Q&A with Lisa Messeri

Lisa Messeri is faculty in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University and author of Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds, also published by Duke University Press. In her new book In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles, she offers an ethnographic exploration of Los Angeles’s VR community, showing how technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race.

You describe an early vision of VR as an “empathy machine.” Where did this altruistic idea of VR start, and what does it think VR can do?

In 2015, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker gave a TED talk entitled “How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine.” This talk named a phenomenon that had been brewing for several years at the intersection of academic research and journalism. Put succinctly, the idea was that because of VR’s sensorially immersive quality, it could induce strong feelings in viewers that allowed them to deeply understand situations far removed from their every day. Rather than VR being a vehicle for escapism and fantasy, instead it was meant to expose people with privilege to experiences of poverty, discrimination, war, and a litany of other injustices. When I began hearing podcasts and reading media stories about how VR could help one understand what it was like to, for example, be a refugee, my alarm bells went off (my training prepares me to be skeptical of technological solutions to societal problems) and the work for what eventually became this book began.

Does VR actually achieve what this vision believes it can?

The ambition of my book is not to say whether VR is or isn’t an empathy machine, but rather to understand how people came to believe in this vision and what have been the consequences of pursuing this vision. Why, in the mid-2010s, was the promise of a beneficent technology still so appealing despite what we were all coming to understand about the biases of algorithms and the social harms and radicalizations happening in online spaces? On the one hand, the empathy machine was one last chance to believe in the promises of technological progress. But there was also this complex irony that positioned VR as a digital fix to the social divisions and fractures that analysts increasingly understood to be caused (in part) by social media and the filter bubbles produced by algorithms. In other words, this next-gen tech was being positioned as a solution to the problems caused by the previous generation. However, as I detail in the book, these concerns are very focused on Silicon Valley and I was more interested in why the empathy machine was appealing for folks in Los Angeles who were just as likely to come from Hollywood as they were from a traditional technological background. In this context, the empathy machine imaginary wasn’t positioned in relation to previous technologies, but rather it referenced broader trends of social and political unrest in the US. Because I was conducting fieldwork during the Trump administration, during which time there were mounting energies from movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, it was apparent that the empathy machine was responding to a growing liberal awareness of the inequities that accompany different lived experiences.

Your book focuses on the VR community in Los Angeles specifically. Why Los Angeles
and not Silicon Valley?

When I began imagining a project on VR (back in 2015) it came as a big surprise that I would be able to conduct fieldwork in LA! As I mentioned, I was concerned by the empathy machine imaginary, and as I began to research where some of the key promoters of this vision were based, my searching led me to LA. This really excited me, as I had already done fieldwork in Silicon Valley and I wasn’t too eager to return. As much as I love the Bay Area, I felt like it would be really hard to say something distinct about VR when writing from that location and with its overdetermined narratives about emerging technology. At the same time, my anthropological project is to write about places of (and people with) power, so LA was ideal in so far as I could approach technology in that location from a fresh perspective while still deeply attending to structures of power and privilege. I will also add, that when I was in graduate school and reading widely on theories of space and place, I loved reading theorists of LA like Ed Soja and Mike Davis, as well as Fredric Jameson’s reflections on the Bonaventure Hotel. There was fantasy in these musings on LA, and I was really excited to conduct fieldwork in this much theorized urban landscape. In the book, I indulge these interests by suggesting that being in LA and moving through its architectural façades becomes a fitting way to understand the experience of immersing oneself in VR.

You describe the entertainment industry as a tech industry of its own – particularly when it comes to special effects. How does VR play into this?

One of the key questions I ask in the book is “What is ‘tech’ in LA?” When I first began my research, the structure of feeling around that word and who identified as working “in tech” was quite different from my expectations informed by work I had done in Silicon Valley and my own undergraduate training as an engineer. I ended up developing the concept of “technological terroir” to remind analysts of technology that local political economies shape not only individual technologies, but also the very concept of “tech” and “tech work.” In LA, the dominant structuring force for the creative class that I conducted fieldwork with is, of course, Hollywood. Hollywood is an incredibly technical industry, particularly as blockbusters have come to drive the box office. I really like the book American Blockbuster by fellow Duke author Charles Acland, which emphasizes that not only do certain filmmakers (like James Cameron) drive the need for advanced technologies, but they also then tell stories that normalize these technological advances. In my book, I found it necessary to distinguish “cinematic technologies” – like cameras and CGI – and “emerging technologies” – like robots and flying cars – to more clearly delineate technologies that help tell stories from technologies about which stories are told. VR, by these definitions, is both a cinematic and an emerging technology and because of that blurring it became a way to better understand the aligned and competing interests of Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

A big part of the altruistic idea of VR was based in the hope that the industry could
achieve true gender equity. How did this play out in reality?

I write a lot in the book (and in talks I have given about the book) about how “Women in VR” became a visible community in LA as VR was re-emerging onto the commercial market. People often ask “are there really more women in VR than other tech sectors?” But what mattered to me as an anthropologist was how this narrative emerged and how it impacted people who voiced and identified as women in VR. Certainly there were several women whose careers and reputations were greatly advanced after they pivoted to VR, and I give them space in the text to narrate their experiences and theories for why they found VR empowering. But I also make clear that some women felt excluded from the “popular feminism” that was often on display and, more materially, the financial beneficiaries of VR largely have been men or corporations with male CEOs. Sometimes it is more analytically helpful to think about the fantasy of inclusion narratives rather than their reality.

In researching this book, you spent time with the co-founder of a start-up that creates VR
experiences for caregivers working in eldercare. Can you describe their project and what
you learned from your experience with them?

The company I worked with, Embodied Labs, imagines a different user for VR. Rather than the privileged audience intended to view empathy machine experiences or the young, tech savvy gamer strapping on a headset to enter a fantasy world, this company creates VR experiences for professional caregivers who work with aging clients. The company suggests that these experiences can help (often underresourced and often women of color) care workers understand experiences of aging that are inaccessible to younger, more able-bodied people.

I was initially wary of conducting fieldwork with Embodied Labs, as some of the key problems with the empathy machine were being reproduced in their VR experiences and I was also aware of the critique from disability studies scholars on analog disability simulations that are often a part of medical training. But the more I talked with the CEO, the more I realized that Embodied Labs might be a helpful opportunity to think about the contexts that make interventions more helpful or hurtful. In other words, after spending a chapter voicing the harms of the empathy machine, I wanted to follow up with a chapter that considered if such well-intentioned approaches could be salvaged. Could the empathy machine be otherwise? Working with Embodied Labs helped me offer some lessons that we might apply to VR and other technologies that could better set the stage for altruistic visions to potentially be realized. I am not saying this company is perfect nor that it avoided some of the pitfalls that critics have highlighted. But it was important for me to not use critique to outright dismiss the possibility of technology assisting in our goals of being better community members, and instead look for models that could help imagine alternative modes of engaging technology and alternative visions of who technology can serve.

You end the book talking about recent developments in VR via the metaverse. How does
the vision of VR you’ve described manifest in these developments?

