Frequencies of Blackness: A Listening Session | The Sojourner Project

What does frequency offer us as a framework for understanding black life? What insights does it provide for responding to anti-blackness? And how might it help us to see, hear, and feel the power of black life’s irrepressible drive toward creating a different kind of futurity?

At a moment of transnational racial reckoning, this listening session explored black frequency as a site of possibility. It engaged black frequency in multiple forms: as a sonic space that ranges from silence to deafening, dissonant noise; as a register of ecstatic rapture and spirituality; as a temporal feedback loop of memory, repetition, and renewal; as a dynamic relation of call and response, or chorus and verse; as a haptic and kinetic space of contact and connection across the African continent and its various diasporas.

Frequencies of Blackness is an invitation to explore black frequency through dialogue on sight, sound, memory, movement, and connection. The conveners of the session, Tina Campt, Zara Julius, Jenn Nkiru, and Alexander Weheliye, assembled a collection of sonic and haptic, written and visual texts that enact black frequency in a multitude of ways.

0:00 Opening remarks
4:40 Introduction

Frequencies: Four Takes
7:30 Take One: Zara Julius
10:42 "Rupture through Rapture"
Access audio recordings and video clips at https://www.thesojournerproject.org/f...
13:51 Take Two: Tina Campt
19:30 Clip: "Dance of Malaga" by Theaster Gates, choreography by Kyle Abraham (not available online)
19:39 Take Three: Jenn Nkiru
25:31"The Black Estatic Cannot Be Contained"
Access the image and videos at https://www.thesojournerproject.org/f...
25:35 Take Four: Alexander G. Weheliye
31:54 "The Complex Frequencies of Black Diasporic Life and Black Queer Life"
Access the videos at https://www.thesojournerproject.org/f...
32:30 Conversation

Q&A
49:24 Frequency and interiority
1:00:43 Reception and transmission
1:04:00 Registers of blackness and white supremacy

Recorded live November 20, 2020. Hosted by the Black Visualities Initiative of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and presented collaboratively with The Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD) at the University of Johannesburg and Art for Humanity at Durban University of Technology, with the support of the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM).