plays Monk (Nonesuch).

    Haywood, Mark S. “Rhythmic readings in Thelonious Monk” Annual Review of Jazz

    Studies 7, (1994-1995): 25-45.

    Holiday, Harmony. “The Fraught Dance Between Artist and Interviewer in ‘Rewind & Play.’” March 18 2023. The New Yorker.

    Hunter, Tera. 1998. To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 

    Jamal, Ahmad. 1960. Happy Moods. Argo

    Kaufman, Robert. 2000. “Red Kant, or the Persistence of the Third Critique in Adorno and Jameson.” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4: 682-724.

    Kaufman, Robert. 2005. “Lyric’s Expression: Musicality, Conceptuality, Critical Agency.” Cultural

    Critique 60: 97-216 

    Kelley, Anthony. Interview with  Jerad Walker, Anisa Khalifa, and Charlie Shelton-Ormond. 2024. “The Hunt for a Long-Lost Musical Masterpiece.” WUNC Radio, May 30. https://www.wunc.org/podcast/the-broadside/2024-05-30/mary-lou-williams-jazz-history-duke-anthony-kelley

    Kelley, Robin D. G. 1999. “New Monastery: Thelonious Monk and the Jazz Avant-Garde.” Black

    Music Research Journal 19, no. 2: 135-168.

    Kelley, Robin D.G. 2009. Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. New York: Free Press.

    Kelley, Robin D.G. 2020. “‘Solidarity Is Not a Market Exchange’: An Interview with Robin D.G. Kelley.” BLACK INK. https://black-ink.info/2020/01/16/solidarity-is-not-a-market-exchange-an-interview-with-robin-d-g-kelley/

    Kronfeld, Maya. 2019. “The Philosopher’s Bass Drum: Adorno’s Jazz and the Politics of Rhythm,” Radical Philosophy 205: 34-47.

    Kronfeld, Maya. 2021. “Structure in the Moment: Rhythm Section Responsivity.”

    Kronfeld, Maya. 2025. “Spontaneity.” In Political Concepts: A Lexicon 7. Literature Edition. https://www.politicalconcepts.org/category/issue-7/

    Kronfeld, Maya. 2025. “The Indispensability of Form: A Kantian Approach to Philosophy and Literature.” In The Cambridge Companion to Philosophy and Literature, eds. Lanier Anderson and Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé (in press).

    Lacy, Steve. 2006. “Steve Lacy Speaks,” interview with Paul Gros-Claude, in Steve Lacy: Conversations, ed. Jason Weiss. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Leal, Jonathan.2023. Dreams in Double Time: Refiguring American Music. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Lewis, George E. 2002. “Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives.” Black Music Research Journal 22: 215-246. 

    Locke, Alain. 2022. The New Negro Aesthetic: Selected Writings, eds. Jeffrey C. Stewart and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Penguin Classics.

    Locke, Alain. 1936. The Negro and His Music. Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Press.

    Love, Michael J. 2021. “’Mix(tap)ing’: A Method for Sampling the Past to Envision the Future,” Choreographic Practices, 12:1 (March 2021): 29-45

    Lunceford, Jimmie. 1935. “The Melody Man.” The Complete Jimmie Lunceford Decca Sessions (Mosaic)

    McMullen, Tracy. “Jazz Education After 2017: The Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice and the Pedagogical Lineage.” Jazz and Culture 4, no. 2 (2021): 27–55.

    McPherson, Jadele. 2025. “Fugitive Acts: One Hundred Years of Afro-Cuban Performance,” in “Overcoming the Difficulty: The Racial and Gender Politics of Cuban Performance in Tampa.” PhD Dissertation, CUNY Graduate Center. 

    Monk, Thelonious. 1968. “Ugly Beauty.” Underground (Columbia Records).

    Monk, Thelonious. 1954. “Evidence.” Piano Solo (Disques Vogue).

    Monk, Thelonious.2012 [1958]. “Misterioso.” Misterioso (Concord).

    Moran, Jason. BlindFold Test with Dan Ouellette. Downbeat April 2018.

    Moran, Jason. 2015. In My Mind: Monk At Town Hall, 1959. Jazz Night in America. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2015/10/08/446866440/jason-moran-plays-thelonious-monks-town-hall-concert

    Morrison, Toni. 1998. Paradise. New York: A. A. Knopf.

    Moten, Fred. 2018. Stolen Life, vol. 2 of consent not to be a single being. Durham, NC.: Duke University Press.

    Moten, Fred. 2017. Black and Blur, vol. 1 of consent not to be a single being. Durham, NC.: Duke University press.

    Muldrow, Georgia Anne. 2023. Author Interview, Durham, N.C., October 30.

    Muldrow, Georgia Anne [as Jyoti]. 2020.  Mama, You Can Bet!  (SomeOthaShip Connect).

    https://someothaship.bandcamp.com/album/mama-you-can-bet

    Muldrow, Georgia Anne [as Jyoti]. 2013. Denderah (SomeOthaShip Connect).

                  https://someothaship.bandcamp.com/album/denderah

    Murray, Albert. 2017 [1976]. Stomping the Blues. 40th Anniversary Edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Okiji, Fumi. 2018. Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 

    Okiji, Fumi. 2017. “Storytelling in Jazz Work as Retrospective Collaboration.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Okiji, Fumi. 2025. Billie’s Bent Elbow: Exorbitance, Intimacy, and a Nonsensuous Standard. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press

    O’Meally, Robert G. 2022. Antagonistic Cooperation: Jazz, Collage, Fiction and the Shaping of African American Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Prouty, Kenneth E. “The History of Jazz Education: A Critical Assessment.” Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 16, no. 2.

    Ramsey, Guthrie P. 2004. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop. Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press.

    Ratliff, Ben. 2016. “Review: ‘We Are King,’ With Its Deep R&B Strategies, Is a Musicians’ Album.” February 13. New York Times

    Reed, Eric. 2011. The Dancing Monk (Savant).

    Reed, Anthony. Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Sawyer, Michael. 2025. “So What: Kind of More or Less Than All Blue(s).”Boundary 2 Online. Special Issue: “(Rhy)pistemologies: Thinking Through Rhythm.”

    Sawyer, Michael. 2025. The Door of No Return: A Phenomenology of Black(ness). Forthcoming.

    Singleton, Tyfahra.2011.  “Facing Jazz, Facing Trauma: Modern Trauma and the Jazz Archive.” Ph.D. diss., UC Berkeley.

    Somers, Steven. 1988. “The Rhythm of Thelonious Monk,” Caliban 4: 44-49.

    Taylor, Art. 1977. Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews. New York: Da Capo Press.

    Taylor, Thomas E., Jr.  It’s All About the Ride! The Ride Cymbal and Snare Drum Book. Forthcoming, 2025. 