I knew it was going to be a gamble to write about VR. It was a guarantee that, by the time this book came out, either the technology would have faded into obscurity or it would be completely transformed from what the community I worked with was developing in 2018 when I conducted fieldwork. It was therefore always important to make this book about something more than VR. As I hope readers will discover, this book is about the fantasies that technologies facilitate – fantasies that individuals have for themselves as well as the social orders they hope to bring about.

Since I concluded my research, the subsequent fantasies that have captured industry and public fascinations have included cryptocurrencies, NFTs, the metaverse, and most recently generative AI. There are three ways that I have found my research on VR helpful for my own processing of these tech trends. First, it is sometimes the case that VR is directly implicated in the fantasy, as in Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the metaverse where we all are wearing our Oculus Quest headsets and hanging out in Meta’s virtual world. In this case, my book becomes a ”pre-history” of sorts to how we got here. A second observation I’ve made is that folks who I came to know through their VR work have at times moved on to one of these newer trends. These individuals serve as helpful reminders that while the physical things might be new and shiny, often the people, institutions, and ideologies undergirding them have common foundations. And finally, one of the intentions of this book is to expand our critique of the US tech industry to include other centers of power. There is a lot we still have to learn about the connections forged between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The recent writers strike in which AI featured prominently as a concern of LA’s creative class serves as a striking example. As my research illustrates, such tensions emerge not simply from Silicon Valley engineers imposing their vision on Hollywood storytellers. People in the entertainment industry are themselves actively pursuing, developing, and investing in AI. Like VR, AI is both a cinematic and an emerging technology and the complexities that arose due to VR’s blurring of these two kinds are evident in how AI conversations have been unfolding.

While thinking about VR in LA might seem at first blush quite specific, my hope is that this book is of interest to anyone who is thinking through the forces that structure our visions and fantasies about the future.

Read the introduction to In the Land of the Unreal for free and save 30% on the paperback with coupon E24MSSRI.

Unspooled: An Annotated Playlist

Drawing on sources ranging from obscure music zines to transcripts of Congressional hearings, Rob Drew traces how a lowly, hissy format that began life in office dictation machines and cheap portable players came to be regarded as a token of intimate expression through music and a source of cultural capital in his new book Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable. Below he offers an an annotated playlist of some of the music he discusses in his book. You can also listen to a longer playlist on Spotify. Save 30% on Unspooled with coupon E24RDREW.

R. Stevie Moore, “I Just Want to Feel You”

In the late 1960s, pop savant and multi-instrumentalist R. Stevie Moore began amassing an oeuvre of hundreds of songs by ping-ponging between tracks on a reel-to-reel deck in his basement studio in suburban Nashville. Moore made music in a subjunctive mood where bedroom troubadours turned out splashy power-pop classics, his reach always exceeding his grasp, his quixotic recordings forever gesturing toward the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and other giants. After a few modest vinyl pressings on independent labels, Moore began advertising his mail-order cassette club in the back pages of various zines, offering personalized, ninety-minute mix tapes of tunes from his vast repertoire. By the late 1980s, he had a catalogue of 180 homemade tapes. “It’s almost a kind of sickness,” he told critic Jon Pareles. “You know, I just did a whole instrumental album yesterday, on a whim. How else could an unknown have 180 releases in print?”

Bad Brains, “Pay to Cum”

A pioneer of the cassette release was Neil Cooper, founder of the early cassette-only label Reach Out International Records (ROIR). His triumph was releasing the debut cassette of Bad Brains, whom he met at one of their CBGB shows in the early 1980s. The famously mercurial, Rastafarian hardcore pioneers were not on the radar of even the edgiest independent vinyl labels in 1982, but Cooper took a chance on them. “He said he was going to put out these cool cassettes and he could give us not a whole lot, but just something that would make an album worthwhile,” recalls vocalist H.R. “And we said, ‘Yes.’ The rest is just a miracle of God, because we got our first album out.” The Bad Brains’ classic “yellow tape” went on to sell 150,000 copies over ten years and helped set the terms for D.C. hardcore, also establishing a crucial presence within that scene for bands with black members such as Scream, Void, and Red C.

The Cleaners from Venus, “Golden Lane”

Martin Newell was a wunderkind from the English home counties who hated studios and suffered panic attacks at the thought of touring. After a couple of unpleasant brushes with the record industry, Newell swore off vinyl and became an early U.K. entrant into the cassette underground. For the better part of a decade as Cleaners from Venus he recorded brilliant, post-Kinks pop on his four-track and released it on cassette while critics scratched their heads at his underachievement. As Newell explained to Richie Unterberger, “We said, ‘Look, the equation is this: we want to make music, and there’s people who want to listen to it. So how do we get our music out of our hearts, through our fingers, into people’s ears, without this plethora of parasites interfering with it?’” The cheapness and ease with which cassettes could be propagated perfectly complemented the creative largesse of musicians like Newell. “Writing songs is what we do,” he told another interviewer. “I’m getting quite good at it now and I’d happily do it for the rest of my life even if I don’t get paid.”

Eugene Chadbourne & Evan Johns, “Redneck Jazz”

As a solo artist and with assorted collaborators, guitarist Eugene Chadbourne tacked between experimental jazz, psychedelic folk, half-crazed political rants, electric rake solos, and much else. Around 1981, Chadbourne discovered the cassette scene and rigged up a stack of tape decks in his home that allowed him to record eight copies at a time from a master signal. He started putting out tapes at a ferocious clip and had nearly forty cassettes in print by the end of the decade. Chadbourne was thus well qualified to comment, as he often did, on the merits of different formats. While valuing vinyl’s polish, he admitted to feeling stifled by its preciousness. “Records are only telling a small part of the story, and the safest part in many cases,” Chadbourne asserted, reciting a checklist of common attitudes among artists and producers: “‘This is for a record – let’s make it sound really slick.’ ‘I like that but I don’t want to put it on a record.’ ‘This is my first LP, I really have to impress people.’” By contrast, Chadbourne noted, with cassettes “the most common point of view is: ‘Who gives a shit? If you don’t like it, dub over it.’ And after over a decade documenting my music that’s the most exciting thing I’ve heard.”

Beat Happening, “Don’t Mix the Colors”

In 1982, as a college radio DJ at Evergreen State, Calvin Johnson recorded a live set by the Olympia trio Supreme Cool Beings and saw the opportunity to release it as a cassette album. He bought 150 blank tapes from a religious music company outside Olympia and paid a friend to dub them on her rudimentary tape-to-tape equipment for $1.20 apiece. Johnson inserted xeroxed J-cards with an arcane capital K surrounded by a hastily scrawled shield and sent off copies to local record stores and zines. More limited-run cassettes by musician friends and other acts Johnson met around the Northwest followed, but the highlights of K’s cassette catalogue were the early releases of his own seminal lo-fi trio Beat Happening, including their debut EP Three Tea Breakfast. Johnson priced his tapes at three or four dollars apiece and branded them through a coordinated campaign touting the cassette’s potential to upend the music business; liner notes, newsletters, and point-of-sale displays all carried the trademark shield and the increasingly familiar slogan, “The K cassette revolution is exploding the teenage underground into passionate revolt against the corporate ogre.”

