Bone-Deep Engagement: Black Methodological Intonations and Ethical Response-Making to Black Living

Abstract

What constitutes an ethical analytical response to Black living? This manuscript thinks with theories of Blackness to explicate how the question of the human, specifically, what it means to be human, interrupts traditional methodological discourse, and requires a critical form of labor to account for the breadth and depth of Black liveliness and living. Diverging from traditional distance-oriented research practices, the author puts forth “Black methodological intonations” as methodological praxes. Unlike conventional methods that prioritize detachment, this manuscript advocates for a transformative attunement that actively engages with and alongside Black liveliness. Grounded in the embodied and relational concept of hapticity, the manuscript outlines the theoretical framework of Black methodological intonations, emphasizing the necessity of transcending mere spectatorship in research on Black life. In conversation with Arthur Jafa’s film, “Love is the Message, the Message is Death” (2016), the manuscript employs haptic reflexivity to consider profound listening, viewing, and feeling experiences in connection with the Black quotidian. Jafa’s film serves as a compelling example of reshaping the white gaze’s racialized power dynamics. The analysis of the film through the lens of hapticity yields valuable insights, culminating in essential considerations for Black methodological intonations as methodological response-making. Key themes include attunement, impressions, slowness, and emanation, contributing to a nuanced understanding of methodological practices that engage with the precarity of Black liveliness and living.

Keywords

black methodology methodological praxes black intonations reflexivity affect hapticity ethical response black living embodied research critical research methods

When I write, I want to sound in theory the way Aretha Franklin sounds in song… I WOULD LIKE TO FEEL THAT EVERYTHING I SAID HAD A LIBERATING AND EMANCIPATORY DIMENSION. That’s what she has. Black singing, at its best, it has this–It’s the idea of poesis, again; there is also a poesis of thought; a new poesis of being human. These concepts don’t come in a linear fashion. - Sylvia Wynter

And I played Bessie every day. A lot of the book is in dialogue, you know, and I corrected things according to what I was able to hear when Bessie sang, and when James P. Johnson plays. It’s that tone, that sound, which is in me- James Baldwin

In Black Metamorphosis, Sylvia Wynter (n.d.) details how narratives of anti-Blackness instruct psychic, physiological, and neurobiological responses to Blackness, particularly as bonded to Black bodies. These narratives congeal to normalize the refusal of Black humanity. Arthur Jafa’s (2016) “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death” responds to and refuses the ordinariness of this symbolic belief system by compiling a range of Black realities and rebellious activities (McKittrick, 2016). The film’s viewers encounter the motions, musicality, joy, and terrors of Black life, and, in doing so, witness an impulse to indict and overturn anti-Black constraints through the ongoing creation of culture. The cinematic montage of still images and video clips brings together an iconic catalog of Black people like Jimi Hendrix, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis alongside realities of Black life entangled in the afterlife of slavery and coloniality (Hartman, 1997; Maldonado-Torres, 2007). The assemblage animates a Black quotidian, or “continuum of terror and joy in Blackness” (Campt, 2021, p. 99), uneasily theorized through traditional methodological protocols that favor linearity, (post) positivism, and dominant approaches to the collection and analyses of data (Brown et al., 2014) and, as such, the film requires a different form of labor to reckon with the intensities and precarity that is Black living. On these terms, this manuscript puts forth some considerations for ethical analytical responses to the precarity Black living.

To engage the film necessitates what Moten (2003) called a bone-deep engagement, an effortful practice of listening that descends into the depths. Bone-deep listening is a form of seeing, “that descent into the music, descent into organization, the ensemble of the senses, unexploded in the cut, excision of the unit, out in the ensemble, in preparation of the necessary sound” (Moten, 2003, p. 83). Bone-deep listening is an affective laboring, a form of labor that allows viewers to sit in the continuum of a Black quotidian— pleasure/pain, sanctity/sexualities, peace/rage—to navigate the hapticity of Black living. Whereas methodological rigor tends to favor distance and detachment (Brown et al., 2014), this conceptual manuscript thinks with Moten about what it means not just to see/document/look at/hear Black life but to shift toward an approach that looks with and alongside Black liveliness and living, a methodological response that I term here as Black methodological intonations. Here, the concern is with the ensembles of senses—relational and embodied intensities—required to come alongside Black living, such that research is more than spectatorial (Callier & Hill, 2019; McKittrick, 2016; Moten, 2003), but an active looking and witnessing.