    Taylor, Thomas E., Jr. “Comping With Miles and Wynton.” Jazz Drummers’ Workshop. Modern Drummer 285 (Aug. 2003): 94-96. https://www.moderndrummer.com/article/august-2003-volume-27-number-8/

    Tillery, Linda. 1999. Oral History Interview with Linda Tillery. March 29. University of Denver. https://mediaspace.du.edu/media/Oral+history+interview+with+Linda+Tillery%2C+1999/0_vy0u97zv/168664692

    Tillery, Linda. 2014. Interview: 2014 Community Leadership Awards. San Francisco Foundation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDyEJoR1zUI

    “Toni Morrison/ Max Roach: Performance lecture et batterie.” Festival d’automne, archive. https://www.festival-automne.com/en/edition-1994/toni-morrison-max-roach-performance-lecture-batterie. Accessed August 31, 2024.

    “Toni Morrison et Max Roach: la voix et le rythme.” 2020. Les Nuits de France Culture. https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/les-nuits-de-france-culture/toni-morrison-et-max-roach-la-voix-et-le-rythme-6555310April 18.

    Veneciano, Jorge Daniel. 2004. “Louis Armstrong, Bricolage, and the Aesthetics of Swing.” In Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, edited by Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin.

    Wideman, John Edgar. 1999. “The Silence of Thelonious Monk.” Callaloo 22, no. 3: 550-557.

    Wiley, Howard. May 5, 2019. Personal Communication.

    Wiley, Howard. 2019. The Angola Project, 12 Gates to the City. Compact Disc. https://www.discogs.com/release/10414938-Howard-Wiley-And-The-Angola-Project-Featuring-Faye-Carol-12-Gates-To-The-City?srsltid=AfmBOoqCHCqH4JKgIGmliHsr6t9dylE8TKgYmJFuortQWNDh2NLUpYnu

    Wilf, Eitan Y. 2014. School for Cool: The Academic Jazz Program and the Paradox of Institutionalized Creativity. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

    Williams, James Gordon. 2021. Crossing the Barlines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi.

    Wolfson, Susan and M. Brown, eds. 2000. Reading for Form. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 

    Notes

    * I am grateful to Erin Graff Zivin, Jonathan Leal, Michael J. Love, Paris Nicole Strother, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Thomas Taylor, Inger Flem and the participants of the “‘(Rhy)pistemologies’: Thinking Through Rhythm” conference at the USC Experimental Humanities Lab, and to Art Share Los Angeles. Special thanks to my longtime interlocutor, Michael Sawyer. Earlier drafts were presented at the 2024 ACLA in Montreal, and at the University of Pittsburgh, 53rd Annual Jazz Seminar. Special thanks to Aaron J. Johnson, Michael C. Heller, and Yoko Suzuki. My discussion of Ahmad Jamal here benefited from “Ahmad Jamal: In Appreciation,” moderated by Dr. Michael P. Mackey with panelists Dr. Alton Merrell, Dr. Nelson Harrison, and Judge Warren Watson. November 3, 2024.  University of Pittsburgh Hill Community Engagement Center. I thank Stephen Best, Anthony Kelley, Philip Rupprecht, Davina Thompson and the two anonymous reviewers for valuable discussions and feedback. I would like to acknowledge my late father Amichai Kronfeld (ז״ל) for teaching me drum exercises before I could walk. 

    [1] Guthrie P. Ramsey discloses “the ways in which blackness troubles the disciplinary boundaries among the subfields of music scholarship” (Ramsey 2004: 19). See George E. Lewis on “an ongoing narrative of dismissal, on the part of many…composers, of the tenets of African-American improvisative forms” (2002:216). My participation in Eisa Davis’ sound-based conceptual art work “The Essentialisn’t” informs my thinking here. For full text see E. Davis 2025 . See also https://www.jackny.org/whats-on/the-essentialisnt-5 .

    [2] Audio available via Les Nuits de France Culture 2020; cf. Cobo-Piñero 2022; Dunning 1995; Kronfeld 2024.

    [3] Recall that Amiri Baraka insisted that the term Aestheticin the “Black Aesthetic” is “useful only if it is not depoliticization of reference.” See Baraka’s 1989 essay entitled, “The ‘Blues Aesthetic’ and the ‘Black Aesthetic’: Aesthetics as the Continuing Political History of a Culture” (Baraka 2009: 9-28). He writes, “The Blues is not even twelve [bars] necessarily, the insistence on that form is formalism” (24). Baraka’s notion of “functional music” has offered a key challenge to reductively formalist paradigms of aesthetic autonomy (Baraka [Jones] 1963). For in-depth discussion of Baraka’s explicit and implicit poetics, see A. Reed 2021. Kwami Coleman illuminates the “ostensible [and ultimately untenable] wedge” in jazz criticism of the mid-60s “between writings on the avant-garde that focused on the music’s design and writings that addressed its social politics” (2021:268). The deeper readings of aesthetic form offered by Okiji and Davis all too often fell out of view in formalist criticism of the twentieth century and beyond. Kaufman (2000) and Wolfson (2000) critique and correct this reductive reception.

    [4] Guthrie P. Ramsey, following Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., writes: “The process of repetition and revision that characterizes these musical styles shows how black musicians and audiences have continually established a unified and dynamic ‘present’ through music” (Ramsey 2004: 36; Floyd 1996). See Baraka, “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music)” (Jones 1967).  For critical engagement with Baraka’s influential essay, see Ramsey 2004: 36.

    [5] See Berliner (1994), DiPiero (2021), Lewis (2002), Monson (1996), Wilf (2014) for critical perspectives on the dominating “paper-based” approach. See Prouty (2005) for an illuminating study redressing the limits of “prevailing institutionally based narratives of jazz education’s history.”

    [6] For an illustration via divergent interpretations of Monk’s “Round Midnight,” see DeVeaux 1999, 223-24. See Baraka as LeRoi Jones (1964) on the racial and epistemological problematics of notation when it comes to Monk’s and Louis Armstrong’s solos (14).

    [7] For an account of embodied knowledges and Afro-diasporic rhythmic form that denies the success of such attempts at erasure, see McPherson 2025.

    [8] See also Fumi Okiji’s discussion of Muhall Richard Abrams (Okiji 2018).

    [9] See also pianist Barry Harris: “Coleman Hawkins would say, ‘I play movements; I don’t play chords’” (Harris 2011).  https://tedpanken.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/its-barry-harris-84th-birthday-a-link-to-a-2011-post-of-a-downbeat-article-and-several-verbatim-interviews-conducted-for-the-piece/.

    [10] See Lewis (2002). See DiPiero (2021).

