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Abstract
This article recalibrates genealogies of punk by focusing on a black feminist reading of four punk performances. By spending time with Poly Styrene, Tamar-kali, M.J. Zilla, and Janelle Monáe and the sound they produce, the historical rendering of punk takes on a new shape, one that is more inclusive of women of color and the presence of black female sexualities. As a way of drawing together black feminism and punk scholarship, two separate uses of a metaphoric “black hole” are analyzed and become entangled in the act of archiving these black feminist contributions to the world of punk rock. Evelynn Hammonds attends to the “black (w)hole” trope to prompt more analysis and admission of a wider range of black female sexualities and their potential. The other, by Dick Hebdige, uses “black hole” to operate as a challenge for punk to carefully unravel the logic of origin, race, and racism. The “black (w)hole” trope pivots around two senses of “record”: the record(ing) of sound and the historical record. This trope, and its play on space, then turns on the mechanisms and performances of race, gender, and sexuality that simultaneously engage not only feminism's pasts and futures, but punk's as well. The materialization of sound and its aesthetic becomes key in this engagement with black feminism and its performances of resistance. What finally emerges is the question that Jacques Derrida came to when faced with the idea of the origin of Nature and the supplement of its presence in performance: is it possible to arrive at either an origin or a presence (even one that has been absent) when the logic of its supplement continually adds and subtracts? What then does the space of the supplement offer?
Acknowledgements
My deepest thanks to Fiona Ngô, Sandra Ruiz, Jeanne Vacarro, Lydia Brawner, Alex Pittman, Krista Miranda, Maya Winfrey, Josh Javier Guzmán, and Patricia Clough for overall awesomeness, support, and editing prowess through the process of developing this project. To Judith Casselberry, Daphne Brooks, Tavia Nyong'o, José Muñoz, Karen Shimakawa, Ann Pellegrini, and Barbara Browning for writing and research direction and conversation. To Mimi Thi Nguyen, Jennifer C. Nash, Ann Powers, and Robert Vorlicky for superlative suggestions and/or use of pre-published writings for my research. To Nicole Daunic, Ebony Noelle Golden, Chelsea Adewumni, Kara Jesella, Carla Briscoe, Samara Gaev, Serap Erincin, Nandita Dinesh, Beth Elkins, Krista Knight, Casey Cleverly, Ayanna Lee, and Summer Kim Lee for being ever so insightful and patient. To the two anonymous peer reviewers, whose invaluable critiques and edits propelled me to go much further. To that one substitute teacher in high school who so briefly rocked my little punk world with her reading of James Baldwin. And finally, to Stefanos Tsigrimanis, who passed on to another time and space way too soon.
Notes
1. Osa Atoe, emphasis added; excerpt from a 2009 Maximumrock’n'roll (MRR) issue, archived on a blog called “Thread & Circuits” by Mimi Nguyen. In the same column she also wrote: “People of color, empowered by the words and deeds of those who came before us, building community with each other, and ready to fuck shit up.” Also see Sabin (Citation1999, 5).
2. Curry Malott and Milagros Peña conducted a late-1990s sociological study, which entailed combing through 3886 US punk recordings from 1980–97. The study broke down its participant findings by categories of sex and race: White Males, Nonwhite Males, White Females respectively. The study indicates a breakdown of 85% white males, 10% nonwhite males, and 5% white females, excluding “nonwhite,” women of color. Malott and Peña (Citation2004, 90).
3. Henderson (Citation1992, 145). She notes that “simultaneity of discourse” was inspired by Barbara Smith, from her edited volume Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology.
4. Queer punk, queercore, and homocore are seen as an offshoot or corollary of punk. They are somewhat interchangeable names for GLBTQ-related social movements within the punk subculture and mainstream gay and lesbian culture that emerged in the 1980s. Many point to particular bands, artists, and zines to locate an origin for them. For background on and more information about the 1990s riot grrrl punk girl feminist movement, see Lisa Darms's “The Riot Grrrl Collection” and Mimi Nguyen's “Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival” in this issue.
5. A remote third interconnection would be the addition of the song “Kids of the Black Hole” by The Adolescents, a 1980s punk band from Los Angeles/Orange County.
6. Working with Albert Einstein's field equations for general relativity, astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild first proposed the idea of an event horizon and a limit point of a radius, where mass exceeds a gravitational field triggering a collapse. The density of this mass is giant, but extremely small and compact, and any light emitted is barely visible – hence, a black hole.
7. Hammonds (Citation2004, 304).
8. Hebdige (Citation1979, 68).
9. Derrida (Citation1997).
10. Foucault (Citation1984, 76).
11. The essay can be found in numerous publications since its debut in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies in 1989.
12. Tracking the black (w)hole trope used by Hammonds and Wallace we can see how they have updated Baker's literary perspective. Baker demonstrates how the metaphor became a trope to designate a vital space of expression. Baker formulated the parenthetical doubling of “(w)hole” to locate a transformational space and process of creativity through the black hole of white-dominated society to another universe of black cultural expression and “wholeness.” Analyzing writers like Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison, he also plays on and critiques the standard reading of “lack” that responds to illegibility by opening the privilege doors, or closing them, and instead places autonomy and desire within the supposed black hole as “a suggestion of feeling and constitution,” a multi-dimensional event with invisibly attractive force (Baker Citation1984, 140, 144). In doing so, Baker asks what signals this (w)holeness, and he responds: the need “to escape incarcerating restraints of a white world … and to engage the concentrated, underground singularity of experience that results in a blues desire's expressive fullness,” the singularity of a communicative cluster (151). By “underground” Baker intends to draw parallels with not only the subterranean, but subcultural space as well. (Perhaps Jacques Lacan's work in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Psychoses 1955–1956 would also be useful to engender a relationship between race and psychoanalysis, via the hole.) For Wallace, the black (w)hole trope reproduces “the dense accumulation, without explanation or inventory, of black feminist creativity” (2008, 218). She speaks of the unrecognized parallels, but also unregulated and unmapped deep space as a necessity. Wallace's essay, “Variations on Negation and the Heresy of Black Feminist Creativity,” responds to harsh criticisms of her previous book while linking negated and buried bodies to the gaps in dominant discourse, which can be read through the tropological allegory (216). (Her previous book is entitled Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman.) The work of this link is similar to Mary Helen Washington's suggestion: “We listen for the silences, we look for who is absent, we try to name the nameless, to see the faces of those made faceless” (1995, 199). Perhaps the poetic bearing of Washington's sensorial series is less a literal seeking than a stillness of something there all along, which optical privileging and general assumption conceals.
13. Hammonds (Citation2004, 310).
14. See Rey Chow's discussion of white feminism and the supplement in Protestant ethnic and the spirit of capitalism (2002, 160, 182).
15. Baker (Citation1984, 149).
16. Fred Moten, in his essay “Taste dissonance flavor escape,” considers a similar train of thought proposed by Daphne Brooks called fugitivity, an outlaw state of belonging and escape “that may well prove to veer away from freedom as its telos” (2007, 223). In this “preface for a solo by Miles Davis,” Moten does include his own version: “w/holes” (218), however fugitivity works without the exclusivity of a black hole, meaning one where no information (or mass) is able to escape outward – although this characteristic may not apply anymore, since recent research and scientific theories are outlining a reversal of this one-way conceptual and cosmic phenomena. In a more recent article, he clarifies this space: “What's at stake is fugitive movement in and out of the frame, bar, or whatever externally imposed social logic – a movement of escape, the stealth of the stolen that can be said, since it inheres in every closed circle, to break every enclosure” (2008, 179). Tracking the affect and etymology of the word “punk” through Kalup Linzy's performance work, Nyong’o comes upon the “hole or aperture” of punk attitude, one through which much history can be seen. Then, traversing the topology of this hole, he finds a passively “unavailable body that makes an available space” (2010 75). This “body” is in constant motion, so much so that its anticipated drive forward is simultaneously its radical withdrawal.
17. Wallace (Citation2008, 229). Emphasis added.
18. Rees (Citation2005, 263).
19. Daphne Brooks combs the archives of narration in aesthetic practices to locate the negotiations of visibility, sexual will, and the iconicity of “representational timelessness projected onto blackness” (2006, 6, 341). Kara Keeling theoretically weds the cinematic and the political implication of “common sense” and invents a perceptual device to track the black femme and the hegemony that conditions the “lingering logics of racism” (Keeling Citation2007, 1, 22). The cinematic is a Deleuzean term indicating a “radical Elsewhere,” much like a black (w)hole. Keeling deploys “common sense” as a useful device to call attention to a shared set of images that affect perception (14). Jennifer C. Nash advocates a practice of reading racial iconography and posing non-normative considerations of 1970s pornographic representations to uncover mechanisms embedded in representations of black female sexuality and subjectivity (2008, 63). Nicole Fleetwood investigates how “systems of visuality” are rooted in performance and not only produce troubled vision, but, on the other hand, can also trouble existing stigmas of visibility (2011, 122). She notes the nuanced understanding of incommensurability in Hammonds's text that shuttles “the black female body as troubling presence in dominant culture” (121). Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks literally sets the (w)hole in the space of the stage for further inquiry by foregrounding race and historical myths as characters in The America Play.
