Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. And I'd like to thank Tony Nwachukwu,
invited me to speak today at the Loop festival.
So my name is Paul Goodwin. I am a curator, and a researcher.
I'm an independent curator around contemporary art and I focus particularly on the art of the African Diaspora.
So the first thing to understand about this lecture is that I know nothing about music.
Professionally. So I'm not gonna talk about music, I'm not gonna play any music,
but I'm gonna show you quite a few images. And what I'm gonna try and do is give you some ideas.
I know many of you, if not all of you, in the audience are makers of music, particularly electronic music.
This talk doesn't really talk about electronic music, but what it tries to do is kind of give a sense of
the role of music with what I call "Black Urbanism." Which is what I wanna talk about today. So...
really, I want to talk about the relationship between what I call: "blackness,"
and I wanna talk about blackness as a creative force in the world. Not an ethnic identity.
Not a racial identity, but a creative force in the world. So on the one hand, blackness, and on the other, cities.
And then I want to make some tentative connections about the role of music in this.
So I began thinking about what I would eventually call Black Urbanism when I was living and working in Paris,
the City of Light, in about 1994. At that time I was researching black African communities in Paris
and their relationship to struggles over citizenship, racism and the right to housing.
It was at that time that I began to research the history of the Black Presence in France, and in Paris in particular.
The so-called "Présence Africaine."
I discovered really that in the 1920s and 1930s, French, African and Caribbean students and intellectuals
from the colonies such as Martinique, Senegal, Guinea, Cote d'Ivoire, and other places, migrated to Paris.
At the same time there were many African-American writers, artists and musicians,
jazz musicians in particular, who were in Paris. And they combined to produce a kind of urban renaissance
of black culture in France, in Paris.
And that urban renaissance took the form of visual art, it took the form of literature, but above all
it took the form of music, and jazz in particular.
So this was the time in the 20s and 30s in Paris of the birth of Négritude, the idea of black consciousness
really first came out of this period. The jazz age, Les Ballets Negres - the Negro Ballet.
People like Josephine Baker, pictured here, in some of these posters, and artists like Sidney Bechet, the musician.
´These people, these black, often African-Americans were immensely popular at the time
with both French and European audiences. And as Petrine Archer-Straw has written,
this was a time in Paris when black culture was very much in vogue. It was the biggest fashion of the time.
Rather like the current global interest, I would argue, in forms of black culture and music today.
So as an urbanist, because I have a background in urban planning and architecture
I became particularly interested in the work of the Swiss-French modernist architect Le Corbusier
who believed that black people, and he was writing in the 1930s, was...
he believed that black people, and jazz in particular, were the epitome of what a modern city could be
and how it could function.
Le Corbusier wrote in one of his memoirs called "When the Cathedrals were White,"
Negro music has touched... (I'm quoting him now), "Negro music has touched America
because it is the melody of the soul joined with the rhythm of the machine.
It is in 2-part time. Tears of the heart, movement of the legs, torso, arms and head. This music...
(He was talking about jazz) ...of an era of construction is innovating, it floods the body and the heart.
It floods America and it floods the world." He went on to say, "Jazz, like sky scrapers, is an event...
and not a deliberately conceived creation. They represent the forces of today.
The jazz is more advanced than the architecture." So he believed that jazz
was actually more advanced than architecture at the time.
"If architecture were at the point reached by jazz, it would be an incredible spectacle."
That was Le Corbusier writing his memoir "When the Cathedrals Were White."
So like many of his artistic and creative contemporaries at the time in Paris, such as Brancusi,
or Picasso, Le Corbusier was fascinated, to the point of obsession really, you can see
this picture in his studio he has plenty of African artifacts in the background.
And you can see many images of people like Picasso as well in his studio surrounded by African sculpture
in particular. He was fascinated really by black and African culture.
Le Corbusier even had an affair with Josephine Baker.
And in particular, black music. The point I want to make here is that when I was in Paris in the 90s studying
the Black Presence in France, I started to understand that the history of this encounter between blackness,
African culture, and urban modernism, was a really important encounter, and that Paris played a central role
in the development of what I would call Black Urbanism, which I will explain in this lecture.
From a range of practices, from cutting-edge music and art, to innovative forms of technology,
sorry, forms of urban creativity. At the same time though, it's really important to note, that part of the reason
why Paris was such an important cultural center at this time was because of the Black Presence.