    [11] See the unprecedented article by Taylor in Modern Drummer featuring trumpet and piano transcriptions from Kind of Blue rendered for drumset, “Comping With Miles and Wynton” (T. Taylor 2003) and his forthcoming book, It’s All About the Ride!: The Ride Cymbal and Snare Drum Book (T. Taylor 2025).  For further resources, see https://www.thomasdrum.com/teaching

    [12] See Samuel A. Floyd: “In Monk’s playing, almost every event is unexpected” (Floyd 1995: 82)

    [13] See Kronfeld, 2019. See also Kelley on his recent completion of Mary Lou Williams’ unfinished last work “History: A Wind Symphony,” performed by the Duke Wind Symphony on April 13, 2024. Interview in Walker, Khalifa and Shelton-Ormond, 2024

    [14] For a major musical and ethnographic intervention in the historiography of swing, based on research at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, see Howard Wiley & The Angola Project, 12 Gates to the City, 2010, compact disc. See also Atkinson 2016.

    [15] See Morrison’s challenge to Ralph Ellison: “Invisible to whom?” (Greenfield-Sanders 2019)

    [16] In contrast, see Robin D. G. Kelley on Monk’s “rhythmical melodies” and his stride piano mastery, as heard from the perspective of Herbie Nichols (RDG Kelley 2009: 98-99).  And see Somers 1988, Haywood 1994-1995.

    [17] See R.D.G. Kelley 2009: 46, 231-232 on Monk’s dancing reflecting his desired rhythmic pulse for the band; for further philosophical implications centering swing see Carr 2023.

    [18] Jason Moran comments in a Downbeat Blindfold Test on Carmen McRae’s lyricized arrangement of “Straight No Chaser,” entitled “Get It Straight”: “The lyric that jumped out was ‘The time is a dancer’ because that’s one of the most important things about… Monk” (Moran/Alouette 2018: 98).

    [19] See also Baraka on polyrhythm as a Pan-African “acknowledgment of several…‘places’ … existing simultaneously” (Baraka 2009: 23).

    [20] See Robin D.G. Kelley for an account of Monk’s beating by police in Delaware: “According to Nica…one cop started beating on his hands with a billy club, his pianist’s hands” (R.D.G. Kelley 2009: 254). See also Art Blakey on Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and Monk: “I watched… how they destroyed [Bird] and Bud and the way they’re destroying Thelonious Monk now” (A. Taylor 1979: 248).

    [21] “The one” (i.e. the first beat of the measure or phrase) is the implicit temporal marker that serves as the point of departure for each rhythmic phrase and is loaded with metaphysical significance.  Pianist Jon Batiste describes Monk’s “Evidence” as exemplifying a technique he calls “the rhyming of notes” (Batiste 2021).

    [22] Both Brent Hayes Edwards and Jonathan Leal have written brilliantly on Monk’s composition as making palpable “fragmentary evidence” (Edwards 2001; Leal 2023). Amiri Baraka’s earlier reading flips the script by stressing an Africanist epistemology: “Evidence, Monk says… [Black] life is meant, consciously, as evidence…Everything is in it, can be used, is then, equal  — reflecting the earliest economic and social form, communalism” (Baraka 1996: 21-22).

    [23] See Kendrick Scott, “A Community Post: Thelonious Monk’s Evidence ” Recorded May 23 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9MKcem0tAs. For Scott’s latest release Corridors (Blue Note, 2025), see http://www.kendrickscott.com/

    [24]  See citations of Ran Blake and Chick Corea in Feurzig 2011.

    [25] See Eric Porter’s discussion of Locke’s ambivalence: “Locke’s optimism was tempered by a recognition that the popularity of jazz threatened the integrity of the music as a black expression”(Porter 2002: 47; Locke 2022).

    [26] Crawford focuses on Langston Hughes’ Ask Your Mama, written after Newport Jazz Festival, where the speaker asks “What’s gonna happen to my music?” (Crawford 2017, 28).  

    [27] https://www.weareking.com/about. See “‘We Are King,’ With Its Deep R&B Strategies, is a Musicians’ Album” (Ratliff 2016).  

  • Michael E. Sawyer–So What: Kind of More or Less Than All Blue(s)

    Michael E. Sawyer–So What: Kind of More or Less Than All Blue(s)

    Image taken by the author.

    This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin. 

    So What: Kind of More or Less Than All Blue(s)

    Michael E. Sawyer

    Toni Morrison, deep in the complexity of the novel Beloved, asks a question for all writers that is relevant for the thinking that I am going to present here: “…how can I say things that are pictures?” (Morrison 2004)  Voicing what Morrison has written, the author saying through the writing of “things” that are the images of the transgenerational and transsubjective mode of cognition, Rememory, that is the engine of Beloved, introduces the technology of sound that is the preoccupation the guiding concept here: Rhythm. This allows us to propose, a series of questions:

    1. How can I write things that are sounds?
    2. How can I make sounds that are pictures?

    I want to begin again with the technology of shattering as a form of making that will serve as the common mode of inquiry for this exploration; adding a question to the ones that have begun to pile up: how can I say things that are broken? A text that allows us into this question is Makoto Fujimura’s Art & Faith where the artist writes:

    Kintsugi, the ancient Japanese art form of repairing broken tea ware by reassembling ceramic pieces, creates anew the valuable pottery, which now becomes more beautiful and more valuable than the original vessel. (Fujimura 2004)

    This art form consists of, in the first place the search for a beautiful object, that then, in the second place, must be shattered, to serve as the beginning of a new beginning, when in the third place it is reassembled. Similar to the limitations of writing, Kintsugi is not a practice that can be presented in its totality—finding/shattering/reassembling—and it is only through the final movement that we can reverse the journey from caterpillar to butterfly across the temporal smear of the metamorphic journey. In the 16th century, according to Fujimura, “Kintsugi is likely to have been refined out of tea culture … and the aesthetic of Sen no Rikyū.” (Fujimura) Rather than kill a servant who shattered a prized piece of tea ware, one of Rikyū’s acolytes had it reassembled, “using the Urishi Japanese lacquering technique with gold gilding.”[1] What all this means is “[t]hat Japanese kin stands for ‘gold’ and tsugi means to reconnect” but tsugi also has, significantly, connotations of “connecting to the next generation.” (Fujimura) 

    Stitch 1

    I want to be intentional here and in the first act of connecting broken and separated shards emphasize the connection between generations exemplified by these Japanese art practices to Morrison’s project of dealing with the crisis of the Middle Passage with Rememory. “And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to someone else.” (Morrison)

    Fujimura, in his text, visits his native Japan and finds himself at the 6th Dimension Café to think with Nakamura-san, “a youthful Kintsugi master…in the midst of vinyl records.”[2] That afternoon, Fujimura, and Nakamura-san work through the dimensions in order to arrive at a definition of the Sixth Dimension, which is where I want to linger for a moment before, ultimately, proposing a Seventh. Fujimura writes:

    We live, let’s say in the 3rd dimension trying the best we can to deal with time and space. The idea of Kintsugi mending…perhaps is the 4th dimension. The 5th dimension…will be what Nakamura-san showed me next; an 18th century teacup mended with early 20th century fragments…Nakamura-san opened a 6th dimension…it’s the Kintsugi master searching for fragments and broken pots, not for the purpose of mending them, but for contemplation. (Fujimura)

    Following the logic of the space that Fujimura has presented for our thinking I want to turn attention to the vinyl records that line the walls of the 6th Dimension Café. Out of that gathering I will pull two objects for our work in an effort to participate in the practice of existing in the 6th dimension, mindfully, and its preoccupation with shards. Shard #1 is Sonny Rollins’ side The Saxophone Colossus that is itself a shard made up of jagged fragments of other broken objects. The particular part of the Shard of the album that allows us this practice is the first track, “St. Thomas”. A fragment that is made up of a rhythmic fragmenting and rupture of what I will call here the coherent incoherence of the undisturbed disruption of the rhythmic necessity of the Blues.

    The second object of preoccupation is the recording that serves as the disciplining framework of this thinking, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue that I want to shatter further to focus our attention on the shimmering omnipresence of the bearable lightness of the darkness of something less and more than the most velvety shades of dark blue.

    Shard 1: Saint Thomas

    I want to be careful and in doing so explicit about the stitching together that is here. Morrison asks us about representation and the break between the thing and the expression of the thing. Fujimura regards his art practice as an act of faith that is informed by the art of pulling together the pieces of a whole that has been broken. Returning with never having ever left, it is Morrison’s cognitive realm of the recognition of the non-existence of the breach that is the weaving together of the break that is already full. It is the lack of faith of St. Thomas the Apostle, who probes the stigmata of the risen Christ in order to prove to himself, in a deficit of faith, that this figure is who he purports to be. St. Thomas is the ancestral home of the saxophonist and the tune of the same name that erupts for our consideration.

    I want to go to Sonny’s second solo and examine how the artist breaks it and then, in the practice of sonic Kintsugi, puts it back together in an act of blasphemy in the shadow of the colossus. I want to point us to the moment of the breaking that preoccupies me here that is underscored by what I believe is a gasp of disbelief from master percussionist Max Roach. Sonny finally and belatedly disrupts the blues, approaching the resolution of the line from another direction to satisfy the need for completion that is only coherent because Roach knows the form and practice of that which Sonny has shattered for the purpose of reassembly.

    I want to lay alongside this shattering a shattering of the shattering by putting back together what Rollins broke before leaving this object as Fujimura and Nakamura-san have allowed us to consider the implication and aesthetic value of its existence as sublime in its shattered nature.

    Shard 2: Oh Ye of Little Faith

    Third Citizen:  We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do; for, if he shows us his wounds and tells us his deeds, we are to put our tongues into those wounds and speak for them.

    Coriolanus, Act 2 Scene 3

    William Shakespeare

    I want to first present at least two trigger warnings that will introduce my examination of the opening object of the canonical Kind of Blue. First, the album is in the wrong order. Second, Cannonball Adderley walks off with every solo on the album.

    The first instance of blasphemy is exemplified by an ongoing conversation Prof. Kronfeld (Maya) and I have that has spanned over ten years and elaborates itself in a back and forth between us that trades objects and thinking. Here is one on this point.

    Me: I figured out why I never really “got” “Blue in Green”. The order of the album should be “So What,” “Freddie Freeloader,” “All Blues,” “Flamenco Sketches,” then!!! and only then “Blue in Green.” It slows down the pace and I just need to get to “All Blues” after “So What” and “Freddie Freeloader.”

    Kronfeld: I really wonder who decided the album order. Would not be surprised if it was NOT Miles. And as usual your attention to temporality and it’s non-ornamental function prevails!! (pers. comm., 2024)

    What this conversation implies is that Miles, or whoever organized the album, is practicing the same type of disruption of the resolution of the blues that we witnessed in the play between Rollins and Roach within the confines of St. Thomas.

    As is clear from the title of this paper, I want to center the opening moment of the album “So What,” and think with and through it to unearth its relationship to the question of generative disruption, and re-constitution. I’m most interested in the way in which the first opportunity we have to live with the song unfolds by thinking with Miles fully mindful of his iconic and predictable admonition that if you knew what he was thinking you’d be him. An interesting improvisation of Descartes…I think like Miles therefore I am Miles. We will leave that to the side for now.

    This reveals the primary point of separation for us to develop some way to suture the break(s), so to speak, between artist and listener. To this point I am most interested in the in the long durée of the song from its birth at an iconic recording session and the way it evolves over the next several years.

    Careful attention to the life of Miles Davis reveals an anecdote. Miles never owned a car that was not constructed by Ferrari or Maserati. For my part, the opening of the version of “So What” on the album is resonant of Miles’s love affair with Italian automotive art.

    The start of the original album version is exploratory. Miles has just picked up the car and walks slowly around it, his fingers, that normally are employed to tease notes from his horn, trail over the hand formed sheet metal before he finally lowers himself into the driver’s seat and turns over the engine that rumbles to life. There is an existential or perhaps even ontological gesture I want to mark. Ferraris are the product of an unbroken genealogy back to the art practice of the Italian Renaissance. Miles didn’t create the car, but he is in the position to appreciate, operate, and stress it to unearth its performance. Similarly, “So What” is the product of an unbroken line back to the foundation of the blues and Miles is a steward of that apparition.

    The rhythm section here serves as the engine, Bill Evans on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and the pistons in the form of Jimmy Cobb, on traps.

    Stitch 2

    Bill Evans helps us here with his liner notes to Kind of Blue that bind us to the framing we have been pursuing all along writing:

    There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere.

    The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see well find something captured that escapes explanation.

    This conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful reflections, I believe, has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician. (Evans 1959)

    I am interested here in thinking about the breach between what we have learned about the series of unbroken lines I am attentive to here. In this instance the one between object, breaking, and repair that Evans wants to further blur by speaking to the need to produce the coherent line, without discernible breach between thought and performance. This analogy, pursued by Evans, takes us back to Morrison’s question regarding saying something about or that is a picture. Here the pianist wants us to understand that the album before us is a picture converted to sound; broken while at the same time seamlessly related to the larger form that provides the linkage necessary for proper translation and evolution that can be rendered coherent.