20. Cvetkovich (Citation2003, 8).
21. Derrida (Citation1997, 240).
22. Unfortunately, there is not room enough here to thoroughly research the detailed politics and sociality of “girl” and “grrrl,” such as how do they operate sonically and interpellatively as well as the appropriation dynamics in a third wave feminist “girl love” reclamation context. One cultural communications study by Karla D. Scott tracked the discursive markers of identity in the usage of “girl” among Black women participants and its dynamic interplay with “look” (2000). There is another article by Ednie Kaeh Garrison who credited popularity of “girl” to “young American black women” with the specific phrase “You go, guuuurlll!” and made a brief link to the “revolution girl style now” of Riot Grrrl (2000, 141).
23. The Gullah (or Geechee) reside along the coast and islands of South Carolina and Georgia and have maintained a strong connection to their African language and spiritual beliefs. During the slave trade, they were shipped mostly from areas along the coast of Sierra Leone. See also the film Daughters of the Dust, directed by Julie Dash.
24. Womanist Alice Walker invokes the importance of spirituality in the African diasporic continuum. The lived nuances of spirituality link to sonic spirituals and how forms of spirituality and vitality make sound multidimensional. “Womanist,” as defined by Walker's In Search of our Mother's Garden, speaks to the potential and actualization of Black feminism or feminism of color (1983, xi). The spiritual aspect connotes an incalculable vitality, a spirit that cannot be supplemented by any unwanted outside force. This distinction points to a utopic wholeness and multiplicity of the body and the surrounding space.
25. Boyd (Citation2010).
26. Lyrics for “Boot” courtesy of Tamar-kali.
27. My everlasting gratitude and love to colleague Ebony Noelle Golden for offering this connective insight. Lyrics for “Four Women” courtesy of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.
28. See Muñoz (Citation2011), for a discussion of “vitalism” in relation to “stagings and renderings of élan vital that manifested the ontological force of brownness as a mode of particularity in multiplicity” in Ana Mendieta's work (192). This trace of iconicity and affect from a past life and world (real or imagined) is also the kind of vitality I am referring to here.
29. Hammonds (Citation2004, 304).
30. Carby (Citation1992, 741).
31. One such example is Sikivu Hutchinson, “Bad ‘Bitches’, True women”, The Feminist Wire. August 9, 2011. http://thefeministwire.com/2011/08/bad-“bitches”-true-women/.
32. Boyd (Citation2010).
33. “Hardcore” (HC) is a term used by punks and critics alike to distinguish a movement in 1980s punk rock that veered abruptly away from the mainstreaming and commercialism of punk, like the softer “new wave” top 40 hits (Taylor Citation2003, 71). HC encompasses a commitment to political values and unflagging sensibility of alternative practice.
34. One of the main arguments of Patricia Hill Collins's substantial volume revolves around a discussion of “controlling images” that objectify and position the black women within a dominant framework, the visual iconographic and political stereotypes and permutations in popular culture that limit the geometry of being and stifle empowerment. Using this tool, she deftly works through the iconography and mechanisms behind institutional racism and misogyny. Drawing on cultural traditions, she also suggests several ideas for countering the persistent “suppression of black feminist thought,” such as ideas of “self-definition” [through the power of naming as well as collective independence, conscious individuation, space, and intimacies], “constructed knowledges” [feminist knowledge and thought that attempts to resolve rampant and ubiquitous social contradictions], and an investigation of the performance and spectrum of roles involved in affective labor of black women in the US (2000, 97–114).
35. In the film Afro-punk, Tamar-kali is interviewed in her apartment; a poster of Betty Davis hangs in the background. The influence is strongly evident in her music. Many of Davis's songs, particularly “They say I'm different,” achieve rock funkiness to the punk degree and add a level of sexuality that deploys the dirty, nasty towards the sublime and “anti-profane.” Her songs perform complicated sexual dynamics through the instrumentality. Both artists musically determine – by all means – how cross power identifications happen, work, and get replayed.
36. Collins talks about the importance, precarity, and elusiveness of safe spaces (2000, 111) and how an institutional or formal “safe spaces” can be threatening and constitute a dominating homogeneity of vocal and visual power play. Moten delves into the “crawlspace” where Harriet Jacobs hid for seven years “to escape mastery's sexual predation” (2007, 219 – also in the paragraph on 239, where Moten has 17-plus “in” enunciations). He speaks of a space of dissonant escape, but also of its confinement, outside the law, for reasons of preservation. Here, the possibility of wholeness lingers in the details and goes on to infinity via “the rickety bridge between things and the whole they (de)form” (2007, 220).
