 I'll just say that, so I have a six-year-old daughter who has been giving me a really difficult time recently about coming out to events in the evening for work, and today, when I was getting ready to come here, she started grilling me, and I said, yeah, well, Andre does work on science fiction stories, and she looked at me, and she said, oh, cool, and then she walked off. So we've got a very rare thumbs up from her, and it's my pleasure to introduce Andre. We lived out graduate school days together at NYU, the American Studies program. Andre's research focuses on the cultural politics of race, gender, and genre in 20th century black and American literature and arts. His first book, Speculative Blackness, interrogates the meanings of race and genre through studies of science fiction, fanzines, comics, film, and television, and other speculative fiction texts. His current research project, Audio Futurism, explores literary adaptation and sound studies through the analysis of science fiction radio plays based on the work of black authors, and we're privileged to hear some of that work today as it's developing. His writings have appeared in the journals Present Tense, Sounding Out, Kallelu, and African and Black Diaspora, and books, including A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, The Black or the Ink, Constructions of Blackness in Comics and Sequential Art, and Black Gay Genius, answering Joseph Eames' call. He has been called on as a peer reviewer for the Journal of Homosexuality, the James Baldwin Review, and African American Review, and serves on the editorial advisory board for the Journal of Modern Literature. In 2015, he organized the first international peers in comics conference through CLAAGS, the Center for LGBTQ Studies in New York. In addition to African American Literature, he teaches courses on comics and graphic novels, LGBT literature and culture, global black literature and literary theory. Thank you. Much appreciated. I want to say thanks to LouVette for the generous introduction, and I want to say thank you all for coming out, despite, you know, whatever prevails you probably have to go through to get here, or at least like to get from where you were yesterday to where you were today. I also want to thank Jessica Tatlok, the administrator who made most of these things happen, and Andrew Whitaker for officially extending the invite. And I want to thank a lot of people who do the administrative work and keep the building clean and safe, and keep the lights on, and shovel their walks, and put too much salt on the sidewalk so that we can be here. I don't know their names, but if you do, thank them next time you see them. So this is the tip of the iceberg. It's a funny story. It will make sense momentarily, I hope. A few weeks ago, in conversation with a grad student at the University of Pennsylvania, I came up with an extended metaphor, the tip of the iceberg, for capturing the relationship between a phenomenon that she had identified in some African American texts that are otherwise realist, and the broader considerations around genre that we can call Afrofuturist. Spurred on by the interventions of critics like Richard Eiting and Claudia Tate, I've maintained a sense that African American cultural production always has something understated in relation to it, a twin. We can learn from posing the question of what African American literature is, and we can also learn about what it is not by doing that. We can learn about what being African American literature is not being. The tradition itself represents the kind of quasi-national project that Ken Warren outlines as a response to the negro problem in what was African American literature in order to argue that contemporary black writing is not doing that anymore. It is being something else. And that to me is exciting. It means that we can learn something new. We can learn what to do instead. So if the leftovers from that tradition and the detritus, the undesirable and the improper texts that trail along behind that project are like ducklings in a row behind the mother, then they still belong to the genus that Kevin Young called the shadow book, the unfinished, the unwritten, the lost texts. I mean to use our time together to illustrate how I'm setting about the next stage of my research by writing the shadow book to speculative blackness, the book that I didn't write while it was being written instead, and the one that I will write now that its counterpart is out there being itself. The extended metaphor that I came up with to explain a seeming eruption of a para-literary within the literary for a student re-examining conventional texts was the tip of the iceberg. When I say that you might picture a canine peak exposing its menace to the doomed Titanic. Ice birds originally in the paradigmatically slow movement of glaciers. We can imagine this heavy, mysterious geological object, if it is African American literature, as something like a reliquary for black knowledge. When it meets the sea, the mountain of frozen fresh water breaks apart or calves to send an aspect of itself out into the chaos of intercourse with all sorts of ocean currents, cargo vessels, conquistadors, assemblies of citations and other states of matter and energy to bring about much faster than its experience in a long time. Most of the action in the iceberg we know takes place below the surface where we can't see and it's mostly silent. When the very old, very dense ice splinters away from its source at a point of contact with salt water, the interacting forces can cause the iceberg not just to break off, but to tip over, exposing its erstwhile underside to view. It's an exceptional sight, but it's coming more likely now because of climate change. The scientific explanation for this process belongs to physicist Justin Burton at Emory, but its aesthetic implications are what make it fascinating to me. Our disciplinary perspectives typically afford us caution and insight that's appropriate to observing rational and irrational phenomena and telling them apart, but occasionally a dazzling spectacle like this shakes us out of our confidence even though we should know better. We should know it's nothing special even though it looks like it. I told Kiana that the moment she identified in black writing could be the tip of the iceberg in this more dramatic way. Temporary, unstable, and rare, but fascinating. So discerning a minor tendency and unremarkable pattern in cultural politics that militates against sharp genre distinctions in the interest of reappraising the versatility of certain authors, which is my young colleague's ambition, is a worthwhile endeavor because it challenges us to rethink how black writers enunciate their relationship to speculation and to mimesis as aesthetic objectives. While speculative fiction by black authors may be the tip of the proverbial iceberg, our knowledge of the greater literary whole is fundamentally altered by the sublime vision of a world that was previously submerged when the tip of the iceberg isn't a fragmentary object that we see, but a whole event. We learn more than we could by examining what's normally visible and usually silent. We gain insight into the formation of the glacier from which it emerged. Physicists study glacial movement, including the improbable but dangerous phenomenon we're in iceberg's tip over. These events can generate seismic forces tend to mount to significant terrestrial earthquakes and devastating waves that threaten life on islands and maritime trade. I find the spectacle of an overturned iceberg compelling because it represents the coexistence of something otherworldly in appearance and behavior within a larger seemingly inert totality. To apply this concept to my research agenda, like a glacier, speculative blackness is more than the sum of its constituent parts. Since it's been in print, I've realized that it's part of a larger inquiry into the cultural politics of genre as they're articulated in a range of media. It has at least one shadow book as yet unrealized exploration of science fiction and race thinking that probably turns its approach upside down. In the course of providing you with an account of the work that will form the basis of my second book project, I'll tell you how sound has worked as the silent partner of my contributions to the scholarship of blackness and speculative fiction so far. The critical itinerary of sound in black study has been indelibly marked by the influence of music, which we can appreciate in the interventions of Louis Chiré Soquet, Fred