So it was a two-way relationship. African people brought incredibly inventive urban culture to Paris,
and Paris benefited from that. OK, fast-forward to 2005. Another city that has influenced my thinking
about Black Urbanism and its relationship to music is New Orleans.
I really stated to focus on New Orleans in 2005. Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans
killing hundreds of people, leaving thousands stranded in sub-human conditions.
We all know what the response to the Bush regime to this crisis
just really compounded the whole thing. I don't need to go over that particular incident again, I think.
The human drama for all New Orleans residents was tragic.
But there was also a lot of truth to the mayor Ray Nagin's statement: that New Orleans before the hurricane
was a chocolate city, he called it a "chocolate city." It was over 70 percent black, New Orleans.
I think this tragic case is paradigmatic, or what I want to call the paradox of Black Urbanism.
In the sense that it's the city that was absolutely built on and thrived on black musical cultures:
jazz, blues, Creole cultures, and yet to the rest of America, and even the White House at that time under Bush,
the majority of its poor, black citizens were invisible.
So how do you get on the one hand, a city like New Orleans, a global capital of black musical culture,
which is really world-famous. But when a natural disaster such as the hurricane struck, no response.
In 2006, I went to a conference in New York City, organized by the Department of Jazz Studies
at Columbia University in New York. At this amazing conference, a number of mostly black architects,
planners, jazz and blues musicians, artists and poets, many from New Orleans, met to ask the questions:
How are we going to rebuild New Orleans? What principles are we going to use to rebuild the city?
Will the historic cultures of the city, the black and Creole cultures, have a prominent place
in the rebuilding of the city? Or would it go the way of so many urban regeneration projects where poor,
marginalized communities are neglected in favor of tourism and business?
How can we visit the questions that came up in this conference? How can we rebuild the city
using principles of improvisation found in the rich black musical cultures of the city?
I found it really intriguing that a major conference of the rebuilding of the city of New Orleans
was organized by a jazz studies department, not architecture and urban planning. Jazz studies.
And it opened up many questions for me really about how Black Urbanism and this relationship to black creativity...
And particularly music, how that was formed. How can blues men or jazz men help in the planning of the city?
What role can improvisation play as an urban design strategy?
And what struck me about the conference was the idea that...
the idea was assembling a whole range of creative practices,
many emanating from within the black and Creole cultures of New Orleans itself to feed into
the rebuilding of the city, I found that quite incredible. So I began to think about the relationship
between black culture aesthetics and architecture.
And what ideas about spacing and time can designers learn from the syncopated rhythms of reggae,
drum 'n bass, or even hip-hop.
And what about the broader cultural tropes of writing poetry of individual arts?
Do they have anything to say about building cities?
The fallout from Katrina at that time, also for me, posed wider questions about the conditions
of black people in cities throughout the world. Conditions of urban precarity.
I began to think about the pressing need to rethink and revision how black communities are situated
economically, culturally, politically and aesthetically in relation to the global politics of space
and the dramatic reshaping of metropolitan regions. Be it by the geopolitics of global capitalism,
the kind of profit agenda of urban regeneration, war and conflict, or "acts of God" such as hurricanes
and other natural disasters.
So at Goldsmiths in 2006, I started a project called Re-visioning Black Urbanism. The title of the lecture.
that had developed as a multidisciplinary platform to explore what I call the "multiple modalities"
of the relationship between black cultures and cities.
And the platform included a number of conference... A number of outputs, conference papers,
research papers. I created an exhibition on black communities and regeneration in London.
These are images from an exhibition called Peckham. Peckham is a borough of North London,
I worked with a number of photographers to really document that neighborhood
and look at the ways in which various immigrant and black cultures played an important role
in the way that area has been reshaped. And Peckham is now a very central,
regenerated area in South London.
These are some of the images from that exhibition. So, the aim of the project really is to provoke a paradigm shift
in the way we think about and map black cultures in the city in two ways.
Firstly it's about re-envisioning blackness. The project looks... critically examines
what you might call the globalization of blackness. And the role of blackness and black culture...
in the redefinition of what the Urban means today.
We hear about these terms as "urban music", "urban culture," where do they come from?
The second element is actually to revision urbanism, to think about the way that architecture,
planning and urbanism relates the Black Presence. And understanding our black communities as dissidents,
but also creative presences in cities.
But I think the first thing, so... the main kind of point I want to make today...
is, and this is the main kind of conclusion in a way, a preliminary conclusion from my research,
is that I want to posit the notion that blackness can be a method.
A creative method for rethinking cities. That's the main thesis that I want to put forward.
