Results by title

In Geologic Life, Kathryn Yusoff theorizes the processes by which race and racialization emerged geologically. Examining both the history of geology as a discipline and ongoing mineral and resource extraction, Yusoff locates forms of imperial geology embedded in Western and Enlightenment thought and highlights how it creates anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and anti-Brown environmental and racial injustices. Throughout, she outlines how the disciplines of geology and geography—and their conventions: surveying, identifying, classifying, valuing, and extracting—established and perpetuated colonial practices that ordered the world and people along a racial axis. Examining the conceptualization of the inhuman as political, geophysical, and paleontological, Yusoff unearths an apartheid of materiality as distinct geospatial forms. This colonial practice of geology organized and underpinned racialized accounts of space and time in ways that materially made Anthropocene Earth. At the same time, Yusoff turns to Caribbean, Indigenous, and Black thought to chart a parallel geologic epistemology of the "earth-bound" that challenges what and who the humanities have chosen to overlook in its stories of the earth. By reconsidering the material epistemologies of the earth as an on-going geotrauma in colonial afterlives, Yusoff demonstrates that race is as much a geological formation as a biological one.

Black virality refers to the spread of Black performance that becomes uncontrollable because of its rapid and ubiquitous circulation through popular media. Gabriel A. Peoples examines Black people and representations of Black people that have gone viral from the eighteenth century to today.

Peoples’s analysis ranges from abolitionist and proslavery visual culture to Do the Right Thing to “Bed Intruder Song” and the cellphone video of Derrion Albert’s murder. After identifying these moments, he considers how performances go viral in Black ways. He also thinks through the ways Black virality circulates ideas that materially affect Black life. As he shows, an interacting person’s vulnerability to racialized gender and racialized sexuality knowledge inspires how they spread a performance. Non-iconic elements of viral moments reveal hard-to-find nuances of Black life while the artists and others represented in viral moments promote both collective and individual liberation by harnessing their visibility and audibility.

Rigorous and expansive, Goin’ Viral uses Black virality as a new way to understand and frame Black performances.

First popularized by newspaper coverage of the Underground Railroad in the 1840s, the underground serves as a metaphor for subversive activity that remains central to our political vocabulary. In Going Underground, Lara Langer Cohen excavates the long history of this now familiar idea while seeking out versions of the underground that were left behind along the way. Outlining how the underground’s figurative sense first took shape through the associations of literal subterranean spaces with racialized Blackness, she examines a vibrant world of nineteenth-century US subterranean literature that includes Black radical manifestos, anarchist periodicals, sensationalist exposés of the urban underworld, manuals for sex magic, and the initiation rites of secret societies. Cohen finds that the undergrounds in this literature offer sites of political possibility that exceed the familiar framework of resistance, suggesting that nineteenth-century undergrounds can inspire new modes of world-making and world-breaking for a time when this world feels increasingly untenable.

In Grime, Glitter, and Glass, Nikki A. Greene examines how contemporary Black visual artists use sonic elements to refigure the formal and philosophical developments of Black art and culture. Focusing on the multimedia art of Renée Stout, Radcliffe Bailey, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Greene traces the intersection of the visual’s sonic possibilities with the Black body’s physical, representational, and metaphorical use in art. She employs her concept of “visual aesthetic musicality” to interpret Black visual art by examining the musical genres of jazz and rap, along with the often-overlooked innovations of funk and rumba, within art historiography. From Bailey’s use of multilayered surfaces of glitter, mud, and recycled materials to meditate on Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism to Stout’s life-size cast of her own body that recalls funk musician Betty Davis to Campos-Pons’s performative and sculptural references to sugar that resonate with the legacy of Celia Cruz, Greene outlines how these artists use mediums such as molded glass sculptures, viscous wet plaster, and dazzling mannequin heads to enhance the manifestations of Black identity. By foregrounding the sonic elements of their work, Greene demonstrates that these artists use sound to make themselves legible, recognizable, and audible.