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Foreword: After Afrofuturism

GEORGE E. LEWIS

Journal of the Society for American Music / Volume 2 / Issue 02 / May 2008, pp 139 - 153
DOI: 10.1017/S1752196308080048, Published online: 17 April 2008

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1752196308080048

How to cite this article:

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 Journal of the Society for American Music (2008) Volume 2, Number 2, pp. 139–153.


C 2008 The Society for American Music doi: 10.1017/S1752196308080048

Foreword: After Afrofuturism

GEORGE E. LEWIS

Welcome to our special issue on Technology and Black Music in the Americas.
As guest editor, I’d like to offer my personal thanks to all of our contributors,
who are exploring relatively uncharted currents in the overall flow of black music
technology. I’d also like to thank JSAM editor Ellie M. Hisama and assistant editor
Benjamin Piekut for their tireless efforts, as well as their extraordinary abilities as
editors to navigate quickly between leaf- and forest-level views.
This issue has proved resolutely intergenre, as literary scholars, visual artists,
and academically trained practicing artists jostle musicologists and ethnomusi-
cologists. My extended foreword will not summarize the themes addressed by
the articles. Instead, I wanted to think for a moment about the strange fact that
despite our explicit call for papers addressing intersections of music, race, gender,
technology, science fiction, diaspora, utopia, Afrofuturism, and posthumanism, the
widely referenced term “Afrofuturism” rarely appears in the articles and reviews in
this issue.
Thus I feel constrained to present (or “represent”) some issues in this area. My
remarks are not intended to position me as respondent, although I do incorporate
quotations from the authors represented. Rather, like John Cage, who used parts of
older works to construct new performances, this foreword demonstrates the intent
of my guest editorship through a collaging of insights drawn from the authors
published here with the various hobbyhorses I’ve been riding for a number of years
now. Along the way, since this issue is meant to encourage scholarship rather than
provide a compendium of the present, I couldn’t resist offering some suggestions
for areas of future research.
Mark Dery coined the term “Afro-futurism” in a 1994 set of interviews with Tricia
Rose, Samuel R. Delany, and Greg Tate. The discussions were largely concerned
not with music, the topic we are vitally interested in here, but with the relative
absence of black science fiction writers.1 In the introduction to the interviews, a
largely prosthetic technological imaginary dominated Dery’s references to writing
and sound—Jimi Hendrix, Herbie Hancock, Sun Ra, Lee “Scratch” Perry, and
the Parliament/Funkadelic combine, represented by George Clinton and Bernie
Worrell.2 This seemed to indicate that even if the original intent of the proponents
of Afrofuturism included the recognition that “African American voices have other

1
Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia
Rose,” in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery, 179–222 (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1994).
2
I’m using the term “prosthetic” in contradistinction to my notion of the incarnative; the
opposition is developed in Doris Lessing’s space novels, which contrast the body politics of the
machine-making Sirians with those of the spiritual technologies of the Canopeans. See Doris Lessing,
The Sirian Experiments: The Report by Ambien II, of the Five (New York: Vintage Books, 1982).

139

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 140 Lewis

stories to tell about culture, technology and things to come,”3 the working out of
these voices in an actual art world—what cybertheorist Alondra Nelson called the
“concerns of ‘the list’” of artists and writers who later cofounded the Afrofuturism
listserv and website, as well as the canon of Afrofuturist music—was essentially
bound up, at least in its initial incarnation, with “sci-fi imagery, futurist themes,
and technological innovation in the African diaspora.”4
A contrasting, Caribbean-originated vision of the relation between blackness and
technology appears in Aimé Césaire’s classic 1939 work, Cahier d’un retour au pays
natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), which appears to ground the purity
of black subjectivity in technological lack:
o friendly light
o fresh source of light
those who invented neither powder nor compass
those who could harness neither steam nor electricity
those who explored neither the seas nor the sky
but those without whom the earth would not be the earth5

On the other hand, Michael Veal, whose book on the histories and practices of
dub is reviewed by Louis Chude-Sokei in this issue, maintains that in the late
twentieth century, “Jamaican attitudes toward technology actually contradict these
oppositional distinctions between a past understood as nature-based, primitive, and
stereotypically African, and a future understood as technological and stereotypically
de-Africanized.”6 Where critic Abiola Irele contends that Césaire’s passage uses the
supposed technical nonproficiency of African civilizations as support for a “vibrant
affirmation of racial pride,”7 one can easily imagine the passage sticking in the
craw of the Afrocentric hero Cheikh Anta Diop, who with many others contended
that the highly technologized Egyptian (pre-Ptolemaic) civilization was one with
Afro-diasporic cultures around the world.
In the post–Sun Ra Chicago of the 1970s (Sun Ra himself being “post–J. A.
Rogers” and other independent black researchers of the 1920s through the 1940s),
it was taken for granted by young African Americans of my generation that the
“Cultural Unity of Black Africa” (to reference one of Diop’s works) bundled ancient
Egypt with the South Side of Second City.8 The pyramids, of course, were one of the
seven wonders of the ancient world, but even among the most ardent Afrocentrists
or their equally implacable opponents, few had heard of Philip Emeagwali or Roscoe