37. Sara Marcus's recent book, Girls to the front (2010), documents one of the first conventions where such a workshop took place. In an attempt to follow the feminist archives, the actual Riot Grrrl Collection at the Fales Archive holds a notebook of Kathleen Hanna's that is of great relevance here. The cover of the notebook says “Riot Grrrl – Test Patterns,” and it details Hanna's original vision for riot grrrl and future conventions with a sense of communism: “Unless there is enough rep. among the vegan, Black, young, lesbian, etc. … community NO decision will be made till ALL PEOPLE will be considered. … RG is dedicated to anti-racist work in THEORY/PRACTICE and thus MUST HAVE women of color among its Elite.” Kathleen Hanna Papers, Fales Archive, NYU.
38. Wallace (Citation2008, 220).
39. Elam and Rayner (2001, 184). Also see Nyong'o, “Punk'd Theory” for a discussion of punk/queering theory through a consideration of race; Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place for more on alternative and queer temporalities; Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, for expounding discussions on time, empire, and feminism; Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, for her treatment of orientation and disorientation as they relate to space and the body; and Muñoz, Cruising Utopia for more on the potentiality and temporality of the space of stages.
40. Moten (Citation2003, 39).
41. Hebdige (Citation1979, 68). Full quote from the “Bleached Roots” section of chapter 3: “To use a term from semiotics, we could say that punk includes reggae as a ‘present absence' – a black hole around which punk composes itself.” Next page: “At the heart of the punk subculture, forever arrested, lies this frozen dialectic between black and white cultures.”
42. Ibid., 132.
43. Ibid., 62–70, 121.
44. Ibid., 69.
45. Ibid., 68.
46. McRobbie (Citation1990, 23).
47. Nyong'o (2005, 22–3).
48. Ngô (forthcoming).
49. Hebdige (Citation1979, 18).
50. Eshon (Citation1998, 2).
51. Hebdige (Citation1979, 67).
52. Ibid., 121.
53. Traber (Citation2001, 36).
54. Hebdige (Citation1979, 120). Skinheads, according to Hebdige's observation, refer to mods, a subculture that turned more towards reggae, ska, and rocksteady in the late 1960s to cultivate a hard-edge look and manner of a “puritanical” lumpen proletarian (55) and, ironically, turned against immigrants. In the U.S., and in the manner in which I am referring to them, the skins phenomena in punk scenes later turned towards violent and conservative “white power” tendencies, aka “Nazi Punks.” As Craig O'Hara conveys in Philosophy of Punk: “The middle and late eighties showed Skinheads to be the enemies of a constructive Punk scene with constant violence at concerts and ties to racist organizations” (1999, 49).
55. Ibid., 44.
56. This sonic archiving is partially recuperative; the pulsating flash in the punk universe that is X-Ray Spex was fairly well documented, particularly Styrene's influential performance for future riot grrrls.
57. Lyrics for “Genetic Engineering” courtesy of Agelong Music Publishing, Inc./Maxwood Music Ltd.
58. Hall (Citation1996, 468).
59. Bangs (Citation2004, 105).
60. Although President Barack Obama provides more than just a visuality of hope for this equality, he also points to a “black hole in history” that could have unfolded a discourse on the historicity of race during his campaign, but rather functioned as a closure in many ways, as Angela Davis voiced in an October 2008 “Barnard Center for Research on Women” speech (available via podcast).
61. Porter and Austen (Citation2002).
62. McNeil and McCain (Citation2006, 208).
63. Tate (Citation1992, 20); Nyong'o (Citation2005).
64. Nyong'o (Citation2005, 30).
65. Ibid., 23.
66. Ibid.
67. Lyrics for “Black & White” courtesy of M.J. Zilla.
68. For a discussion of the differences and intersections of the homonyms, signifying and signifyin, as well as a historical and literary tracing of black tropes, see Gates (Citation1988).
69. Spillers (Citation2006, 25).
70. Quote is from a personal email interview with M.J. Zilla, July 2007.
71. Lorde (Citation1995, 215). In Vodou spirituality, as practiced mainly in Benin and Haiti, Aida Hwedo (or Ayida-Weddo) is a loa spirit of fertility, rainbows, and snakes.
72. Nguyen (2010).
73. Regarding the Afro-punk festival and website (www.afro-punk.com), Tamar-kali once referred to Afro-punk as more of a “lifestyle brand.” She also highlights the typical music scene problem of the lack of visibility women performers receive on the annual festival stage.