But what is blackness?
What does it mean to be black today in the context of living in a city?
There are a number of questions... You can see that I like questions, right?
...that can be opened up here. Is something called blackness the same thing as being black?
Is blackness the same thing as being black?
Is blackness a hard fact of genetics? Are you born with blackness?
Is it something that's hardwired in our coding, our genetic coding?
Is it a call to arms? A manifesto? A form of radical, political organization?
Or, is blackness an idea? An abstraction? A set of forms that can be molded and shaped
according to the eye of the beholder.
Now, all of these ways of understanding blackness, it seems to me,
have come to the fore in various ways in recent years, in public discussions about race,
particularly in relation to race and urban life.
I'm thinking here about the Black Lives Matter campaign in the United States, and world-wide.
In the wake of the mass killings of black women, men and children
by the state forces of order otherwise known as the police.
And it seems to me that we are at historical conjuncture with the ongoing dehumanization
and the existential threat to black lives, in other words, you've heard the idea of driving while black.
Driving while being black, you can be stopped, and killed, in certain parts of the States for driving while being black.
This is an existential threat, in my opinion, to black life. In other words, so this
existential threat is a prominent part of our present reality, often mediated through social media and technology.
This is an image of Mark Duggan, who was killed in North London by the police,
which sparked huge riots in 2011.
This... Black Lives Matter, I think, embodies this mobilization of blackness.
And it mobilizes a kind of live-bodies-in-the-street element, as well as a creative, aesthetic dimension
consisting of posting and sharing images, footage, memes, posters, artworks, music tracks online.
This is a Black Lives Matter protest in London. So it's a global movement, not just in the States.
And as you can see in this image, there are many white people that are involved in this movement.
So, again, it questions about what blackness, not necessarily just relating to black people.
The poet and writer Fred Moten makes a crucial comment on current articulations of blackness
in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, and I think that helps us understand the radical
and creative dimensions to blackness that I feel is so important
to Black Urbanism, the way I want to think about it.
In a discussion with the historian Robin Kelley in 2015 in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown,
I showed you an image of Michael Brown a bit earlier, and Eric Garner, was a black man
who was selling cigarettes on a street corner. The police arrested him...
for not having a license to sell cigarettes, then they consequently choked him until he died.
So again, selling cigarettes while being black seems to be a crime in certain parts of the States.
In a discussion with the historian Robin Kelley, in the wake of the killing of Eric Garner, Moten,
this writer Fred Moten, drew an important distinction between what he called "black lives"
as in Black Lives Matter, and 'black life,' in what he calls the "mobile black sociality" in cities
that was perceived as such a threat to law and order. Let me just read through this quote from Moten. He said:
"We need to actually understand what it is that the state is defending itself from,
and I think in this respect, the particular instances of Michael Brown's murder
and Eric Garner's murder are worth paying some attention to, because what the drone
Darren Wilson shot into that day was insurgent black life walking down the street.
I don't think he meant to violate the individual personalhood of Michael Brown,
he was shooting at "mobile black sociality" walking down the street
in a way that he understood implicitly constituted a threat to the order he represents and that he is sworn to protect."
Eric Garner on the very basis, the everyday basis initiated an alternative kind of marketplace,
another mode of social life.
That's what they killed, OK. So when we say that black lives matter,
I think that what we do sometimes is obscure the fact that it is in fact black life that matters.
This is the crucial point that he says. He says that, "Insurgent black social life constitutes a profound threat
to the already existing order of things.
And part of the reason it constitutes such a profound threat is its openness. Its un-fixity.
The fact that anybody can claim it, and that's what I found interesting, he's saying that anybody can claim blackness.
This insurgent, open, unfixed black urban sociality that anybody can claim
and that is perceived as being such a threat to the existing order of things,
I think is key to understanding Black Urbanism in the way that I want to frame it.
A form of blackness that is radical, inventive, improvisational, powerful,
but at the same time radically open, unbound and unfixed. And I will argue that black music,
and various forms of black musics very much conform to this aspect of blackness.
I want to suggest that blackness conceived in these terms can form the basis for a speculative,
experimental urban project in the 21st century. And that black musical cultures are essential
to this project. So for the rest of the talk, I want to hone in in a very speculative way,
forgive me, I'm gonna go into a bit more theory here. I told you, no music, just ideas, for me the moment, OK.
So ideas that maybe you can think about when you engage some of the musics that you work with.
So, for the rest of this talk I want to hone in about this kind of radically open understanding of blackness.