Marine Girls, “Honey”

In early 1980, seventeen-year-old Tracey Thorn joined up with three school friends in Hertfordshire, England, to form the Marine Girls. The group borrowed a four-track deck and recorded twelve of Thorn’s compositions to a cassette they titled A Day by the Sea, despite the fact that they all still lived with their parents and had never played outside Thorn’s bedroom. “In other words,” Thorn later reflected, “we were RECORDING OUR FIRST ALBUM, some three months after forming. … God knows where this audacity came from, though perhaps, being girls, there was a sense of having something to prove. … It simply never occurred to us that there was any reason not to do these things, or anything that could stop us.” Pooling cash from after-school jobs, they had fifty copies dubbed for thirty-six pounds, dropped some off at local retailers, and placed a small ad in the New Musical Express for mail orders. The tape sold out and made its way to producer Pat Bermingham, who recorded more polished versions of the Marine Girls’ songs and released that cassette on his In Phaze label as Beach Party, garnering glowing reviews on both sides of the Atlantic.

Bow Wow Wow, “C30 C60 C90 Go”

Former Sex Pistols manager and inveterate troublemaker Malcolm McLaren pulled the pop group Bow Wow Wow together in 1980 to record “C-30, C-60, C-90, Go!”, a paean to home taping that he’d penned as a technological call to arms to Britain’s youth and a thumb in the eye to his old record industry overlords. To drive the point home, McLaren convinced Britain’s oldest record label, EMI, who’d apparently learned nothing from its dealings with the Pistols, to release “C-30” as its first ever cassette single; it was followed later that year by Your Cassette Pet, Bow Wow Wow’s first full-length release, an eight-song cassette priced at £1.99 and packaged in a flip-top box that resembled a cheap candy carton. The early-1980s spike in home taping appeared to McLaren as a political gesture connecting technology to claims of power and pleasure he’d been toying with for years, reviving old Situationist dreams of the beach right under the pavement. Listening to fourteen-year-old singer Annabella Lwin’s defiant affirmation of stolen pleasures (“I don’t buy records in your shop, I tape ‘em all from ‘Top of the Pops’!”), one could be forgiven for believing that “free” music might offer access to larger vistas of freedom. As McLaren told Roger Trilling in New York Rocker, home tapers were “using technology in a way that the industry doesn’t want you to use it. You are therefore claiming part of that culture for free. There’s the possibility to control a lot of the cultural forces around you right now.”

Liz Phair, “Go West” (Girly-Sound version)

Limited-edition releases whose lifespans were confined to cassette took on a totemic status within the careers of some soon-to-be-legendary indie artists, as fans shared the burden of passing on their creative spirit. Your proximity to the performance documented by the cassette seemed inversely proportional to the number of generations separating your copy from the original. Because such releases were never not on cassette, their master recordings were subject to the same ravages of replaying and rewinding, time and the elements, as the copy on your shelf; their spontaneous virality among fans thus seemed necessary to assure their preservation as precious and perishable relics of the artists’ pre-fame personae. When Liz Phair became an indie sensation, the early bedroom cassettes she’d recorded as Girly-Sound and shared with friends Chris Brokaw and Tae Won Yu circulated via fans for nearly two decades before being granted a proper CD release: “Assuming Phair’s songs were originally never meant to be heard by anyone other than Brokaw and Yu,” notes Marlie Centawer, “they had the potential to be ‘lost’ to degradation in their original cassette form, if not for their preservation as dubbed copies [and] bootlegs.”

Sentridoh, “Subtle Holy Gift”

Lou Barlow began recording acoustic freak-folk tunes with his friend Eric Gaffney in the late 1980s during Barlow’s last days with the band Dinosaur Jr. The pair interspersed their tapes with snippets of noise, conversation, and media detritus and self-released them on cassette under the nonsense moniker Sebadoh; their first “pressing” amounted to 25 copies, dubbed at home and sold at a record store in their hometown of Northampton, Massachusetts. The tapes made their way to CD release on Homestead Records, and over the ensuing years Sebadoh evolved into a tight three-piece outfit, won a contract with Sub Pop, and were soon hailed in some quarters as “the new torch-bearers of the Nirvana flame.” Yet Barlow continued to channel his four-track energies into a trio of solo cassettes released on Shrimper under the alternate name Sentridoh. With self-deprecating titles like Losers and Wasted Pieces, the Sentridoh tapes showcased Barlow in all his unfiltered glory, belching forth dozens of half-formed song sketches that rarely ran more than two minutes. Barlow’s Sentridoh cassettes thus provided an outlet for an artist whose prolificity couldn’t be contained by a yearly release of a dozen or so songs, as well as a second stage for his lo-fi vibe even as his main band’s sound grew increasingly mid-fi.

The Mountain Goats, “Going to Maryland”

John Darnielle’s project the Mountain Goats released music almost exclusively on cassette for its first half-decade. In an encroaching digital music market, Darnielle found virtue precisely in the cassette’s limitations, its cheap offhandedness and unwieldy temporality. ‘They’ve been my entire career!” he told an interviewer in 1994. “You consider them differently … you can’t flip them around as freely, so you have to listen to the whole thing, get involved with it.” To prove the point, Darnielle one-upped most of his lo-fi brethren by recording to cassette, a seemingly perverse technical quirk that he was quick to defend. “I don’t like production that makes the fact that it’s a made thing disappear,” he averred. “You put almost anybody in front of a four-track and they’re going to put in two tracks too many.” Darnielle came to regard his trusty Panasonic boombox (whose designers had situated its oversensitive microphone too near its grinding gears) as a mischievous yet congenial collaborator; “an ornery little fellow who will have no sound without a second sound to obscure and pollute it,” as he joked in a eulogy to the failing machine that accompanied his last album produced with its aid.

Neutral Milk Hotel, “Tuesday Moon”

The albums that defined the legacy of core acts in the Elephant 6 collective were only the culminative traces of years of shifting, recombinant collaborations in which unreleased and semi-released cassettes passed between members in an ongoing musical brainstorm. When the collective’s studio whiz Robert Schneider began affixing a delicate, Art Nouveau “Elephant Six Recording Co.” logo to some of those tapes and selling them for a few dollars by mail order, it appeared as a natural outgrowth of their private tape-trading network, both in terms of the format of choice and the communal vibe. With their hand-drawn covers and handwritten liner notes, those early E6 releases looked a lot like mix tapes. “Hello and welcome to my first cassette release to actually exceed more than two copies,” Jeff Mangum wrote in the barely legible notes to his 1993 tape Hype-City Soundtrack, his first as Neutral Milk Hotel, as if shooting off a letter to a confidant. “Sorry the lyrics are so hard to read but ive got to mail this to robert in an hour so its a little scribbly.”

Daniel Johnston, “Living Life”

As a teenager in West Virginia, Daniel Johnston began recording his compositions on a mono cassette deck in his parents’ basement, delivered in a quavering tenor and accompanied by a feeble chord organ. He relocated to Austin, Texas, in the early 1980s and began handing out copies of his cassettes, dubbed over cheap tapes of mail-order sermons. Within a few years, Johnston’s songs were being covered by every band in town and hailed as lo-fi masterpieces, winning wider release on the local cassette label Stress and eventually on Homestead Records. But his recordings were too outré for a wider public, and his psychological fragility was exacerbated by excessive attention, so that even his admirers felt obliged to speak of him in hushed tones. As a result, Johnston was often heard through covers, like those of his friend and fellow Austinite Kathy McCarty. Not quite able to cope, as Johnston admitted in his heartbreakingly lovely “Living Life,” with “the emotionless mediocracy of day-to-day living,” he relied on interpreters like McCarty to mediate his relation to the music business and its attendant rigmarole so that his own spirit might forever reside on those homemade cassettes.

