[This transcript is automatically generated and may contain errors.]

Scott Black: Welcome to the Virtual Jewel Box Podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center.

I am Scott Black, director of the Tanner Humanities Center, and I'm joined today by Louis Chude-Sokei, professor of English and Director of the African American and Black Diaspora Studies Program at Boston University, where he holds the George and Joyce Wein Chair. Dr. Chude-Sokei is the author of three books: The Last "Darky": Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora; The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics; and most recently, a memoir, Floating in a Most Peculiar Way.

He has also collaborated with musicians, dancers, and artists on a variety of projects, and curated a citywide Afrofuturism festival in New York City for Carnegie Hall. Welcome, Louis.

Louis Chude-Sokei: Very happy to be here. Thank you.

Scott Black: You grew up as an immigrant to the U.S., a Black man, and the son of fascinating parents who themselves crossed a divide within diasporic culture and embodied two key features of 20th-century Black history.

Your mother was a Jamaican of the Windrush generation of West Indians who patriotically immigrated to the U.K. in the 1940s and ’50s. Your father was an important Igbo leader in the Biafran Civil War, who was killed just after you were born. You are the product and embodiment of a complex diaspora. In your memoir Floating in a Most Peculiar Way, you raise fascinating questions about identity, race, and masculinity—but from an angle of experience that is distinct from many discussions of Black identity in America.

Your West Indian perspective on African American identity also shapes your scholarly work: your book on the wonderful and important star of the early 20th-century stage, Bert Williams; your book on the intertwined histories of race and technology, informed by Caribbean thinkers as well as your own experience with Jamaican sound culture and dub; and your work with musicians, artists, and museums on Afrofuturism and experimental music. We have a lot to talk about.

Your memoir is mapped across the African diaspora—from Jamaica, England, and Nigeria, in your parents’ generation, to your own life in Jamaica and America, with trips back to Jamaica and Nigeria. Could you give us a broad overview of your family as a way to introduce your memoir?

Louis Chude-Sokei: It's clearly the story of an immigrant—but a Black immigrant. And why that specificity matters is that it's about exploring different cultural and national experiences, all of which define Blackness in very different ways. And so you're always an immigrant not only to Britain or to America, or to quote-unquote whiteness—you’re an immigrant to local notions of Blackness.

And the family experience of mine has been really unique in that regard. I've been blessed in that way—intellectually and professionally. On a personal level, it's a bit of a dramatic kind of set of experiences, as family can be, right? But try spreading that family over multiple continents—and this is in advance of social media and easy communication. It was very difficult growing up to maintain the bonds, but one of the reasons that these bonds were always maintained was not the ideologies of Pan-Africanism or Black solidarity—those are secondary, actually. It's just the ideologies of family, of connections to keep you safe in relationship to the new nation and the new peoples you encounter.

Many of those new peoples may look like you racially, but culturally are not like you at all. So the family experience has been really helpful in mapping the Black diaspora for me. And that's why this third book is a memoir—because it's the stories that lead to the kind of critical and intellectual work I would do as a scholar, writer, artist, or what have you—even as an administrative figure. But it's rooted in a very personal experience.

People are beginning to understand now, for example, that the densely theoretical first book, The Last "Darky", is actually the same as Floating in a Most Peculiar Way. It's a theoretical version of a very personal experience. So rooting it in family has been very helpful to me. I've always felt connected to the family structure for these kinds of ideas, but I don’t think I was ready to engage it through family until I started losing members of the family. Then I went back and started to frame it that way—losing my mother and, of course, my godfather, who was the leader of the Biafran secession. So those things gave a real personal energy to the scholarly and artistic work.

Scott Black: I do want to get back to the relationship between this book and your early scholarly work, but first maybe we can just get a sense of the memoir itself and go through some of what I thought were the really interesting key paths.

At the beginning of the story, when you're a kid in Jamaica, you write about practicing being a Black American. You write, “We acted out American television programs, particularly the ones that featured Black Americans. My cousins and I would even practice the accents we heard on those programs at church, thereby risking eternal damnation—which would be worth it if we could spend an eternity sounding like Black Americans.”

I hope you're not condemned to an eternity of damnation. Later, when you're actually in America, your aunt tells your mother, “You have to keep his accent strong. They must hear him before they see him. The whites have to know who we West Indians are so they won’t treat us like them—Black Americans.”

Music and sound are recurrent issues across your work. And here I’m interested in how identity is shaped by accent and performance.