74. James Spooner, Moe Mitchell, Tamar-kali, et al., Afro-punk: The “Rock n Roll Nigger” Experience, directed by James Spooner (Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2006), DVD.
75. Hall (Citation1996, 473).
76. Ibid., 468.
77. Nguyen (Citation1997).
78. Nguyen (2007, 74). Chelsea and Jonah Peretti exemplify and evoke this performance of the constituted relationship between whiteness and blackness and the social anxieties around racism in a 2002 new media (net.art) piece called “Black People Love Us.” See http://www.blackpeopleloveus.com. Also, the “casual surprise” of the white reaction to seeing black people at the punk club, as conveyed in the film, is reminiscent of Frantz Fanon's experience when a child pointed at him and essentially said the same thing, “Look, a Negro!” (Fanon Citation1967, 111).
79. See McNeil and McCain (Citation2006) and Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces (London: Faber & Faber, 2011). It is rather interesting how the origin narratives of punk circulate between the U.S. and the U.K. Another U.S. example includes Marvin Rev of Suicide in the documentary Kill your Idols, who explains how they started using the word “punk” to describe their own music after Lester Bangs used it to describe Iggy Pop in Creem Magazine. Dir. Scott Crary, 2004. DVD.
80. Liner notes from Janelle Monáe, Metropolis: The Chase Suite, 2008.
81. Nyong'o (Citation2005, 30–1).
82. Hoard (Citation2010).
83. Felman (Citation2002, 23).
84. Muñoz (2011, 148).
85. Derrida (Citation1997, 243, 304).
86. Ibid., 149.
87. Atoe (Citation2009).
88. Derrida (Citation1997, 202).
89. See Spivak (Citation1991), who argues that the precedence of the visual in History and Time conceals the wholly “lived” and the fusion of spacing and timing.
90. Trouillot (Citation1995, 26).
91. Bhabha (Citation1994, 254). Like Hall, Bhabha sees this form of articulation as “subverting the rationale of the hegemonic moment and relocating alternative, hybrid sites of cultural negotiation” (255). In the archival sense, I am also thinking of Derrida, Archive Fever and Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire here.
92. Derrida (Citation1997, 270–80, 312).
93. Ibid., 240. Emphasis added. Society and law supplement nature and language, writing supplements speech, and any binary or dialectical designation of perception, sense, or spirit exhibits différance where either one may defer the other and easily open a space for a chain of supplements to defer ad infinitum – to be the representation of the represented who is representing the representation of the represented and so on.
94. Ibid., 154, 295.
95. Ibid., 197.
96. Theatre scholar Marvin Carlson suitably noted how the iteration of a supplement discloses “a potentially infinite series of future performances” (1985, 10).
97. Ibid., 226.
98. Liner notes from Janelle Monáe, The Archandroid: Suites II and III.
99. Stuart Hall, from an interview with Lawrence Grossberg (Citation1996, 144).
100. Nash (Citation2008, 63). This quote from Nash also brings in yet another related text by Loïc Wacquant, “For an analytic of racial domination,” Political Power and Social Theory 11 (1997): 221–34.
101. Who knows what is really in a black hole – recent research has proposed that a black hole contains two-dimensional information to project a three-dimensional reality, an infinity of supplemental spaces. On October 28, 2010, Dave Mosher from Wired Magazine reported on a Grote GEO600 machine being built by Craig Hogan that may be able to measure the holographic principle of a black hole. Recent theories say this principle occurs at the boundaries (the event horizon) of black holes, an area that reflects an illusion of 3D objects (in reality) from a 2D surface of information located in the black hole. In other words, Physics researcher Kate Becker explains, the holographic principle demonstrates that “our universe is a kind of cosmic phantom – that the real action is happening elsewhere, on a boundary that we have not yet begun to map.” Kate Becker, “Holograms, Black Holes, and the Nature of Reality,” NOVA on PBS.org, November 15, 2011.
102. Bhabha (Citation1994, 257).
103. Ibid., 234.
104. Ibid., 232.
105. Derrida (Citation1997, 149, 154, 199).
106. In “The Case of Blackness,” Moten briefly points to the lived experience of blackness as the dangerous supplement that constitutes a “disordering, deformational force while at the same time being absolutely indispensable to normative order, normative form” (2008, 180).
107. Opening line for Monáe's track “Violet Stars Happy Hunting!” on The Chase Suite.
108. Derrida (Citation1997, 203).
109. Ibid., 240.
110. Janelle Monáe, “Many Moons,” Metropolis: The Chase Suite (2008).
111. Ibid.