3
Dery, “Black to the Future,” 182.
4
Alondra Nelson, “Introduction: Future Texts,” Social Text 20/2 (Summer 2002): 9. Nelson is
founder of the Afrofuturism listserv and website (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/afrofuturism and
http://www.afrofuturism.net).
5
Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, trans. and ed. Clayton Eshleman and
Annette Smith (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, [1939] 2001), 34.
6
Michael E. Veal, Dub: Soundscapes & Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae (Middletown, Conn.:
Wesleyan University Press, 2007), 213–14.
7
Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 2nd edn., with introduction, commentary, and
notes by Abiola Irele (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, [1939] 2000), 117.
8
Cheikh Anta Diop, The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matri-
archy in Classical Antiquity (Chicago: Third World Press, 1978).

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 Foreword: After Afrofuturism 141

Giles, who were inventing the internet backbone and developing supercomputers
around the same moment that the rather more modest nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century achievements of Jan Matzeliger and Garrett Morgan were being
marketed as “positive images” to young twentieth-century African Americans in
search of evidence of black technological prowess.9
George Lipsitz’s review here of Alexander Weheliye’s Phonographies cites Wehe-
liye’s understanding that “thinking about sound is essential for sound thinking.” At
the same time, as Lipsitz gently prods Weheliye to interrogate the division between
sight and sound, one can imagine asking music/sound scholars to take up the
challenge of achieving intertextuality by first developing new ways of theorizing
sound. What does the sound—not dress, visual iconography, witty enigmas, or
suggestive song titles—what can the sound tell us about the Afrofuture? How can
we develop a new theoretical and descriptive language that both complements and
exceeds the purview of the terms “music,” “sound,” and “listening”?
French economist Jacques Attali, in his 1977 book Bruits—a futurist text to
be sure—provided a fair amount for musicologists to ponder, not least by re-
purposing the term “composition” in a manner that recalls improvisation. One
sees Attali as responding to the marginalization and devaluation, in the public
sphere, of the practice of culturally and philosophically theorizing contemporary
nonliterary, nonvisual sonic “texts” (a term used here for lack of a more developed
sonic discursivity)—not because music scholars are not producing the work, but
perhaps because it has somehow gone without saying that music has little to teach
us about the critical issues of our time. In deploying music as a critical tool for
analyzing contemporary critical, cultural, historical, and social issues whose im-
portance cuts across fields, it is not interdisciplinarity or intertextuality that matter
as much as the kinds of interpretational catholicity and trenchancy enabled by the
two approaches.
Again, what we really want to know is if music has anything to tell us about
the future, and if the confluence of music with technology will teach us anything
about ourselves.
Jann Pasler, for example, draws important theoretical insights from composi-
tional methodologies such as those of Pauline Oliveros and Cage, lending credence
to the notion of the intrinsic centrality of music study to intellectual inquiry and
human experience.10 Lipsitz makes the case for the centrality of music to the public
sphere in his review: “Afro-sonic modernity has been where the liberal citizen subject
meets the cyborg, where technology intersects with art, where commerce and culture
collide, and where memories of ancestors pervade contacts with strangers. Weheliye
makes a persuasive case that there would be no modernity without blackness and
its many representations.”

9
For a representative US mainstream media account of the “Afrocentric education” controversy
of the 1990s, see Barbara Kantrowitz et al., “A is for Ashanti, B is for Black,” Newsweek, 23 September
1991.
10
Jann Pasler’s methodology is on fuller display in her recent book, Writing Through Music: Essays
on Music, Culture, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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 142 Lewis