Rob Drew is Professor of Communication at Saginaw Valley State University and author of Karaoke Nights: An Ethnographic Rhapsody. Save 30% on his new book Unspooled with coupon E24RDREW.

New Books in February

Stay warm and comfy this February by curling up with a good book. Take a look at our many new titles coming out this month!

FUTURE/PRESENT, edited by Daniela Alvarez, Roberta Uno, and Elizabeth M. Webb of the nonprofit Arts In a Changing America, brings together a vast collection of writers, artists, activists, and academics working at the forefront of today’s most pressing struggles for cultural equity and racial justice in a demographically changing America.

In Between Shadows and Noise Amber Jamilla Musser theorizes sensation as a Black feminist method for aesthetic interpretation and criticism that uses the knowledges held by the body to access the unrepresentable.

Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman looks at recent experiments in black expressive culture that begin in the place of ruin. Writerly and experimental, Millennial Style theorizes contemporary black art as the holding (or hoarding) of black mortal and material resources against the injuries of social death, as the fashioning of relational ethics, and as exuberant black world-building in ruinous times.

In Black Girl Autopoetics Ashleigh Greene Wade explores how Black girls create representations of themselves in digital culture with the speed and flexibility enabled by smartphones.

In SARS Stories, Belinda Kong delves into the cultural archive of the 2003 SARS pandemic, examining Chinese-language creative works and social practices at the epicenters of the outbreak in China and Hong Kong. 

In Tendings, Nathan Snaza brings contemporary feminist and queer popular culture’s resurging interest in esoteric practices like tarot and witchcraft into conversation with Black feminist and new materialist thought. 

In Violent Intimacies, Aslı Zengin traces how trans people in Turkey creatively negotiate and resist everyday cisheteronormative violence. Drawing on the history and ethnography of the trans communal life in Istanbul, Zengin develops an understanding of cisheteronormative violence that expands beyond sex, gender and sexuality.

In Nonhuman Witnessing Michael Richardson argues that a radical rethinking of what counts as witnessing is central to building frameworks for justice in an era of endless war, ecological catastrophe, and technological capture. 

Amelie Hastie examines the popular 1970s television show in Columbo: Make Me a Perfect Murder. She analyzes American television as an intertextual system, from its origins as a commercial broadcast medium to its iterations within contemporary streaming platforms. 

In Closures, Grace Lavery reconsiders the sitcom genre’s seven-decade history as an endless cycle of crisis and closure that formally and representationally frames heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of both collapse and reconstitution. 

Drawing on cultural policy, queer and feminist theory, materialist media studies, and postcolonial historiography, Bliss Cua Lim analyzes the crisis-ridden history of Philippine film archiving—a history of lost films, limited access, and collapsed archives in The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema.

In Push the Button, Elizabeth Rodwell follows a battle over what interactivity will mean for Japanese television, as major media conglomerates took on independent media professionals developing interactive forms from new media. 

What if we understood the idea of family as central to representing alternative forms of governance as expressions of racial deviance? In The Politics of Kinship, Mark Rifkin shows how ideologies of family, including notions of kinship, recast Indigenous and other forms of collective self-organization and self-determination as disruptive racial tendencies in need of state containment and intervention.

In The Rock of Arles Richard Klein relays the history of the city as told to him by the Rock, its genius loci, which infallibly remembers every moment of its existence, from the Roman conquest of Gaul to the fall of feudal aristocracy, from the domination of the Catholic Church to the present French representative democracy. 

Drones are revolutionizing ocean conservation. In the process, new dependencies between nature, technology, and humans emerge, and a paradox becomes apparent: Can we have a wild ocean whose survival is reliant upon technology? In Oceaning, Adam Fish answers this question through eight stories of piloting drones to stop the killing of porpoises, sharks, and seabirds and to check the vitality of whales, seals, turtles, and coral reefs. 

In Subterranean Matters, Andrea Marston examines the ongoing history of Bolivian mining cooperatives, an economic formation that has been central to Bolivian politics and to the country’s economy. Marston outlines how mining cooperatives occupy a contradictory place in Bolivian politics. 

In Streaming Music, Streaming Capital, Eric Drott analyzes the political economy of online music streaming platforms. By interrogating the tensions between streaming’s benefits and pitfalls, Drott sheds light on music’s situation within digital capitalism, from growing concentrations of monopoly power and music’s use in corporate surveillance to issues of musical value, labor, and artist pay.

Platinum Bible of the Public Toilet, edited and with an introduction by Petrus Liu and Lisa Rofel, is the first English-language collection of short stories by Cui Zi’en, China’s most famous and controversial queer filmmaker, writer, scholar, and LGBTQ rights activist. 

In A Wall Is Just a Wall Reiko Hillyer focuses on gubernatorial clemency, furlough, and conjugal visits to examine the origins and decline of practices that allowed incarcerated people to transcend prison boundaries.

The first annual Alchemy Lecture brings four deep and agile writers from different geographies and disciplines into vibrant conversation on a topic of urgent relevance: humans and borders. Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relation, features lectures by Dele Adeyemo, Natalie Diaz, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, and Rinaldo Walcott that capture and expand those conversations in insightful, passionate ways. 

Never miss a new book! Sign up for our e-mail newsletters, and get notifications of new titles in your preferred disciplines as well as discounts and other news.

Q&A with Lucas Hilderbrand

Lucas Hilderbrand is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright and Paris Is Burning: A Queer Film Classic. In his new book The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America,1960 and After, he offers a panoramic history of gay bars, showing how they served as the medium for queer communities, politics, and cultures.

Your previous scholarship is situated solidly in the realm of film studies. Why did you decide to research the history of gay bars, and how do you see your previous work informing your approach here?

Although my research trajectory may not seem self-evident to anyone else, it always made intuitive sense to me! Like everyone else, I’m a multifaceted person, and I’m as shaped by nightlife as I am by watching films and television or listening to music. My training in cinema and media studies helps me to understand the importance of popular forms that shape our culture, that become pervasive, that define the zeitgeist, and that may be ephemeral or fashionably cyclical—but that may not be taken seriously enough for other scholars to research. My interest often starts with realizing no one else has written about something that seems, to me, innate and central to our culture. Or it starts from discovering something fascinating in the archive that has been overlooked or that overturns my understanding of history.

I am also interested in challenging myself to learn new fields with each project. I’m not a traditionally trained historian, nor am I a social scientist. I try to be self-aware of what I don’t know and of how the questions I might ask offer new ways to make sense of bars’ cultural significance. To focus on zoning or liquor laws without also listening for what songs are playing, to my mind, would be to misunderstand how and why bars work for their patrons.

The Bars are Ours argues that gay bars were at the center of gay political and cultural formations in the second half of the 20th century. Has this changed today?

What has changed in the past 50 years is that the range of outlets to explore one’s queer identity and find community has expanded beyond bars or nightclubs, which were once the only public options. But I contend that nothing has truly replaced what bars provide.