For me, Moten's point about the distinction between Black Lives Matter, black life,
black lives, sorry, plural, and black life opens up in a really interesting way the possibility that blackness
and black people are not necessarily the same thing.
Blackness in what he calls "mobile black social life" is a defining element of what he understands
as the undercommons, the underground, the undercommons.
The fugitive, unrepresented majority that surrounds those in power and causes them so much fear.
For me, Moten is opening up, at least in theory, the possibility that blackness is ontologically separate
from black people. This is of course philosophical speculation, and there are issues and problems with that,
I don't have time to go in to some of the dangers or issues around that, but there are problems with that.
Now there's been a very lovely debate for some years in American academia, an area called Black Studies.
between writers like Nahum Chandler, Saidiya Hartman, Jarod Sexton, Frank Wilderson, and Moten.
around what might be termed the conflict between two different ways of understanding
the ontological nature of blackness. Ontological meaning the state of being, what it means be essentially,
what is the meaning of being black?
And they're focused around two ways: Afro-Pessimism, on the one hand,
and Afro-Optimism. And I think this has important implications for how we understand modes of black music.
Afro-Pessimism focuses on post-slavery blackness, in other words, blackness after the slave condition.
as an irreducible condition of social death.
In other words, that basically slaves were socially dead, they had no rights and under human society,
they were outside of human society, they were socially dead.
To quote Jared Sexton: "Blackness is not an identity, or a contra-social actor,
but is rather a structural position of non-communicability in the face of all other positions." In other words:
blackness is outside of the sphere of humanity, and he talks about that not only in slavery, but today.
Which is the reason why police feel, and other agents of the order, feel they can kill black people with impunity.
That's Afro-Pessimism. Afro-Optimism, on the other hand, associates blackness with the creative agency
of the black radical tradition, and black performance, particularly in music. And Fred Moten is a big...
supporter of this theory. And this black agency, in other words, black agency, black creative traditions,
goes back before slavery. We can't limit the understanding of blackness to slavery.
Black people didn't start in slavery, is what he's saying. And in fact there were creative traditions that went
before slavery, and after slavery.
In other words... Yeah, so... I think much of this debate
takes the form of very enjoyable, but also very complex forms of philosophical speculations,
I've just given you a taste, really, of what that might be about. But what I think is important...
is that speculation about blackness, thinking about blackness in a creative sense,
is something I think is worth doing, it's valid. And I think it might be called a kind of black ops,
to quote Moten again: "A form of black optimism, or assertion of black creativity."
But also an operationalization of another mode of being in the world
that may hint at progressive, alternative futures not just for black people but for everybody.
So, I want to now just quickly go through a few examples of how, for the visual arts, if you don't mind
taking a slight discursion into the visual arts, of how a number of artists have been engaging with these forms of
speculating blackness in the wake of Black Lives Matter.
Often engaging with questions around black ops, or black optimism, and black pessimism.
So Titus Kaphar, as you can see here, uses chalk to sketch the faces of Trayvon Martin,
Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell and Michael Brown, black men killed by the police
for no reason other than being black.
In the drawing titled: For Trayvon, Amadou, Sean and Mike,
Kaphar overlays these unarmed black boys' and men's faces on top of each other, so you get a layering
of voices, of images to visually represent the present day and the historical nature of police brutality.
At the Brooklyn Museum in 2014, Rashaad Newsome, another artist, African-American,
commissioned protesters to storm the stage at the opening of the Killer Heels exhibition at the museum.
One protester held up a sign that read: RIP Islan Nettles. And you can also see a Michael Brown thing.
Islan Nettles was a 21 year old black trans woman who was fatally beaten by a group of men
while walking down the street with friends in New York City. The moment brought attention to the troubling reality
that black trans women represent 72 percent of LGBTQ homicide victims in New York. 72 percent
are black trans women.
The artist says "I created the work because I wanted Islan Nettle to be remembered, and her stories to be heard."
Artists such as Jordan Casteel, an image here called "Jireh"...
is making work about exploring the range of black experience,
addressing stereotypes that often lead to violence against black Americans.
In the "Visible Man" portrait series, Casteel created a body of work that addresses the complexities
humanity and vulnerability of the black men she'd known and loved in her entire life.
She created 12 portraits and she asked these black men to show her a place where they felt safe.
And she painted them in the nude.
