ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Feenin, Alexander Ghedi Weheliye traces R&B music’s continuing centrality in Black life since the late 1970s. Focusing on various musical production and reproduction technologies such as auto-tune and the materiality of the BlackFem singing voice, Weheliye counteracts the widespread popular and scholarly narratives of the genre’s decline and death. He shows how R&B remains a thriving venue for the expression of Black thought and life and a primary archive of the contemporary moment. Among other topics, Weheliye discusses the postdisco evolution of house music in Chicago and techno in Detroit, Prince and David Bowie in relation to appropriations of Blackness and Euro-whiteness in the 1980s, how the BlackFem voice functions as a repository of Black knowledge, the methods contemporary R&B musicians use to bring attention to Black Lives Matter, and the ways vocal distortion technologies such as the vocoder demonstrate Black music’s relevance to discussions of humanism and posthumanism. Ultimately, Feenin represents Weheliye’s capacious thinking about R&B as the site through which to consider questions of Blackness, technology, history, humanity, community, diaspora, and nationhood.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Alexander Ghedi Weheliye is Malcolm S. Forbes Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and author of Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human and Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity, both also published by Duke University Press.

REVIEWS

“This cutting-edge book demonstrates the work of a thinker who has devoted a great deal of research and care to the study of the sonic, historiographic, and aesthetic consequences of Blackness. Alexander Ghedi Weheliye’s concentration on the rich concurrences of Blackness and R&B is a true blessing. Deftly mapping out new avenues of critical pursuit devoted to the art of Blackness, Feenin is a stunning work.”

-- Michael Boyce Gillespie, author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film

“Feenin is less a collection of essays and more a playlist of Alexander Ghedi Weheliye’s greatest hits. It assembles a series of captivating essays that register the complex sonic frequencies of Black life with resounding effect. The ‘tracks’ gathered here demonstrate the force of Weheliye’s incisive theorizing and its profound contribution to sounding the rhythm, vibes, and groove of Black studies in the ‘forceful fullness of the Now.’”

-- Tina M. Campt, Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities, Princeton University

"Though the book may be of particular interest to scholars of twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular music, voice studies, Black studies, and digital studies, scholars from many different disciplines can benefit from Weheliye’s theories about the study of the present and the insights that critical fabulation can reveal. Weheliye’s writing is poetic and incisive, and he weaves together lyrical, sonic, cultural, historical, and technological elements as he reckons with R&B’s impact on Black culture, mainstream popular music, politics, and his own musical experiences. His commitment to exploring forgotten near-past histories and the omissions in the archive of the Now is palpable throughout the book. Weheliye masterfully argues throughout for the urgency of these stories as he explores the technological and the humanity in Black culture."
-- Kelly Hoppenjans Bulletin of the Society for American Music

"Feenin is great for readers interested in learning more about the inter-section of R&B, gender, sexuality and race. The book offers a tremendously deep discussion of R&B from 1995 to 2010. The Black diasporic focus and book’s organisation around a tracklist are also exciting features. The tracklist is fitting, as Feenin helps readers better understand some very popular R&B songs that they may enjoy, remember and have a few questions about. Feenin will also open larger conversations about the cultural politics of contemporary R&B and other genres of Black popular music."
-- Lavar Pope Popular Music

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Phonographies

A Response to Tavia Nyong’o

Interview with Annie Goh

#BeyondDeepBrandyAlbumCuts

An Interview with Nehal El-Hadi

REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you with an electronic file for alternative access.

Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.

It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.