    Miles has started the engine, and its note arrives in the form of Jimmy Cobb on ride who makes the cymbal shimmer, emitting a form of unbroken light that revolves around the groove… a lighthouse guarding a rocky and dangerous coastline. Cobb defines the contours of the groove while at the same time filling it to the point of overflowing and then, in an act of kenosis, lets the air out of it before filling it again. This is the back and forth of swing, the pendulum that flows hither and yon that allows me to take up the second instance of blasphemy.

    What we know about the pendulum and its swing is that it loses power with each trip through the arc of its travel. In the world we inhabit this means that you can hold a cannonball to your nose, literally touching it, release the 300-pound piece of iron and let it swing and stand your ground because on its return it will be short of hitting your face. It has expended energy on its trip there and back so it will eventually come to rest. This is one type of swing and one type of cannonball.

    This does not apply to the Cannonball otherwise known as Julian Adderley. I want to contextualize the praise I intend to heap on Adderley here over and above that I grant to the play of Miles, Trane, and Evans. Miles is eager to leave bop behind. Clap hands, here comes Charlie. Cannonball represents a shattering of the shattering of the project that Miles has insisted upon; playing with and thorough modes which the altoist demonstrates is the invitation to find the blues-based possibility in that problem. Miles is fly fishing. Cannonball is trolling the bottom with stink bait for catfish. He is pure soul and his insistence on anchoring Miles’s project to the vernacular of the blues is revelatory. It frees it and allows us to flatten the relationship between rhythm section and soloist blasting the hole in the blues that James Brown will fill. The relationship, no, marriage between Cannonball, Paul Chambers, and the metronomic Jimmy Cobb cannot be put asunder. Evans insists upon comping with the cords and here I mean cords not chords woven by Miles and these three collectively become the Third Citizen of Coriolanus breaking the bond, sticking their tongue in the wound and giving it voice. Clap hands here comes Charlie.

    Shard 3: So What Now

    Here we are: at some distance yet closer than ever to the vinyl we pulled from the shelves of the 6th Dimension Café, we find ourselves years later in the past in Copenhagen. Cannonball has been told to lay out to the point of not making the trip and Bill Evans has been replaced with the symmetrical blues shouting of the sonic architect Wynton Kelly. Cobb and Chambers remain, forming the engine block that Miles intends to modify seeking not just more but a different form of performance. Now there is no need for the slow walk around the machine, it is already fueled and ready to go, and Miles snaps off the time to signal the breakneck pace he requires. They, the collectivity, understand everything there is to know about this thing and this tour is the angle quickest for flight for Coltrane, the event horizon of his trip to beyond. I am curious here about this process that is the mana of sonic art but the poison of literature: plagiarism, self or otherwise. So what?

    These restatements of the case, over and over, night after night on this European tour are worth exploring in detail. “So What” becomes like a sea monster that has some parts of its body above water, recognizable, and others below the surface. All of them connected and labyrinthine. The version we are thinking with in Copenhagen witnesses Miles returning to the language of bop that he has tried to abandon. The modal complexity of “So What” invites or perhaps requires the rhythmic and harmonic intricacy of bebop. Clap Hands. Here comes Charlie.

    In the other versions on this tour, Miles finishes his solo in his classic form. Laconic. Clipping off the final sentence leaving the listener to wonder if they missed the final farewell, never to hear from him again. Not here. He hangs around daring Coltrane to get rid of him by blowing him away on a flight of fancy that the crowd boos; sound that is edited from the recording. Trane is preoccupied with the line he is exploring; this is the tour that includes the iconic and revealing interview when he answers the following question from the too hip to be hip radio host:

    Interviewer: Would you say, would you say that you’re trying to play everything you hear?

    Artist: Well…

    Interviewer: At one time, or something like that?

    Artist: No, there – there are some set things that I know, some devices that I know, harmonic devices that I know that will take me out of the ordinary path, you see? If I use them. But I haven’t played ‘em enough and I’m not familiar with them enough yet to take the one single line through ‘em so I play all of ‘em, you know, tryin’ to acclimate my ear so I can hear.

    I mentioned earlier that Cannonball had opened the portal between this improvisational form and the blues that is filled by funk. There is joy in repetition. The time is short, but I want to propose that the James Brown walks the road Cannonball paves all the while repeating the groove until he has exhausted it of its kinetic energy only after he has been able to acclimate his ear. Doin’ it to Death. When JB calls for horns, he is adding that to the groove to discipline it before it slips the tether and spirals out of control. Trane’s horn serves as warning to the possibility of opening doors that are hidden in the groove that cannot be closed. A shattering that can only be repaired with more breaking. These are the two paths that lead to the 7th Dimension.

    Conclusion

    I want to return to the beginning in order to get to the end and truncate Morrison’s question, rendering it as “How do I say things?” Fujimura, along with Nakamura-san propose a method: Make the beautiful object. Break the beautiful object. Repair the now more beautiful object for the breaking. Recall the sixth dimension stops short here, using the broken object as the site of meditation and contemplation in service of the production of the new thing.

    Morrison calls this Rememory, the encounter with a sufficiently shattered object with another sufficiently shattered object both of which mix the shards together so the separation, time and place of breaking, and the possibility of joining is lost to the point of mattering in not mattering.

    “Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.” (Morrison)

    Sonny is rememory-ing. We left unremarked his calypsonian reading of the blues or vice versa that itself is another shattering, a rememory that belongs to somebody else, but the Brooklyn born Saxophone Colossus has grown up with the sound of his Island ancestors all around him. How it arrives or who it belongs to or its situatedness in or out of time and place is the thing of the thing. He plays with the rememory of the blues and shatters it by failing to resolve it which becomes the object of confusion and upon reflection the practice of kintsugi by Max Roach who is determined to reassemble the tea set and is taken aback when Sonny steps on the already broken porcelain. And so what?

    It is all more and less than the darkest shades of kinda blue(ish) because Miles is in flight from Bird only to find that it is swing that sung and delivered him to where had already always been. Clap Hands. Here comes Coltrane.

    None of this is possible without Nakamura-san’s Sixth Dimension, the form, practice, and café. Recall it is the identification of the broken object for purposes of contemplation that is the stuff of the 6th form. I want to propose that the 7th Dimension is both a contemplative and active practice of working with objects that are properly broken which requires that we identify the component parts of the thing in order to identify where this ends and that begins.

    “So What” exemplifies this because there is no melody per se. It has already distanced itself from the concept of song and in that separation the shards become the thing they were not meant to be: a song in the hands of other artisans.

    Literature—the practice of writing—resists this generative technology. The journey from Morrison to Fujimura along with Nakamura-san, to tarry with Max and Sonny, to arrive at the limitations of the album version that only gets itself figured out by hundreds of acts of what writers and critics of writers would call plagiarism, is needed in this world so we can say things that are pictures.

    References

    Evans, Bill. 1959. Liner notes to Miles Davis, Kind of Blue. Columbia Records.

