The Counterpublic Papers vol. 5 no. 10

So earlier this year, Abdul Ali, a poet and coordinator of the Mellon Fellows program at CCBC Essex asked me to give a humanities lecture to his students. But knowing that I have a basement life as a DJ, he asked me if I’d consider doing something non-traditional with the lecture. So I thought about it a bit, and after talking with him we both decided it could be interesting to actually DJ the keynote.

In 1963 EP Thompson wrote The Making of the English Working Class. The word “making” in the title gets at the heart of Thompson’s project—the English working class wasn’t simply a statistical entity that popped up in response to, say, the French Revolution, or even solely in response to the creation of capitalism. Rather it was something that was constructed, in part by that class itself.  If we were to turn to literature for proof of this process we wouldn’t find it. Even in the case of a writer like Dickens, we’re looking the prescient observations of people who aren’t themselves part of this class (by the time Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol for example he was an internationally renown writer). So it seems to me, and I very well could be wrong (I study America not Great Britain!), that in order to get at this making process Thompson had to go to sources that weren’t traditionally considered part of the archive.    

In 2018 Saidiya Hartman found herself facing similar to yet quite distinct from the project Thompson undertook. We know that in the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, as black men and women were moving to the industrializing north in droves, that what we might call the black working class was in the process of being made/making itself. But the archive does a far better job of telling us what that making process looked like from the standpoint of reformers (black and white) than they do from the standpoint of the working class itself. Particularly from the standpoint of black working class women. Here Hartman didn’t even think an expanded conception of the archive worked…so she for lack of a better word imputed it. That is to say, she took the figures who were in the process of being remade—the women who’d made something of a political project out of resisting the wishes of reformers, violently in some cases—and imagined what they could’ve said, what their intimate lives could have been like if we had better records. There are challenges with Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. But to the extent someone "deserves" a MacArthur Genius award (a dubious prospect) Hartman does. 

Both of these projects get at the politics of the archive.

Part of what I wanted to do with this project is to think about what a nineties era counter-archive would look like if we, understanding that black popular culture is always already political, looked at nineties era debates about black life primarily through the lens of black popular culture.

But the other thing I wanted to do was make a specific claim about DJing as an art form. Thinking about what Alan Moore did with Watchmen (not the dope HBO show and definitely not the movie), I wanted to show that there were a few very specific things you could do with DJing that you couldn’t do with any other art form.

And then finally there are enough academics with at least some DJing chops that I think this could serve as proof of concept.

So here it is. The gaps should be clear after about 20 minutes or so. As should the possibilities. Please take a listen and let me know what you think. And if you know someone’s who has tried something similar let me know.

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Red Bull is primarily known as a drink you should only consume if you’re looking to add something to vodka that will keep you up long enough to see the DJ you’ve paid good money for. But over the past several years the company’s also been known for sponsoring a set of discussions with DJs around the world. They decided to stop sponsoring the music academy a few weeks ago, but kept the approximately 2000 lectures online. It’s worth taking a peek. With interviews like this one (with Theo Parrish who I got to see last week here in Baltimore) we get a richer sense of what the black fantastic was/is/could be.

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Michael Bloomberg and Duval Patrick both announced their intent to run for President. With Patrick I’ll simply say that he, like Corey Booker, like Kamala Harris, missed his moment. The three of them thought that the centrist politics of Obama were the only way to win a national election in the Democratic primary…further they all thought those policies were the correct ones. Harris, for example believed that we needed an approach to criminal justice that was for lack of a better term “rationally punitive”. Booker believed that education needed to be a market dynamic, offering people in poor neighborhoods in Newark choice. They were wrong on both accounts.

We’re still waging a battle in Baltimore against the decision of Hopkins administrators. Bloomberg has explicitly supported this project. I don’t think there is a chance in hell that Bloomberg wins the election—just as the tide is turning against centrists like Patrick and Harris I think the tide is turning against billionaires like Bloomberg. I will probably write more at a later date, but while I get the idea of someone apologizing for a previous decision purely for political reasons—there is not only nothing wrong with this but there’s something incredibly right about it in as much as it shows how certain forms of collective action can shift interests—there’s something deeply problematic about using black churches for it.

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On that note I’m about to pour a glass of wine in honor of 108 years. In honor of Edgar Amos Love, Frank Coleman, Oscar James Cooper, and Ernest Everett Just. And then in honor of Komuria Harden, Vaughn Spence, Kamari Spence. And then in honor of Selvan Manthiram, Sam Kirkland, Darius McKinney, and Glenn Eden. I’d say that the other side of fifty has me thinking about legacy. But the reality is that I’ve been about legacy for the last thirty years. I don’t believe much in hope. I do on the other hand, believe in legacy.

Hold on to yours. Use it to build a world worth fighting for.