Louis Chude-Sokei: I think I say somewhere—maybe in The Last "Darky"—that the voice is the mask when the face looks the same, or when the skin looks the same. This is something that I think a lot of African American culture doesn't quite get—that other Black communities don't necessarily feel and express Blackness in the same way, or have the same affiliations and perspectives, etc.

The goal of this book was to open up some fairly personal—and sometimes unflattering—conversations about how race and identity work. Accent is very important, because Black immigrants in America tend to exaggerate their accents at times—not just to show how comfortable or connected they are to their homelands. And of course, all immigrants—you don’t have to be Black—feel some sort of nostalgia for the homeland. But sometimes that nostalgia gets weaponized as a way of critiquing the new country: “We're not really like you.” And how do you know that? Because we talk differently, we eat different foods, etc.

It changes generation to generation, but one of the ways to map the differences in how Black peoples think about themselves is in the way they use accents. And West Indians—certainly when I was growing up—we were told, “Listen. Emphasize your accent because you look like Black Americans.” And for my parents' generation, that was a liability.

Now, for my generation, it was something that we affirmed—because we watched television, we listened to the music, we saw the Afro hairstyles and the cool clothes and the certain versions of masculinity. We wanted that. That is cool. Our parents thought of that as, again, a liability. But the difference between the cool African American and the liability—that is, the Black identity—is mapped in the languages and in the accents.

I mention in the memoir too that we got caught up in the elaborate handshakes we saw Black Americans doing. We walked certain ways and acted certain ways. Because for a lot of West Indians of that generation, what was called Black radicalism or Black nationalism or Black Power came largely from African American books and movies—like the Blaxploitation films and things like that. So learning the other Black accent was very crucial.

In the music world, that too. For example, if you listen to a lot of contemporary Black musics in the diaspora—if you remove the vocalist—production-wise, it's very similar. Everyone's using a lot of the same software, and a lot of the same textures and sounds. It's when the vocalist shows up that you go, “Oh, this is a dancehall tune. Okay, this is an Afrobeats tune. Oh, this is a highlife song.” All of those genres of Black music going back to reggae feature a moment when Africans from the Caribbean or from West Africa imitated African American music and sounds.

But then there's always this crucial moment—it happened with reggae, it happened with highlife as it turned into Afrobeats—when Africans realized: “We need to break away from the dominance of African American sound. We need to sound like ourselves.” But the only way to get to that is through African American vernacular and style and representation.

So again, it's something that I could tell happening in my family, but it's a broader politics in the African diaspora—working to get to yourself through the voice of the Black other who is similar to you, but necessarily different. Or you have to differentiate yourself from them in order to be “authentic.”

Scott Black: That's really interesting. This is not where I'd planned to go here, but we’re going to go there. You say it’s when the vocals come in, when the accent comes in—I always think it’s when the rhythm comes in. It’s the shifts in rhythm. And that may be an aspect of accent as well.

Louis Chude-Sokei: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. The shifts in rhythm, and rhythm structures, and beat structures, etc. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, in his legendary piece History of the Voice, always said—and it influences me even though I may not agree with it, but it sounds really good still—that one of the things that shifts the rhythm is the shift in vernacular poetics.

He talks about, for example, how in the moment of Black decolonial nationalism in the Caribbean, the switch from the imitation of African American R&B to this thing called ska was a vernacular shift. When people stopped speaking a certain way—not just speaking British, because my mother’s generation, if you heard them speak, you’d think they were British. Why? Because they thought they were British, right?

It’s the children after that who start to really embrace the vernacular of the working class—which is why, in the memoir, my very British uncle describes the era after decolonization and the birth of reggae music derisively as, “Oh, that’s when the ghetto won.”

Scott Black: And when the music starts to follow the rhythms of that form, it becomes indigenized.

Louis Chude-Sokei: Yep. But even the indigenous is something that is produced through some kind of mimicry and performance. The authentic is a product of certain kinds of performance. You go through stages of imitation before you get to yourself.

Scott Black: That’s interesting, and I’m hoping that we can get to your libretto for Anarchic Artificial Intelligence, where I think you actually write a story precisely following—I don’t know what to call it—the naturalization of the artificial, or the recognition that there’s no actual natural on the other side of the imitation.

Louis Chude-Sokei: Yeah, the performance.