Moten, Carter Mathis, C.C. Jaji, and Sean Redman. The questions I've addressed prior to my engagement with sound studies set the stage for my investigation in a slightly different manner. I have different work to do. In order to illustrate how this next stage in my research represents the divergence of an agenda that's already differentiated from other forays into the field, I have to step back to the glacial point at which this calving takes place. By comprehending an sudden audible crack as part of a centuries-long process, I hope to explain how the emergent aspect of my scholarship that I'm calling audio-futurism relates to an inchoate totality, a vision of the larger field of cultural production that we will have attained once we articulate the relation of its parts to the whole. I use the future anterior tense as a gesture to the Afro-futurist treatment of astrology, authored by my neighbors, the Philadelphia based Kamai Aiewa, who performs as More Mother Goddess and Rashida Phillips, founder of the Afro-futurist affair. More Mother's works, as you can hear, fuse metal, rhythm and blues, jazz and vocal distortion with titles like How to Use Ancient Hip Hop Beats to See into the Future Past, Free Jazz for the Free Dune, and The Afterlife of Events. The latter, which you heard an excerpt from, was created as part of the collaboration Black Quantum Futurism. It's a howl for the late Sandra Bland. The liner notes for The Afterlife of Events read in part, we applied the Black Quantum Futurism gaze to study the Afterlife of Events and astrological influences surrounding the birth, arrest, and death of Sandra Bland in order to synchronize the influences playing a role in Black Woman genocide. Black Quantum Futurism cites an obscure British artist, Dennis Elwell, to deploy a theory of retroactive causality. One of the digital artifacts accompanying their sound includes a set of natal charts for Sandra Bland's birth, her arrest, and her death. The document proclaims, we believe that astrological events are reversed and act retrocausally from the cosmic future to influence present events that will be subsequently written on the fabric of the past by light. Crafting horoscopes for the dead makes sense when irreversible events are understood as part of a process in which the present is being drawn toward its future state. In this unusual rendering, future moments affect the eventuation of causes in their past. They look like horoscopes and they sound like that. Black Quantum Futurism and More Mother represent a long legacy of avant-garde experimentation in Black music and sound culture. There's no aesthetic more iconic in this realm than that of the jazz band leader, Sun Ra. Sun Ra should have invented the term Afrofuturism, but he didn't. The prehistory of the word, invoked by the terms originator, Mark Derry, positions Sun Ra in conversation with Jimi Hendrix and B-Boy performance artist, Ramelzi. In terms, scholars from Fred Moten to Eric Steinsko highlight connections between the quixotic band leader and the satanelio of Cecil Taylor and George Clinton. The Sun Ra story is the mothership of inventors like DJ Spooky and it's irrepressibly inspiring to look to Saturn as the source of the queer erotics of Grace Jones and Jeanelle Monet and Tessa Thompson. Maybe? I hope not. She should be able to do what she wants. While it's instructive to draw on a genealogy of black radical aesthetics incorporating Afro-cobambata and Afropunk, my outlook on black sound and its attendant technologies defers to the work of Alex O'Hellier and Catherine McKittrick to think through those enunciations of black life that represent the debasement of our creativity as well as its ascendancy. The discourse of phonography that O'Hellier outlines reminds me and McKittrick in this case that black cultural politics encompasses Kanye West as well as Kamasi Washington. It's problematic as fuck. I worry that when we forget that in order to elevate black genius to the ancestral plane we remain preoccupied with the tip of the iceberg and we miss the chance to commemorate what McKittrick and O'Hellier regard as vernacular phonographies. When they cite inventions like the TR-808 drum machine in the title of their article 808s and heartbreak from which this quote comes naming one of West's albums and hit single by the R&B group Black, they're writing a phonography that decenters the device itself in order to situate the felt knowledge evoked by the sensations associated with it. These situations include pleasure but also the heartbreaking violations enacted by putative black geniuses in their progeny like Africa Babbata, Marvin Gaye, and Robert Kelly. When we locate their significance in technical mastery as well as emulation, vernacular uptake, derivative works, and reception phonographies then encompass the trauma, its repression, and its repetition. A reparative orientation of cultural practices born out of trauma affords all of those who take part in working through them the chance to realize potentialities those events seem to foreclose in silence. My goal is to reconstruct a phonography of science fiction radio drama in a way that affords black feelings the same complexity that we bring to our relationship with rhythm and blues. Sound is an absence, a haunting, this is its nature sound is absence, beguiling, out of sight, out of reach. What made the sound? Who is there? Sound is void, fear, and wonder. David Choup's inquest into the inaudible vibrations of literature in his book Sinister Resonance conjures an alternative history of listening in text presumed to be silent. Fundamentally he asks, what is the absence of sound the absence of? Characteristic of what you call the new sound studies, Sinister Resonance takes note of the fearful symmetry that Bay Erlman is called, Resonance and Reason. The conjunction of these terms in Erlman's work aims to reconcile sympathetic vibration with the unmoved, dispassionate solidity of the rational viewer. Erlman retraces a history of the ear as a sight of discernment that's equal in sophistication to that of the learned eye. When the ear resonates with external stimuli, he argues, it doesn't collapse the distinction between the individual subject and the world, but it helps to rationalize it by representing the interior of the self as the place where knowledge becomes meaningful. The tip of the iceberg or its underside is the part that's not only invisible, but the place that the sound it makes comes from. The aptitude of silence as a metaphor for the violent excisions of colonial rationality. Can this of all terms speak? Can the hegemonic ear hear anything? It's made it sensible to locate resistance in black sound. However, more recent interventions in sound studies and Afrofuturism pursue what Kevin Feixi has called the sovereignty of quiet, a cultural politics that deliberately attenuates loudness in order to comprehend the interiority of black being. More and more artists are working a little bit softer now, from Solange, Sampha, and Abel Tespaye to the Nairobi-based Ness Collective. They're still images from their works are exhibited there. They beckon us to listen for annunciations of blackness and being that do not cry out for recognition. After all, sometimes the most interesting things black people do elude identification. When the racial dimensions of meaning are turned inward instead of outward facing, when a wordless look is what secures the act of knowing between silent companions. That's when the cultural modality I call black form emerges as something other than resistance. The objective of my inquiry into black cultural practices that don't quite pierce the veil is not the disavowal of resistance but affirmation that our living and dying matter despite the pall of epistemic violence. The things we do are meaningful even if their meaning is occluded. In the words of Christina Sharpe, at stake is not recognizing anti-blackness as total planet. At stake too is not recognizing an insistent black visual sonic resistance to that imposition of non-being. By appraising black participation in the whiteness of science fiction and other endeavors that do not announce themselves within an autonomous political framework organized by race. I hope to memorialize the going on being in black life. What we do every day. What Sharpe refers to as black being in the wake. When we're compelled to ask what made the sound, who is there. We're also invoking the questions posed by my late mentor Jose Esteban Munoz in his work cruising utopia, the then and there of queer futurity. In pursuit of the liberatory