In what follows, I briefly review relevant literature and disciplinary grounds for Black method-making (McKittrick, 2017). Thinking with Moten (2003), I deploy hapticity as an embodied and relational theoretical frame to outline Black methodological intonations as praxes. From there, I draw on Jafa’s (2016) film to engage in haptic reflexivity, centrally asking, what emerges in a bone-deep listening, looking, feeling with, and alongside a viewing of the Black quotidian. Following my embodied, bone-deep reflexive response, I discuss guiding principles that undergird Black methodological intonations as a methodological response.

Review of Relevant Literature

Wynter (1994, 2006) has remarked on the role of academics and researchers in creating and maintaining the discourse of nonhumanness. Pointedly, she queried, “Why is it that as intellectuals we can disagree so much with what is being done, and yet it is we who create the rules of the discourse that make these behaviors possible?” (Thomas, 2006, p. 20). Academia, and consequently, educational research, tends to engage the study of race as an undeniable social construction (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Omi & Winant, 2014). The benefit of the discourse is in how it creates space to consider the social locations and the experiences that individuals and groups have at the nexus of lived experience and systems of oppression. The conclusion for much of the research that understands race as socially constructed is to provide recommendations to institutions that are more inclusive of the needs and desires of individuals and groups. The danger masked and missed beneath attempts to address race and racism is that this approach does not account for the activity of Blackness (Wynter, 2006). Often unaccounted for in the study of race and racism, is the function of racialization wherein Blackness informs and reinforces. Wynter’s (1994, 2006) call, thus, is toward specificity.

Regarding specificity, Blackness as a mode of knowledge production stages possibility for understanding the hierarchical power structures, relationships, or assemblages (Weheliye, 2014), that designate who can lay claim to the human, full human status, and those who cannot in the United States social imaginary. Anti-Black colonial discourses direct this ability to lay claim. Coloniality names the “underlying logic of the foundation and unfolding of Western civilization from the Renaissance to today of which historical colonialisms have been a constitutive, although downplayed, dimension” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 2). Whereas European colonialism references the relational social, political, and economic contours that have worked in tandem as a force of domination globally against, namely, nonwhite people, anti-Black coloniality is nuanced. Anti-Black coloniality, for Wynter (2003, 2006), must grapple with epistemological foundations and the construction of the human.

Construction of Man as Human

For Wynter (2003), colonialism and its afterlife as the world’s social, economic, political, and environmental condition reflect the ongoing tensions between Man and the idea of the human. In these terms, Man, as white, male, bourgeoisie representing, is overdetermined as human. The history of what it means to be human is, thus, constrained by the epistemic amalgamation of Man and human.¹ These epistemic discourses are the basis for the current order of knowledge that determines what it means to be and how to be in the Western social imaginary. The consistent refrain across Wynter’s oeuvre is a pointed critique of Man and how Man is overrepresented as human.

Intervening on this overrepresentation in educational research, then, might follow Weheliye’s (2014) Wynterian query that asked, “What different modalities of the human come to light if we do not take the liberal humanist figure of Man as the master-subject but focus on how humanity has been imagined and lived by those subjects excluded from this domain?” (p. 8). Important to these analyses, methodological conservatism advances white logic and methods (Zuberi & Bonilla Silva, 2008), a harmony emblematic of the Western Man-as-human that regards that which exceeds the conditions of harmony as deviant and thereby unfit and out of place (Hartman, 2019; Henson, 2021). Attending to Black liveliness and living, thus, is to first interrogate the uncritical ways Blackness constructs and maintains the order of knowledge and then, to consider its life - and method-making capacities.