This viewpoint, of course, is diametrically opposed to Norman Mailer’s 1973

prediction that “[s]ince the Negro has never been able to absorb a technological
culture with success, even reacting against it with instinctive pain and distrust,
he is now in this oncoming epoch of automation going to be removed from the
technological society anyway.”11
Michael Veal’s book on dub asks us to consider “whether Afro-futurism is fun-
damentally an African American trope, reflecting a particular proximity to the cold
war. Much of the emphasis on technology seems a likely reflection of the space race
as a component of the arms race. . . .”12 Veal further observes that dub itself “tends
to be less concerned with images of flying saucers and interplanetary travel, and is
more reflective of prominently interwoven dichotomies of nature/technology and
past/future.”13 Thus, although this issue was originally projected as “the Afrofu-
turism issue,” considering the implications of Veal’s remark leads us to understand
that the science-fiction model could only account for a fraction of contempo-
rary Afrodiasporic imaginings of technology. In the course of my editor’s task it
was becoming evident that Afrodiasporic people were asserting non-Afrofuturist
engagements with technology. It was this larger world that intrigued me, where
resistance was by no means futile. For instance, one can easily view Santerı́a as a
kind of technology designed to facilitate communication with higher powers and
condition the neo-Yoruban Afrofuture. As with the more usually invoked silicon-
based machines of today, the example of Santerı́a shows us that we need not eschew
the spiritual dimensions of black engagement with technology.
Broadening the conversation would allow a wider range of theorizing about the
triad of blackness, sound, and technology; for a start, one could interrupt the male-
ness of the Afrofuturist music canon with artists such as Pamela Z, DJ Mutamassik,
Mendi Obadike, Shirley Scott, Dorothy Donegan, the Minnie Riperton/Charles
Stepney/Rotary Connection collaborations, and more. Going further, removing
the putative proscription on nonpopular music allows us to take a more nuanced,
complex view of the choices on offer for black technological engagement, as artist
Morgan Craft (whose work with Mutamassik is reviewed in this issue) noted in an
impassioned letter to the British music magazine The Wire:
As far as hiphop being the future, well, the things Ornette Coleman, Butch Morris, Cecil
Taylor, Braxton, etc talk about are not the same things that rappers or producers are talking
about (exception: RZA five years ago). I’m listening and I want to eat these words. What
does the black American musician do now with the space s/he has been given?14

Indeed, this is an important question for young black musicians choosing alternative
nodes in the network. In the course of their navigation, some of these young people
might encounter the now eighty-seven-year-old Egyptian Halim El-Dabh, who
was experimenting in a radio studio in Cairo a half-decade before the advent of

11
Quoted in Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (London: Verso,
[1978] 1999), 46. Also see Norman Mailer, Existential Errands (New York: New American Library,
1973).
12
Veal, Dub, 209.
13
Ibid., 210.
14
Morgan Craft, letter to the editor, “Towards a New Consciousness,” The Wire, October 2005, 8.

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 Foreword: After Afrofuturism 143

musique concrète.15 El-Dabh, who worked in the Columbia-Princeton Electronic

Music Studios in the 1950s, was recognized as the “father of African electronic
music” at the 2005 UNYAZI Electronic Music Festival in Johannesburg, the first
event of its kind on the mother continent.
Along those lines, scholars might want to pay more attention to the work of
Anthony Davis, particularly his second opera, a space-fiction drama called Under
the Double Moon (1989), with a libretto by Deborah Atherton about telepathic
miscegenation on the mythical planet Undine. The work raises the issue of whether
the realities of operatic reception in the West could ever be subsumed under the
narrative of radical, populist, post-agrarian high art. Truth be told, however, that
landscape vanished a long time ago, along with the American frontier myth that
nurtured it—hip-hop, currently riven with harsh debates over commercialism and
political retrogression, having failed (and serendipitously so) as perhaps the last
viable candidate for the purple, as symbolized by Jay-Z’s 2003 celebration of capi-
talism on the CBS television news review, 60 Minutes.
Further broadening also allows us to consider, as does Ajay Heble’s review here of
Herman Gray’s book Cultural Moves, that “encounters between such technologies
and black vernacular musical practices have resulted in new understandings of
blackness, identification, and belonging through sound,” leading to the possibility,
strongly cherished by Heble, of promulgating “progressive projects for social jus-
tice.” At the same time, this forces the realization that there is much, much more to
be done—much of it, unfortunately, in the same mode of recovery that one finds
so depressing, although necessary.
This décalage exists for many reasons, which of course cannot be reduced to
questions of race. In any case, these reclamation projects, which I enjoy even as
some younger people find them tedious and vindicationist, proceed from the noble
motive of writing back into history some of those whom mainstream histories have
written out—in particular, those whose work went beyond the bounds of popular
taste, or at least beyond the tastes of those commentators who are busy creating
newer forms of the same gatekeeping narratives surrounding black expression.
Certainly, technology is one of those areas of the African diaspora where these
projects of reclamation are most sorely needed, and what I want to suggest is that
these histories of technology are discontinuous, local, and heedless of simplistic
racializations.
Finally, taking up Veal’s challenge to move beyond the dominance of African
American cultural and historical tropes allows the technologies of the Afrofuture
to be imagined globally, as with the series of “AfroGEEKs” conferences organized
by film scholar Anna Everett. These conferences featured critiques of technologi-
cally mediated representations of black masculinity, studies of video game culture,
confrontations with the “digital divides” that condition black access to digital

15
Hear, for example, his 1944 “Wire Recorder Piece.” See Halim El-Dabh, Crossing Into the Electric
Magnetic, Without Fear Recordings WFR003, 2000. A fascinating biography of this widely traveled
Egyptian composer and ethnomusicologist, which includes a compact disc of previously unreleased
works, is Denise E. Seachrist, The Musical World of Halim El-Dabh (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University
Press, 2003).