potential of transient moments, moments that passed that we may never touch again Munoz consigned the sublime and aleatory force of queerness to conditions of possibility that are no longer conscious and not yet here. What made the sound who is there. These holding spaces, bygone eras, idle resonators and impossible desires are silent for now. Maybe they're not empty vestibules but chambers full of baited breath as Hortent Spillers writes unvoiced awaiting their verb. The inquiry into untapped depths of the sonic imagination and African American literature that Carter Mathis undertakes so incisively and imagines the sound which Madhu Debe recognizes at work in Toni Morrison's praxis of reading as listening. Bear witness to the vibrancy of the black fantastic but I'm equally intrigued by the heat still dissipating from the receiver after the broadcast is ending and the sechura between words that crackles with potential energy. In the sense articulated by Jennifer Stover I want to break down the experimental traditional binary to explore how what she calls the sonic color lines disciplining of the senses disrupts notions of universal listening and therefore interested in avant-garde as well as popular annunciations of black futurity. The literary landmarks in the next phase of my research don't quite represent the mainstream of black studies because we're still beholden to a vision of Afrofuturism that is better equipped to recognize our claim to authorship in funk, jazz and hip-hop than performance and adaptation. Black participation in the tradition of science fiction radio drama has yet to be thoroughly articulated with the soundscape of modernity. The works that will make up audio-futurism exist then in a state of decalage to cite Brent Edwards their stars awaiting their constellation. They consist of from 1967 the New York Minds Eye Theater adaptation of the Star Pit, a novella by Samuel Delaney that we'll talk about at length at the end of the presentation. Delaney himself voiced the first person narrator in the leading role and the same studio produced a different radio play with an original score by Sun Ra. From 1979 the BBC Radio production of the comic space opera Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which appeared as a classic novel the following year. In 2005 African-American rapper and actor Most Death co-starred in a film adaptation as the protagonist's alien confidant Ford Prefect and is being brought back to the radio later this year or probably while we speak on the BBC Radio now. From 2002 an audio adaptation of Octavia Butler's 1979 Neo-Slave narrative Kindred starring acclaimed African-American actor Alfred Woodard pictured here from her role in Star Trek First Contact. This production was part of the cable television sci-fi channel's short-lived experiment in internet radio. First performed in 2014 Jace Clayton an experimental sound artist who performs his DJ rupture created the Julius Eastman Memorial Deer an interpretation of provocative works by the black experimental composer who passed away in 1990 strung together by a speculative radio drama set in the near future. And finally from 2016 black British playwright Patricia Comper's adaptation for BBC Radio of Toni Morrison's haunting novel Beloved. A typical text within the scope of this inquiry is the inimitable broadcast of the War of the Worlds on American Radio in 1938. The most notable moment for me occurs when the radio goes silent following the debut of the Martian Heatman. So a couple of things are going on in that moment. One is that a sound effect has to be invented to make room for a certain kind of silence and that silence has to be interrupted, has to be replaced has to do some being because the non-being that the listeners here is very dangerous, unprecedented, unknowable here to for silent. Another thing that's going on is the imagery. While silence seems like an appropriate image or absence or I don't know, blankness seems appropriate. A rounded set of finger would be the right illustration for a moment like that. In the French edition of The War of the Worlds published in 1906, in a French edition the edition utilized drawings like these by a Brazilian artist named Tanrique Alim Correia, who was from Belgium, I think originally, but in his illustrations which have a lot of sort of art nouveau imagery the packaging of the edition looks very well on the outside. This is a scene that doesn't take place anywhere in the text. The caption for it on the website where I found it, where it was a reproduction from the British libraries holdings of this object. The caption for it on the website was Martian Gets the Girl. But of course if you've read The War of the Worlds or if you've listened to it, you know that Martians don't want to get the girl. That's not what they're there for. Martians can't even survive under the Earth's atmospheric pressure and gravity. Actually most of what makes Martians so menacing is how strange and different their physiology is. You could even look at Martians and say, oh well they obviously they have so many things, but one of the things they don't seem to have is sex. Sex is not something that you can tell the Martians have by looking at them or listening to them. You can tell instead about a whole lot of other things they have. But as far as whether they have sex, your knowledge of that is totally silent. So it's absence from the recording, it's absence from the text that's denunciated in this familiar form, I think is really offset by this depiction that is right on point, but doesn't occur anywhere in the text. And it's kind of unvoiced. It brings up a lot of things that we can hear, but whatever we're hearing it's an echo of something else, not the text. Anyway, the alien menace in the world only hoodwinked a fraction of the audience and its impact has been cited as a precedent for other fiction about the planet Mars, rather than as a touchstone for 20th century treatments of race, capitalist exploitation, fear of racial contamination and degeneration and colonialism on the planet Earth. But for audio-futurism the War of the Worlds is the ideal vanishing point. When a livable future for black cultural production can trace the blood in its veins to the beating red heart of the whiteness of science fiction, that's when this tradition will belong to us. The first stop on my itinerary after the War of the Worlds is the work of Samuel Delaney. The Star Pit directed by Daniel Landau with Randa Haines, Walter Harris, Jerry Matz, Joan Tanner and Phoebe Ray. The narration is by the author The music for the Star Pit is composed and performed by Susan Schwiers. The technical direction is by Ed Woodard and David Rappkin. Production assistant Neil Conan The Star Pit first appeared in Worlds of Tomorrow published by the Galaxy Publishing Corporation. I came across an essay by the author while I was revising the manuscript for speculative blackness and I didn't know what to do with it until years later. In his essay Notes on the Star Pit, Delaney recounts the solicitation adaptation, casting, recording, editing and broadcast of the radio play based on his novella which was published in the February 1967 World of Tomorrow. I followed the leads from his essay to the Pacifica Radio Archives online where, much to my delight, the public radio institution disseminates the product of a 2013 Grammy Foundation grant to preserve the recordings produced from 1966 to 1969 by what was then the 99.5 radio theater led by Bay Searles, the director of WBAI's New York's, WBAI New York's drama literature department. The Pacifica Radio Archives and the Internet Archive at archive.org now host digitized versions of the magnetic tape recordings from WBAI's archives including the Star Pit and the other radio place which the project website reports ranked amount among their most popular productions. This archive of dozens of works representing the writings of many authors in multiple genres and featuring an array of actors and musicians living in New York in the late 1960s obviously elicits a wide range of interests for scholars of literary adaptation, performance, media history and sound studies. For my purposes today it provides the basis for a substantive new contribution to scholarship on the intersection of race and science fiction studies. The Star Pit begins with an announcer's voice orienting listeners to the title and provenance of the material about to be broadcast. The announcer's voice delineates back from fiction but this isn't the last time we'll hear from him. As the story unfolds the