Often incorporating references to classic and modern nude figures in art history,
in this case two images by way that Henri Matisse used textiles. At the 56th annual Venice Biennale,
the artist Adam Pendleton lined the walls of the Belgian Pavilion with a set of black and white paintings
and large-scale text-based work that simply read: Black Lives Matter.
Pendleton, whose work the relation of blackness to the historical avant-garde movement of Dada,
was attempting to address what he saw as a new aspect of the Black Lives Matter mobilization, in other words,
quote the artist: "It was a language that was at once a public mourning, a rallying cry
and a poetic plea." So blackness is a form of mobilization.
In 2015, the curator Mariame Kaba organized a small but important exhibition in response to a forgotten aspect
of the Black Lives Matter campaign: the impact of police violence on black women and girls.
For the exhibition, "Blood at the Root," accounting the stories of state violence against black women,
the artist Antonia Clifford designed a poster that listed the names of a hundred women and girls
killed by police violence. Let me just go through quickly a couple other artists I think are interesting.
Theaster Gates is an artist and an urban planner, and here he basically transformed a bank
on the south side of Chicago into an art space.
And the bank houses the entire collection of Frankie Knuckles,
known as the godfather of house music. It's kind of his way in which black culture has to be at the heart of the city.
So, for me, I come back to my main thesis, which is that blackness is a creative tool or methodology
for re-imagining cities and how we navigate them.
Blackness can be considered as one of many discrepant imaginaries of the city,
to borrow a phrase from the urbanist Abdoumaliq Simone. In other words, there are many and proliferating
discrepant imaginaries about the built environment, in other words
how we imagine the built environment, there are many of them,
that challenge how the city works, it challenges what a city looks like, and how it changes.
providing alternative cognitive maps for how a city is to be navigated.
Now, I'm interested in the possibility that blackness can be a creative device or modality for urban dwellers
everywhere. In order to navigate the increasing precarity, the stress, and the intensity of urban life
under conditions of neoliberal, racial capitalism.
Blackness, essentially, in my opinion, is a creative interface where the local articulates the global.
Not only in terms of cultural identity but also in a range of spacial practices around navigating urban environments.
Strategies for getting by, and ways of using what the geographer Nigel Thrift calls: "Fugitive Materials,"
to construct meaning in the face of hostile environments and forms of exclusion.
The notion of Fugitive Materials refers to the ability of black urbanites to switch between different modes
or functionalities of urban residencies, how we inhabit the city.
They have the capacity to deploy and utilize these urban materials I think is really important.
These fugitive materials encompass things such as submerged traditions, alternative codes, linguistic bits,
pirated technologies, informal and patchwork economies and distribution systems.
And they're accompanied by spacial practices and strategies of evasion, trespassing, squatting,
and circumvention within the intersections of neoliberal urban conditions of fragmentation and precarity.
The writer Abdoumaliq Simone argues that black urban residents in various cities around the world,
and I would include musicians in this, have created platforms for engagement
and connections across cities in ways that evade or circumvent
the dominant urban histories, frameworks and policies by creating new, radical, improvisational practices.
He argues, blackness has had to assume an incessantly inventive practice
of maintaining the creativity of black people and warding off all impediments
this creativity has faced. As such, blackness is a resource for better understanding the vicissitudes and possibilities
of urban life everywhere.
So I think these ideas about fugitive materials and inventive practice, I think chime powerfully
with Fred Moten's ideas about black life as a form of abstract sociality that is mobile, open and unfixed.
There's a move here away from defining blackness in limited terms as merely an ethnic or racial mark of identity.
What if blackness was a creative tool? And Black Urbanism a creative methodology?
What if blackness is evolving to become a hybrid form, multiple form of general urban expression,
mobilization and even building...
despite the fact that it emerged from particular sets of experiences
and historical circumstances in black urban communities?
To conclude, I want to argue that blackness as a creative urban methodology is most powerfully embodied
in the history of black musical cultures in cities, from slavery to modern times.
And I want to think about the role of black music and urban culture
through what the French-Caribbean writer Édouard Glissant calls "the right to opacity."
In several of his texts and interviews, Glissant talks about the rights of people and things not to be understood.
To resist full scrutiny by the other. The demand for opacity is not a demand for invisibility,
but an insistence that I exist on other than your terms. It's an assertion of the right not to be understood.
We don't always have to give up all our information.
He was referring really to the dominant demand for transparency
that he saw as characteristic of Western thought and its relations to the non-West.
In an interview with Manthia Diawara, he said:
"There's a basic injustice of the world-wide spread of transparency and the projection of Western thought.