    Fujimura, Makoto. 2021. Art + Faith: A Theology of Making. New Haven: Yale University Press.

    Morrison, Toni. 2004. Beloved. New York: Vintage Books.  

  • Jamal Batts–Black Queer Cadence: Hearing as Diasporic Seeing

    Jamal Batts–Black Queer Cadence: Hearing as Diasporic Seeing

    Marlon Riggs, Anthem, 1991, film still. Copyright Signifyin’ Works, by courtesy of Frameline Distribution. 

    This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin. 

    Black Queer Cadence: Hearing as Diasporic Seeing

    Jamal Batts

    Rhythm is as central to Black film as it is to the blackness of life. I’m interested in thinking about sound as foundational to what scholar Darius Bost terms the Black Gay Cultural Renaissance of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, might provide a reading of works from this era. Here, I will take two paths toward a theory of sound in and as Black queer diasporic cinema. I will reserve my comments to two interrelated elements, rhythm and the voice. I will work to draw out how the filmmaker Marlon Riggs’s montage and poet Essex Hemphill’s voice in various experimental film works lay a rhythmic mark on the constellation of the varied labors referred to as Black film.

    One unlikely source to begin thinking the itinerary of rhythm and Black queer film might be scholar Robeson Taj Frazier’s recently published book KAOS Theory: The Afro-Kosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell, about experimental L.A. Rebellion filmmaker Ben Caldwell’s astro-grounded aesthetics. Caldwell, the founder of KAOS Network—a media arts education center and performance space in historically Black Leimert Park—produces work that evinces an artistic hydraulics which moves across scales. In remarks delivered during the 1992 Black Popular Culture conference filmmaker, Arthur Jafa, Caldwell’s former student at Howard University, proposes an aesthetic agenda for the Black filmmaker—to transpose the tonality and movement of Black music into the making of Black film. In Jafa’s forward to KAOS Theory, he reveals that it is in Caldwell’s work where he first encounters what he terms a “fully realized jazz cinema” (Jafa 2023: 6). Frazier’s work guides the reader through the aesthetic maneuvers that visualize this improvisatory impulse in Caldwell’s visual practice, or what scholar Fumi Okiji might describe as “the play, the wrestling and cooperation, of disparate parts” that is the “fecund blackness” of jazz (Okiji 2018: 6, 4).  

    In the 1980s, Caldwell co-founded the performance ensemble Hollywatts which included actor Roger Guenveur Smith, musicians Mark Broyard and Vernon “King Oji” Vanoy, and filmmaker Wesley Groves. Hollywatts employed video work, hip-hop, reggae, vocalization, theater, and musicianship in order to forge uncommon connections amongst distinct community formations. Their performances and Caldwell’s film works were projected on site via monitors controlled by Caldwell and Groves. Their projections were manipulated in such a way that they would tremble, pause, deform, and play in reverse—a live improvised rhythmic visual response to the sounds of Hollywatts’s musical performance (Batts 2024). Hollywatts’s practice gave presence to the always immanent liveness of the moving image. Caldwell’s and Groves’ skill as filmmakers and projectionists “enabled Roger to engage in a call-and-response with the videos; he would ask the screen a question, and Ben’s edited videos answered with an image or cinematic sequence. Then the image was rewound and reshown when Roger repeated the question or made a statement, he and the screen engaging in back-and-forth chant” (Frazier 2023: 178).

    In this essay, I argue that much of the Black queer experimental film of the 1980s and 90s, considered in the most expansive of terms, utilizes both sonic and visual rhythms to challenge the racializing mechanisms that seek to submerge the queer potency of blackness across the Black diaspora. This work, resonant with Hollywatts’s extension of the cinematic via Black sonic methodologies (i.e. call-and-response), is conversant with Michael Gillespie’s concept film blackness, which seeks to “[suspend] the idea of black film by pushing for a more expansive understanding of blackness and cinema” (Gillespie 2016: 5).  Gillespie queries “What do we mean when we say black film? Black directors, actors, or content?…What does the designation black film promise, and what does it disallow?” (5). Part of the impetus for this line of questioning is to expand the objects and modes of study available for understanding how blackness becomes visible on screen and the variegated work its figuration performs. The avant-garde musical methodologies employed in experimental Black queer cinema offer a potent avenue for thinking the import of (Black) sexuality, in its filmic deployment, as a rhythmic-visual tool advancing a processual blackness.

    Visual Polyrhythms

    In his forward to KAOS Theory, Jafa describes a scene from Caldwell’s 1977 film I&I: An African Allegory that makes me see Riggs’s 1991 experimental film Anthem with new eyes. Anthem is an 8-minute short film/music video soundtracked by house music, punctuated pauses in the rhythm, and a whiplash sound effect. Riggs dances in front of a white tarp graffitied in memorialization to the late Joseph Beam, the progenitor of Black gay cultural production as the editor of the first anthology of Black gay men’s poetry and prose. Certain motifs flash briefly but effectively, punching through the frame and rhythmically playing as what could be termed imagistic beats interrupting the moving image. I’m most interested in the still images of drag queens and trans women, including the legendary activist Marsha P. Johnson, which work in the montage alongside Riggs’s image and stock footage of West African dance from the continent. Although, as Stuart Hall has argued, we always risk the flattening of Africa with the excision of context, the images of moving and leaping bodies conspire to both thicken and collapse our vision of time (Hall 1989). I would argue that this is accomplished through rhythm.

    The house music that is played throughout is given a visual polyrhythm via figures whose appearance does not necessarily align with the metronomic back beat of the music, but form their own contrapuntal incision. This maneuver is heightened in scenes of dance filmed at Club Bella Napoli (the dancers are listed as the Bella Boys in the credits). The scenes give off the feeling of a strobe light, where vision oscillates between granular clarity and complete darkness. The metaphorical strobes do not align with the soundtrack, much like in Riggs’s experimental documentary from 1991, Tongues United, where still newspaper obituary photographs of those who have died from AIDS-related complications are flashed sullenly in and out of time with the sound of a heartbeat and then a fast-ticking clock, ending with a picture of the director himself in preparation for his own certain death. I would place the sound of (Riggs’s?) heartbeat in dialogue with the mimetic sound of the heart in another experimental short film/music video from the era; white filmmaker John Sanborn’s Untitled (1989), an impassioned exploration of choreographer Bill T. Jones’s grief for and memory of his late partner and collaborator Arnie Zane through dance, montage, and music. The video ends with Jones forcefully and rhythmically beating his chest, the sound and echo giving the impression of a powerful though slowing heart in motion as Sanborn gradually pans the camera away from Jones and the lights fade to black, leaving Jones in the otherworldly place of his deceased partner’s voice, which provides the background for the film.

