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 ethnomusicologists. 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 Reference Dery and Mark1994 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 stories to tell about culture, technology and things to come,”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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:

• • friendly light

• • 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 earthFootnote ⁵

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.”Footnote 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,”Footnote 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. 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 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.Footnote ⁹

George Lipsitz's review here of Alexander Weheliye's Phonographies cites Weheliye'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 repurposing 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 importance 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 compositional 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.Footnote 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.”

This viewpoint, of course, is diametrically opposed to Norman Mailer's Reference Mailer1973 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.”Footnote ¹¹

Michael Veal's book on dub asks us to consider “whether Afro-futurism is fundamentally 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. . ..”Footnote 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.”Footnote ¹³ Thus, although this issue was originally projected as “the Afrofuturism issue,” considering the implications of Veal's remark leads us to understand that the science-fiction model could only account for a fraction of contemporary 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 Santería 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 Santería 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 maleness 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:

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 musique concr éte.Footnote 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 capitalism 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 justice.” 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 technologically mediated representations of black masculinity, studies of video game culture, confrontations with the “digital divides” that condition black access to digital technology in Africa and its diaspora, and issues of globalization and economic modernization in Africa and the Caribbean.Footnote ¹⁶

The Afrofuturist encounter produced an extraordinary 1999 conference,Footnote ¹⁷ a lively listserv and website,Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote ²⁰

Alexander Weheliye, who still footnotes his work, has commented:

At the same time, Weheliye points out:

Nelson's connection of Afrofuturism with its 1920s Italian predecessor is an entirely natural move;Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ²⁵

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.”Footnote 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

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:”Footnote ²⁸ “la facultad,” as Sandoval cites Gloria Anzald'ua'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.”Footnote 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,Footnote 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.” 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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:

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 Reference Harris1969, a year before Miles Davis's Bitches Brew, warns of “High Voltage.”Footnote 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, an early tape-based delay line noted for its portability.Footnote 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 Reference Davis1967 album, Miles Smiles.Footnote 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:

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 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.Footnote 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 popular music making that entered the American classical world only grudgingly, as critic John Rockwell notes in his unjustly neglected 1983 book, All American Music.Footnote ³⁹

On the other hand, we have Eddie Harris, whose electronically vocalized saxophone 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.Footnote ⁴⁰ Imprudently, in 1970 Harris attacked Davis publicly for fostering a “new white image”—ironically, a charge that was soon leveled at Harris himself.Footnote ⁴¹ The remark needs to be contextualized 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 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.Footnote 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 mobility in a way that, in Houston Baker's words, “secures territorial advantage and heightens a group's survival possibilities.”Footnote ⁴³ Here, we need to remember that this kind of experimentalism can take many forms, draw from many histories, confront 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 listening, 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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: