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No Conclusions: Response to Symposium, August 16, 2021
No full textTools and perspectives serve particular ends. When they are no longer useful because a goal, such as writing a book, has been achieved, pieces of paper change status from vital tools to a pile of materials to be recycled. Also, when the goal (or question) changes—for example, from racially differentiating people by voice, exhibiting musical superiority, or settling and colonizing continents to uncovering vocal and musical multiplicities or writing the complex history of settler music history and land practices—we discard outdated tools and perspectives and adopt those that will serve our current goals. At least to this point in my work, it has been vital to focus on understanding the questions we ask and the ways we arrive at them, rather than dealing in conclusions.
One of the main questions I asked in The Race of Sound was: How can the sound of the voice be essential if, as we know from vocal pedagogy and vocal artists, the voice is material, formed by practices, and practices are determined by understandings limited by culture and history? The question I am currently concerned with is: How have deep (and largely unarticulated) conceptual metaphors shaped musical practice, thinking, sensing, and imagination
Notes on Art and the Abolitionist Imagination
No full textFormed in the tumultuous summer of 2020, UC Cops off Campus groups coalesced around the joint aims of getting police off the campuses of the University of California and developing a collective abolitionist practice. In this essay I reflect on my own involvement in organizing to get cops off UC campuses as a lecturer in the art department of UC Riverside and in doing so, speculate on the complicated and evolving relationship between art and abolition. I attempt to disentangle the facile way that creativity is often understood in political and artistic contexts from the absolutely crucial centrality of the imagination within contemporary abolitionist struggles. Artists committed to systemic transformation might begin by taking seriously Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s deceptively simple proposition: "Abolition requires that we change one thing: everything.” Especially in this moment, art’s engagement with the political must go beyond embracing an abstract version of “change” that leaves institutional dynamics unexamined
The Evolution of Sentencing Policy in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania
Get PDFCriminal justice reform has become an important policy area in the American states and federal government due to the extremely high rates of incarceration in the United States. In addition, high and disproportionate rates of incarceration for black people is an important civil rights issue that needs attention at all levels of the criminal justice system, from policing to parole. This case study of the mid-Atlantic states generates hypotheses for a 50-state model on one aspect of this system: sentencing policy. The mid-Atlantic states of New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania are similar in terms of political culture and demographics and have key differences in incarceration rates that make them good choices for a comparative case study using the “most similar systems” or “comparable cases” design. Through our case study we identify policies that we believe contribute to rising incarceration levels as well as suggest reforms. Specifically, we argue that the combination of Pennsylvania’s structured sentencing guidelines and indeterminate sentencing have contributed to high levels of incarceration that have persisted even as the push for punitiveness in the criminal justice system has diminished. These factors in conjunction with political variables should be studied further in a quantitative model of the 50 states in order to provide areas for reform
“Did He Ever Hear of Egypt or Carthage?” Moses Roper’s Literary and Oratorical Activism in the British Isles
No full textMoses Roper was one of the first African Americans to conduct an extensive lecturing tour of Britain and Ireland, and he published an autobiographical narrative there in 1837. He was a groundbreaking force in his use of literary, oratorical, and visual forms to expose slavery’s brutalities, and throughout his speeches, he resolved to tell the truth about his experiences no matter the cost to his personal and financial circumstances. Despite his radicalism on the transatlantic stage, Roper has been cast to the sidelines of abolitionist history and is overshadowed by figures such as Frederick Douglass, whose antislavery lecturing tour in Britain and Ireland between 1845 and 1847 electrified audiences. Throughout his life, Roper used the mediums of oratory and print to simultaneously expose slavery’s brutalities and ensure his voice and life-story were not rendered invisible by dominant white power structures. At the heart of his speeches, countless editions of his slave narrative, newspaper advertisements, and letters to the press was a pioneering emphasis on authorship and literary resistance against slavery. In this article, I shed new light on the relationship Roper established between performance and print culture and for the first time explore previously unpublished stories related to his life in Britain and the United States. In doing so, I provide a fresh examination of Roper’s transatlantic activism: in context with other Black international visitors, his visit has received scant attention, and the radicalism of his speeches, together with his relationship with print culture, has been overlooked
Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence, by Yarden Katz
No full textIn Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence, Yarden Katz departs from conventional discourses about artificial intelligence (AI). Rather than speculate on the transformative possibilities or perils it presents, the book asks: What exactly is AI, and what political and ideological projects has it served? Katz argues that AI functions as a tool of white supremacy and has historically served its projects of imperialism and capitalism. AI, he adds, mimics the very form of whiteness: state, corporate, military, and university experts have consistently made and remade AI into that which serves white supremacy. Artificial Whiteness is a timely and important text. It intervenes in scholarly and popular discussions of AI, which have proven largely resistant to critical inquiries. Artificial Whiteness interrogates the myths upon which AI rests and invites us to refuse patterned attempts to reform AI and the oppressive systems it underpins
Black on Both Sides: Internationalism in the Struggle for México Negro
No full textThis article explores the emergence and development of organizing around Blackness in Mexico. It offers an excavation of recent political history that culminated with the achievement of federal recognition of Afromexican identity by the Mexican state. The focus is on political gatherings and processes, although some mention of cultural work is made as well. Specific attention is given to the controversial presence of people of African descent from outside Mexico, assessing their contribution to the larger process of Black organizing within the country. I argue that these organizers played a key role in helping local activists devise what one scholar, writing in another context, has described as a “common grammar” of social experience that connected disparate villages throughout Mexico with the wider African diaspora. At the same time, the article offers an overview and assessment of the organizational forms and goals of Black organizations in Mexico. Here, questions regarding terminologies of self-definition, political interventions within the wider national context, the role of cultural activity, and the relationship between Black and Indigenous mobilization are all taken up
