The Counterpublic Papers vol. 3 THE SUMMER EDITION

I don’t usually write newsletters during the summer. By the end of the academic year I’m usually spent and need the summer vacation to recharge. I started it to keep up my writing discipline during the school year as obligations increased. As a result it’s one of the things I end up needing a vacation from during the summer.

This week is a bit different.

I was hit by a perfect storm. My father had what ended up being an aborted stroke, an academic issue I’ve been involved with off and on for years came to a head, and Art McGee died.

I’m going to try to talk about Art. This is a bit of a brain dump. Apologies in advance. (Again, lightly edited, etc. etc.)

“Afrofuturism” has become a keyword of sorts in the wake of the success of Black Panther. I plan to write more about this later but many black folk thought it radical in large part because the idea that there was a conception of blackness outside of white supremacy that was technologically and in some ways ethically superior was in essence a radical one. The fact that Avengers: Infinity War still has yet to surpass Black Panther as far as domestic gross is concerned is a testimony.

But the afrofuturist imagination has a much longer (and more radical) history. We can go back to George Schuyler and Black Empire, and before that to W. E. B. Du Bois’ short story “The Comet”, fast forwarding from that to the work of Sam Delany, Octavia Butler, and Steven Barnes, among others. Music is probably the best venue to explore this terrain, as there’s evidence that the transition from big band to bebop was driven at least in part by what we would now call an Accelerationist vision of the future—the idea was to create a type of music that would reflect the velocity of world political, social, and cultural change. And we don’t have to do deep digging to connect artists like Sun Ra (who actually believed he was from space), Afrika Bambaata (“Planet Rock” anyone?), and George Clinton (take a look at any of his album covers), much less entire genres (electro, techno—particularly it’s Detroit variant) to see this tradition at work.

(On hip-hop. If we’re thinking about the genre itself, I think the second most important figure in hip-hop when it comes to Afrofuturism is Missy Elliott. Her videos were arguably some of the first to tackle explicitly futuristic themes although the songs themselves weren’t particularly futuristic. But if we’re thinking about the material technology, arguably hip-hop plays an essential role not only in afrofuturism but in futurism more broadly. I’ve probably written this before here—I think transforming a turntable into a music instrument is one of the most important technological innovations of the latter quarter of the twentieth century.)

This body of work is the partial byproduct of the post world war 2 era. Before the civil rights era we began to see racial integration in the workforce, particularly in the manufacturing sector, during world war 2. The US needed every adult body it could get. My grandmother ended up working in the plant. Hidden Figures is basically a Cold War story….as is the creation of the internet itself.

We know about Oakland (as an aside haven’t seen Sorry to Bother You but I plan to), largely because of the Black Panthers. But it becomes this type of Oakland largely because of its status in the defense industry. Blacks moved to Oakland and to Seattle to not only get away from southern Jim Crow racism (the push factor) but also to participate in the burgeoning (and relatively less racist) defense economy (the pull factor).

This Oakland becomes the hub for a black working class similar in some ways to that of Detroit—one of the projects I wish I’d have pulled off when i had the chance was a project involving bringing together activists and organizers from Oakland, Detroit, and Baltimore, because i think of them as the same city in three different spaces. But it isn’t just that Oakland becomes the hub for a black working class, it also becomes the hub for a certain type of middle class. Blacks weren’t just working at the plant, they were also managers, and they didn’t just work at Ford they also worked in spinoff industries.

There were a group of black folk involved in the creation of what we think of as the internet from day one. These black folk worked in developing both software and hardware, and participated in some of the first online forums you could only get access to with a modem and an invitation. But they also created their own spaces—some public (like soc.culture.african.american), some less so. In the early nineties when people like Skip Gates, Cornel West, and bell hooks were becoming household names in certain types of households, these individuals were in the process of creating the first modern black counter-public. When the Black Radical Congress began as a partial attempt to contest the turn towards conservatism represented by the Million Man March, Art McGee (an Oaklander) was one of the people responsible for maintaining its web-presence (I believe Abdul Alkalimat was another). But before that, when ftp, gopher, newsgroups, and listservs, were the primary way black folk found one another, Art Mcgee was there.

When Alondra Nelson first develop the concept of “afrofuturism” Art McGee was there. Helping to populate the Afrofuturist email list, Art McGee posed, curated posts, and when  traffic died down as email lists became passé  Art tried to develop Afrofuturist spaces online. He wasn’t involved in the academic output—Art didn’t participate in either the academic conference or the edited journal Nelson created—but he played an influential role nonetheless. When Myspace and Friendster developed, Art was there. When Orkut developed as an international social media site with a large black Brazilian presence, Art was there. (Going back at least to 1985.)

Here’s a picture of Art, George Kelly, and me. Taken in Oakland sometime in the late nineties or early oughts.

You probably don’t know George Kelly either. I’m only exaggerating slightly when I say that George Kelly was probably directly or indirectly responsible for more black bloggers than almost anyone on the planet.

And then when Facebook took over the known internet universe Art was there was well. Poking, prodding, always from a radical and ethical position…one more committed in some ways to connecting black radical strands (black marxism and afro-pessimism for example) then differentiating them from one another.   

There are a range of folk who’ve become household names in this particular iteration of the internet, folks who are household names largely because of the economy made possible by the internet. The distribution of the idea of “afrofuturism” itself as well as cultural productions like Black Panther are possible because of the political-economy made possible by the internet. And Art McGee and people like him are partially responsible for this. He wouldn’t take credit for any of it, because he didn’t believe in that sort of thing. But he’s partially responsible nonetheless.

I have more to say…but I’ll leave it at this. Art is the fourteenth person I’ve lost this year. I expect more. We can’t fight for the world we want without growing the community we need. And that means checking in on the people we love, and holding them close.

See you in a few months. Some of you a bit sooner.