"Musical Speech and the Digital Regime of the Image"
The first guest for our new colloquium series will be Kara Keeling (Associate Professor, USC).
Please note the change in location.
Karl Marx's well known phrase "poetry from the future" references a formal and temporal material disruption that functions primarily on the level of affect in ways that resist narration and qualitative description. This presentation offers "poetry from the future" as a kind of musical speech.
Thinking "poetry" as a type of "musical speech," I explore the continuities and discontinuities of today's digital media and its cultures with those of the media that precede it. I consider how the work of free jazz musician Sun Ra and other sonic Afrofuturists point towards the ways that whatever escapes or resists meaning and valuation within our commonly crafted structures of valuation and signification exists as an impossible possibility within our shared reality. It therefore threatens to unsettle, if not destroy, the common senses on which that reality relies for its coherence as such. Music and other organizations of sound offer especially rich terrain for Afrofuturisms because they imbricate sentient bodies with technology, such as mirophones that amplify and project a singer's voice, or the tools of music production, recording, and dissemination, such as mixing boards, synthesizers, musical instruments, radio, television, the PC, the Internet, etc.
Increasingly, sonic Afrofuturisms are inseparable from digital technologies. They therefore offer compelling insights into the workings of what I call, extending the work of Gilles Deleuze on film, the digital regime of the image. Sun Ra's film Space is the Place and his music open a consideration of those affinities between celluloid film and digital media that are of particular interest to creative explorations of the presently (im)possible possibility, black liberation.
Biography: Kara Keeling’s research has focused on issues of race, sexuality, and gender in film and media, critical theory, and cultural studies. Her book, The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007), explores the role of cinematic images in the construction and maintenance of hegemonic conceptions of the world and interrogates the complex relationships between cinematic visibility, minority politics, and the labor required to create and maintain alternative organizations of social life. She is co-editor (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) of a selection of writings by the late James A. Snead entitled European Pedigrees/ African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing and author of several articles that have appeared in the journals Qui Parle, The Black Scholar, Women and Performance, and elsewhere. Her current research involves issues of temporality, media and black and queer cultural politics; digital media, globalization, and difference; and Gilles Deleuze and liberation theory. She currently is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts and of African American Studies in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.