Frequencies of Black Life (team taught with Tina Campt)

Title: Frequencies of Black Life

Spring 2023

Tina Campt (Princeton)

Alex Weheliye (Brown)

This course takes as its starting point that Black life consists of among other things a series of discontinuous frequencies. Understanding Black life’s frequencies as both complexly material and deeply abstract, we ask: What can frequency offer us as a way of understanding Black life? What insights does it provide for responding to anti-Blackness? How might it help us to see, hear, and feel the power of Black life's irrepressible desire and drive toward creating a different kind of present and future? Lastly, how might attending to Black frequencies offer us new sites of possibility?

Part of an inter-institutional collaboration between the Princeton Collaboratorium for Radical Aesthetics and the Brown Arts Initiative, this seminar will be team-taught by Tina Campt (A&A/LCA) and Alexander Weheliye (BAI). It engages the idea of frequency as a conceptual framework in a range of fields including sound and media studies, Black studies and critical theory, studies of the anthropocene and social ecology, art history and criticism, and among contemporary artists working in multiple media. The seminar will include a combination of separate meetings at each respective institution, joint in-person meetings (travel and lodging will be funded by BAI and the Princeton Collaboratorium), and joint zoom meetings. Joint in-person sessions of the seminar will be structured around conversations with guest artists and scholars who will present their work at public events and seminar meetings at the host institution.

The course will explore four overlapping layers of the multivalent frequencies of Black life:

1. Sonic Frequencies examines intellectual and creative practices that require listening closely to how sound, technology, and space serve as conduits for the frequential possibilities of Black life.

2. Temporality, Afrofuturism, and the Black Fantastic explores how frequency has been articulated by artists and scholars conjuring alternate worlds and realities as a core component of Afro-Futurism and ideas of the Black Fantastic.

3. Visual Frequencies takes a multisensory approach to attending to the resonances of images that register beyond looking and seeing, focusing on questions of illumination, vibration, affective labor, and alternative calibrations of the visual.

4. Anthropocenic Frequencies will excavate how the earth and its differing vibrations are thoroughly enmeshed in the vicissitudes of Black life. The section considers what frequency might offer for theorizing the Anthropocene and interdependent social ecologies that rely on the planet to sustain them.

Course requirements:

 1.    Lively participation in seminar (20% of grade)

2. Collaborative seminar curation (20% of grade) and weekly blog posts (20% of grade):

Students will be assigned to a collaborative study group that will ‘curate’ a seminar session and work together to generate innovative approaches to theorizing the concept of frequency in each of the four domains that structure the course (sonic frequencies, temporal frequencies of futurity and the fantastic, visual frequency, and anthropocenic frequential values).

Curation of the seminar discussion is not intended as merely a discussion facilitation or individual presentations on the assigned texts. The study groups should curate the content and structure of our conversation in ways that actively engage and contextualize the frameworks for theorizing the frequencies of Black life offered by assigned readings and visual and sonic texts.

Study groups will be responsible for providing a substantive blog post (600-800 words), which should be posted on the course blog 24 hours before the class session. Your post should introduce the materials assigned for the session, consider the texts within the framework of selected secondary sources, relate them to the larger themes of the course, and provide three keywords you view as central to the assigned texts. The substantive blog post will also serve as the basis for your seminar curation. The remaining students should post their responses (300 words) to the substantive post and/or the assigned materials 12 hours before the class session. You are also encouraged to respond in a less formal manner to the posts and comments of your classmates, provide links and/or quotes that illustrate or challenge another post, etc.

3. Final paper/Glossary (40% of grade):

For their final paper, each student will submit a glossary defining six keywords that link the idea of frequency to their own research topics. The glossary is intended to be a ‘thought experiment’ geared toward creating a working lexicon of terms and conceptual framework for future research and thinking, and students are encouraged to think creatively about what a glossary can and should be. Instead of a traditional glossary, students also have the option to submit a creative project (visual, sonic, filmic, literary, architectural, etc.) supplemented by a brief written rationale explaining its conceptual relevance to the course themes. You will present one keyword definition to the seminar in class on our final meeting of the semester which we will workshop together for future revision and submission in your final glossary.