Over and against the Western order of knowledge that rejects Black living, Black people live, love, cry, laugh, and practice radical theory-making (Christian, 1987; Clifton, 2012). Though the Western order of knowledge conditions Black theories of being/doing/living, this order is not its inspiration (Robinson, 1983). Black radicalism, “the accretion, over generations of collective intelligence gathered from struggle” (p. xix), is a definitively Black “response to an oppression emergent from the immediate determinants of European development in the modern era and framed by orders of human exploitation woven into the interstices of European social life from the inception of Western civilization” (Robinson, 1983, p. 73). As such, Blackness as a starting point, provides the conditions for learning, loving living, and being in the world differently (McKittrick, 2020), or what Wynter (2006) has discussed as the “groundwork” for how to be human (p. 163).

Black Creative Activities

Methodologically, the general expectation is that researchers acquiesce to normative methods (Henson, 2021)—blend in with the tone of Western empiricism, to remove variation and turn down, as if adjusting the volume, constraining the noisiness of Blackness. If knowledge, theory, and method have been dominated by that which encloses, overdetermines, and expects constraint, Black creativity and Black creative intellectuals are an interruption of those normative standards in ways that harness the embodied registers that can bring liberation and emancipatory dimensions into view (McKittrick, 2020; Spillers, 2003; Wynter, n.d.). The claim here is that Black liveliness and living exceed Western epistemological and methodological frames and demand an otherwise form of engagement to understand its fullness (Okello, 2023). To account for Black liveliness and living in method necessitates, again, a bone-deep (Moten, 2003) orientation to “that tone,” its melodic and vibrational movement, the weight, thickness, and intensity of its sonic force, and the ways it takes shape in the lives of Black people. In this paradigm, thinking with Moten (2003), Black liveliness and living is a break—evidence of the phonic materiality that bends and extends, lives as an ongoing and consistent “irruption that anarranges every line–is a strain that pressures the assumption of the equivalence of person” (Moten, 2003, p. 1), or Black liveliness and living are of phonic materiality.

A Grounding for Black Method Making

If nonhumans is a prerequisite for Man and the order of knowledge that directs Western society (Wynter, 2003), then the defining logic that structures society is naturalized and reproduced in research. Nevertheless, Black living exists in excess of this logic (Hartman, 2008, 2019). Even as Black people are radically unaffirmed, they have the capacity to see and do beauty everywhere and imbue life with joy and beauty, over and against normative registers. How do educational researchers make operative ethical care that attends to affective tonality, the intimate worlds Black people construct while living in an anti-Black world? In response to this question, I turn to the praxis of Black creativity, to rewrite and affirm modes of being that refuse anti-Black disregard.

Rewriting the order of knowledge in ways that might affirm Black living, must occur at the level of ideas—epistemology and discipline (Wynter, 2006). This rewriting exposes the tension between liberatory thought and institutional liberalism. In contrast, the latter projects slip into self-replicating systems that prioritize production, ownership, and domination. Wynter’s (2006) theorizing illuminates how the order of knowledge plays out as a form of discipline. Put another way, the rigidity of Western epistemology directs disciplines (i.e., bodies of knowledge) and disciplines (i.e., guides by way of habit) how we study and conduct research (McKittrick, 2020). In order to facilitate a shift in how we know and study, Wynter (2006) located possibility in Black art and aesthetics. To take up this posture positions Black methodology as rebellious and unfinished. McKittrick (2020) added to this point, writing, “the maneuvering, ideally, dwells on and thinks about questioning and overturning of normative systems of knowledge, and thus what it means to be human, by situating the process of inquiry as the analytical framework through which to study” (p. 44). Beyond protocols and administering structured techniques onto an object of study in the service of the outcome, a methodology concerned with Blackness, a Black methodology is curious and disobedient, a marker of Black radical theory and method making. On these terms, Blackness, and, as such, Black people are the blue note–that note played or sung at a slightly different pitch than is standard in Western scales and notation—, a defining characteristic of Black music.