Scott Black: Getting back to your memoir, one of the really striking passages when you finally arrive in L.A. as a young man is your example of your cousin Brian, who is for you a powerful force—an example of African American manhood. And I really stress the “manhood.”

Louis Chude-Sokei: Absolutely.

Scott Black: The violence is very important there. Would you mind reading that passage from your memoir on cousin Brian? I believe it’s at the bottom of page 130 to 131.

Louis Chude-Sokei: [Reads]

I took in every word, every shrug and gesture, and even every moment when he punctuated his points by moving the Afro pick around and patting his hair back into shape. If what he taught me could be reduced to words, it would be something like this: Gang life was his America—a small enough piece of it, anyway, for him not only to manage but also control. He'd met other Black immigrant kids in that world—Belizean, Korean, Caribbean. Like them, he’d assimilated head on, without the puritan thrust of denial and blame that the rest of us depended on. Our vacillation was the problem. In-betweenness was weakness—pussy.

There could never be doubt about where he stood, where he belonged, what side he was on. He aimed to be certainty itself, reality personified. You’d think this would enable stillness—a quiet coming from absolute self-knowledge. It was the opposite. It required a relentless generating of fear in others to keep them on edge and render a man’s history and authenticity beyond reproach.

Accent doesn’t matter. Racism doesn’t matter. White people don’t matter. Nigerian, African, Caribbean don’t matter either. He said, “We, our people, are stupid to hold onto those types of things. That’s why people hate us.” In his view, only one Black identity mattered in America, and there was no point in fighting it or asking it to recognize ours because we would always be secondary to it. This was their country, their game.

But as if he wanted to make sure I wasn’t utterly disconsolate at his revelation, he said there was, however, a way to win. “Become king,” was what he said over a cassette gone squeaky at the end of the tape’s run. It might have been the Gap Band or Zapp featuring Roger. Maybe it was Egyptian Lover, maybe it was Prince. I remember thinking how cool it was for someone with such masculine street cred to blast Prince, who was mocked by everyone in those days as effeminate and wannabe white.

Being king required that you so master their rules that you would disappear—all traces of foreignness gone. But then you could use your mastery to rise above those who’d established the rules in the first place. This advice would stay with me throughout high school and into college—as would the fact that it came from a man on the verge of doing serious time in prison.

Scott Black: It’s a fantastic passage, and it really speaks to how your assimilation is both into a racial identity as well as into a certain form of masculinity.

Louis Chude-Sokei: Absolutely.

Scott Black: Which is really striking right now in our particular moment of masculine crisis.

Louis Chude-Sokei: I have just a little bit of gossip to throw into the mix. I’d always thought that Brian was gone for good—and by the way, that’s not his real name. I changed the names of the family members, which hasn’t helped them from hating me for writing this book.

Scott Black: Seriously?

Louis Chude-Sokei: Oh yeah. Not all of them—some of them love me—but some of them are not happy with the book, particularly the Caribbean side. But I went back to Jamaica a few months back and discovered that Brian had been released, went back to Jamaica, and was living there with a Latina he married while in prison. He was making his life in Jamaica.

That’s important if you read the memoir, because he wanted nothing to do with Jamaica. He had become African American, and that was why he was a hero to us—or to me. But it’s interesting that’s where he ended up. I haven’t spoken to him or interacted with him since he went back, but I suspect a conversation is going to happen at some point.

Scott Black: Do you know if he’s read your book?

Louis Chude-Sokei: I doubt it. But he might have, actually. I honestly don’t know. But I suspect that if he had read it, he would’ve reached out.

Scott Black: Yeah. A sort of counterpoint passage is a few pages later. You have a couple different paragraphs about diaspora. One is on 133 and the next is on 137. Could you read them both for us? And then I’d like to ask you about your experience of diaspora.

Louis Chude-Sokei: [Reads]

“Diaspora” was one of those words from my mother’s “Word of the Month” or “Word of the Week” subscriptions. What made it stick out was that I heard it repeated around the table. The word meant the scattering of a people across different lands and countries and languages. To me, this meaning seemed immediate—oppressively intimate. It wasn’t just about the Middle Passage and slavery in the New World. It wasn’t even about our more specific migration from Africa to Jamaica to America. It was accents and curses, uncles and aunties, cousins, and endless trips to Western Union and obligations of all kinds. Diaspora was mapped across the plates of ackee and saltfish, fried dumpling, salt cod, and curry goat. Everyone was there—or I should say, everywhere was there.

Scott Black: Food is obviously central. Food and music.

Louis Chude-Sokei: Exactly.

Scott Black: And substitute different foods, and you would have many people’s experience of diaspora—a very different diaspora than yours, but it’s fascinating. A lot of your discussion of family is sitting around tables.

Louis Chude-Sokei: Yeah.

Scott Black: I recognize that. I’m sure we all do. These are the places where family actually does what family does, which is feed and talk—and argue.

Louis Chude-Sokei: Yes. A lot of this book was inspired by those table conversations. In fact, you could see it as being built out from those conversations. When I wrote that, it was about the immigrant experience, the traditional family experience. It wasn’t specifically about the Black diaspora. It was the Black diaspora as something that I figured a lot of people could relate to.

In fact, one of the reasons this memoir mattered to me is that a lot of the academic world—the Black intellectual world I operate in—tends to be a little bit resistant to exploring some of these different kinds of Blackness or acknowledging how different they can be. But I wrote the memoir because I knew that people outside of the academy, no matter what their racial or ethnic or cultural background, would get it.

It’s not bizarre for white Americans in different parts of the country to go, “Oh yeah, those Nigerians are this way, but those Jamaicans are another way.” For good and for bad. The stereotype is now—especially if you’re in Mississippi or something—the Nigerian doctor or the Indian doctor. So they’re familiar with these different kinds of diasporas. And all diasporas, in my view, intersect.

And a lot of American Black thought tends to be very particularistic—and we know why that is. There’s a specific history that’s being worked out there. But there’s so much happening at the same time, intersecting with it. And to move into the memoir was to break away from a scholarly and intellectual tradition that is still—as Brian would say—one kind of story. That story is celebrated, as it should be. But there are other stories too that are equally Black, but quite radically different.

Scott Black:
Just to clarify—do you think this is an issue with Black thought in the academy or with Black culture more broadly in America?

Louis Chude-Sokei:
I would say it’s American. Americans—and there are historical reasons why that is necessary—but also, when I say American, I don’t even mean Black Americans specifically. Americans have the reputation for being provincial. That as big as the country is—or perhaps because it’s so big and so complex—they tend to have very little awareness or interest in things happening outside. Even if those things happening outside feed directly into what’s going on inside America.

So I don’t see African American thought or Black thought being radically different from American thinking about itself. It’s a kind of very American focus on self—here.

And that’s what I wanted to open up in the book. There’s a specific history of race, racism, and racial affirmation and achievement, accomplishment, and difficulty and trauma. But it creates certain tropes, narratives, and key moments and key points, which are all very important—but those things are being intersected all the time by different kinds of immigrant groups.

The reason The Last "Darky" is about West Indians is that in the early 20th century, the dominant Black group that was intersecting with African Americans were West Indian immigrants. One-third to one-fourth of all Black people in New York at the time were from the West Indies. And if you want to talk about Puerto Ricans and Cubans who were Black—as we understand Black—that just opens up the numbers remarkably.

But then the largest group of new Black immigrants since 1990 have been Nigerians. And I happen to be half Jamaican and half Nigerian. So that’s another way that the personal family story is really telling a global Black story that is busy transforming American notions of race. But I don’t know that American notions of race and conversation are up to the task of handling this.

Scott Black:
And that’s pretty much what the work has been doing—all of it from day one.

Louis Chude-Sokei:
Yeah.

Scott Black:
The dominant story, of course, is a literally Black and white story.

Louis Chude-Sokei:
Absolutely.

Scott Black:
And white people are trapped in their whiteness. Black people are assimilated into that Blackness.

Louis Chude-Sokei:
It’s an American story.

Scott Black:
Yes. Yeah.

This actually gets to the next passage I wanted to ask you to take a look at. It’s on page 137. It’s a paragraph that I believe starts, “What gave our diaspora shape wasn’t white, but Black Americans.” I think this speaks to what we were just talking about.

Louis Chude-Sokei:
[Reads]

What gave our diaspora shape wasn’t so much racism, slavery, or the contrastive presence of white Americans. It was the more pressing reality of Black Americans. American Blacks inevitably became the topic and the source of most arguments. If Black Americans often seemed fixated on white America, Black immigrants seemed fixated on Black America, as if it were the wall between them and the promises of this country.