    In Anthem, as in Tongues and Untitled, it is as if the beat were a form of rhythmic visual accumulation. In Jafa’s elaboration of Caldwell’s film I&I, he focuses on “a sequence… composed entirely of black-and-white still images that triggered such a shift in my thinking, that I’m still working out its implications… There’s a staccato montage of images that demonstrated conclusively the possibility of imposing on cinema the feel and flow of black music” (Jafa 2023: 16). Caldwell’s mixing of photographer Diane Arbus’s imagery with Black representations leads Jafa to ask “How was it” then, “black cinema?” and Caldwell’s later work made Jafa question “Does cinema have any potential therapeutic value?” (7). I’m interested in this provocation to questioning because it speaks to Gillespie’s assertion that “black film is always a question, never an answer” (Gillespie 2016: 16). Potentially, a focus on the rhythm of film blackness, as opposed to the Black on film, can go some way toward keeping the collapse of racial “referent and representation” in abeyance (2). Other still images that Riggs calls upon to flash on screen are ACT UP’s slogan Silence = Death, the American flag, and the Pan-African flag in red, black, and green. At the end of the video, all of these images flash, waver, and visually layer as blues musician Blackberri sings “America” a cappella while Hemphill, looking directly at the camera, confidently recites in his deep voice, with a slight lisp, the words to his poem “American Wedding,” here an erotic suture to a mesh of moving imagery without certain confluence.

    The film is, in an aslant way, conversant with Caldwell’s Hollywatts and what Frazier describes as the group’s use of certain “film/video images” and “audio cues” as “predetermined ‘constants [which] served as the groups collective metronome supplying them with the foundational indicators, cues, and steady pulse to perform and ‘play in time.’ It was within the gaps and breaks between these cues that they experimented, improvised, and cultivated new interpretations. Such improvisatory shifts were often rhythmic…” (Frazier 2023: 178). The use of improvisation as a technique in the cutting and editing of sound and video—a visual rearticulation of jazz improvisation—allows for readings of blackness as recombinant and always already in process as opposed to fixed (Linscott 2016). Thinking with Riggs’s Anthem as improvising with the prerecorded audio of Black queer house music, American and Pan-African visual and sonic iconography, archival still images of Black queer life, movement imagery, and stock and pre-recorded footage opens a new texture for considering the ways in which his work signifies an ongoingness, an enduring aesthetic and corporeal beat at some distance from the registers of mourning, melancholia, and political malaise and toward what Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman calls the Black ecstatic or “black queer… representational practices that punctuate the awful now with the joys and possibilities of the beyond (of alternate worlds and ways)” (Abdur-Rahman 2018: 344). Riggs’s non-linear, rhythmic, and arrhythmic experimental juxtapositions of video and sound picture compressed, dense, and compassionate relations out of step with normative scripts and clock time, allowing for dynamic, mutable, and vital interpretations.

    The Black Queer Ensemblic

    In the DVD extras from the Frameline distributed version of Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied there is footage of poet Essex Hemphill practicing his narration for the documentary. Unlike the talking head footage featured in the actual film, here Hemphill’s head is for the most part faced down, looking at the pages from which he’s reading as opposed to the direct and straightforward glare he delivers in Tongues. When he does look up from the page, it’s an obvious look behind the camera at Riggs as if for approval. He looks to the director, a fellow Black gay man, for confidence as to his delivery. Two things stand out to me about these images. The first, is my own surprise at seeing Hemphill unsure of himself. On screen, both visually and vocally there is an assuredness to his posture and tone that did not prepare me for Hemphill in rehearsal for his part, in the process of steadying his body for the screen.

    There’s much yet to be written on Hemphill. There’s that striking voice, its particular grain evoking the work it was put to across open mics, college campuses, bookstores, and films throughout his life. His voice is special. There’s a reason it was so often utilized. It’s the anoriginary Black queer vocal, strong and sensual, the erotic considering the pornographic, a vocal caress (Lorde 1984). It has the quality of leadership in its steadfastness, found consequential under a context of heightened premature death. His voice could also be read at the level of pace, the quality of his pauses and repetition. His masterful control of his instrument, from the page to film, is why hearing difference in that voice is so shocking; like when his voice cracks when facing his mortality as an ambivalent Person with AIDS at the Black Nations/Queer Nations? conference in 1995. His is also a voice that requested a complement. His live performance work was often performed in chorus. What would it mean to read that replayed instrument that is the materiality of Hemphill’s voice on film as music?

    The second aspect of this footage that draws my attention is its focus on the sound of the voice. Hemphill and Riggs share moments of poetic dialogue, reciting poems meant to be read in tandem, that require their voices to layer and rhythmically meld. At one point in this behind-the-scenes footage, Riggs admonishes himself for forgetting to pause as Hemphill had suggested. His rereading of the text is lovely, varying mightily in tone, intonation, and texture as to communicate the anguish of silence and the multitude of inscriptions it bears. The intense focus on sound between two stars of the Black Gay Renaissance reveals a keen understanding of its import in this moment. In particular, the sound of Hemphill’s voice is a leitmotif in Black queer cinema. It is utilized in Riggs’s films Tongues Untied, Anthem, and Black Is…Black Ain’t (1995), Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989), Aishah Simmons’ No! A Rape Documentary (2006), Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson’s A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (1995), and as the narrator’s voice in a documentary on Black gay men and transgender women based in Philadelphia titled Out of the Shadows.

    If, as Amy Lawrence has argued, the projection of the seamless convergence of sound and image that is film produces a “fantasmic body” which Mary Ann Doane refers to as a “unity, cohesion, and hence, an identity… holding at bay the potential trauma of dispersal, dismemberment, difference,” then it could be reasonably argued that Hemphill’s voice is an indispensable joint that holds together a Black queer body (in pieces) (Lawrence 1992: 179; Doane 1980: 45). I, of course, use the term “joint” here in reference to Brent Hayes Edward’s deployment of the term in his elaboration of the underexplored gaps between the politics and cultural productions of diasporic and Pan-African artists and organizers thought to be a cohesive body. As Edwards theorizes, “The joint is a curious place, as it is both the point of separation… and the point of linkage… Articulation is always a strange and ambivalent gesture, because finally, in the body, it is only difference—the separation between the bones and members—that allows movement” (Edwards 2001: 66). I want to consider this difference as movement via the voice of Hemphill as it crosses the ocean between the United States and Britain in two films that feature his voice (as well as that of blues singer Blackberri).