Black Music

Black method making occurs outside normative systems of knowledge, and these demonic grounds are “inhabited by those who are brilliantly and intimately aware of existing systems of knowledge and that awareness provides theoretical insights” (McKittrick, 2020, p. 24). This liminal space of alterity (Wynter, 1984) is an epistemological outside that provides a clearing for experiments on knowing and being in the world. One such experimental break from form has been the miracle of Black music as the emergence of Black worlds over and above Western epistemology. The breadth and depth of Black music are most pronounced in and through its various expressions, though in its particularities, the music owns a distinct style of repetition, circulation, and flow. Or, as Jafa (1998) contends, the musicality of Blackness bends and refuses normative patterns of Western epistemology.

Moreover, as McKittrick (2016) has noted, Black musical aesthetics materialize over and against anti-Black policies and practices; they are “heard and listened to across and in excess” (p. 80) of those logics. In this way, listening, grooving, and sharing Black music is a political act of rebellion that enunciates and pronounces Black life. Following Wynter (n.d.), the making of Black culture and subsequent affirmation of Blackness reinvented the human toward notions of Black liveliness and living, a subversion of anti-Black histories, geographies, and practices. On this point, Wynter (n.d.) posited

[Black music] created in this exterior [alienated reality] social space out of an outlier consciousness born from the sustained experience of social marginality. Because of this, even as the record industry makes black music the ‘raw material’ of its profit production and diffuses it globally, the bourgeois order itself creates the condition of possibility of its own subversion. (p. 896)

In its subversive quality, Black music is heretical, disrupting linearity and colonial arrangements of time; it is a “freeing of time from a market process, its insistence on time as a life process” (Wynter, n.d., p. 199). In these ways Black music refused Black nonhumanness through collectivity, shared sounds, rhythms, rituals, and songs, clarifying new ways of being and relations that come into view through participation (Wynter, n.d.).

This tendency is notably apparent in blues music. As noted by Woods (1998), blues was the antithesis of the plantation tradition, emerging out of the lived experiences of Black Americans in the Mississippi Delta that bore witness to a range of violent institutions inclusive of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. The blues are guttural utterances and sultry performances, the intimate expression of those positioned as having no recognizable life, carrying fear, devastation, relief, and pain on flattened notes (Speight Vaughn, 2020). The blues embody defiance and refusal as a break from conventional form, a political treatise on the violence of oppression that affected the livelihood of Black people, and an articulation of Black being. As a rejection of the order of knowledge that prohibits Black liveliness and living, Black music is a way of knowing and being–an onto-epistemology amid negation and alienation.

The Musicality of Alienation or the Ethic is the Aesthetic

The emergence of Black music, in response to dehumanizing logic, generated unique insight into and about being in the world across interconnected domains: historical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, cosmological, and material. One might read Black music, thus, as a call to the range of Black liveliness and living–joy, pain, love, loss, hope, and compassion. Methodologically, Black music works to document the affective register, to illume how Black creative intellectualism engenders thought and action, and to pursue relationality as a survival praxis. Moreover, in attending the soundscape, “black song as expressive of black politics” is centralized (McKittrick, 2020, pp. 64–65):

Songs demonstrate how knowing and feeling black music is correlational to being human. To put it differently, in [Development Arrested], the way of being black, or the way of black humanity, is to recognize music and soundscape as the way of, rather than external to, the self and the social world. In this sense, Black is sound, a way of being black, and black being is an aurally aesthetic way of life. (p. 65)

Attending to structures of feeling as a form of consciousness, and thus, a way of being Black, does not reduce Black people singularly to affective and sensuous experience; instead, it is a way of naming the quotidian effort to live, make, and imagine more than anti-Black colonial logics (Hartman, 2019; Wynter, n.d.). Aurality–listening to and with Black music, attending to the sonic frequencies, is to annotate not just the descriptiveness or the what; Sonic frequencies enunciate the how as an assertion of Black life. Aurality is a pathway for recognizing not just the narrative–notes, lyrics, and songs–but also the grooves, desires, memories, and intensities. If, as McKittrick (2020) noted, “the economy of reason demands something more of us, a different kind of effort” (p. 65), engaging with and in Black music and its rebellious and subversive traits is one entry point into that sense of more as it constitutes attending to the bones, going toward, being with something or someone’s outside of conventional structures of investigation. Noticing the praxis of aesthetics, rhythms, and grooves that is Black music, too, requires bone-deep engagement that is opened up by what Sharpe (2016) methodologically articulates as Black annotations and redactions.