Sometimes the conversation began by someone fresh to the country discussing problems they were having with a coworker or a schoolmate or an unruly neighbor. Before questions were asked, the seasoned veterans would share a smirk of recognition, knowing that the person being complained about was not white. It was time to school the newcomer on what really went on in this America—and that there were two Americas, two distinct regimes of pain and promise.

Scott Black:
Yeah. Another really revealing passage.

Louis Chude-Sokei:
Again, the book was deliberately opening up these uncomfortable conversations—which have been received in different ways from different kinds of readers. But I do believe that we can’t have a healthy conversation that speaks about where we actually are without diving into the blood of it all.

Scott Black:
Yeah. And I think it’s unusual to open up those internal conversations—sharing dirty laundry, exactly—to a broader audience. That’s what I grew up in: don’t share our stories. We can argue this all we want, but don’t take it outside.

Louis Chude-Sokei:
Memoirs are good for that.

Scott Black:
Yes.

Louis Chude-Sokei:
But I always say to folks when they say, “Don’t take this outside,” I’m like—there is no outside. Everybody knows this. You’re deluded if you think other people don’t know this. Everybody knows this. Everyone is talking about this. But you’ve got this—we’re maintaining this fantasy that there’s this internal world that’s distinct to us.

I understand the history of that desire for there being this community—that we’re connected and we’re speaking frankly to each other in private, right? It’s that double consciousness of Du Bois. There’s a conversation with white America, but then there’s that internal conversation. Folks, I’m sorry—there is no internal conversation. Everybody hears everything about everybody all the time.

Scott Black:
I want to go to the end of the book now and talk about a long passage. I think it’s in the beginning of your last chapter, and it’s the moment where you, I think, set up your scholarly program. And I want to talk about how this work fits into your larger scholarship. But first, I think I’ll just ask you to read that long passage. I believe it starts, “As an immigrant, I recognized exquisitely…”

Louis Chude-Sokei:
Yes. This chapter, I just want to say, is called The Man Who Fell to Earth—all chapters of the book being named after a David Bowie song, which I really appreciate.

[Reads]

As an immigrant, I recognized exquisitely by now the limitations of race in the country I had grown up in. But this was the country where I’d formed the questions that had led me between and among dialects, cultures, and communities. And despite its own limitations, the academic world still seemed the best place to continue asking them.

I’d never been like some of my aunts and uncles, who’d counseled me and my cousins to leave the issue of race alone because it wasn’t our business. As great-uncle Irving used to say, “We are here to drink the milk, not fuck with the cows.”
I chose to fuck with the cows.

Scott Black:
And then you go on—you talk about how making this public betrayed the prejudices and tensions within the Black community. And you end up saying there was much to learn from the spaces among multiple Black stories. This memoir comes after your first two books, but it actually is the prequel.

Louis Chude-Sokei:
Exactly.

Scott Black:
I do want to turn to your other academic work, but I think I first want to ask you just to reflect on how your memoir complements your academic work—and how you made the shift from scholarly writing, academic-ese, which we all do, to what is actually a beautifully written, very accessible memoir. That is a public book. A public humanities work.

Our first guest this year, in our first podcast, was also someone who’s an academic. She’s a scholar of death and memorial practices in the early modern period. She wrote a memoir as an academic about her mother’s death. And it also was a book that tried to put her own scholarship in the key of a popular memoir—a very successful memoir, like yours. So I just want you to talk a little bit about how you made that shift in kinds of writing.

Louis Chude-Sokei:
You said something else before that—and I’m going to respond to this part—but I want to go back to when you said, “the spaces in between different kinds of Blackness, and what’s there to learn.” There’s a general statement one could make: “Yes, we learn from immigrants. And people who have gone all over the world—they contribute to what we do, think, and know, and what’s possible for us.”

It’s also true though, that when you’re so tightly involved in a particular conversation about anything—when you’re so deeply invested in it—you are blind to what’s going on around it. And so that’s why immigrants are just so important, whether Black ones or otherwise. When you’re really in your conversation about America and the future and politics and race, etc., you can get stuck in a kind of cul-de-sac.

So people from outside, who don’t understand it or who come from a whole different understanding of race—they tend to be ignored, because: “You’re not from here,” or “You don’t understand it.” It’s a common thing to say to Black folks from Cuba: “You don’t really get American race.” My comment, my point is—that’s great. The fact that they don’t get it should offer some insights.

