dalton anthony jones

I am sitting in the backseat of a Van Gogh blue Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, thin but healthy. A guy who calls himself "Mohawk John" is behind the wheel. His orange spikes touch the roof, testifying, one hopes, to a commitment to something deeper than just a nickname. He is a friend of a friend of a friend of mine. Like so many of the white youth out in search of freedom that I have encountered since going ABD and hitting the road, he is reckless, eager, and his feet are made of lead. Leaving Chicago we skirt Lake Michigan as the sun begins to set. Rhizomes: issue 29: Dalton Anthony Jones

This paper offers a meditation on the life and music of Willie Mae Thornton in order to theorize the production of voice and affect as critical sites of capitalist exploitation.  Reorganizing the current discourse on subsumption, I situate the endemic crisis of agency under neoliberal capital in relation to the historical harvesting of black labor, aesthetics and culture.

This essay examines a controversial memoir Louis Armstrong wrote on his deathbed in New York’s Beth Israel Hospital. I argue that critics have made the mistake of treating each of the narrative’s elements as discreet units. In doing so they have protected the musician’s legacy by detouring around many of the challenges the document poses to some deeply cherished ideas about Armstrong’s life and the significance of his art. Cherry picking aspects of the narrative that reinforce his legacy as a social healer and purveyor of joy, they have reaffirmed his place as an exemplar of American exceptionalism. In order to make this claim they have left out, minimized or created apologetics for his many troubling mediations on the social conditions ordering turn of the century New Orleans. Instead of enriching our understanding of Armstrong, this has reproduced a sentimental analysis of his work. Using the prism of emotional labor I argue that the memoir primarily reflects the ideologies and mores of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era into which he was born. Critics have reinforced this by emphasizing the narrative’s uplift mythos in place of a more complex, and problematic analysis of American racism, capitalist exploitation and political disfranchisement. Above all, the deathbed memoir attests to the lasting negative impact of structural changes in American society initiated at the turn of the century. In particular, I suggest that the narrative forces us to consider the re-imposition of black political and economic subordination in the wake of Plessy v Ferguson. The document demands that we take seriously the consequences of the emotional and structural estrangement of black social life.

Deleuze and Guattari deploy the image of the black hole to describe the grotesque disfigurations – the pores, blackheads and little scars – pockmarking the “semiotic face of capitalism.” It is an apt analogy for the unsettling position of blackness in relation to contemporary thought and political practice. In this special issue of Rhizomes we use the black hole as a conceptual starting point to consider how racial blackness serves as a vortex disrupting the smooth administration of late-capital and our resistance to it. An increasingly precise challenge is on the table that has largely been met with silence by radical theorists and activists alike. This challenge, what is often expediently called, “afro-pessimism,” has targeted the foundations of modern critical thought and declared them ineffective given their inability to engage what Wilderson describes as “the structural relation between Blacks and Humanity as an antagonism (an irreconcilable encounter) as opposed to a conflict.”

ACS 6730/ETHN 6800 Toni Morrison once claimed that the black subject, forged in the cauldron of terror, fungibility and alienation, was the world’s first truly modern subject. Travelling from New Orleans’ Storyville to the Paris banlieue, this course will consider the place of black music as a force of modernity, social change, and creative self-fashioning in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Our weekly readings will include musical (auto) biographies as well as recent critical work on black music in relation to sound technologies, anti-blackness, globalization and Afrofuturism. Along the way we will be exploring the sounds of blues, jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, soul, funk, hip hop and spoken word poetry. One of the requirements (and costs!) for students taking this course is to register for the online music space Spotify, as each week we will be profiling a particular musician and/or musical group. Music under consideration will include: Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Slim and Slam, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Nina Simone, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, Parliament-Funkadelic, Afrika Bambaataa, the Wu-Tang Clan, the Roots and more. Each will be examined through the lens of the collective struggles for citizenship, social justice and economic equality that have marked the African American experience for over 200 years.