Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T06:21:45.880Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cruising Utopia with Brittany Howard: Jaime's Queer Afrofuturism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2020

FRANCESCA T. ROYSTER
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Inspired by Brittany Howard's solo album Jaime (2019), this contribution creates a conversation between music studies, queer studies, African American Literature, and memoir to think about lived ways of understanding, performing, and participating in music to create a future of inclusion. I argue that Black queer strategies of listening and musicking contributes to a new layer of music, the dream space, which helps us understand the impact of music on everyday life.

Type
Forum
Information
Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , February 2021 , pp. 13 - 28
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bibliography

Apple Music. ‘Editor's notes: Jaime. Brittany Howard’. https://music.apple.com/us/album/jaime/1468956639 (accessed 25 October 2020).Google Scholar
Boilen, Bob. ‘Brittany Howard: Tiny Desk Concert’, NPR. 15 October 2019. www.npr.org/2019/10/15/768439696/brittany-howard-tiny-desk-concert (accessed 25 October 2020).Google Scholar
Butler, Octavia. Kindred. New York: Beacon, 2003.Google Scholar
Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2019.Google Scholar
Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tavia Nyong'o, Ann Pellegrini, . ‘Forward’, in Muñoz, José Esteban, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 10th anniversary edn. New York: New York University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Clinch, Danny, dir. ‘Stay High’. 2019. www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfizQsGWOxI (accessed 25 October 2020).Google Scholar
Cohen, Cathy. ‘Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?’, in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. Patrick Johnson, E. and Henderson, Mae G.. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. 21–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
David, Marlo. ‘Afrofuturism and Post-Soul Possibility in Black Popular Music’, African American Review 41/4 (Winter 2007), 695–707.Google Scholar
Dery, Mark. ‘Black to the Future: Afro-Futurism 1.0’, in Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction's Newest New Wave Trajectory, ed. Barr, Marleen S.. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. 6–13.Google Scholar
Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope in the Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hughes, Hilary. ‘Brittany Howard Retraces Her Adventurous Path to Her Solo Album “Jaime”: Everything Is Very New Again’. Billboard, 26 September 2019. www.billboard.com/articles/columns/rock/8531444/brittany-howard-solo-album-jaime-interview (accessed 25 October 2020).Google Scholar
Johnson, E. Patrick, ‘“Quare” Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother’, in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. Patrick Johnson, E. and Henderson, Mae G.. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. 124–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laymon, Kiese. ‘Da Art of Storytellin’ (A Prequel)’. Oxford American, 19 November 2015. www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/702-da-art-of-storytellin (accessed on 11 May 2020).Google Scholar
Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. A Biomythography. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Lorde, Audre. ‘The Uses of the Erotic, the Erotic as Power’, in Sister Outsider: Speeches and Essays. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. 53–9.Google Scholar
Mapes, Jillian. ‘Brittany Howard on Her Solo Debut, Her Black Heroes, and Owning Her Greatness’. Pitchfork, 17 September 2019. https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/brittany-howard-jaime-interview/ (accessed 10 May 2020).Google Scholar
Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Vintage Reprint, 2004.Google Scholar
Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 10th anniversary edn. New York: New York University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Murchison, Gayle. ‘Let's Flip It! Quare Emancipations, Black Queer Traditions, Afrofuturisms, Labelle to Janelle Monáe’. Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Music 22 (2018), 79–90.Google Scholar
Nelson, Alondra. ‘Future Texts’. Social Text 20/2 (Summer 2002), 1–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nguyen, Thao. ‘Brittany Howard: “Stay High”’. Produced by Hrishikesh Hirway and Christian Koons. Song Exploder, 18 September 2019. Podcast, 18:33. http://songexploder.net/brittany-howard (accessed 25 October 2020).Google Scholar
Robinson, Zandria F. ‘Goat Head: A Song of Herself – and Her Revenge’. New York Times Magazine: The Music Issue, 15 March 2020, 28.Google Scholar
Royster, Francesca T. Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Royster, Francesca T. ‘Are We Still Fabulous’. Los Angeles Review of Books, 17 May 2016. https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/are-we-still-fabulous/ (accessed 11 May 2020).Google Scholar
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).Google Scholar
Shaviro, Steven. ‘Supa Dupa Fly: Black Women as Cyborgs in Hip Hop Videos’. Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22/2 (2005), 169–79.Google Scholar
Simmons-Duffin, Selena. ‘“Whiplash” of LGBTQ Protections and Rights, from Obama to Trump’. NPR, 2 March 2020. www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/02/804873211/whiplash-of-lgbtq-protections-and-rights-from-obama-to-trump (accessed 11 May, 2020).Google Scholar
Small, Christopher. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Smalls, Shanté Paradigm and Pabón, Jessica, eds. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory (special issue, All Hail the Queenz: A Queer Feminist Recalibration of Hip Hop) 24/1 (2014).Google Scholar
Snorton, C. Riley, ed. Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender and the Black International (special issue, On the Queerness of Hip Hop and the Hip Hop of Queerness) 2/2 (2013).Google Scholar
Steinskog, Erik. Afrofuturism and Black Sound Studies. New York: Palgrave, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weheliye, Alex G. ‘Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music’. Social Text 20/2 (Summer 2002), 21–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Womack, Ytasha. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi and Fantasy Culture. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2013.Google Scholar

Discography

Howard, Brittany. Jaime. CD, ATO Records, ATO0505, 2019.Google Scholar
Ndegeocello, Meshell. Bitter. CD, Maverick Records, 9 47439-2, 1999.Google Scholar