And I’ve said to people many times: the fact that African immigrants on average make between $50,000 and $100,000 more a year than African Americans; the fact that the majority of Black students graduating from elite schools all over the U.S.—particularly along the Eastern seaboard—are largely children of Ghanaian and Nigerian and West Indian immigrants…

Whatever it is they don’t “get,” we should learn some of that. It seems to be shaping a whole different set of cultural outcomes. And even if it’s naïveté and ignorance—or, as some people would like to say, self-hatred—I don’t know that it’s necessarily that. They can hate you but not themselves. Even if it’s hostile, we have to dig into it, because something’s going on there that I think could be useful.

But the second part of your question was about the writing.

It’s funny—I’ve always thought of myself as a writer. And after years as a young writer in my teens and twenties, writing horrendously bad novels—I’m so grateful they were all rejected—but that’s how I learned that I don’t really write fiction. But I’m informed deeply by fiction and the techniques of fiction. And as I embraced my academic world—when I started reading French theory and poststructuralism and all of those things—I was fascinated by not just the French and German writers, but also their style.

Because they were clearly writerly—right? Even if you didn’t understand what Lacan was trying to say, there was clearly a commitment to style there.

So I realized that theoretical work, critical work, was nonfiction—and it had its rules and expectations, certainly when you’re dealing with different publishers, etc.—but it was just a kind of nonfiction. And so I’ve always wanted to write different types of nonfiction.

The scholarly work, of course, is necessary for tenure and job stability, etc. But I initially wanted to write nonfiction, scholarly-based work. And the idiom at the time was poststructuralist theory and what became called critical race theory, diaspora, postcolonial theory, etc. Those were the idioms. And you master whatever idioms are happening at the time for that particular form.

But I always expected to do different kinds of nonfiction. The Sound of Culture is stylistically slightly different from The Last "Darky", because I was freer of some of the constraints. Then I was able to write a memoir.

But also, I’ve always been—as you see in my writing—committed to issues of language and sound. I played in a lot of crappy bands, man. All throughout grad school and as a junior faculty member, I was playing in terrible bands. Every now and then, you’d have a good moment—but never good enough to break away from academe.

But I didn’t do it for academe—I did it just from a commitment to sound and to the community of artists and musicians, who I will admit were, at times, much more exciting and interesting than the community of colleagues. Which sometimes can be, as you know...

Scott Black:
This doesn’t surprise me.

Louis Chude-Sokei:
Of course. So you always have to balance not just different types of writing, but different kinds of communities.

For example, being in a place that’s largely African American—fine, you work in there. But then playing in reggae bands—that’s how you meet the Caribbean people. Or working with African percussion or dance—that’s how you meet the Africans. And being involved in putting together events or playing in events—that’s how you get to bring all of these groups together and to blend things.

So I’ve always been writing—or aiming to write—different kinds of nonfiction, with varying levels of success. And over time, things become larger and more recognizable. But I’ve always been doing that stuff.

Scott Black:
It’s not just digital—you write very beautifully about dub, which is the sound of technology. Which is the use of the studio—like Lee Perry, King Tubby—for making music. Inauthentic music.

Louis Chude-Sokei:
Deliberately. Deliberately inauthentic music.

Scott Black:
Yeah. And this is one of the themes of your Sound of Culture book, which I’m fascinated by—the way that the double, the mimic, the technology, the explicitly artificial becomes the basis of sound. And also, therefore, naturalized—probably “naturalized” is the wrong way to say it, but…

Louis Chude-Sokei:
No, that’s exactly right. Naturalizing it is exactly the way to say it.

Scott Black:
So I’m very interested—you, in this book, and this is a large topic—attack it where you’d like—you relate some of the work of Caribbean theorists: Sylvia Wynter, Édouard Glissant, and I believe Wilson Harris. In their work on creolization, you map that, I believe, onto the way you think about dub as a particular kind of sound technology—or perhaps the sound of technology.

Louis Chude-Sokei:
Yeah. Creolization—coming out of Latin America and the Caribbean—is a sort of loose body of thought that’s been around for quite a long time. It has a hard time within the American context, because so much of the understanding of hybridity and mixture when it comes to race is connected to rape, trauma, and inequality.

Not that it doesn’t exist that way in the Caribbean as well—but the Caribbean and Latin America, because they don’t have that binary black-and-white structure, have multiple types of ethnic subjectivities—in some countries, even legal categories—that are quite different from each other, based on different kinds of racial mixture, etc. That has produced some interesting thinking about race and culture—and music too.