Why must we evaluate people on the scale of ideas proposed by the West?
As far as I'm concerned, a person has a right to be opaque. It doesn't stop me liking that person,
it doesn't stop me from working with him, hanging out with him, etc.
A racist is someone who refuses what he doesn't understand. I can accept what I don't understand."
In her important work on forms of black resistance under slavery, Saidiya Hartman writes about slave songs.
And draws on the idea this idea of the right to opacity by suggesting that slaves are more than simple
expressions of the hurt... Slaves songs, sorry, are more than just simple expressions
of the fact that black people felt hurt by slavery. It's more than just talking about a form of being hurt.
Hartman argued that encoded in the modes of performance of these songs, in the way that they were sung,
in the way they were performed, there are subtle forms of resistance.
And withholding, withdrawal, that remained opaque to the slave masters.
Hartman argued that encoded in modes of performance... She calls this "the right to obscurity."
The right to obscurity must be respected, Hartman argues, for the accumulated hurt,
the rasping whispers deep in the throat, the wild notes, and the screams lodged deep
within confounds of simple expression.
I'm nearly finished here. Fred Moten, building on the work of both Hartman and Glissant,
framed this right to opacity or obscurity in terms of the idea of the secret.
In other words, that black music always holds its forms of meaning in the break or in the cut
that do not reveal themselves as transparently as is often thought or expected.
To quote Moten: "This is a political imperative that infuses the unfinished project of emancipation
as well as any number of other transitions or crossings in progress.
It corresponds to the need for the fugitive, the immigrant and the new citizen to hold something in reserve.
To keep a secret. The history of Afro-diasporic art, especially music, is, it seems to me,
the history of keeping this secret even in the midst of this intensely public and highly commodified dissemination.
These secrets are relayed and miscommunicated, misheard and overheard, often all at once,
in words, in the bending of words, in whispers and screams, in broken sentences,
in the names of people that you'll never know."
This, I think, tells us so much about how black music operates as a form of resistance to the incorporation
its incorporation by dominant culture. There's always an underground in the undercommons,
where the opacity, the obscurity, the secret of black urban music cannot be breached. I'll leave it there. Thank you.
I believe if anyone has any questions there are some mics at the sides if anyone wants to ask any questions
or has anything they want to specify, please do. If not, we can end the session and go have some drinks.
Hello Paul. I thought it was really interesting. I was interested specifically though in...
do you know of any examples where that thesis is being tested in terms of blackness as a cultural tool,
a creative tool, in the changing of cities and any specific emerging artists, either within the visual art or within music
who you know are actually linking to these ideas that are in your thesis?
I've done some work with a group of young black architects at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh,
who've been kind of using...
mapping forms of hip-hop and dance, particularly from the 1980s and 1990s, old-school hip-hop,
looking at the way that space was occupied by young people.
And then coming up with kind of algorithms to looking at how those
occupations of space can translate into architectural paradigms and forms of design,
this very kind of early experimentation, that was done a few years ago. That's one example
which hasn't really been made that public. I would say that, yeah, people are doing it out there.
The biggest example of a visual artist I can think of, someone like Theaster Gates, I mentioned,
who I think, you know, music has actually been central to his practice and performance.
Really, kind of music and performance, there's a kind of re-framing of black music in performance
around a critical project, which I think can help us to think through cities in a quite interesting way. It's still...
as I said in the beginning, it's very much putting the ideas out there. I'm interested to see how makers
will come up with solutions to try to deal with that. But I do stand by the idea that speculation
is an important practice in its own right, I guess that's what I'm doing, it's not... I don't have practical examples
it's more kind of thinking about an area of life that I think has not really been given as much thought
which is the essential connection between blackness and cities, and the way that cities in the West,
all round the world in fact are... The revival of urban culture around the world is in part, not totally, but is in part, I think,
been driven by various forms of blackness, commodified blackness, but also this kind of underground.
So I subscribe to this idea about the secret, this idea about opacity,
that black advanced cultures often withhold themselves, they operate in the underground.
And I think that's a potentially radical way of thinking about the future. Thank you.
Hello. Thank you for coming here today and speaking with all of us. I'm from Montreal.
And just to follow up what you just said, I started also as a singer-songwriter, but started first as a dancer with hip-hop
back in the 90s, so that what you touched is very dear to me. I just had a question because I've just heard
my guess through a different documentary, it's not that I can name any of them right now, but the idea of blackness
as a status, not necessarily just confined to urbanism but I was just curious as to what...
if you have any thoughts of that sort of idea and how that also links to this talk today,
if there's an actual link to that idea. - As a status?