LGBTQ+ community centers, for instance, started emerging in the 1970s to provide services; these developed after bar scenes were established and as an alternative to them. In the 21st century, online forums, social media, and dating/hook-up apps provide ways for people to connect. But the internet cannot replicate the experience of being in a shared public space. Community centers usually do not, and the internet cannot replace the experience of being on a crowded dancefloor as a part of a social body—or of making out with another person.

It is important to have alternatives that are not predicated on consuming alcohol or feeling pressured to consent to strangers’ gazes and touch. But for those who want to experience these things or who feel them as a rite of passage, bars are still the primary way to access them.

It’s also possible to be openly LGBTQ+ and even, in some cases, to feel safe holding hands with one’s partner in spaces that are not differentiated or defined as LGBTQ+ spaces; that did not used to be the case. But it’s still experientially and affectively different to be surrounded by straight people—even if they’re liberal allies—than it is to feel like one is in community.

Gay bars often are stereotyped as being a primarily white space, but you also write about bars that specifically cater to Black and Latinx patrons. How does race play into the history your book covers?

In LGBTQ+ culture and spaces, just as in straight ones, whiteness often goes unacknowledged as a default or norm—and this has the effect of reproducing white supremacist conditions. By the 1970s, activists recognized and fought back against conspicuously exclusionary door policies—both sexist and racist—and these efforts continued and needs to continue. Bars became the site to make visible and respond to bias in the queer community at large.

In part in reaction to discrimination at white venues and in part through self-determination, bars catering to Black or Latinx patrons have also opened and sustained these communities. These bars may feature more or less the same elements as white gay bars, but they also often foster community-specific cultures, ranging from favored musical genres to social norms. In some cities there’s a sufficient population to have multiple Black or Latinx queer venues, but in many places, there might just be one or none at all. I don’t know of any city where ethnically defined gay bars have reached parity with white bars, relative to local population demographics; even majority-minority cities typically have more white bars than non-white bars.

For my book, it was essential to me that my survey history be inclusive—that I understand Black and Latinx gay bars as gay bars. But I also recognized that they often had community-specific histories and cultures, which I worked to document as best I could without claiming to speak for or exoticizing them. The Atlanta and Los Angeles chapters, which center Black and Latinx venues, effectively decenter the white venues that may be the most famous locally and that have dominated understandings of their respective local scenes—for instance, Backstreet in Atlanta and The Abbey in West Hollywood. Similarly, I don’t focus on my local LA bar where I’m a regular: Akbar.

I also look to key parties where the goal was to produce integrated venues, or where clubs sought to serve multiple segments of the LGBTQ+ community by creating targeted parties on different nights of the week.

Are there any distinct differences between gay bars of the past and gay bars of today, and do you view these differences as being for better or for worse?

Before and into the early days of gay liberation, bars were often viewed as exploitative of gay people. They were often owned by the mafia or homophobic straight people, and they treated clientele poorly. Venues and owners were also vulnerable to shakedowns and raids from local vice cops. Queer people endured these indignities for as long as they did because they had so few alternative public spaces to congregate. In these venues, the management often pushed patrons to keep buying drinks in exchange for the right to occupy space. This had a correlative effect of exacerbating alcoholism at a time when many people were already prone to self-medicating their shame about their sexuality. Although these were gay venues, many venues also policed patron’s behavior so that people couldn’t dance together or touch casually.

We’ve moved beyond these conditions, obviously. But I also believe to only see past venues as bleak sites of oppression is reductive and inaccurate. If people hadn’t had fun and found kindred spirits, gay bars would not have endured and evolved. And people continue to experience a full range of tensions and release in bars of the present.

One of the challenges I faced for this book was trying to convey not only the facts of the past but also how it was experienced. One strategy I devised for this was to infuse the book with music; another was to draw parallels or contrasts from my more recent lived experiences.

How does the history of gay bars you relate in your book speak to our present moment of homophobic and transphobic fearmongering exemplified by drag bans and “Don’t Say Gay” bills?

Until recently, it was easy to slip into complacency about gay bars, to take them for granted or dismiss them as passé. Likewise, gay bars may not seem relevant to younger generations who came out before drinking age and who grew up with alternatives to bars—or who may reject binary understandings of gender and sexual identities. (Gay bars operate on a binary logic, in distinction to straight bars.)

What the resurgent culture war reveals is that our lives, our rights, and our venues remain precarious—and possibly subject to erasure. My book looks back on worlds and cultures we built, political battles we fought, and the ways we self-invented through bars.

Read the introduction to The Bars are Ours for free and save 30% on the paperback with coupon E23BARS.

New Books in October

Fall is in full swing, so curl up with a hot drink, a cozy sweater, and a new book! Check out our October releases.

The contributors to The Black Geographic, edited by Camilla Hawthorne and Jovan Scott Lewis, explore the theoretical innovations of Black Geographies scholarship and how it approaches Blackness as historically and spatially situated. In studies that span from Oakland to the Alabama Black Belt to Senegal to Brazil, the contributors draw on ethnography, archival records, digital humanities, literary criticism, and art to show how understanding the spatial dimensions of Black life contributes to a broader understanding of race and space. 

The Border Reader, edited by Gilberto Rosas and Mireya Loza, brings together canonical and cutting-edge humanities and social science scholarship on the US-Mexico border region. Spotlighting the vibrancy of border studies from the field’s emergence to its enduring significance, the essays mobilize feminist, queer, and critical ethnic studies perspectives to theorize the border as a site of epistemic rupture and knowledge production. 

Building on the foundational The Affect Theory Reader, editors Gregory J. Seigworth and Carolyn Pedwell gather together contemporary scholarship that highlights and interrogates the contemporary state of affect inquiry in The Affect Theory Reader 2. Tracing affect’s resonances with today’s most critical debates, it will reorient and disorient readers to the past, present, and future potentials of affect theory.

In Kingdom Come, Tshepo Masango Chéry charts a new genealogy of early twentieth-century Black Christian activists who challenged racism in South Africa before the solidification of apartheid by using faith as a strategy against global racism.

In Children of the Soil, Tasha Rijke-Epstein offers an urban history of the port city of Mahajanga, Madagascar, before, during, and after colonization. Drawing on archival and ethnographic evidence, she weaves together the lives and afterlives of built spaces to show how city residents negotiated imperial encroachment, colonial rule, and global racial capitalism over two centuries.

Celeste Winston explores marronage—the practice of flight from and placemaking beyond slavery—as a guide to police abolition in How to Lose the Hounds. Winston contends that maroon geographies operate as a central method of Black flight, holding ground, and constructing places of freedom in ways that imagine and plan a world beyond policing.

In Radical Health Julie Avril Minich examines the potential of Latinx expressive culture to intervene in contemporary health politics, elaborating how Latinx artists have critiqued ideologies of health that frame wellbeing in terms of personal behavior. Utilizing her concept of radical health, Minich claims a critical role for Latinx artists in addressing the structural racism in public health. 

Never miss a new book! Sign up for our e-mail newsletters, and get notifications of new titles in your preferred disciplines as well as discounts and other news.

Elegizing Cultural Capital | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for September 9, 2023, is Elegizing Cultural Capital by Simon During. The article appears in Thirty Years after John Guillory’s Cultural Capital, a special issue of Genre (56:1).