    Both Julien and Riggs highlight a number of Hemphill’s poems and share one entitled “Now We Think.” Julien, in Looking for Langston, uses the work during a sparsely decorated scene where a Black man sits while watching a pornographic film. Alone, Hemphill shares the well-known words “Now we think, as we fuck, this nut might, kill us” in a rather straightforward manner. The film pictures the Black man cropped in shadows, smoking a cigarette with close ups of his mouth. When the poem mentions the possibility of “a pin-sized hole in the condom, a lethal leak,” Julien cuts to a close up on his pursed lips with the slightest of openings. At the mention of a kiss, the lips reappear. When Hemphill utters “turn to stone,” there is a cut to the making of a statue. As with the majority of the film, the scene is full of potential associations and unanswered questions. Hemphill never appears but is gestured toward by imagistic substitutes. His voice is a specter, a potentiality for the image but not its dictation.[1]

    In Riggs’s Tongues, Hemphill performs the work with his frequent collaborator Wayson Jones. The scene is embellished by a pig latin version of the line “now we think as we fuck” (repeated rhythmically by Jones in the background throughout) and quick visual fades between Hemphill and Jones that intensify in pace as the poem accelerates. For the majority of the poem Hemphill’s voice is contained and steady, but as his reading proceeds his voice becomes more brash and emphatic, ultimately leading to his sensual and panicked belting of the line “this nut might…” repeatedly in a crescendo that ends with his unexpectedly composed and quiet recitation of the words “kill us.” The scene concludes with Hemphill and Jones delivering shared orgasmic moans to the camera, mouths wide in ecstasy. The filmic rhythm of the poem is slowed and then quickened to enact an erotic intensity.

    The scenes share an interest in the gaze. However, in Julien’s work the subject looks past the audience toward his own projected screen, whereas in Riggs’s work you are the desired, a direct interpolation into sensuality, the hoped for other to the “we.” There’s also an emphasis placed on the line “sucking mustaches” in Julien’s film not present in Riggs’s. The erotic intensity of these scenes, work with different vocal paces and volumes; they stimulate differing affects, punctuating and overlaying the deathly stakes of the AIDS crisis. They offer various direct and clipped orations and introspective muted tones, a Black queer ensemble under the influence of a singular voice.[2]

    There are numerous understudied and untraveled pathways for thinking sound and Black queerness on film. The cacophony of sound and image that Black queer film instances may be the raucous band that forms the polyrhythm of blackness in and as what Okiji refers to as “sociomusical play;” here, around the terms of sensuality (Okiji 2018: 4). In the defiance of form located in the rhythms of jazz and house music, Black queer experimental cinema finds fugitive movements that refract and recompose the terms of blackness and sexuality in a moment of acute narrative constriction, risk, and crisis for Black life. Play and improvisation with the structure of visuality through rhythm provides lines of flight from the imperatives of racialized erotic restraint, punctuating convivial and unexpected relations across time. To focus on the sound of the visual, and the visual of sound might give us a peek into the unruly intramural sociality of Black and queer as entangled, relational, and stereophonic forces.

    References

    Batts, Jamal. 2024. “Toward a Black Alternative Media: On Robeson Taj Frazier’s ‘KAOS Theory.’” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 30, 2024. lareviewofbooks.org/article/toward-a-black-alternative-media-on-robeson-taj-fraziers-kaos-theory/.

    Bost, Darius. 2019. Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Carroll, Rachel Jane. 2023. “What Can Beauty Do?” In For Pleasure: Race, Experimentalism, and Aesthetics, 39–86. New York: New York University Press.

    Doane, Mary Ann. 1980. “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space.” Yale French Studies 60:33–50.

    Edwards, Brent Hayes. 2001. “The Uses of Diaspora.” Social Text 19 (1): 45–73.

    Frazier, Robeson Taj, and Ben Caldwell. 2023. KAOS Theory: The Afro-Kosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell. Los Angeles, CA: Angel City Press.

    Gillespie, Michael Boyce. 2016. Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film. Duke University Press.

    Gilroy, Paul. 1998. “It’s A Family Affair.” In Black Popular Culture, edited by Gina Dent, 310–15. New York: The New Press.

    Hall, Stuart. 1989. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Framework 36: 222–37.

    Jafa, Arthur. 1998. “69.” In Black Popular Culture, edited by Gina Dent, 249–54. New York: The New Press.

    Jafa, Arthur, Robeson Taj Frazier, and Ben Caldwell. 2023. “Forward.” In KAOS Theory: The Afro-Kosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell, 6–7. Los Angeles: Angel City Press.

    Julien, Isaac, dir. 1989. Looking for Langston. Strand Home Video.

    ———. 1994. “Confessions of a Snow Queen: Notes on the Making of The Attendant.” Critical Quarterly 36 (1): 120–26.

    Lawrence, Amy. 1992. “Women’s Voices in Third World Cinema.” In Sound Theory/Sound Practice, 178–90. New York: Routledge.

    Linscott, Charles “Chip” P. 2016. “In a (Not So) Silent Way: Listening Past Black Visuality in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm.” Black Camera 8 (1): 169–90.

    Lorde, Audre. 1984. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” In Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches, 53–59. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press.

    Moten, Fred. 2017. “The New International of Rhythmic Feel/Ings.” In Black and Blur, 86–117. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Neumeyer, David. 2019. “Studying Music and Screen Media.” In The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture, edited by Tim Shephard and Anne Leonard, 67–74. New York: Routledge.

    Riggs, Marlon, dir. 1989. Tongues Untied. Frameline.

    ———, dir. 1991. Anthem. Frameline.

    Sanborn, John, dir. 1989. Untitled. Electronic Arts Intermix.

    Stilwell, Robynn. 2007. “The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic.” In Beyond the Soundtrack, edited by Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert, 184–202. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Notes

    [1] Robynn Stilwell refers to filmmakers’ play with diegetic (a part of the story) and nondiegetic (outside of the story) sound as the “fantastical gap,” a visual-sonic in betweenness that allows for the subversion of viewers’ aural expectations. Rachel Jane Carroll notes Julien’s use of this technique with house music and the sound of the ocean in Looking for Langston as ways of probing identification and diasporic loss and connectivity. See Stilwell 2007. See Neumeyer 2019. See Carroll 2023.

    [2] In much the way that Fred Moten in “The New International of Rhythmic Feel/ings” reads a productive and “sexual politics” in the disagreements of Black diasporic musicians who seek to exceptionalize the national character of their Black music and its genres (while disallowed from entry into the national family) the work of Riggs found strife in diaspora; critics who, including Julien, read an essentializing impulse in Riggs’s work in terms of racialized desire and masculinity. Instead of plotting Riggs and Julien as combative aesthetic forces, I read the way they rhythmically play with the same instrument, Hemphill’s voice, as a shared though tenuous desire in the making and positioning of difference as an unfixed commitment to new creative potentialities. Their relation is generatively posed as disjunctively choral due to the history and present of blackness and its spatial dispersion. See Moten 2017. See Julien 1994. See Gilroy 1998.