Yes, in terms of the slave trade, for example, like, whiteness and black and how that's more of a status
sort of construct as opposed to just skin tone.
If I understand your question correctly, I think... This is not a direct answer to your question,
but what I think is exciting about black studies at the moment is that the status and the meaning of blackness
is being opened up, and it's being debated. It's a really exciting, fundamental base. I kind of simplified it
between two poles of Afro-Optimism and Afro-Pessimism. One believing that blackness is...
So Afro-Pessimists kind of argue that blackness has no status actually in the modern world. In fact the only way
that the kind of white, Eurocentric world can operate is by keeping black people outside.
It's very hardcore. But what they argue, in a more positive sense, is that we need to renew the world.
We need to get rid of this world that is basically been destroyed through forms of white power, white dominance.
And by "white power" I'm not talking about all white people, we're talking about whiteness as a system,
as an ideology, as a belief, which is very destructive, and which holds that black people are slaves, basically.
Even today.
So what Afro-Pessimists argue, as a status, it's not a status actually, it's a non-status,
it's a non-ontology, it's something that's outside. Again, I don't totally subscribe to that
but I think it's an interesting debate, to think about, it makes us think about the question of blackness in a
a really interesting way. So the question of blackness as a status I think is an interesting question,
I'll think about that, so thank you for raising it.
Thank you.
Hi, sorry, yeah, hi.
I'm wondering what you think. I don't think I'd be alone in thinking there's been in the last number of years
a vast commercialization and commoditization of at least American black rap music.
It now gets churned out in enormous quantities. And I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the effect of that
commercialization and commoditization is on these concepts of blackness, or possible concepts of blackness?
What will the effect be? - Yeah, I completely agree.
And in some of the texts I've written about I talk a lot about that. Blackness operates within...
the neoliberal global economy, and in fact is quite central to the way that the neoliberal economy
tries to incorporate difference. Blackness is sexy. Black culture is sexy. Black music is sexy.
But what I try to... My last slide is about the idea of the future is in the undercommons
and in the underground. There's always an underground
I mean, I went to New York in 1982, when I was 16. Because my half-brother lived in the States,
I went to visit him, and he took me into a world that I just couldn't imagine. I went to a block party
where a massive black guy with a mohican, this is 1982, and a punk-rock T-shirt,
I found out his name was Afrika Bambaataa, I was like, what the fuck is that?!
And there were guys scratching records... - I was a teenager in New York at that time.
What I'm trying to say is, is that it took me into an underground world that I didn't think possible because
at that point it was, you know, Luther Vandross and very commercial music, commodified music.
This was not commodified, it was completely underground. Now, of course, the paradox
is that that has now become... hip-hop has now become the form of commodified... the face of global capitalism.
Jay-Z in 444 talks about not having one billionaire, but two, we need two, we need more than one. So...
of course, there are undergrounds to that. You guys probably know more about that than I do,
I'm kind of old now, know what I mean? But I think, my view, is that this idea of opacity
there's always an opacity to black music, there's always a way in which it doesn't give out
everything that people think it does. There's always ways that black culture withholds
something, which, in Moten's terms, in the break. He calls it "in the break," "in the cut."
in this discontinuity that black music kind of thrives on, there's always this kind of break.
So what I'm saying is I think there's always a resistance to commodification.
An example, what's happening with grime music in London. I think a lot of that is really...
of course it's been commodified, but there's some really interesting forms of culture that's coming out of that.
Thank you. - Thank you.
Hi. - Hi.
My name's Arianni, I'm from Brazil. And the Brazil... black scene is very chaotic at the moment, there's a lot of
a lot of stuff going on, and me, as a Brazilian and being white with European heritage,
I would like to hear a bit from you, your thoughts about cultural appropriation as well as how can we, as artists,
that are white, and have certain privileges that most of us don't even realize,
can create an atmosphere or space or environment that is inviting to black artists to blend in as a way of...
breaking this awful system that shouldn't exist. Thank you. - It's a good question, thank you.
I think the question of cultural appropriation is a real one. I think it's, you know...
there's a long history of cultural appropriation, as I mentioned with Le Corbusier in Paris,
with Josephine Baker, etc. There's always a dynamic that forms a black underground culture
were appropriated by the mainstream. So it's a cycle that kind of continues to fuel itself and goes on and on and on.