Read the article here, for free, through December 31, 2023.
Buy this special issue and use coupon code SAVE30 for a 30% discount.

Abstract
This article considers the legacy and value of John Guillory’s literary sociology in providing a rationale for literary studies today. Bringing the work of Pierre Bourdieu to bear on the canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s, Guillory laid bare the mechanisms of canon formation within the institution of the school. While the influence of his argument is still perceptible in scholarly treatments of literary institutions, though, his more affirmative case for the general extension of literary appreciation and aesthetic judgment has gone unheeded. This is because Cultural Capital is not really interested in literature itself but in literature and literary education’s functions and effects. Turning to Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” this essay offers a literary and historical interpretation that contests Guillory’s reading of the poem as an allegory of canon formation. It then finds in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black an alternative allegory of the fate of the canon in a democratic society and argues finally for the continued value in teaching the canon to those engaged by it.

Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture is a triannual publication devoted to the study of the codes, conventions, and histories of generic forms in the context of their cultural manifestations and effects. It publishes articles that deal with questions of genre in both literary and nonliterary forms, that bring a broad range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to genre, or that consider theoretical, institutional, or political dimensions of discourse.
James Zeigler and Justin Sider, editors

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

New Books in September

Start off the semester strong by checking out some of the great new titles we have coming out this month!

In A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten, award-winning author, sex educator, filmmaker, and podcast host Tristan Taormino shares her coming-of-age story, revealing how her radical sexuality and unconventional career grew out of an extraordinary queer father-daughter relationship.

The contributors to Citizens of Photography explore how photography offers access to forms of citizenship beyond those available through ordinary politics. Through contemporary ethnographic investigations of photographic practice in Nicaragua, Nigeria, Greece, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, the PhotoDemos Collective traces the resonances between political representation and photographic representation.

In A Nimble Arc, Emilie Boone considers Van Der Zee’s photographic work over the course of the twentieth century, showing how it foregrounded aspects of Black daily life in the United States and in the larger African diaspora. 

Many listeners first heard “Hound Dog” when Elvis Presley’s single topped the pop, country, and R&B charts in 1956. In Hound Dog, Eric Weisbard examines the racial, commercial, and cultural ramifications of Elvis’s appropriation of a Black woman’s anthem. 

 In a newly updated and revised paperback edition of The Dark Tree, Steven L. Isoardi draws on one hundred in-depth interviews with the Arkestra’s participants to tell the history of the important and largely overlooked community arts movement of Black Los Angeles.

From the Black Power movement and state surveillance to Silicon Valley and gentrification, Medina by the Bay by Maryam Kashani examines how multiracial Muslim communities in the San Francisco Bay Area survive and flourish within and against racial capitalist, carceral, and imperial logics. 

In Unseen Flesh Nessette Falu explores how Black lesbians in Brazil define and sustain their well-being and self-worth against persistent racial, sexual, class, and gender-based prejudice.

In Nimrods, Kawika Guillermo chronicles the agonizing absurdities of being a newly minted professor (and overtired father) hired to teach in a Social Justice Institute while haunted by the inner ghosts of patriarchy, racial pessimism, and imperial arrogance. 

In Reckoning with Restorative Justice, Leanne Trapedo Sims explores the experiences of women who are incarcerated at the Women’s Community Correctional Center, the only women’s prison in the state of Hawai‘i. 

In Habit’s Pathways Tony Bennett explores the political consequences of the varied ways in which habit’s repetitions have been acted on to guide or direct conduct.

Alice Mah examines the changing nature of the petrochemical industry as it faces the existential threats of climate change and environmental activism in her new book, Petrochemical Planet . 

In Radical Play Rob Goldberg recovers a little-known history of American children’s culture in the 1960s and 1970s by showing how dolls, guns, action figures, and other toys galvanized and symbolized new visions of social, racial, and gender justice.

In Black Enlightenment Surya Parekh reimagines the Enlightenment from the position of the Black subject. Parekh prompts us to consider the timeliness of reading Black Enlightenment authors who become “free” in a society hostile to that freedom.

Elizabeth Dore reveals the decay of the Cuban political system through the lives of seven ordinary Cuban citizens in How Things Fall Apart.

Never miss a new book! Sign up for our e-mail newsletters, and get notifications of new titles in your preferred disciplines as well as discounts and other news.

Unpacking the Viral Success of RRR’s “Naatu Naatu,” a Guest Post by Rumya Putcha

We’re pleased to share a guest post by Rumya Putcha. Putcha is a Professor at the University of Georgia in the Institute for Women’s Studies as well as the Hugh Hodgson School of Music. Her research interests include citizenship, race, gender, sexuality, the body, and the law. She is the author of The Dancer’s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transational India. Save 30% on The Dancer’s Voice with coupon E22PTCHA.

As you may have heard by now, a song from an Indian Telugu film soundtrack won “Best Song” at the U.S. 2023 Academy Awards. Many people were thrilled to see the hit Tollywood song, “Naatu Naatu,” performed live on stage at the awards show in front of an audience of American celebrities and broadcast to millions of viewers around the world. The performance was followed by numerous reflections on the politics of representation in Hollywood, with many focusing on the absence and exclusion of South Asian dancers on stage.

Nina Davaluri being crowned Miss America at the 2013 pageant.
Source: Reuters

This moment has me reflecting on an equally significant performance at another historically white space – Nina Davuluri’s dance at the 2013 Miss America beauty pageant. Davuluri, a Telugu-American woman, performed what she called a “Classical-Bollywood fusion” for her talent. She went on to become the first Indian American woman to be crowned Miss America.

Although the performances at the Academy Awards and the Miss America Pageant are separated by a full decade, it’s worth looking at them together. I believe they both reveal a great deal about Telugu identity in a global context and tell us what kinds of performances are legible to U.S. media as “dance” or even as “music.” 

In Davuluri’s case, the song she danced to in 2013 was well known by that point, at least in India. She danced to “Dhoom Taana,” a track from the 2007 Bollywood film Om Shanti Om, starring Shah Rukh Khan and and Deepika Padukone.

If one views Davuluri’s performance next to the song scene from the film, it becomes clear which movements are adopted directly from the film’s choreography and which ones she adjusted to feature her abilities as a trained Kuchipudi and Bharatanatyam dancer.

With the exception of the movement that appears during the chorus, during the words “Dhoom Taana,” the rest of the choreography features a potpourri of movement styles – from Kathak, to Bharatnatyam, to even a hint of Kuchipudi. Unlike the film choreography, Davuluri turns the energy up to a ten. Compared to the original performance, she jumps, moves, and bounds in a chaotic but extremely athletic and virtuosic manner. Significantly, the majority of the film’s sinewy and belly-dance-esque moves are removed, scrubbing the performance of any overt sexuality.

Of course, in 2013, the popular media response to Davuluri’s dance was simply to call it “Bollywood.” This was the case even, and perhaps especially, when she became the target of Islamophobic and racialized attacks for her victory in the pageant. In 2023, the reaction to a Telugu dance(r) appearing on an American mainstage did not seem to incite similar racial vitriol. Perhaps this arguably points to the way cultural institutions like Miss America or femininity are somehow more entrenched in white supremacy than the Oscars.

