ON(LINE) TRANSPARENCY AND THE BLACK PUBLIC SPHERE

In the past several decades, Black publics have increasingly employed digital technologies to advance Black liberation movements, culture, and joy. This proliferation of Black publics online has prompted many scholars to ask whether the internet as a tool ultimately works to the benefit or detriment of marginal publics. Proponents of internet technology cite the aforementioned growth of these discursive communities online as well as their success in organizing demonstrations and producing independent media. Critics of the internet argue that its construction by powerful institutions forecloses the possibility of it being used to truly challenge those institutions. This essay seeks to contribute to this discussion not by advocating for one side or another but exploring the ways in which these two literatures may be inclusive. It does so by putting the theoretical construct of the Black public in conversation with an oft-discussed digital affordance: transparency. It first outlines the historical relationship between the two, noting both the threats and opportunities that transparency has created for Black publics. It moves on to discuss the forces of the state and the market that built transparency into the infrastructure of the internet. It then synthesizes the histories of Black publics and the internet by discussing how the historical threats and opportunities of transparency are impacting Black publics online. Finally, this paper concludes with some thoughts on the idea that digital technology might simultaneously aid and harm marginal publics, particularly with regard to its implications for digital strategy.

Kate Dossett. Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal

Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal focuses on the Negro Units of the Federal Theatre Project (1935–39). Dossett argues that Black performance communities consisting of Black theatre artists and the Black public sphere helped shaped the performance and reception of theatre manuscripts in the New Deal era.

Suffrage and the New Negro in the Black Public Sphere

The era immediately following World War I was tumultuous for African American communities, with its widespread backlash against black American soldiers, urban antiblack violence and riots, and lynching. The black press, which conveyed the communities’ sense of anxiety and grievance, was critical to the formation and maintenance of a radical black counterpublic—a formation that operated outside the mainstream public sphere. While some black publications stayed on the margins of radical politics, this chapter shows that others embraced more militant ideas and strategies. Socialism and the Communist Party held special sway for some African Americans seeking a way out of their social, economic, and political isolation. A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, who founded The Messenger in New York in 1917, supported woman suffrage and promised to help women make the most profitable and desirable use of the ballot. The Messenger’s editors viewed black women’s suffrage as part of a larger political and social transformation that would give the masses a voice and equal opportunity. W. E. B. Du Bois also articulated strong “profeminist” politics in the pages of The Crisis, promoting women’s suffrage as a key element in the quest for black liberation.

No Bodily Rights Worth Protecting

The sexual labor of music making began, in earnest, with the classic Blues women of the 1920s who epitomized the turn to a national Black popular culture. Gertrude “Ma” Rainey was one of the most prolific of her cohort and made a career describing, in intimate detail, the interior lives of Black women and working class communities. Her popularity was a testament to her talents as a singer and performer but also to the skill of those around her, including the “Father of the Gospel Blues,” composer Thomas Dorsey and his wife, seamstress Nettie Dorsey. The materiality of the relationship shared between Mrs. Dorsey and Rainey is found in the dresses painstakingly sewn by Dorsey and glamorously displayed on stage by Rainey. While pleasant for the eye, these dresses also carry sounds—the music of its making as well as its performative display, making this object a text. In this examination, Redmond exposes the close proximities that exist within the costumes sewn by Mrs. Dorsey and worn by Rainey—namely the relationship between pious respectability and working-class nonheternomativity, laboring femininity and sonorous vocalities. Mrs. Dorsey’s work documents dressmaking as a sonic production capable of facilitating the growth of new industries and challenging the normative practices within the early twentieth century Black public sphere. Microreadings of these items, laborers, and artists expose some of the detail of Black political cultures in this moment and highlight the intertextual and multimedia enterprise of Black women’s sexual economies.

Black Radio/Black Resistance

Black Radio is a window into the most famous radio show you never heard of. The Tom Joyner Morning Show is a quarter-century-old syndicated black morning radio show reaching more than eight million adult, largely working-class listeners. It offers progressive political talk, soul music, humor, advice, philanthropy, and celebrity gossip. But the TJMS is not just an adult “old-school music” radio show: it is an on-air organizer, fusing progressive politics and aesthetics. It focuses on specific political issues affecting and enraging African Americans. Black Radio analyzes the TJMS’s rise in the Clinton era, and its coverage of key events—9/11, Hurricane Katrina, President Obama’s elections and terms, the murders of unarmed black Americans and the rise of Black Lives Matter, and the shocking 2016 Donald Trump electoral triumph. It showcases the varied, contentious, and blackly humorous voices of anchors, guests, and audience members. Finally, it investigates the new synergistic set of cross-medium ties and political connections now affecting print, broadcast, and online politics in anti-racist directions. Despite the dismal present, this new multiracial progressive public sphere has extraordinary potential for shaping future American politics. Black Radio, then, is more than the project of making the invisible visible, bringing to light a major counterpublic phenomenon unjustly ignored for reasons of color, class, generation, and medium. It tunes us in to an alternative understanding of the black public sphere in the digital age. Like the show itself, Black Radio is politically progressive, music-drenched, angry, and blisteringly funny.

Grime and Spirit: On a Hype!

Grime is a genre of Black British music originating from London at the turn of the twenty-first century. In this article, I explore responses to moments of Grime music making and engagement in live performance settings. I make connections between Grime, Black music streams (Lena), Black Atlantic (Gilroy) practices, the Black Public Sphere (Baker) AND how engagements at these intersections are connected to spiritual practice in the context of live performance. The power in Grime live performance settings; where the spiritual is found, connects to the sonic characteristics deployed, embodied and emotive responses and cultural practice. Spirituality, through cultural practice, is an Africanised religious/spiritual outlook that remains with the African diaspora over time and space (Mbiti). Smith’s work shows how African derived religious and spiritual practice continues in diasporic religious practice contemporarily. Through live performance (raving/club culture), I explore and theorise how power is a) generated, b) operates, and outline the roles people play in the cultural-spiritual practice. Building on the work of Smith, Kennett, Sylvan, Mbiti and Baker, I introduce theories: 1) Liminal Energy Power Spirals (LEPS) and 2) AmunRave Theory, to show how the spirit enters live performance space.

The Neglected Narratives of Cuba's Partido Independiente de Color: Civil Rights, Popular Politics, and Emancipatory Reading Practices

On March 10, 1910, Pío Coronel informed his readers that he was abandoning his home in the western province of Pinar del Río and saddling up his horse to set out on an important journalistic and political assignment. The black press journalist noted that once he got wind of Cuban president José Miguel Gómez's plans to set off from the presidential palace on a political campaign across the island, he kissed his wife goodbye and took off in pursuit with little more than a pen and a shoulder bag. In the following weeks, Pío galloped hundreds of miles across the Cuban countryside, or, as he called it, the “ill-fated American Colony,” to report on how black communities from Havana to Guantánamo received President Gómez. In other words, Pío showcased Cuba's black public sphere, which despite its effervescent political and civic life was outside the purview of Cuba's mainstream reporters. As this article argues, it was also largely neglected by subsequent generations of historians.