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 144 Lewis

technology in Africa and its diaspora, and issues of globalization and economic
modernization in Africa and the Caribbean.16
The Afrofuturist encounter produced an extraordinary 1999 conference,17 a lively
listserv and website,18 and like its Italian cousin, a fair number of manifestos, of
which the classic 1998 disquisition of Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun:
Adventures in Sonic Fiction, might be considered the most extended and influential.19
It was in this work that Eshun coined the extraordinarily powerful term “sonic
fiction.” As Eshun made clear in an interview with cybertheorist Geert Lovink, this
work constituted a response to the need for a kind of extra-academic activism in new
media: “I realized that there are several people with a similar structural position,
who had left academia, infiltrating pop cultural spaces. They did not footnote their
work and refused to contextualize their work. I wasn’t alone. There were sectors in
every city who were moving along similar tendencies.”20
Alexander Weheliye, who still footnotes his work, has commented:
According to Eshun, black posthumanism stands in stark contrast to the strong humanist
strand found in a host of black cultural styles, ranging from the majority of African American
literature to the history of soul and the blues. Eshun describes these two modes of thinking
as Afro-diasporic futurism and the humanist future—shock absorbers of mainstream black
culture. Eshun’s important work unearths some of the radical strands of black music
that refuse to uncritically embrace the Western conception of “the human,” are largely
instrumental, and therefore do not rely on the black voice as a figure of value.21

At the same time, Weheliye points out:

From nineteenth-century spirituals through the blues, jazz, soul, hip hop, and techno, the
human and the posthuman are in constant dynamic tension. It is precisely because slavery

16
The AfroGEEKS 2004 and 2005 conference website, “From Technophobia to Technophilia”
and “Global Blackness and the Digital Public Sphere,” is at http://research.ucsb.edu/cbs/projects/
afrogeeks.html. A recently edited volume derived from the concerns of these conferences is AfroGEEKS:
Beyond the Digital Divide, ed. Anna Everett and Amber J. Wallace (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Center for
Black Studies Research, 2007).
17
Alondra Nelson organized “Afrofuturism Forum” at New York University in 1999. The inter-
disciplinary set of participants included Beth Coleman, Kodwo Eshun, Leah Gilliam, Jennie C. Jones,
Kobena Mercer, Tracie Morris, Erika Dalya Muhammad, Simon Reynolds, Tricia Rose, and Reginald
Woolery. See Nelson, “Introduction: Future Texts,” 15 n. 25.
18
The Afrofuturism website is at http://www.afrofuturism.net/. Among the various man-
ifestos that dot its pages are Paul D. Miller, “Afro-Futurism: A Statement of Intentions—
Outside In, Inside Out,” 2002, http://www.afrofuturism.net/text/Manifestos/Miller01.html. Another
intriguing manifesto is Mark A. Rockeymoore, “What Is Afrofuturism?” AuthorsDen website,
http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?AuthorID=7174&id=4308.
19
See Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet
Books, 1998). So far this important book remains out of print (as of January 2008, used copies on
Amazon.com are offered from US$81 to $345), recalling the absence from the marketplace of the
important early Arista recordings of Anthony Braxton (among many others, particularly in jazz-
identified worlds), currently offered at Amazon from US$40 to $99. Many musicians suspect that
the companies, which in most cases own the rights to the work, choose cynically to wait until the
creator’s death to capitalize; an even less charitable, more conspiratorial version sees it as the simple
suppression of inconvenient ideas.
20
Geert Lovink, “‘Everything was to be done. All the adventures are still there’: A Speculative Dia-
logue with Kodwo Eshun,” 2000, Telepolis website, http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/6/6902/1.html.
21
Alexander G. Weheliye, “‘Feenin’: Posthuman Voices In Contemporary Black Popular Music,”
Social Text 20/2 (Summer 2002): 29.