Despite the fact that RRR was a Telugu film, as many have noted, the vast majority of media commentary has referred to it as a “Bollywood film” – an insult for most Telugus, but not an original one by any means. 

Gender, Region, and Sound

I have been following the commentaries on Naatu Naatu’s dance and the choreography, including those published here on Maidaanam. I’m left wondering how gender and the very specific politics of “the South” in India – where Telugu and Tamil musical expression are hotly debated and contested – might figure into this song’s unprecedented global legibility.

Whereas most songs that “go viral” from Indian cinema feature a solo dancing woman with backup dancers, strikingly, “Naatu Naatu” features two men, dancing together.

It’s worth noting that some scholars have highlighted the role of the rhythmic devices in the song, in some cases describing them as “syncopation.” Technically speaking, “Naatu Naatu,” like most songs that could be described as Kuthu pop, relies on a fast (around 150 bpm) compound meter, 6/8. This is not the same as syncopation as understood by music scholars. However, I suspect that many people have (mis)applied the term “syncopation” in an attempt to explain what makes “Naatu Naatu” a “dance song.” 

I would argue that it is a composite of visual and sonic elements that allowed this dance, and thus this song, to become so popular among U.S. and global audiences. For example, many dancers would recognize the rhythmic pattern in “Naatu Naatu” as a “three beat” or in dance terms “ta-ki-ta.” There is a lot more that could be said here about the “odd numbers” – including the “five beat” (ta-ka-ta-ki-ta), “seven beat” (ta-ka-di-mi-ta-ki-ta) or “nine beat” (ta-ka-di-mi-ta-ka-ta-ki-ta) – and how they elicit a rhythmic tension that is synonymous with “dance.”

But perhaps more importantly, it is the variety of musical and extra-musical elements that make “Naatu Naatu” and other songs like it register as dance music.

To be sure, the song Davuluri performed to also features similar rhythmic devices, including a very fast tempo and specific instruments that are associated with dance. In other words, it is a combination of sonic elements – the instruments used in these tracks, combined with the lyrics, and of course the musical language – that taken together make a song sound like one that is danceable.

And in the case of “Naatu Naatu,” in featuring a pair of men in what could be described as a “dance fight,” this performance also draws on narrative conventions of martial arts films. This is a genre that, in the U.S. at least, offers an easy and well-trodden path for audiences to make sense of what they are seeing and hearing, especially in what is otherwise a foreign and Asian film. 

In this regard, social media, especially platforms like TikTok and YouTube are also part of the story. Though the film RRR was released in March 2022, “Naatu Naatu” was released five months earlier in November 2021 as a single on YouTube. In my case, I first encountered the song in December 2021 on TikTok. “Naatu Naatu” had already become popular as a viral dance challenge well before the movie was released in theaters. 

For those familiar with TikTok dance challenges, the “hook step” in “Naatu Naatu” relies on the fundamentals of shuffle, an extremely popular style on the platform. The song’s choreography also features certain kinds of limb independence that are not usually associated with Indian dance and particularly not with kuthu. Put another way, with the exception of one movement – a classic kuthu wide stance – there is very little in “Naatu Naatu”’s choreography that locates this dance specifically in India.

Jr. NTR and Ram Charan displaying the wide stance associated with Kuthu dance
Source: YouTube

As interviews with the choreographers and composers have suggested, this was a calculated move, especially for a Telugu language film. Kuthu sounds have traveled from their origins in Tamil-speaking regions, particularly through global circulations like cricket as well as popular musicians like Sri Lankan-Tamilian M.I.A. But Kuthu sounds remain local and tied to the Tamil-language film industry, even as they are now sourced in Telugu cinema and speak to Telugu audiences. 

Ultimately, the genius of the “Naatu Naatu” performance at the Academy Awards, much like Davuluri’s performance at Miss America a decade ago, is that it relies on sounds that can and do resonate with local Telugu and Indian audiences, but are paired with movements that speak to and even appeal to U.S. and global audiences even, and especially, on social media.

This post was originally published in Maidaanam.

Together, Somehow: A Playlist

Drawing on fieldwork in the minimal techno and house music sub-scenes in Chicago, Paris, and Berlin, in his new book Together, Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor, Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta shows that people get along and share the dancefloor by an intimacy and belonging rooted in affect. Below he offers an an annotated playlist of some of the music he discusses in his book. You can also listen to a longer playlist on Spotify or YouTube. Save 30% on Together, Somehow with coupon E23TGTHR.

Heartthrob, Dear Painter, Paint Me (album mix)

• Heartthrob’s album, Dear Painter, Paint Me (2008) is emblematic of “the sound” of minimalist electronic music that dominated the years of my fieldwork for Together, Somehow (2006–2010). The album was released on the in/famous minimal techno record label, m_nus, founded by Richie Hawtin (a.k.a. Plastikman), a leading artist in the “Second Wave” of Detroit techno. That said, Heartthrob’s released were notable (sometimes controversially so) for challenging the very hetero-coded and masculinist austerity of techno with touches of queer lyricism. For example, his first breakout hit, “Baby Kate,” (2006) featured a slow melodic synth line—very much a rarity for releases on m_nus—and swiftly climbed DJ charts as a summertime anthem.
• The sounds of this album provided the sonic environment for the fieldwork vignette that opens my book, as Heartthrob was on tour to promote this album in the summer of 2008 and came to play a “live set” at Panorama Bar (Berlin). Much like in this recording, his live set featured “long, sustained, atmospheric washes across the high-frequency range, grounded by relatively slow, resonant, yet punctuating bass kicks” (pp. 2–3). In that moment on the dancefloor, I was struck by the similarities between sound and other sensory experiences: “shimmering washes of sound hung in the air like the omnipresent haze emanating from the smoke machines, while the loud bass-drum kicks thudded against my flesh like the crush of bodies on the dancefloor” (p. 3). And, out of that shimmering haze and pulsating flesh stepped a stranger… (For the rest of this story, download the introductory chapter for free!)

Mr Fingers, “Can You Feel It”

• “Can You Feel It” (1988) appears further into the introductory chapter, in a section where I am tracing a condensed history of queer dancefloor utopianism through a series of early disco, house, and techno tracks. As much a manifesto as a house music anthem, Mr Fingers’s (Larry Heard) track features a spoken-word performance by Robert Owens, delivering a dancefloor sermon steeped in the style and rhetoric of American Black Church traditions. He recounts a musical creation myth of house music while riffing on several biblical creation narratives, eventually uttering the much-sampled & re-cited phrase, “Let there be house!” However, it is the few lines of sermon immediately following that makes this track an explicitly utopian one. House music becomes a shared utopian world, one where “house is a feeling that no one can understand, unless you’re deep into the vibe of house.” As I put it in the book, the dancefloor becomes “a festive public sphere with open membership but requiring deep immersion and bodily surrender” (p. 9). His emphasis on belonging through music and affect (feeling) draws me back to the main thread of this book.