Annotations and Redactions

Forging grounds in the way of Black viewing practices, Sharpe (2016) was not interested in “rescuing Black beings” for the category of Man or human (p. 116); her interest was in what the images of Black life call forth, as in what they provoke in viewers to do, feel, and think. In this regard, annotations are notes or supplemental information accompanying an image. On the matter of Black liveliness and living, the work of annotation is valuable, wherein the general circulation of images of Black people in society is constructed by and for the white social polity. Furthermore, viewing the range of anti-Black violence as circulated through images has not engendered critical forms of empathy, pathways to Black livability, or liberation. The opposite tends to be more accurate, such that these images reinforce social hierarchies that disregard the fullness of Black existence. Annotations and redactions are an effort toward proximity, a counter to neglect, refusing to see; the praxis is a commitment to looking without turning away. Black annotations and redactions are ways to make Black living apparent and intentional, and they work against the limitations of words and normative modes of capture and circulation. Sharpe’s (2016) approach is a way of disrupting colonial optics that reproduce unethical attachments to Black bodies.

Annotations and Redaction as Praxis

Evidence of these practices is central to the work of Black artists like Julie Dash, who, for example, chose to interrogate enslavement through the indigo-stained hands of Black people as opposed to marks of corporeal violence like brands and scars. The decision rejects renderings of Blackness as linked to injury and death, instead opening up ways to enter into a relationship with the lives of Black people. The project of annotations and redactions is consistent with what Jafa (1998) called Black visual intonation. The cinematic idea employs “irregular, nontempered camera rates and frame replication to prompt film movement to function in a manner that approximates Black vocal intonation,” an attempt to analyze tone (Jafa, 1998, p. 267). In conceptualizing the idea, Jafa shared,

Each [Black voice] has a particular signature relationship to the black voice (as transgenerational continuity) and with black vocal intonation specifically, whether in the performer’s voice or played out instrumentally, as a primary mode of expressive articulation. I was interested in coming to understand this vocal intonation and how these traditions or continuities of manipulating tonalities are bound up with what it means to be black. (para. 10)

This film movement, or adjusting camera rates to experience the particularity and distinctiveness of Blackness, is emblematic of what Mikael Owunna created in his Infinite Essence series. The visual style consists of adjusting the camera flash to transmit ultraviolet light. The ultraviolet collides with Black models lathered in fluorescent paints only visible in ultralight light; the bodies appear as cosmic scenes and starry universes. Owunna (2023) noted that the goal was to “create a visual style that would uniquely capture their cosmic grandeur, dense symbolism, and presentation of Blackness as the divine, cosmic source from which everything emerges” (para. 1). The work of Sharpe, Dash, Jafa, and Owunna engender ways of attending to Blackness as anagrammatical, which is to say that as structures encounter Blackness, those structures–language, thought, ordering– are disordered. Attunement to that disordering necessitates material theorizing that might reveal and open up alternative visions of Black living. This approach must shift the relationship and adjust the gaze.

Shifting the Gaze

To notice “that tone” that I understand as intimate Black worlds may begin from what Wynter (1984) has discussed as the gaze from below. Wynter (1984) has consistently noted that to confront and disrupt the category of Man, tethered to the Western episteme that defines being human in purely bio-economic terms, understandings of what it means to be human must be viewed from an outside–external to Western conceptual systems of knowledge. Such a viewing opens possibilities for perceiving new ways of being and thinking. This break is an autopoietic turn/overturn through which to define being human as part bio, part mythos, logos, and cosmogony. This conceptualizing enables one to break from proffered truths established by Western thought patterns. The autopoietic turn/overturn rejects the premises put forth by the Western Man about what constitutes humans as primarily biological (Wynter, 2015). The maneuver intends to rewrite Man as the representation of all modes of being human (Wynter, 2015).