next sound we hear is non-diajet. It's a flute overture by Sue Schwiers played on an instrument made of industrial hosing with an inch and a half bore arbitrarily cut in finger holds according to the author. The first voice we will hear the narrative is Delaney as the protagonist and first person narrator whose name is Vine. And the first thing with which he populates the narrative is an object containing non-human life. As the flute overture trails off in the background the first word spoken in the Star Pit literally frame a world within a world the self-contained biosphere of an ant colony. This motif recapitulates itself several times over within the story as ecospheres, now as large as a playground jungle gym, now wearable behind a magnifying glass on a dangling pendant now the size of galaxies become figures for the limits of life itself. Little tunnels from cell to cell, when I was a kid I had an ant colony. To the ants of Vine's childhood the size of the earth is unfathomable. But he lets us know that much greater mysteries revealed in the time he lives in make our home planet seem like the provincial Europe whose antique maps used to read Here Be Dragons before the colonial era. A flashback set apart from Vine's adulthood travails by another flute interlude reminds us about his origins at the beginning of a space age. Back in the dormitory I was lying on my bed scraping graphite lubricant from my nails with the end of my sliver rule and half reading an affolded back copy of the ant colony. I thought I was going to be able to do that but I didn't know what to do. I thought I was going to be able to do that and half reading an affolded back copy of the young mechanic when I saw the article and the pictures. Through some freakish accident two people had been discovered who didn't crack up at 20,000 light years off the galactic rim, who didn't die at 25,000. I use the indefinite article A Space Age because there are now several shifts in the state of human planetary consciousness between the time of Delaney's writing and the time about which he writes in the future. When he wrote the star pit, the Apollo missions were bringing Americans to the moon. And within a generation new rockets and the reusable space shuttle would make international racially integrated cross-gender collaboration in space a viable career for scientists and humanists alike. I write about the social significance of this moment envisioned in popular media in chapter two of speculative blackness, Space Race Woman, on actor and astronaut Michelle Nichols. Vine grows up at the tipping point between interstellar travel and intergalactic exploration when a new category of human beings is leaving the rest of us behind advancing beyond what we once thought was the final frontier. He addresses the reader from the other side of that historic watershed when Earth and our moon are a homely old country to the vast majority of human beings who live in diaspora. I know that at the time of his speaking there will have been a break within genres of the human that makes it possible for some of us to venture 20,000 light years past the Galactic Rim beyond the final boundaries of the age of reason to a place that a few have seen, many have heard about, but very few can come back from. The voice of the announcer returns to the broadcast to explain why the few individuals capable of movement between galaxies are so exceptional. The head of some commission summed it up with a statement. The logical death as well as recording breakdown in computers that might replace human crews. Complex explanations have been offered and not completely satisfactory, but the base of the problem seems to be this. As the nature of space and time are relative to the concentration of matter in a given area of the continuum, the nature of reality itself operates by the same or similar laws. The average mass of all the stars in our galaxy controls the reality of our microsector of the universe. But as a ship leaves the Galactic Rim, reality breaks down and causes insanity and eventual death for any crew, even though certain mechanical laws, now not all, appear to remain for reasons we don't understand relatively constant. Say for a few barbaric experiments done with psychedelics at the dawn of spatial travel, we have not even developed a vocabulary that can deal with any apart from its measurable physical expression. Yet just when we had to face the black limit of intergalactic space, bright resources glittered within. Some few of us whose sense of reality has been shattered by infantile, childhood, or prenatal trauma whose physiological and psychological orientation makes life in our interstellar society painful or impossible. The announcer's voice re-enters the narrative as an intertext, ostensibly originating in some incredible news source from Vimee's youth, and it jars the reader out of the credulous disposition required to treat science-fictions like interstellar travel as if they were science fact for the purpose of appreciating new discoveries and inventions posited within the story world. In his treatment of the language of science fiction, the Jewelhin's Jaw, Delaney argues that writing in the genre relies on a particular variety of subjunctivity such that we are able to read phrases like he turned on his left side and her world exploded in science fiction as if they literally referred to an electrical man with separate power switches for each half of his body and a female inhabitant of a doomed planet respectively. In this context, because it recalls the listener's orientation to the pre-narrative content of the broadcast, the interpolation of the announcer's voice in parts of reality is not as direct to his words. By foregoing the musical transition that sets fiction apart from fact and texturing the voice with a cough or congestion, this recurrence of an authoritative voice linking Vimee's memory with our own smuggles in a rationale for the limits of space exploration among ordinary humans, that is they succumb to space madness when they travel too great a distance from the familiar accretions of matter that make up our galaxy. This reality doesn't have to fool the listener into believing the facts transmitted through the announcer's microphone are as real as the nightly news as they supposedly did in 1938 with the broadcast of the War of the Worlds. Instead, its task is to perform what the War of the Worlds demonstrably achieves for contemporary and original audiences alike to make a distinction within the text between highly subjective, character-driven considerations and those that are instrumental to the internal consistency of the story. The same voice that let us know the star pit was published in Worlds of Tomorrow now lets us know that certain people can overcome the apparent contradiction between sanity and the aspirations of intergalactic travel. Some few of us whose sense of reality has been shattered by infantile, childhood, or prenatal trauma whose physiological and psychological orientation makes life in our interstellar society painful or impossible, and whose psychological orientation makes life in our interstellar society painful or impossible, Here, on the verge of the breakthrough within Delaney's story world that telegraphs the social symbolism of the star pit is where I part ways with the meaning most readily assigned to its fictitious renditions of identity and the best interpretation of it out there. In Black and Brown Planets, a critical anthology edited by the great Isaiah Lavender, Jerry Canavan writes that the star pit represents Delaney's confrontation with limits of racial identification. He contends that there are no such limits. The logic of racial difference extends indefinitely into the identity of the privileged and disadvantaged alike, subordinating the unmarked status of whiteness to the, quote, authority of racialized subjectivity. After all, since whiteness is designed through the exclusion of the racial other, the discourse of the other is the only sight from which it can be seen from outside itself as something like a discreet, objectified form. Canavan arrives at this adept interpretation by reading the figure for those improbable, psychologically traumatized humans who can survive the voyage beyond the edge of our galaxy in Delaney's story as a deconstructed representation of whiteness. Under a new mode of production made possible by intergalactic travel, they alone possess the unique agency necessary to advance human prerogatives on a more than human scale. According to this reading, the people of Earth and all but a few of our distant descendants are all the colonized subjects of a vast intergalactic society where a precious elite moves about freely, engaging in trade, practicing cosmopolitanism amongst themselves, and subordinating solar systems like our own to their priorities along the way. The term that Delaney uses to assign exceptional status to this airside's master races golden. It's an adjective made a noun, and it implies the value of the status it describes. Even though it goes on to argue that Delaney deconstructs the simple allegory for racial dominance inscribed in the identification of space travelers as a privileged elite, I'm skeptical about Canavan's reading of what golden means in racial terms, and therefore skeptical about what it means to read it in racial terms. The author's enunciation of what sets them apart from the majority of humans, both in print and especially on the version staged for the radio play, positions golden as the embodiment of a concrete, multifarious form of marginality. In the Star Pit, golden make up a tiny improbable minority of that otherwise predictable fraction within all gendered and racialized populations whose state of mind you will recall makes life in our society painful or impossible. I've elided the word interstellar from the preceding phrase deliberately in order to reiterate the ellipsis that describes the star-faring class in the future in the printed text. The presence of the word interstellar, our interstellar society, masks the true and unspeakable difference between the future society Delaney depicts here and our present world. The space race is already afoot at the time of his writing. Chemical propulsion is taking human beings to the moon and back, and nuclear fission powers the dreams and dreams of the so-called war generation. What sets the society in which golden exists apart is not the possibility of space travel, but the sight of land on its horizon. The denizens of this future society know that they have a destination within their reach, but it exceeds their grasp for the most part. Golden, the outcast from this society, which is much like our own, belong to that space for the cast out, the no place that you took here to wish we relegate anomalies of the no longer conscious and the not yet here. Life is already painful or impossible for the class of non-persons to whom golden belong. Indeed, they're only discernible as a distinct minority to the extent that within their ranks, a non-zero probability of survival between the galactic barrier occurs. Non-person may be a harsh characterization, but let me explain. When the announcer from Vime's youth uses the word golden, he's modifying a word we never hear. His voice is preempted by Vime's uncertainty. In the text the first person narrator wonders whether there was static or the gentleman coughs. He remembers not hearing what he said, but he doesn't remember what he heard instead. In the broadcast, Delaney and his interlocutors conspire to preserve this mystery. The announcer is already a bit congested when he begins reporting the discovery of golden, foreshadowing the interruption. Now, a signal degradation preempts the recovery of the speaker's intentions as well. In the time of the audience, the demonym that golden modifies is an irretrievable secret. The text offers no clues. Instead, we're left with the problem of how to reckon with it as a phenomenon that simultaneously annoys and assailants, but definitely not a word. The plot of the star pit revolves in part around one of Vime's companions trying to steal the trappings of golden status so that he can steal away on an intergalactic spaceship. Because he's not really golden, he's just as likely to succumb to space madness as the tiny organisms in an eco-sphere are to suffocate when they're removed from the delicate equilibrium of the glass enclosure. Nonetheless, this young man envies golden for their seemingly endless mobility. They're infuriatingly oblivious to the consequences of their privilege, and an entire interstellar society subscribes to norms that guarantee them maximum freedom of movement through space. From Vime's point of view, it's hard not to sympathize with the consensus voiced by the narrator and his young friend that golden are alternately mean and stupid. The first confrontation between Vime and a character who is golden folds the tenor of the metaphorical whiteness of being golden back into the vehicle it employs in the story. When Vime narrowly avoids crashing into another spacecraft piloted by someone who happens to be golden, we begin to understand why they attract such an odd combination of desire and resentment, and why we might at least initially take whiteness as the point of departure for what they represent. The golden our protagonist almost crashes into is phenotypically black. This leads Kenevan to his deconstructive reading of what they represent. We jerked around in the status quo from the killer. I slammed on the video intercom and shouted, you great big stupid, stupid! So mad and scared I couldn't say anything else. The golden pilot in the ship scared of people with a view screen with a mildly surprising noise. I remember his face was just slightly more nitroid than mine. Our little servant Tina couldn't hurt him, but if we'd been even a hundred meters closer we might have ionized. The other pilot came bellowing from behind the sleeper curtain and started cursing me out. Dammit it was in the well. Am I lost all the profanity I knew through my rage? Golden! This far in the galactic center, come off it. They should be hanging around the star here. It was a humor drive that came right up in front of us. I stopped because the control stick was shaking in my hand. As figures for the reification of a privilege that depends constitutively on its difference from its comparatively disadvantaged counterpart, sure, golden are metaphorically white. Yet this figuration takes on a form of embodiment that is within the story literally identical with racial blackness. For some readers this poses a paradox. How can a proposively black character attain all of the trappings of whiteness, if that's what being golden means, without passing? That is being the negation of blackness, not being black. If the new interstellar society of the star pit allocates privilege according to the logic that makes racial distinctions meaningful, how can a member of any racially subordinated group ascend to the pinnacle of human activity on a more than planetary scale? One interpretation is that this future is yet another instance of science fiction refuting the inadequate and self-contradictory social construct of race. Complicated as that sounds, I don't know if things are that simple. Learning that golden can be black only intensifies my attention to what goes unsaid in the language community of the future. But golden is a marked category, while whiteness is not. Instructs the reader, the listener to pay attention to the way that people talk about the constituents of this victim category when they might not otherwise. When Vime almost crashes into the pilot who's golden, he stammers. You great big stupid, stupid, words fail. I slammed on the video with your comments shouting, you great big stupid, stupid! Moments later, in the exchange with his startled co-pilot, Vime tries to explain the tumble by calling out the golden so his confederate knows who's at fault. But he can't even come up with a suitable obscenity, and his co-pilot is incredulous anyway. The other pilot came bellowing from behind the sleeper curtain and started cursing me out. Damn it! It was him who was wetter! And I lost all of his startles! Now, Delaney has written reams about obscenity, often in profane vernacular. But the starpate has written in such a way that something other than propriety obfuscates the content of these statements. Either golden is profane enough on its own, and that doesn't seem likely. Or there's nothing more to be said because one of the power's golden annexes to itself through the peculiar circumstance of its coinage is the occlusion of an inherently negative meaning. Golden can't mean anything profane. In that way it is very much like whiteness because there's virtually no epithet for white that constitutes an unspeakable racial slur. Golden, strangely, makes that unspeakability legible. The epigraph to Kennevin's treatment of the starpate quotes Delaney placing himself on society's margins to frame the essay as an exploration of social marginality. He is black, he is a sexual minority, and he has spent time in a mental hospital. Each