M.A.N.D.Y. x Booka Shade, “O Superman feat. Laurie Anderson (Reboot’s 20 Cubans Rework)”

• I briefly discuss this remarkable palimpsest of sampling and remixing in Chapter 2, where I develop the notion of “sonic tactility” to describe how electronic music engages our sense of touch through sound. Specifically, this track appears in the “Flesh” section of this chapter, where I’m thinking about how a lot of dance music—especially the minimalist “micro house” & “glitch” genres that were dominant in the 2000–2010s—used samples of the human body (such as clapping, breathing, slapping, rubbing, etc…) to convey texture. An important analytic concept here is timbre, that is, the quality of a sound that enables you to distinguish different instruments playing the exact same note—for example, a violin versus a saxophone. Ironically, timbre is very difficult to define “scientifically,” in a consistent and quantifiable way, but we know that it has to do with the mix of frequencies and how a sound evolves over time.
• “O Superman feat. Laurie Anderson” draws heavily from Anderson’s original “O Superman,” taking fragments of her vocoder-treated voice and applying a whole suite of studio effects to give an especially dreaming, floating quality. Reboot’s “20 Cubans Rework” of this track, however, adds a constantly repeating loop of layered hand claps—slightly out of phase and out of tune with each other, giving the impression of a group of clapping performers—which are recognizable through their timbre as acoustic samples, foregrounding the sound of skin hitting skin.

Oliver Hacke, “Millepieds (SLG Remix)”

• Oliver Hack’s “Millepieds (SLG Remix)” also appears in the chapter on sonic tactility, but in the “Grain” section, where I explore an even closer link between sound and touch. I borrow the notion of “sonic grain” from early 20th-century electronic music composer and theorist Pierre Schaeffer, who likened the granular microstructure of textured surfaces (like sandpaper or woodgrain or asphalt) to the microstructure of sonic “attacks” in complex sounds. Think, for example, of the sound of a zipper as the teeth snap into place sequentially.
• Notably, Schaeffer’s theoretical link between sonic grain and texture can also be illustrated physically: through the sounds that surfaces make when you rub things across them, crush them, grind them, and so on. In fact, several musical instruments make use of this direct link between textured surfaces & sound, like the güiro: a type of rasp commonly found in much of the Afrodiasporic musics of Latin America, made from a hollow gourd that has been scored with parallel grooves. As you draw a stick across the grooves, you create a zipping sound that increases or decreases in granularity, depending on how quickly you move your hand.
• In this remix, the artist SLG fills the track’s texture with highly granular, textured sounds: “from the beginning of the track, one can hear a rhythmic, threefold back-and-forth scrubbing/rattling sound that evokes coarse sandpaper (on the third beat of every four-beat cycle), a zipper-like rasping sound (extending over the third and fourth beats, starting around 0:30)…and a wide array of other pops and crackles that mark longer metric cycles” (p. 86). Despite their spartan aesthetics, minimal techno tracks such as this one still provide an overall sonic texture that is complex and deeply engaging to our sense of touch.

DJ LeRoi feat. Roland Clark, “I Get Deep (Late Nite Tuff Guy Remix)”

• This mashup-adjacent “edit” of an early 2000s house track appears twice in this book, both in Chapter 4 (”Thickening Something”) and Chapter 5 (”The Sweetness of Coming Undone”). In Chapter 4, in a section where I am exploring the techniques that electronic dance music uses to shape affect (feeling, emotion) on the dancefloor, I note how Roland Clark’s spoken-word narrative tells a story of musical ecstasy based only on how the DJ manipulates the bass kick drum: “When he takes all the bass out the song / And all you hear is highs / And it’s like: oh . . . shit! / [moan] I get deep.” This technique, often called “dropping the kick” by artists and fans as well as “withholding the beat” by music theorist Mark J. Butler (in Unlocking the Groove, 2006), involves temporarily cutting out the bass frequency range of the track for a few metric cycles—usually multiples of 4 beats—and then bringing it back at the beginning of the next cycle, creating a satisfying and energising sense of arrival.
• In this remix prepared by the producer Late Nite Tuff Guy, the underlying track mirrors Clark’s narrative: “the bass-frequency range of the Rework loop is cut out in a gradual ‘filter sweep’ as Clark describes the self-same technique, losing most of the mid-frequency layer as well by the time he flips into falsetto; and then the bass gradually returns as he narrates ‘catching’ himself, filling out the full frequency spectrum as he repeats the word ‘sweet’ four times” (p. 137)

Underground Resistance, “Transition”

• This last track comes from the closing section of the book’s Epilogue, after a brief meditation on the queer public intimacy that prevailed in the wave of the Pulse Orlando Massacre of 2016. In retrospect, 2016 figured as a turning point—a “conjuncture” in the sense developed by “Birmingham School” Cultural Studies—for queer public life and nightlife. Just three months before the shooting, Andrew Ryce’s article in Resident Advisor, “America’s gay techno underground” (2016), reported on the flourishing of queer nightlife collectives throughout the first half of the 2010s. Two years earlier, I had written an article for the same online platform, “An alternate history of sexuality in club culture” (2014), where I closed the article with a brief survey of the networks of queer, sex-positive party crews that were gaining visibility in across various cities and towns. These two articles bookended a period “when various media outlets, bloggers, and artists sought to ‘reclaim’ dance music from a straight, white, middle-class mainstream and recenter it around burgeoning queer scenes by insisting on electronic dance music’s queer, Black and brown, working-class, inner-city roots” (p. 228). By early 2016, queer nightlife felt resurgent and vibrant again…and then Orlando happened…and the Brexit vote in the UK…and the Trump campaign and subsequent election.
• It’s always tricky to try and identify specific “turning points” or transitions in history—especially recent history—but the senses of reversal, crisis, and decline were palpable across queer nightlife communities from then on.

Meditations on Writing Hell | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for June 10, 2023, is Meditations on Writing Hell, by Hayley Singer. The article appears in in Multispecies Justice, a special issue of Cultural Politics (Volume 19, Issue 1), edited by Danielle Celermajer and Sophie Chao.

Abstract

This essay is a broken elemental thing composed of cuts, by which is meant outtakes. Outtakes are scenes or sequences that never make it into a film. The scenes collected here have been retrieved from the cutting floor of the editing suite in its author’s mind and reassembled in ways that hold onto an ambitious claim—to think of narrative cuts and silences as interruptive forces in the operation of writing and the imaginative rendering of the abattoir. Working with outtakes helps the author approach, in a new way, questions the author has been exploring for a while now: How can writers critically respond to the existence of abattoirs? What strategies might writers engage to render normalized forms of violence against animals strange and even intolerable through particularly literary practices, strategies, and generic forms? Literally, caesura means “cutting.” It evokes pause. Space for breath, for detours in modes of multispecies literary representation. If the line—working on the assembly line and writing a certain kind of poetic line—is an orientation that draws literature and the abattoir together, as Joseph Ponthus’s autofictional poem essay On the Line: Notes from a Factory (2021) suggests, this essay also suggests that the slash is an allied critical-creative orientation that equally requires engagement.

Read the article here, for free, through August 12.

Moving beyond the boundaries of race, gender, and class, Cultural Politics examines the political ramifications of global cultural productions across artistic and academic disciplines. The journal explores precisely what is cultural about politics and what is political about culture by bringing together text and visual art that offer diverse modes of engagement with theory, cultural production, and politics.

Ryan Bishop, Mark Featherstone, Eva Haifa Giraud, and Douglas Kellner, editors

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.