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 Foreword: After Afrofuturism 145

rendered the category of the human suspect that the reputedly humanist postslavery black
cultural productions cannot and do not attribute the same meaning to humanity as white
American discourses.22

Nelson’s connection of Afrofuturism with its 1920s Italian predecessor is an entirely

natural move;23 moreover, any futurism worth its salt should properly be tempted
to claim a certain prescience, preferably with the same sense of evangelical ecstasy
that permeates Eshun’s book. This imputation of the oracular is routinely made—
with a similar fervor and often with a certain insouciance regarding timelines—for
Sun Ra’s work, and as for jazz more generally, particularly in the post-Marsalis era,
with death the legend only grows.
Ra’s use of electronics is a crucial component of the claim to “pre-science” (a
metanalysis that Ra might have enjoyed). Yet no academic treatise of which I am
aware has historically traced and contextualized Ra’s use of sound technologies—or
for that matter, that of the composer George Russell, one of the US pioneers in
pan-African collaborations who used “space” titles in his work (Jazz in the Space
Age, 1960) and whose 1968 Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved By Nature, realized in
the studios of Swedish Radio with musicians such as future “Nordic jazz” founder
Jan Garbarek, combine electronic tape collages with improvisation.24 While we’re
at it, one area that might prove fruitful is the tracing of the technological histories of
two other African American musicians who have flown well under the Afrofuturist
radar: Olly Wilson, the composer and founder of the Oberlin Electronic Music
Studio, and David Levitt, former MIT researcher working on computer models
of music making, and the author of HookUp, an early visual patching language
that was developed and running among Levitt’s students at the Media Lab while
Miller Puckette, the author of the now dominant patch language, Max/MSP, was a
graduate student there.25

22
Ibid., 30.
23
Nelson, “Introduction: Future Texts,” 2.
24
I’m indebted to Harald Kisiedu for this reminder. One of the few substantial accounts of Russell’s
Electronic Sonata is contained in Max Harrison, Charles Fox, and Eric Thacker, The Essential Jazz
Records, vol. 2, Modernism to Postmodernism (London: Continuum International Publishing Group,
2000), 242–44. For a reference to Russell’s contribution to the early collaborations with conguero
Chano Pozo, see Jason Stanyek, “Transmissions of an Interculture: Pan-African Jazz and Intercultural
Improvisation,” in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, ed.
Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble, 87–130 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2004).
25
For an early report on HookUp, see Christopher Yavelow, “A Report on the Workshop for
Music Notation by Computer,” Computer Music Journal 11/2 (Summer 1987): 65–70. For a photo of
the HookUp user interface, see “Product Announcements,” Computer Music Journal 14/2 (Summer
1990): 90. David A. Levitt’s influential compendium of work on computer music modeling, co-
edited with Stephan M. Schwanauer, is Machine Models of Music (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). In
his account of the origins of the Max visual patcher interface, Miller Puckette, its developer, doesn’t
mention HookUp, perhaps the most proximate immediate precursor in terms of look and feel. Puckette
observed: “Many other graphical patch languages—both for music and for other applications—had
appeared by 1987 when I started writing the Max ‘patching’ GUI [graphical user interface]. Although
several specific elements might have been novel, at least in the computer music context, the overall
idea of a graphical patch language was not.” See Miller Puckette, “Languages and Environments for
Computer Music: Max at Seventeen,” Computer Music Journal 26/4 (Winter 2002): 33.

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 146 Lewis

Finally, opening up the network allows us to harmonize with the sense in which
tropes of techne¯ are deployed in Mike Heffley’s essay on Anthony Braxton—in
this case, by engaging the thought of Kali Tal, whom Nelson cites as suggesting
that “over a century’s worth of ‘sophisticated tools for the analysis of cyberculture’
already existed in African American thought.”26 Chela Sandoval raises the historical
ante still further, with her assertion that the brunt of cyborg life in the twenty-first
century is borne not nearly as much by artists as by
the muscles and sinews of workers who grow tired in the required repetitions, in the
warehouses, assembly lines, administrative cells, and computer networks that run the great
electronic firms of the twentieth century. These workers know the pain of the union of
machine and bodily tissue, the robotic conditions, and in the late twentieth century, the
cyborg conditions under which the notion of human agency must take on new meanings . . . .
Cyborg life as a worker who flips burgers, who speaks the cyborg language of McDonald’s,
is a life that the workers of the future must prepare themselves for in small, everyday ways.27

Nonetheless, for Sandoval, over the last three hundred years these people and others
“had already developed the Cyborg skills required for survival under techno-human
conditions:”28 “la facultad,” as Sandoval cites Gloria Anzaldúa’s term, or reading
signs; deconstruction and meta-ideologizing, aimed at the rearticulation of signs
of dominance; the reassertion of egalitarian social relations; and what Sandoval
calls “differential movement,” a “polyform” appearing as womanism, mestizaje,
or strategic essentialism—“a differential form of oppositional consciousness, as
utilized and theorized by a racially diverse US coalition of women of colour, is
the form love takes in the postmodern world. It generates grounds for coalition,
making possible unity across difference.”29

One is struck by the absence of blackness from narratives of musical postmodernity,

at least where “art music” (to deploy that rather wan category) is concerned. It
cannot be accidental that lacunae of this sort populate the areas of theoretical
and historical music scholarship, which have found gender a far more tractable
category of analysis than race. In these worlds of scholarship, race is easily seen as
proper to black music studies; less immediately evident, however, is its centrality
to theorizations of the historical reception and production of putatively non-black
musics. Even so, as Jann Pasler has shown,30 and as Vijay Iyer notes in his review in
this issue of Mark Butler’s book on electronic dance music, “the very language of
the discipline has come into being against the backdrop of the racial imagination.”