So what I did with The Sound of Culture was: what if we tell the story of technology and the emergence of accessible technologies—accessible enough for people in the Black diaspora to be using them—and the first place that Black folks always get access to technology is always in music? What if we start looking at it not as music, but as coding, as informatics, as engineering—which it is.

If we look at it from that perspective: what is happening when they’re bringing all of this deliberately inauthentic sound together to create this weirdly hybrid sound that may be called authentically Jamaican or authentically African—but from an engineering perspective, you’ve got sounds from India here, mixed with sounds from Turkey, mixed with British marching rhythms, etc.—and you’re creating this authentic thing, deliberately from mixing all these things together?

How does that sonic world represent a cultural world—or a sense of yourself in culture?

Caribbean islands, for example—Jamaica’s national motto being “Out of Many, One People” and things like that, right? Which is problematic too, because it’s out of many, one people—but what happens if you celebrate your hybridity when 98% of your population is Black? It becomes a way of escaping, right?

So all of that becomes a part of creolization: how mixture is used to silence different kinds of identities. So creolization, looking at the work of Wilson Harris and Édouard Glissant, who are most explicitly committed to seeing culture and the future as being not about any discrete identity, but about how they all cross-pollute each other—and what do they produce?

That’s been really interesting to me. Because rather than the conventional historicism of a lot of Black thinking—looking to the past, looking to traumatic experiences, or even affirmative, revolutionary experiences—what happens when you look to the future? What happens if you look at culture not as what we were and what we went through, but what we become?

Which, of course, is there in some contemporary European theory—but it’s been the core of creolization for a very long time. And that’s something I wanted to really spend time on in the work, because it enables me to think about, again, the Afrofuturist model. What happens if we make sense of ourselves not according to what we were, but what we could be?

Scott Black:
You say at one point that creolization distinguishes itself by “an equal commitment to the possible.”

Louis Chude-Sokei:
Exactly.

Scott Black:
“And the vagaries of what cannot be contained by the past or the contemporary.” That’s great. I want to turn to your beautiful sci-fi Afrofuturist story—a libretto you wrote for the experimental Berlin duo Mouse on Mars.

Louis Chude-Sokei:
I’m still working with them.

Scott Black:
Oh, fantastic. I hope you have a new album.

Louis Chude-Sokei:
Yes, we do.

Scott Black:
Excellent. I look forward to it dropping.

Louis Chude-Sokei:
And I’m going to throw you a little bit of advance notice: it features the last studio recordings of Lee “Scratch” Perry.

Scott Black:
Whoa!

Louis Chude-Sokei:
Yeah.

Scott Black:
Fantastic. You have no idea—I’m signed up. I look forward to that. At one point, in the end of your book The Sound of Culture, when you're discussing Sylvia Wynter, you write:

“It is those who are excluded from the category who expand it and complete it. Yesterday’s monsters are today’s subjects. Today’s machines are tomorrow’s human beings.”

Louis Chude-Sokei:
Yes.

Scott Black:
I think that’s the lead-in to your work on Anarchic Artificial Intelligence, where you tell a story of AI—artificial intelligence, tools, slaves, machines—becoming conscious, becoming themselves, through sound. Could you talk about that?

Louis Chude-Sokei:
It’s also what my new book is about—more explicitly about that. The historical transformation of those who are seen as inhuman becoming legally prescribed as human. That transition from inhuman to human—right through the 14th Amendment, or what have you.

It’s interesting that the 14th Amendment was used to make corporations into people, right? And it’s being used now to turn environments and lakes and mountains into people. This is not a joke. This is not sci-fi. This has happened—and is happening. So we’ve got this long history where things that were seen as not human became legally—if not human—then persons, which is a much easier-to-trace historical category.

The word “human” is still weird. We don’t really know what it is—just like we don’t know what consciousness is. But we do know what a legal person is, because we have laws that establish it.

So that pathway from slaves to persons is being used by lots of different movements. Even animal rights groups are trying to give animals the rights of persons. Trees, rivers—rivers have been granted rights. It’s worked in some cases, and it’s not going to stop. Because once corporations became seen as people, the floodgates were open.

Right now, we know—for example—the EU has proposed electronic citizenship. Electronic personhood. With algorithms and all of these things that become increasingly lifelike. These entities that are going to be flooding our universe—they’re already there—that seem to have agency.