of these testimonials invest the author with an affirmative quality of what Sally Haslinger is called, moral entitlement. A standpoint from which his experience affords credibility regarding the systems of power structured by race, sexuality, and the carceral ableism that characterizes the diagnosis and treatment of psychological health in modern society. It's not that I disagree with Kennevin's appraisal per se, and if he were here he'd be like so man, I'm gonna write him a nice email. But that I'm interested in other dimensions of the starpates tapestry of race and genre. For one, the analysis in question only deals with the front version of the novella rather than its at least equally significant and arguably more significant radio adaptation. The commemoration of the broadcast year after year and its role in a preservation project make it worthwhile to revisit the afterlives of the meanings inscribed in the text in light of their reiteration in audible form. Moreover, in a elicitous turn, Kennevin juxtaposes the star pit with another text central to my interest, Far Beyond the Stars, an episode of the 1990s Star Trek spin-off series, Deed Space Nine, which is famously stars and is directed by a black actor in the leading role, Avery Brooks. The episode in question recounts a speculative story about the history of racial discrimination in the lives of science fiction writers that I discuss in detail in one chapter of speculative blackness. Great minds think alike but what's missing or at least understated in Far Beyond the Star Pit is an acknowledgement of how these works function as touch stones for the study of literary adaptation as a staging ground for the cultural politics of race and genre. Finally, the dimension of the star pit that I find most right for exploration echoes the author's self-defining gesture from The Straits of Messina, the author Delaney's knowledge of society's margins, including his vulnerability to incarceration due to race, sexuality, and pathologies assigned to his mental state, are all interconnected within his experience because he's the one living. This is not, and I wholeheartedly agree with other readers in this regard, a cause for interpreting Delaney's fiction as a veiled memoir. Instead, it's a reminder that human experiences of social marginality, privilege, and disadvantage are multi-dimensional. If we regard the socially symbolic element in the narrative of the star pit through the prism of intersectionality, I argue we arrive at a more adequate interpretation of what golden means in relation to matters of race, gender, genre, and madness. This is also germane to reading the text as a composite of its audible and its silent print instantiation. Before we have the opportunity to learn what golden means and before we witness what it is that makes life painful or impossible in the interstellar society of the star pit, we learn that Mime, the protagonist, has lived in a, quote, procreation group on a distant planet with several husbands and wives co-parenting the children that it conceived in common. This is a good way to colonize other planets with human populations. It's among these children that he maintains an ecologarium, a grown-up version of the ant colony from his childhood. For lack of a better word, the silent partner to golden in the text is queer. It's never spoken, but if we could hear it, queer would further confound the intersecting context-sensitive privileges and comparative disadvantages that accrue to being golden in the story. Queer is an adjective, but it can constitute a noun when used in the catacrystic way that golden simultaneously modifies and occludes its object. And what is queer but a partial description of the psychological orientation that makes life painful or impossible in our society, yet nonetheless enables a few of those golden to make the crossing and return. The prospect that beckons at the intersection of black and golden is queer in so far as it implies a relation between the two quantities that, while it might not be a relation of identity, mean something that can't be said any other way. I'm listening for the resonance that makes the word spelled G-O-L-D-E-N sound like what to some readers sound like black, like queer, because it represents the tip of the iceberg. That sounds like it refers to something you know, but it looks like something else. Thank you. If you have looked into some of the work of the early techno guys, specifically about the Detroit techno scene, I'm working on a project and I was looking at an interview with Waikens and just talking about how some of the early machines that they were essentially playing with these toys to them were these sort of tools of revolution. And so I wonder if you've looked into that world and they're reading they all read this book Future Shock and they sort of used that that influenced a lot of the early sort of playing around that they were doing. So I wonder if you've looked into that and like where does it fit in sort of the spectrum of the sounds of Afrofuturism? It totally fits. It's part of the narrative that we already use to kind of animate Afrofuturism as a black knowledge practice that repurposes inventiveness and innovation and does that innovation thing in a way that's different from say like canonical modernism. And that narrative is part of it and I feel like a deepening of our knowledge of what people who created techno and drum and bass and house did with technology and why they did it and what they created. Not just like the sounds they created, the machines they created but phonographies in the sense of like spaces, narratives that they created are very much part of that itinerary. I also think that it's a reminder to me to look back at Trisha Rose's book Black Noise which does not get enough love because she was talking about black recalors repurposing disused technical education materials to kind of invent new forms of cultural capital for themselves in the black and Puerto Rican working class in the Bronx. She was talking about that at the time and it hasn't quite acted up with the similar histories that we have for some other genres of music but it's like it's right there, it's like right there. So we're all sibling of Africa. Trisha Rose. I just wanted to appreciate the connection with what is happening in Africa because I always think I acknowledge that not in Africa it's written because Africa has not as much writing society as it is in all of the societies. Thank you so much. Thank you. Her comment actually connects to the question that I had which was I was kind of wondering how ideas around indigeneity figure into what you're thinking about, whereas in the context of Indian beauty is an African identity and within a North American context and kind of what I was thinking about was there was a documentary recently about Native Americans rumble, about Native Americans and rock that I thought was interesting but also had tensions around claiming things as indigenous not black and so I'm kind of curious about how you're going to kind of intersect with those questions. Yeah, intersect is the word for it because what intersectionality actually means which you can look up in, I don't know if they might have computers or database or something here. You can look it up. You can attribute it to the person who pointed it. It's not amended by disparaging stereotype about women who use tone. But intersecting means that people are simultaneously black and indigenous and also sometimes indigenous and not black and also sometimes some of those other things but they are also gendered and classed and national and non-national and all those things. There is I think a value to investigating where black and indigenous connections take place in the histories of black diasporic North American identities and cultures. I think that the ways that for instance language learners, the ways that black people come into native nations as language learners tells us something about how our different oral traditions and cosmologies and phenomenologies around the word in a spoken form, how they interact, how they interface. That's a fascinating site for exploration that maybe deals with a little bit of that like do we need to ever raise the question of black versus indigenous or can black versus indigenous mean something like a remix, right? This versus that. Can it mean that? I think that one of the things we might get from say communities in which black people become constituents, become part of native nations is thinking about how language learning is part of that