Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology
Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology
by Alexander Ghedi Weheliye
Duke University Press, 2023 Cloth: 978-1-4780-2031-8 | eISBN: 978-1-4780-2729-4 | Paper: 978-1-4780-2521-4 Library of Congress Classification ML3521.W445 2023
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In Feenin, Alexander Ghedi Weheliye traces R&B music’s continuing centrality in Black life since the late 1970s. Focusing on various musical production and reproduction technologies such as auto-tune and the materiality of the BlackFem singing voice, Weheliye counteracts the widespread popular and scholarly narratives of the genre’s decline and death. He shows how R&B remains a thriving venue for the expression of Black thought and life and a primary archive of the contemporary moment. Among other topics, Weheliye discusses the postdisco evolution of house music in Chicago and techno in Detroit, Prince and David Bowie in relation to appropriations of Blackness and Euro-whiteness in the 1980s, how the BlackFem voice functions as a repository of Black knowledge, the methods contemporary R&B musicians use to bring attention to Black Lives Matter, and the ways vocal distortion technologies such as the vocoder demonstrate Black music’s relevance to discussions of humanism and posthumanism. Ultimately, Feenin represents Weheliye’s capacious thinking about R&B as the site through which to consider questions of Blackness, technology, history, humanity, community, diaspora, and nationhood.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Alexander Ghedi Weheliye is Malcolm S. Forbes Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and author of Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human and Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity, both also published by Duke University Press.
REVIEWS
“This cutting-edge book demonstrates the work of a thinker who has devoted a great deal of research and care to the study of the sonic, historiographic, and aesthetic consequences of Blackness. Alexander Ghedi Weheliye’s concentration on the rich concurrences of Blackness and R&B is a true blessing. Deftly mapping out new avenues of critical pursuit devoted to the art of Blackness, Feenin is a stunning work.”
-- Michael Boyce Gillespie, author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film
“Feenin is less a collection of essays and more a playlist of Alexander Ghedi Weheliye’s greatest hits. It assembles a series of captivating essays that register the complex sonic frequencies of Black life with resounding effect. The ‘tracks’ gathered here demonstrate the force of Weheliye’s incisive theorizing and its profound contribution to sounding the rhythm, vibes, and groove of Black studies in the ‘forceful fullness of the Now.’”
-- Tina M. Campt, Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities, Princeton University
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Track 0.0 Good Days: R&B Music and Critical Fabulation in the Frequencies of Now 1 Track 1.0 Engendering Phonographies: Sonic Technologies of Blackness / A Response to Tavia Nyong’o 23 Track 2.0 “Feenin": Posthuman Voices in R&B Music 37 Track 3.0 Rhythms of Relation: Black Popular Music and Mobile Technologies 75 Interlude 1. Calling My Phone 98 Track 4.0 My Volk to Come: Specters of Peoplehood in Diaspora Discourse and Afro-German Popular Music 100 Track 5.0 “White Brothers with No Soul": UnTuning the Historiography of Berlin Techno / Interview with Annie Goh 121 Interlude 2. Don't Take It Away 135 Track 6.0 New Waves, Shifting Terrains: Prince’s and David Bowie’s Transatlantic Crossovers 140 Interlude 3. #BeyondDeepBrandyAlbumCuts 153 Track 7.0 “Sounding That Precarious Existence": On R&B Music, Technology, and Blackness / An Interview with Nehal El-Hadi 158 Track 8.0 “Scream My Name Like a Protest": R&B Music as BlackFem Technology of Humanity in the Age of #Blacklivesmatter 178 Interlude 4. Songify Your Life 198 Track 9.0 808s and Heartbreak / Alexander Ghedi Weheliye and Katherine McKittrick 201 Track 10.0 Wayward Shuddering, Beautiful Tremors (AGW's Quiet Storm Remix) 237 Sources 245 Index 275
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