Hip-hop commodification being the latest in the cycle.
I think one of the ways to break it is, what you've just said, to... I think that white artists, white people need to become
conscious of what whiteness is. I've spent a whole hour talking about blackness.
But there's also... I mean, blackness could not exist without another construct. Blackness is a construct.
But there's another construct called whiteness. And that white ideology, which is now in the White House
it is, right? White supremacy in the White House, and other places, need to be self-consciously
called out, white people need to reflect on that.
When you talk to white people about whiteness, they go, "What you talking about,
I'm just me, just a human being, I'm just an individual. What's this obsession with race that you have,
why do you have an obsession with race?" Well, guess what?
White people created race in the first place in order to keep black people in a position of inferiority.
So I think the answer to the cultural appropriation is that I think white people need to reflect on that, understand.
Have a bit of distance. Step back and say, what is this thing called whiteness?
And how am I related to that? How am I implicated in the negative aspects of whiteness?
Not all whiteness is negative, of course not. But the ways in which whiteness operates as a power
a dominating power that can appropriate and control ethnicities and cultures which are in a structurally
less important position, needs to be challenged, we need to be kind of opened up.
So I think, really, there needs to be a debate on whiteness, and in fact,
one of the projects I'm working on at the moment in London is a project on whiteness.
It's not about so much how black people feel about whiteness, it's more about understanding
what whiteness is, where it comes from, how it operates as a system of power,
so let's take it out of the personal, the individual about... 'Cause otherwise we get into issues around white guilt.
"Ah, I feel really bad, 'cause I'm a white person and I benefit from white guilt." I'm not saying that you're doing that,
but you see what I'm saying? There's a discourse that can be kind of quite non-productive in that,
"Oh, you know, my god, whiteness, I'm white and I don't know what to do."
Well, hey, it's like, what we need to do is take it out of that personal sense and understand it as a structural position.
I think that's what you're saying. A structural position that needs to be critiqued. It needs to be provincialized.
Europe needs to be provincialized. Europe is no longer the center of the world, we know that, anyway.
But people like Donald Trump or Teresa May don't seem to know that. We need to tell them that it is.
America is a provincial construction. It's not the center of the world. And similarly with white identities.
There's a question... Thank you.
There's a lot going on, like you said, world-wide with the Black Lives Matter movement. And I know, in Berlin...
there's demos happening all the time, world-wide there's articles popping up and talking about these things
and challenging the system. And personally, I try to be a strategist,
I'm maybe not so much the street soldier as I am the strategist, so I find hope in your presentation.
And so, I think maybe what I was hearing in this short time is that perhaps your thesis and these theories
lead towards a type of reconstruction. What types of resources do you think would absolutely be necessary
to actually implement, you know, the solution when we come to one?
That's a very good question. I think... Thinking about music, for example,
I've been to quite a few listening sessions, held by various thinkers, where...
I think music is a fantastic way, an example, to look at this. Where we listen to tracks seriously, collectively,
and discuss them, and discuss not only the aesthetics but also the politics of the music, what it means
in terms of improvisation, in terms of the kind of creative aspects of black culture.
So I think one of the ways that we can do it, and in particular, in thinking about music,
is to come together and form groups. And we can do it online, we can do it face-to-face,
and start discussing these issues, start speculating. I mentioned about the idea of speculation.
People often say to me, Oh, Paul, we haven't got time to speculate, we gotta be on the streets, we gotta be...
knocking down the doors. Yes, but, before you can act, you have to think.
I do believe that there's a space for thinking through these issues. That's what I'm trying to do. I also...
go on demonstrations, I also go and do action, but I do believe that we need to really think about it,
'cause we're talking about questions around ontology. Ontology is about thinking through who we are.
The most basic question that human beings can face. And given that blackness is often at the margin of humanity,
and that blackness has been excluded from humanity, and from the idea of being a human being,
we need to re-think that, and that will lead us to re-think the whole idea of being human.
What does human being mean? In that if we think through the ways in which European philosophy has basically
cast various aspects of human beings out of that kind of network.
So we need to think about a new concept of being human. Again, it's quite abstract,
but I think abstraction is part of the world. Abstraction is part of what helps us to map the future.
So I take your question in the spirit of being constructive, and I think... Obviously this is a conference of music makers
but I know that music makers are also thinkers. So this is what I try to do, is just give a few
kind of ideas that maybe people can take forward and think about when thinking about how the social
and cultural implications of what they're producing in terms of music.
OK. So, thank you so much for coming.