process. I think that the spoken and silent role of slavery and violations of treaties with native nations are places where the relation of nationality and empire to blackness is enunciated or not enunciated, right? Is silenced. And those circuits, those moments, those interactions where somebody has to talk to someone else, someone has to speak or make people or make a situation or make the land speak or speak for it, those moments I think are good moments to take up those questions of like, is this a black and indigenous situation? What dimension of this is black and not indigenous and what dimension of it is indigenous and not black if it is. Like those can actually coexist at certain moments in a way that's not annihilating. And I hope to see that. So I want to look for it so that I don't know what it is. This is a fantastic talk. Thank you so much for this. I'm thinking about I feel like there's a little bit of an irony in the beautiful images from all the stars that you're using. So they're illustrating the gold texture and so on and so forth. And you're talking about golden as you're rereading it as figuring for queer. And yet people have been talking about the straight washing or the erasure of the queer sublines from Black Panther. It's most explicitly articulated by Roxanne Gay's role in Wakanda side series, which has a very explicit multiple same sex lesbian relationships between Dora Milagic and they're also doing this amazing work of sort of challenging patriarchy inside Wakanda that gets rethought as not a utopia. But yes, there are things that are amazing about this vision for futureism and a space that's never been colonized and yet they're still heteropatriarchy and sexual slavery. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about that. And I don't know if it's an erasure, but I'm wondering how you think about that. Is it just too much for a mass market of cultural attacks? Why did that happen? It's not too much because it's kind of the dilemma that I have with using fictionalized forms of difference as surrogates for rather than like windows onto or elaborations on the differences that we experience and know. The problem I have with that often is that like there is no such thing as too much, right? So you can't be like, oh, we're all cool now because we've got to fight the board, right? Or like, no, we're all cool now because the Martians are here. I'm like, we are clearly not cool when the Martians come. We're like, ah, Martians, hold up, we're still like, we can't do this yet. Right? Like, you just can't. Wakanda might have a plan for the Martians, but everybody else is like, what? We can't. Existing nations and radio frequencies. In that moment, my uptake of that visual is deliberate because I like it creates like a resonance. And that's so exciting and fun. It's attention grabbing and rhetorically effective from a place of like producing aesthetic pleasure. To the extent that it pulls these narratives together from different moments and asks about like a shared tradition, just a total knowledge practice that they have to be part of, right? I think that whatever is like part of like what I arrive at in reading a figure like Golden as something like queer is in part, especially because it's not said and because reading what Golden comes to mean in this fictional context and the society it imagines requires working through of what queerness means by a variety of other names. It's really fascinating to me that here can be unspoken, right? Can be written right as the counterpart to what is spoken there, right? Queer can be spoken now, whereas in the then and there of the story it's not spoken. That's a fascinating and useful thing about having critical terminology and being able to speak of things in multiple times and places. And I feel like that work which I call catacrystic because I think it's like it's kind of retrograde, it's not cool, but it's like a weird moment where I think like Vivian Namaste and some other queer critics or some other critics, some other feminist critics who authored Seminole Text and Queer Theory were like struggling a little bit with the kind of inflation phase of queer theory, right? Where it accelerated faster than the speed of light and then like now we have Mass in the Universe. That moment to me and thinking through how queer can be and can like Sarah Ahmed says not have a relation of externality to what it describes. It's fascinating, it's like golden, right? In that you don't know, you don't need to know, you can't know the term it modifies in an ideal state because there is no discrete ideal state for it to modify because all it modifies is something already spoken for, somebody who is golden and also black, somebody who is golden and also diagnosed with Schizophrenia, somebody who is golden and probably in the world of Delaney's story susceptible to being diagnosed with a variety of, well susceptible to being diagnosed with a psychopathology because of the relation between their sexuality, their gender expression and their gender identity, right? Like in that world life is painful or impossible psychologically and so the world of Delaney's story is one in which we can apply the term golden to such a person otherwise that person is not a discrete category of person, they're non-person right? There's only, the category only coalesces in so far as you can identify the subsection of it among whom golden might exist. I'll have to say I feel like in the way that golden names instead of, it names instead of something that could be named otherwise and queer does that, I feel like what you see in especially this variety of popular cultural black Afrofuturist stuff, especially this popular cultural variety of it is sometimes a silence and it's sometimes an articulate silence and sometimes an inarticulate silence. What I think can be articulate about it is, like an inarticulate silence is like, well I don't want to, right? Is editing out, is this decision or that, is a discrete naming and doing on screen before the camera or not, right? Those inarticulate silences that you can do in those ways. But what might be articulate is the argument I take up in an article about Black Panther, about the comics that will come out later this year, is kind of about this moment about like, what do we do now? Everybody's talking about this what is the vocabulary we used to talk about it. And what I say is basically like some of the things that are spoken for in terms of the desiring practices that are legible and argued for, right? Some of those positions on what identity and desiring mean and do in a narrative like this are spoken for by the term Black. That doesn't mean they can't be spoken for by the term queer, but it means that saying they can be spoken for by the term Black is not a refusal to answer what the place of desire is. In them it is an answer to those questions. And I feel like that's a thing. Because like, because the kind of the performance that Tessa Thompson does in that film and like the performance that Tessa Thompson did in Thor Ragnarok have, they have these qualities of inarticulate silence where they're just like, don't do that, right? Don't signify that. But they also have that quality that everything has which is like, you don't just not signify anything even if you don't signify that in particular, you signify something and also not something and whatever that is one of the things it is, is an answer to nation and gender and desire that needs to be understood as in the lexicon of Blackness. And I feel like it's not that Black people are not queer, it's that Black people are not being Black when they're being queer. So like, when Black people are being queer, they're also being Black. So some of the things that we look for won't show up the way that we expect them. Like you cannot, you can't populate the the queerness of whatever the Afro, in the Afro futurity of the queer futurity of this narrative is you can't populate it with people who are not Black and I feel like there is something there rather than something, rather than only something that's not there, right? So like, yeah to an extent, okay, there is an absence of Black lesbians as such. There is an erasure of Black lesbians as such. Very good smart writers like Gil Gomez and Roxane Gay have taken that question in informative places that allow us to learn from it rather than see it as like, rather than only experience it as the epistemic violence that it is, that no, there's no learning, there's nothing to know, there's nothing to see here, right? We didn't even cut it