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Film, TV, Video

Janet Staiger Lecture in Gender and Sexuality: Alessandra Raengo, “‘How much fuller?’ Jenn Nkiru’s Cosmic Archaeologies”, University of Texas at Austin, March 28, 2024

David Roche

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1Lalitha Gopalan introduced the second edition of the Janet Staiger Lecture in Gender and Sexuality, organized in collaboration with the departments of Radio-Television-Film and African American and Diaspora Studies, whom she thanked. Alessandra Raengo is Distinguished Professor of Film studies at Georgia State University and author of On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (2013) and Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled (2016). Alessandra Raengo launched the journal liquid blackness in 2014 and, with her co-editor in chief, Lauren McLeod Cramer, brought it to Duke University Press in 2020 as liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies. This talk stems from this collective research project.

2The notion of liquidity comes from Toni Morrison’s 2019 essay, “Abrupt Stops and Unexpected Liquidity: The Aesthetics of Romare Bearden,” in which she argues that the liquidity that characterizes the black arts requires an expanded art history that takes into account how Black artists may model their artistic practice in one medium on another medium (for instance, writing a novel like one would compose a piece of jazz). As a practice, liquidity, Raengo explained, is a given for the post-black generation of artists she studies. Robert G. O’Meally’s 1998 collected volume The Jazz Cadence of American Culture offers ample proof of this legacy, including Arthur Jafa’s republished essay “Black Visual Intonation” which suggests that liquidity has long been a practice for African American artists. Liquidity accounts for the fluidity of art itself—which flows between the art exhibit and the fashion house, between movie theaters and streaming platforms—while potentially resisting the traditional art market configuration. Raengo’s forthcoming book on Black artists spans from the L.A. Rebellion and Arthur Jafa to contemporary artists like Kahlil Joseph, Bradford Young and Jenn Nkiru. Together they are part of an intergenerational group of filmmakers from the black diaspora, who have all experimented at some point or another with the visuality of black music, for instance, by directing music videos (Nkiru famously directed Beyoncé’s 2019 “Brown Skin Girl”). The group is also characterized by a rejection of the figure of the individual genius in favor of a more open and collaborative approach to artistic creation. What interests Raengo is how these artists inhabit this practice but also negotiate their freedom dreams, as well as how they retroengineer the extractive relationship between black expressivity and aesthetic value. Their work raises many questions regarding: (1) the moment when the work of art becomes the process itself, and the practice thus becomes a praxis; (2) the challenge the collaborative approaches poses to archival protocols; (3) the limitations of formal analysis.

3Raengo’s talk focused on one case study in particular: Jean Nkiru’s 2017 Black Star: Rebirth Is Necessary, edited by Kit Wells, which can be viewed online. Her talk was divided into six sections and a coda.

41. “The black ecstatic cannot be contained.” Nkiru believes that the archive should be conceived as a dynamic, constantly creating and recreating itself. Hence, Rebirth Is Necessary thrived in the film festival circuit while remaining available online, and has moved between single- and double- channel screenings. Its credit sequence functions like a bibliography or syllabus, evidencing the group’s collaborative approach to art. The film itself is full of references (to Nina Simone, for instance), utilizes frenetic montage and is structured according to several rewound segments. These aesthetics have ethical implications and express a complex queer temporality, experienced as “errant, eccentric, promiscuous and unexpected organizations of social life” (Keeling 19).

52. “(In)formal conceits.” Raengo started by commenting on an interview in which Jenn Nkiru emphasized the dynamic relationship between past, present and future, and the idea that the preservation of histories should enable a more expansive future. “How full is the future we are going toward looking like?” Nkiru asks. Raengo then called on the concept of “kink,” as theorized in Stefano Harney and Fred Morten’s discussion of black activism’s troubled relationship to the flow of capital; “kink” implies a critique of capital that remains practical, and that asks whether black arts depending on capital’s flow might or might not be partly compromised for doing its work.

63. “Get Black to Get Back.” Not only is rewinding a staple formal device of Rebirth is Necessary; the dancers were asked to move backwards in footage that was then played both forwards and backwards. The accumulation of portraits suggests that black identity is both liquid and plural, the “I” always meaning “We.” The film’s use of archival footage is indebted to sampling practices, and the film derives its kinetic energy from the energy of the clips it samples. Raengo identified this as a recurrent approach in these artists’ work and showed a clip of an interview with Arthur Jafa who uses a basketball analogy to explain the idea of “quantum intentionality”—that passing a ball back and forth will harness its energy and enable it to go through the hoop. For Jafa, black creative history sustains itself through such passes and accumulates radical energy in the process.