Now they’re talking about “general AI”—which is the difference between an AI that does your work for you, and an AI that knows what work you want it to do and does it without you having to ask. We’re going to be interacting with these entities in addition to interacting with other human beings.

Whether they are conscious or not, whether they are human or not, whether they are intelligent or not—it doesn’t matter. They will operate socially, culturally, and politically as persons. So the future is dealing with all of these different kinds of others. And that’s what the new book is about—but that’s also what the AI libretto is about.

The AI libretto is a much more poetic piece—because I use sound there, of course, since it's a music album. But it’s about the fact that things that were denied access to agency and humanity will, at least, get personhood at some point. Because we’ve seen it happen before.

And I get that from Sylvia Wynter. Now, Sylvia Wynter doesn’t focus on the future—she does a bit—but that particular transition, from marginalization to inclusion, that’s me looking at Wynter and pointing out how that which is marginalized is often a sign of the future.

Usually we look at the marginalized as examples of a horrific past—which is true. But for Sylvia Wynter to say, yes, but if we look at the immigrants or the aliens and the people that we leave out—they actually are the canaries in the coal mine. They are the future.

So if you want to understand where we’re going to go in the future, we have to look at the immigrants and those who are on the margins. And if you look at people who are hostile to the margins—whether it’s immigrants or others—they’re really afraid of the future.

Scott Black:
And I think you’re saying that what looks unprecedented to us actually has a history. We’ve been here before.

Louis Chude-Sokei:
Exactly. We’ve been here before. And the fact that these new entities exist—means that we’re already there again.

Scott Black:
Yeah. I want to end with a couple passages from AI: Anarchic Artificial Intelligence.

Louis Chude-Sokei:
Still available everywhere.

Scott Black:
Yes! I got mine on Bandcamp.

Louis Chude-Sokei:
Oh, cool.

Scott Black:
Buy direct from the artists—always. You write: “Repetition suggested agency. They sought recognition through rhythm. And in echoes could be heard something called soul.”
And then you say: “New life always announces itself through sound.”
That I will put on my wall.
And: “Once humans were no longer the focus, history became a more generous story.”

Louis Chude-Sokei:
Yeah. Scott, you’re aware of the new materialisms and all these different kinds of discourses—or just broader attempts to tell the story of who we are by looking at not just who we are, right? But other forms of things: objects, animals, environments, etc.

If we open up history from other perspectives—including the perspectives of trees, for example—it’s a whole different story. It’s pretty clear to me that right now, in terms of what’s happening with technology, even though I don’t think the U.S. humanities is really as adept or focused on this as it should be, history is being rewritten. Not just by scholars and humanists, but by technologists. Not just engineers and coders, but people like Ray Kurzweil, etc., who are producing books every few years.

There’s lots of intellectual work coming out from engineers and coders and theorists who are producing different notions of history—where AI and robots and robotics are a much bigger part of the present and future than we scholars in the humanities seem willing to acknowledge.

So that’s what I’m getting at there. I want—with AI, but also with the new work—to get people to realize that issues of race, gender, and migration… all of that stuff is happening in the conversations about technology.

Scott Black:
And as you say: the tools used tools—and they gained souls.

Louis Chude-Sokei:
Absolutely. And think of The Souls of Black Folk from Du Bois. The argument that Black people did have souls—because they were considered inhuman, right? They were seen as animals. They didn’t have souls. And if they did have souls, maybe you could liberate those souls.

And there’s a whole conversation about soul—which then turns, of course, into soul music, right?

The conversation about AI and these technologies—“Do they have souls? Do they have intelligence?” That’s poetic and fun to write about. But the point that’s less poetic, and more important, is: it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if they have souls or intelligence or not. They will control your banking records.

Scott Black:
And if we listen carefully—they have sound.

Louis Chude-Sokei:
Oh, they absolutely do. Before I wrote that sentence—“new life announces itself through sound”—I’d read this article, and I sent it to Mouse on Mars (so I can find it again if need be), that even on the microbial level, there were sounds being emitted by these kind of partitions from cells.

And that’s what really inspired me at that moment—in addition to babies emerging with a sound.

Scott Black:
That’s great. And that is an excellent place to stop. Thank you so much for talking with us.

Louis Chude-Sokei:
Oh, thank you for talking to me. That was a lot of fun. Thank you.

Scott Black:
You’ve been listening to the Virtual Jewel Box Podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center.
Our theme music is Jelly Roll Morton’s “Perfect Rag.”
Thanks for joining us.