out, we didn't even ask that, we got a director who wouldn't have it, right? It's not just that. So, yeah I'm like, I'm passionate about it because I'm like, Blackness is a discourse of desire and then I'm also like, mmm, you can erase in silence some things that sometimes don't, that sometimes articulate you with something other than a total opposition or a total co-optation. I guess basically about the kind of geography of the project. A number of the radio plays you mentioned were BBC adaptations and Afrofuturism is such a capacious kind of body of words, but there's been such a pushback now on the kind of geographical, how much of Futurism is Afrofuturism versus a British African Futurism, an African Futurism, a Nigerian African Futurism. So I'm just kind of curious about how you're kind of thinking the kind of market of that, why the kind of BBC, you know, when I think kind of like British Afrofuturism, you know, I've got to look like the audio film collective The Great Films from Comfort, particularly. But you know Isaac Julian is one of the stuff he's doing, which is wonderful. So anyway, I'm just kind of curious about that. The geographies, how you're thinking Afrofuturism as a kind of geographic practice, what it means for these to be BBC kind of radio plays and other things, can you just speak a little bit about that? Yeah, yeah, I think that's like my strategic Anglo-centrism, right, which is both a recognition that Black Britishness is different from Black Americanness and stuff, but also that our relationship to each other is a circuit of meaning that's generative there. And also like an effort to not try to do too much is a part of that work. So what I want to achieve by maintaining that deliberate US and British relay is to get some things out of it, right, that it has to give us, to show us. And also to do the thing that I hope it does is kind of restore some of the geography to kind of speak to, okay, why have these sites in the Anglophone world? What does that phone mean, right? Like who is it? Who is in the language community of English speakers and readers? How are these traditions from like a George Schuyler, Black, weird satirical, not quite Afrofuturism to, you know, a new way British 1960 science fiction, how are those moments like varieties of Anglophone cultural practice in which Blackness is integral? I'm interested in that. I'm also interested in like the varieties of Lucophone and Hispanophone cultural practice and Francophone cultural practice that are informative and in the other diasporic sites that have like a whole different set of questions embedded in them politically and geographically, but I also know I'm not that good at engaging with them, and other people are much better at engaging with them than I am. So I'm like, very, yeah, I feel motivated to stay in my lane, but I'm also like, it's a it's an HOV lane. It's like a, it's like I'm not alone in it, right? Which is why I'm like, there's no such thing as a purely as a national frame that contains, right? There's only a national frame that articulates with other national and nonnational frames. So I'm like, oh, okay, so this one will be like this. So yeah, that's a, I feel like there's something to the U.S. circuit there, and the Tiffany Barber is doing phenomenal, excellent work on Black Audio Film Collective, Alessandro Rango, sometimes in collaboration with Tiffany Barber and Amy Elias and some of these folks are also reanimating conversations around Isaac Julien's work, and like, I am really excited and feel affirmed by that. Because it's like, oh, it's not that it's not that Black Americans and Black British stuff can continue to be hot, but it's also that there is good company to do the work in. That's a part of my work. I'm really interested in sound that articulates some kind of a body politic that goes beyond resistance. Yeah, yeah. There's a, there's a like a, there's a kind of, I think a short circuiting and a naturalizing that can happen, right? With the presumption that Black will be loud. It will agitate, it will resist. And I think most people who want to consider Black knowledge production in sound as a site of knowledge production are really invested in saying like, well, sure, it resists domination, but it also involves, you know, we resist so that we can do other things, you know, so that we can go on being and you can simultaneously know about, learn about the going on being and learn about, like what Moten talks about, like the saturation of makes that is the sound, right? You can be there and there can be a totality to it and you can be identical with it, right? But you can also have relations to it that are not relations of identity and I think that's, that's interesting, right? So that, so the thing that echoes or reiterates a moment or or turns it down or like you know, mixes it in otherwise, right? Those ways of doing, you know, Black cultural work and doing any cultural work, right? That gives sound these different roles allow you to, you know, create soundscapes that have different relations to each other, right? So that, so that you have a place that you would like to be, right? A place that is not yet here, that you hope in horizon and one of the things you do by gesturing toward it or moving toward it is that you negate the here and now, but you don't just negate the here and now, you negate it for a second, right? You negate it for a song, you negate it for a night and I'm like, that's interesting, that's fun, that's useful because it does, hopefully, move it to inhabiting that not here. And what is the, you know, what it is acoustically, yeah, as a kind of space, right, that you can inhabit that because it is a space, because it has a geography, because it has a time, has a sound is part of what makes it what it is. That's why I'm interested in like, repurposing of the technologies to make different kinds of music, right? The repurposing of noise as music and the recombining of music in order to produce noise. Like, that all sounds like noise to me because I'm, you know, I'm curmudgeon or something. It makes me insufferable, right? It makes me a bad critic, right? I'm aesthetically not smart enough to understand why it's music. But I know that somebody is right about it and I'm not. So I'm like, okay, what are you doing that I am not doing? I don't have a relation of identity to you. You are creating and inhabiting a space whose imaginary architecture makes this sound articulates it with desire and all of this stuff that's fulfilling. And I'm like, that's a fascinating set of things to do at the least. We can understand people's motivations for that even if they're on an agenda that's not ours, right? So to me what resistance means and doesn't mean in that situation is like yes, not all the sounds people make are resistance. Yes, being is not only resistance but also you can, you know, you can be a member of a coalition and a member of a totality and a member of a multifaceted constituency or of an intergenerational succession that has moments that are resistance and has moments that are not. And so one of the things you can learn from studying the ones that are not is to learn how we differentiate them and why it matters and how to get from one to the other. So yeah, I'm interested in music that does not do much and does not do well. And this is part of my thing about Black Panther too is like I'm interested in texts that fail at certain things. But like, you know, it's just, it's that heartbreak thing. Because I'm like, well yeah, all anything is is failing at doing something else. You know, it's like blackness can't be non-being it's, oh no, it's failing to be white. Oh no, I guess I'll just have to go on being awesome. This is like, it's fine. Or at least it should be. Right? And that horizon of possibility that you want to attain is always not here. That's okay. This is where we are now. And I like treating just like fucked up cultural politics as informative. And informative not because they achieve something we should strive to achieve necessarily but informative precisely in the way that we can say like ooh, that's really, you know, the masters of the TR-808 are the worst let's instead look at, you know, people who synthesize the sounds it makes or people who sampled them and give us better songs that don't make us feel dead inside when we hear them. Like let's do that instead. So there are lots of, um, yeah, there are some things to do with failures to resist failures to be something that are in part acts of being something else. On time. Thank you again. Thank you.