26
Nelson, “Introduction: Future Texts,” 3.
27
Chela Sandoval, “New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed,”
in The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (London: Routledge, 2000),
374–75.
28
Ibid., 375.
29
Ibid., 376–77.
30
See Jann Pasler, “The Utility of Musical Instruments in the Racial and Colonial Agendas of Late
Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 129/1 (2004): 24–76.

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 Foreword: After Afrofuturism 147

Iyer cites Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman’s evocative assertion that “[a] specter
lurks in the house of music, and it goes by the name of race.”31
As one might expect, these lacunae expand at the Elegban junction of race
and technology. Thus for a new generation of black electronic musicians, music
became a way to push and challenge the economic, geographic, and informational
boundaries of any and all “ghettoes”—and at least in the ghetto where I grew up,
the trope of the “electronic nigger” (the title of a series of plays by the influential
black playwright Ed Bullins) was hardly a complimentary one. The title character
in the Bullins plays, for example, is a technologically facile buffoon and all-around
Uncle Tom.32 The negative trope of the technology-blackness opposition recurs in
poet Michael S. Harper’s 1973 poem “In the Projects,” in which the protagonist
is a depressed Vietnam veteran, estranged by dint of his war experiences from his
fellows on the basketball court:

“black-medal-man ain’t street-poisoned,”

militants called:
“he’s an electronic nigger!”
“Better keep the electronic nigger ’way.”
Electronic Nigger?
Mama, unplug me, please.33

In contrast, the cover of a 1968 album by saxophonist Eddie Harris, featuring his
broad, smiling visage positioned comfortably behind an electronic music device to
which his horn is connected, laughingly invites the listener to “Plug Me In.” The
title of Harris’s subsequent live album, released in 1969, a year before Miles Davis’s
Bitches Brew, warns of “High Voltage.”34 Around 1965, Harris had become one of
the first musicians in any field to seriously experiment, in concert and on records,
with the new real-time music technologies, forging a trenchant connection between
advanced electronic music techniques, extended acoustic instrumental technique,
and down-home funk.
At heart, Harris was what the Germans call a Bastler, creating self-published,
difficult-to-play books of technique and fashioning reed mouthpieces for trumpets,
which he used in recordings and performances. Anticipating Miles Davis by at least
two years, Harris used electric pianos and organs, and recorded pieces with real-
time electronic sound processors such as the Varitone, a so-called octave divider that
synthesized parallel octaves above or below the pitch of a horn, and the Echoplex,

31
Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman, “Introduction: Music and Race, Their Past, Their
Presence,” in Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1.
32
For an analysis of Bullins’s play, see Leslie Catherine Sanders, The Development of Black Theater
in America: From Shadows to Selves (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989).
33
Michael S. Harper, Images of Kin: New and Selected Poems (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1977), 101.
34
Miles Davis, Bitches Brew, Columbia G2K 40577 (2 CDs), [1970] 1986; Eddie Harris, High
Voltage, Atlantic SD-1529, 1969; and Harris, Plug Me In, Atlantic SD-1506, 1968.