74. “More touches.” The film incorporates a chant for James Baldwin, including lines from his text in defense of the Harlem Six, mixed with a sample from Steve Reich’s 1966 Come Out, which included a sample of one of the Harlem Six’s (Daniel Hamm’s) voice. The specific line—“You have to go the way your blood beats”—from a 1984 interview about coming out introduces another instance of queer temporality. The motions and gestures of on-screen bodies challenge ethnographic conventions and empower these bodies, endowed with a forward thrust. One sound bridge in particular links the Black Panthers from Agnès Varda’s 1968 documentary to footage of some Daughters of Islam in a London basement, epitomizing an Afrofuturist conceit. Here, it is the rhythm that is the rebel, raising the question, “How can a black body leap into safety?” as put by Christina Knight. The moving bodies usher in the film’s final title, “We will not sleep anymore” as the end credits scroll over various Black couples. The film suggests that queer movements were already there in the archive to be uncovered.

85. “A family affair.” Is Rebirth Is Necessary a mixing console or a turntable? The family is comprised of the film crew but also of the artists for whom the film is a platform for their own work. The end credits is thus both a play list and a reading list, and all the collaborators are considered to be filmmakers. It is this collaborative practice that secures the legacy and that will contribute to the archive it mines. Raengo illustrated this idea of a “queer community” with Lorna Simpson’s 1992 painting She whose grid-like composition explores the potentiality of the grid as queer temporality.

96. “Deep cuts.” One particular example illustrates this idea: the goddess scene calls on the memory of the photography of Malick Sidbé by nodding to the 1997 Janet Jackson music video Got Til It’s Gone, which was itself inspired by Sidbé’s work.

10Coda. “Music is the midwife.” In Rebirth Is Necessary, music is the site of a conversation between the black arts, reconciliating different modes of the sensible across the wide variety of black cultures. The musical archives engender a feedback loop. The collective work is a congregation, a family affair where kinship is a practice of “both” and “and.”

11Q&A. Much of the Q&A had to do with the potentialities of the archive and kinetic aesthetics. Raengo insisted that the radicalism is already present in the archive and that, for these artists and theorists (who are sometimes both), it is necessary to tap into the kernels of radicalism to reactivate them and avoid losing their insights. She also insisted on how the collaborative praxis posits that others will themselves engage artistically with another artist’s work, that these works exist as an ongoing collaborative process. Raengo then returned to the notion of liquidity which, for these artists, is not just a metaphor that would view images as music or vice versa, but a practice whereby filmmaking is approached like musical composition. For Raengo, the metaphor runs deep within the liquid blackness research group as well, so that one scholar may riff on another’s ideas just like the artists sample each other’s work. Lalitha Gopalan inquired about the silences and absences that inhabit the archive, and whether relying on the archive did not run the risk of perpetually giving visibility to images that were already visible to the detriment of the invisible. Raengo agreed that the archive should also include what lies hidden in people’s memories and that there are hidden connections and sources of inspiration, for instance Malick Said who, as a director of music videos, is basically a mentor for all these artists. One member of the audience wondered whether the notion of “kinship” didn’t run the risk of perpetuating heteronormativity, but for Raengo, the artists’ sense of kinship had little do with family and inheritance but everything to do with the relationships they developed through common artistic and political interests. Raengo was also asked to elaborate on the use of rewinding, which she deemed non fetishistic but geared at accumulating energy to become a space of congregation to propel forward. Raengo explained that Nkiru easily got the rights to use all the footage because she created this community through this film: creative work begins by breaking bread. Hence the centrality of kinship in the artistic practices of black liquidity.

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Bibliography

Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. All Incomplete. Minor Compositions, 2021.

Jafa, Arthur. “Black Visual Intonation.” The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, edited by Robert G. O’Meally. 1998, pp. 264-268.

Keeling, Kara. Queer Times, Black Futures. New York University Press, 2019.

Knight, Christina. “Rebirth Is Necessary.B.o.S, vol. 10, no. 4, 2020, https://asapjournal.com/b-o-s-10-4-rebirth-is-necessary-christina-knight/

Morrison, Toni. “Abrupt Stops and Unexpected Liquidity: The Aesthetics of Romare Bearden.” In The Romare Bearden Reader, edited by Robert G. O’Meally. Duke University Press, 2019, pp. 178-184.

Raengo, Alessandra. Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled. Bloomsbury, 2016.

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References

Electronic reference

David Roche, Janet Staiger Lecture in Gender and Sexuality: Alessandra Raengo, “‘How much fuller?’ Jenn Nkiru’s Cosmic Archaeologies”, University of Texas at Austin, March 28, 2024Miranda [Online], 30 | 2024, Online since 20 September 2024, connection on 17 June 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/61848; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12hwm

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About the author

David Roche

Professor of Film Studies / professeur d’études cinématographiques
Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3
David.roche@univ-montp3.fr

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