Course Schedule

January 26, 2023     No class

February 2, 2023    Course intro

Sonic Frequencies

February 9, 2023    Ralph Ellison, “Prologue and Epilogue,” Invisible Man

Frantz Fanon, “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” Black Skin, White Masks

W.E.B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings”, The Souls of Black Folk

Shikeith, #Blackmendream (2014)

https://shikeith.com/blackmendream

[Zoom] February 16, 2023  Nadia Ellis, “Out and Bad: Toward a Queer Performance

Hermeneutics in Jamaican Dancehall”

Julain Henriques, “Sonic Diaspora, Vibrations and Rhythm”

Alexander Weheliye, “Good Days: R&B Music and Critical Fabulation in the Frequencies of the Now”

Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Intro & Chapter 1)

[Joint at Brown] February 23, 2023 Class visit and DJ set/lecture by Madison Moore (USC)

Tony Cokes: If UR Reading This It’s 2 Late, Vol 1-3:

Christopher Cox, “The Author as Selector: Tony Cokes’ Iconoclasm”

Denise Ferreira da Silva, “The Already None”

special issue: Black Rave (December 2022), edited by madison moore and McKenzie Wark

Videos: https://vimeo.com/407613208

https://vimeo.com/719197390

https://vimeo.com/580648594

https://vimeo.com/43942884

https://vimeo.com/8505111

Temporality, Afrofuturism, and the Black Fantastic

[Zoom] March 2, 2023       Martine Syms, “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto”

Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism”

Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun (Motion Capture Interview)

Film: Last Angel of History (John Akomfrah dir., 1996)

[Joint at Princeton] March 9, 2023 Class Visit: Ekow Eshun

Ekow Eshun, In the Black Fantastic exhibition catalog

                                 Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic (excerpts)

Films: Jenn Nkiru, Black to Techno (2019), Hub Tones (2018),

Rebirth Is Necessary (2017)

Visual art: Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking Are You Listening (2021)

Visual Frequencies

March 16, 2023                               <Princeton Spring Break>

Tavia Nyong’o, “Crushed Black: On Archival Opacity” from Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life

Kara Keeling, “Looking for M: Queer Temporality, Black Political Possibility, and Poetry from the Future”

Treva Ellison, “Black Femme Praxis and the Promise of Black Gender”

Dionte Harris, “The Smear: Vibrational Flesh and the Calculus of  Black Queer Becoming in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight”

Recommended Films:  Looking for Langston, The Aggressives, and Portrait of Jason, Moonlight, Barry Jenkins, dir.

[Zoom] March 23, 2023     Krista Thompson, Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African

Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (excerpts)

Tina Campt, “The Visual Frequency of Black Life”, “The Opacity of Grief” 

Fred Moten, “Black Mo’nin’” 

March 30, 2023                           <Brown Spring Break>

Tavia Nyong’o, “Crushed Black: On Archival Opacity” from Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life

Kara Keeling, “Looking for M: Queer Temporality, Black Political Possibility, and Poetry from the Future”  

Treva Ellison, “Black Femme Praxis and the Promise of Black Gender”

Dionte Harris, “The Smear: Vibrational Flesh and the Calculus of  Black Queer Becoming in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight”

Recommended Films:  Looking for Langston, The Aggressives, and Portrait of Jason, Moonlight, Barry Jenkins, dir.

Anthropocenic Frequencies

[Zoom] April 6, 2023 Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of

Black and Native Studies (introduction, chapters 1 and 2)

 Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human. Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (introduction and chapter two)

Omise'eke Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: : Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage”

Vanessa Agard Jones, “What the Sands Remember”

Class visit: Zakiyyah Iman Jackson and Vanessa Agard Jones

[Zoom] April 13, 2023       Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (excerpts),

Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother:   A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (chapters six, ten, and eleven),

Tianna Bruno, “Ecological Memory in the Biophysical Afterlife of Slavery”

Axelle Kerera, “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics”

[Joint at Princeton] April 20, 2023 Class Presentations

Class visit and lecture Dionne Brand and Christina Sharpe

April 27, 2023         TBD