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 148 Lewis

an early tape-based delay line noted for its portability.35 It is not known whether
Davis and Harris ever discussed electronics—or for that matter, science fiction,
with which neither artist was particularly associated—but Davis was undoubtedly
aware of Harris’s work, not only because Harris was quite prominent himself, but
also because Davis recorded the saxophonist’s now-canonical piece, “Freedom Jazz
Dance” on his 1967 album, Miles Smiles.36
Certainly, this special issue on Technology and Black Music in the Americas would
be incomplete without an audience with Sun Ra, who has inspired (and perhaps
sired) more Afrofuturist paeans than any musician except George Clinton—perhaps
a holdover from the days when jazz was said to divine the future, or a yearning
for the Ethiopianist Zion that Ra and so many others in the black diaspora have
evoked. Brent Hayes Edwards’s review here of The Wisdom of Sun Ra (edited by John
Corbett) cites a 1986 interview in which Ra saxophonist John Gilmore claims that
the Nation of Islam had drawn from Ra’s views. Gilmore’s sense of Ra as originary,
however, leaves very little space for the dynamics unearthed by historian Daniel
Widener, who identifies an Asian presence in Afrofuturism:
Elusive Asian radicals spread a message of apocalyptic racial revolt throughout the United
States’ internal colonies which survives, in various guises, into the present day. While the
membership rolls of the Society for the Development of Our Own, the Pacific Movement
of the Eastern World, and the Moorish Science Temple contained but a miniscule fraction
of black America, the message of Japanese deliverance spread by W. D. Fard, Satohata
Takahashi, and Policarpio Manansala achieved a wide consonance in African American life.
Spreading an impassioned missive complete with Japanese bombers, troops, and arms, these
figures and groups attracted thousands of blacks searching for a swift end to a seemingly
intractable racism. The proponents of this vision often sought to tie African Americans
and Asians together biologically, and the vision of Japanese “motherships,” the language of
the “Asiatic Black Man,” and the fiery destruction of a racist white world proved enduring.
However fanciful such scenarios might be, they remain important both as precursors to the
explosion of a technophilic Afro-futurism in the 1970s and as a profound instance of the
social construction of race from below.37

Widener’s reference to W. D. Fard is worth further consideration here. Elijah

Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam (born Elijah Poole in 1897), met
Fard in Detroit in 1931. In the Nation’s belief system, Fard becomes “Master Farad
Muhammad” or “God in person,” and in books such as Message to the Blackman,
Elijah Muhammad credits Fard’s 1930s teachings on the vision of Ezekiel’s wheel as
foundational to the Nation’s belief in the “Mother Plane,” a technologically advanced
artificial planet whose capabilities are eventually deployed in an Armageddon that
ensures the ultimate triumph of the black race over its enemies. According to
Michael Lieb, technology-based interpretations of Ezekiel date from the Miltonic
era, and the Nation’s proto-Afrofuturist eschatology, which antedates Scientology’s

35
By his own account, Harris was also an early user of Robert Moog’s new voltage-controlled
synthesizers. During intermission at one of Harris’s concerts at the New Morning jazz club in Paris in
the 1980s, Harris proudly showed me his latest Moog-designed device.
36
Miles Davis, Miles Smiles, Columbia CL 2601, 1967.
37
Daniel Widener, “‘Perhaps the Japanese Are to Be Thanked?’: Asia, Asian Americans, and the
Construction of Black California,” positions 11/1 (Spring 2003): 26.

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 Foreword: After Afrofuturism 149

more widely known futurisms by several decades, appears to date from around the
same period when Gilmore was a toddler and Sun Ra was living in Birmingham,
Alabama, in the Earthly guise of a teenager named Herman Blount.38
In this light, it seems evident that engaging multiracialism would be useful in
theorizing the black musical encounter with technology. To begin with an energizing
binary, on the one hand, we have Miles Davis, whose early forays into electronics,
as Paul Tingen notes, were fostered as part of a multiracial, integrationist milieu
encompassing jazz, rock, and classical musicians, as well as anyone else seeking
the hybridities and fusions that were part of a general eclecticism in 1960s pop-
ular music making that entered the American classical world only grudgingly,
as critic John Rockwell notes in his unjustly neglected 1983 book, All American
Music.39
On the other hand, we have Eddie Harris, whose electronically vocalized saxo-
phone on “Listen Here,” recorded in early 1967, was enormously popular nationally,
particularly in black communities around the United States, if less so in the white
communities that embraced Davis’s new electronic music.40 Imprudently, in 1970
Harris attacked Davis publicly for fostering a “new white image”—ironically, a
charge that was soon leveled at Harris himself.41 The remark needs to be contex-
tualized by noting that Harris cut his musical teeth as Sun Ra did, in the 100%
hypersegregated, overcrowded, cheek-by-jowl black environment of Chicago’s
South Side, where Ra’s claim of extraterrestriality could be seen as having the
effect (and perhaps even a playfully Signifying intent) of hiding any histories of his
work (including its pre-1961 reliance on twelve-bar blues and AABA forms) that
were not audible to the more sound-challenged critics.
That such all-black, largely working-class environments could become the staging
ground for eclectic fusions and postmodernities need not surprise us—that is, if
we recognize that it was not hybridity but mobility, the master trope of the Great

38
In 1989, Louis Farrakhan, Elijah Muhammad’s self-proclaimed successor, recounted his own
abduction by aliens from the Mother Wheel. See Mattias Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad:
Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996). For a detailed
history of the technological interpretation of Ezekiel, including the Nation of Islam’s visions, see
Michael Lieb, Children of Ezekiel: Aliens, UFOs, the Crisis of Race, and the Advent of End Time
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998).
39
See Paul Tingen, Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967–1991 (New York:
Billboard Books, 2003). John Rockwell, All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century
(New York: Da Capo Press, [1983] 1997). Rockwell’s ideas have now entered the mainstream of US
cultural programming, even if one signal attempt to put his ideas into practice as director of the
Lincoln Center Festival was roundly condemned by New York critics when he selected Ornette
Coleman as 1997’s composer-in-residence. His rejoinder is noteworthy: “Most disturbingly, [Paul]
Griffiths suggests that the idea of ‘retrospectives devoted to the music of major American composers’
might be ‘worth reviving.’ Curiously, from the exact opposite position in musical polemics, Kyle Gann
of The Village Voice similarly suggested that this year we had ‘nearly bailed out of the new music
business.’ Have either of these gentlemen heard of Ornette Coleman?” John Rockwell, letter to the
editor, “New and Old Music Put in Context,” New York Times, 17 August 1997.
40
Eddie Harris, The Electrifying Eddie Harris, Atlantic SD-1495, 1968.
41
Quoted in Ian Carr, Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press,
1999), 285. For an account of the black nationalist criticism of Davis and Harris, see George E. Lewis,
“The Virtual Discourses of Pamela Z,” Journal of the Society for American Music 1/1 (February 2007):
57–78.

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 150 Lewis

Migration, that fueled the aspirations of black people in a complexly articulated but
socially black milieu like the South Side, which had a larger population of African
descent in 1960 than all of Great Britain did in 2001.42 In this light, Birmingham
School theorizations of hybridity could be viewed as the recognition of a hopeful
post-race reality, but also as a metaphorization of multiracial political coalition, a
minoritarian response to local conditions.
“Strategic” hybridity, however, is hardly generalizable to a complex diaspora.
Local conditions do matter, and in a globalized environment, paradoxically, they
matter more than ever. Thus, techno founder Juan Atkins’s phaneric deployment
of the mask of “Model 500” not only avoids racial typing but also asserts mo-
bility in a way that, in Houston Baker’s words, “secures territorial advantage and
heightens a group’s survival possibilities.”43 Here, we need to remember that this
kind of experimentalism can take many forms, draw from many histories, con-
front different methodological challenges, and manifest a self-awareness as being
in dialogue with the music of the whole earth—all while emerging from a black
environment.

Having spent this entire essay discussing Afrofuturist production, I’d like the reader
to spend a few moments after its conclusion considering modes of Afrofuturist lis-
tening, consumption, and dissemination, matters that I won’t have space to discuss
here. While those notions reverberate, let us make a brief foray into the troubled
history that black musicians have had with labels and labeling. As Duke Ellington
remarked in 1962, in the wake of decades spent evading racialized categories, “Let’s
not worry about whether the result is jazz or this or that type of performance. Let’s
just say that what we’re all trying to create, in one way or another, is music.”44 In
contrast, Leroy Jenkins, speaking in 1997, maintained that “I don’t mind the labels;
they can put the labels one right after the other if it will get me work. But then, on
the other hand, if it’s going to keep me from getting work, I don’t want to be put in
that position.”45
But one reform I am not calling for is the “expansion” of the label “Afrofuturism”
to perform a wider range of cultural work. As Ellington realized, there is more
at stake in these label disputes than simple, immediate pragmatics. As a tool by
which sociomusical networks produce what counts as knowledge and repair border
breaches, labels themselves tend towards hegemonies that reduce mobility and clog
communication lines. Dizzy Gillespie’s account of a conversation with the Duke,
quoted by Eric Porter, presents the issue well by way of conclusion:

42
I draw here upon the ideas on the post-slavery deployment of power through movement artic-
ulated in Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The African-American Migration Narrative
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
43
Houston A. Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1989), 51.
44
Duke Ellington, “Ellington: Where Is Jazz Going? (1962),” in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed.
Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 326.
45
Ludwig Van Trikt, “Leroy Jenkins,” Cadence, November 1997, 6.

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 Foreword: After Afrofuturism 151

In the context of the economics of the industry and the racial discourse surrounding the
music, the label [bebop] had the power to fix a complicated series of musical innovations
in a particular time and place and make them irrelevant. Gillespie recalled that Ellington
warned him about the problems with categories: “Duke Ellington once told me: ‘Dizzy, the
biggest mistake you made was to let them name your music bebop, because from the time
they name something, it is dated.’ ”46

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Discography
Davis, Miles. Bitches Brew. Columbia G2K 40577 (2 CDs), 1970.
———. Miles Smiles. Columbia CL 2601, 1967.
El-Dabh, Halim. Crossing Into the Electric Magnetic. Without Fear Recordings, 2001.
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