Moreover, the turn/overturn shifts the notion of the human from created/invented to that which narrates the self, imbued with storytelling capacities and agency. The gaze from below, occupied and made functional by the liminal subject, is taken up as an embodied project by Tina Campt. When Campt (2021) enters an art gallery or the research site, she attempts to do so from a position of humility and reverence for what the scene and images may want to communicate; this studio practice of writing to art is a reorientation method. On her practice, Campt (2021) postulated, “I write to [the art] about the feeling they solicit, the forms of discomfort they evoke, the emotional work they require and often demands, and the potentially transformative effects they have when we allow ourselves to inhabit those feelings and responses” (p. 27). This posture of listening from below enables Campt to take in the thrust of art in often controlled spaces that militate against intimate connection, only allowing for strained observation (e.g., standing to view an image in a gallery space). Concomitantly, listening from below minimizes the viewer in an attempt to carve away at the inherent power dynamics associated with spectatorship and observation. Writing to images from below means encountering images/scenes from the bottom up.

Black Viewing Practices

Campts’ (2017, 2021) recognition of the power dynamics threaded into seeing, viewing, and being looked at grapples with the concept of the gaze. In visual and cinema studies, conceptually, the gaze is defined as a gendered and racialized form of spectatorship that involves looking at. Power and politics are central to discussing the gaze, “who gets looked at, how, and at whose expense” (Campt, 2021, p. 37). The gaze has roots in racialized and colonial histories that infuse structures of domination (e.g., the Western order of knowledge) with its constitutive force. Interrupting these visual patterns is to come alongside Black arts and scholars who have put forth alternative definitions of the gaze (see hooks, 1992; Diawara, 1988; Callier & Hill, 2019). In hooks (1992) foundational essay, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” she documents oppositional looking patterns as moments of refusal– explicit decisions to confront authority with curiosity and critique. hooks’ (1992) work builds out of historicized surveillance conditions that structured Black being in the United States (e.g., enslavement, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow). For example, amid anti-Black social dynamics that prevented Blacks from making eye contact, Black people constructed ways of looking at and looking back to stare, which opened the “possibility of agency” (hooks, 1992, p. 247). In that same essay, hooks engaged with Diawara (1988) to wrestle with the notion of agency, precisely, the understanding of the resisting spectator as more than a passive actor and more active in the work of criticism.

Campt (2021) builds on and departs from these foundations by thinking particularly about the ways a Black gaze “transforms viewers into witnesses and demands a confrontation” (p. 39). If then, an oppositional gaze, an active criticism, and, most demonstratively, a Black gaze are always and already present, then Black possibility is always already present, which begs the question of how to methodologically attune to sense experiences. Here, as others have (see Marks, 2000), mimetic relationships are a useful heuristic in research. Mimetic relationships are sense experiences and perceptions that help to understand cultural occurrences through the body. Furthermore, there is an insistence in mimetic relationships that emphasize affective proximities and are cognizant of the power of the perceiver, which is to say, while looking tends to be spectatorial, “one cannot touch without being touched” (Marks, 2000, p. 149).

Methodologically, mimetic relationships have been discussed in connection to phenomenology. In phenomenology one makes embodied claims about the essence of experience, and within those arguments, one understands the symbiotic relationship that researchers have with an object of study. This framing, however, reflects an approach and positioning toward the unit of analysis as that which is for consumption–to be analyzed and deciphered for meaning (Marks, 2000). Returning to hooks (1992) and Diawara (1988), Black people are not passive objects that researchers decode, or inscribe with meaning; instead, they are meaning in and to themselves. In this way, I am interested in how researchers might ethically engage with Black people by noticing differently what Black people evoke. To do this, I turn to hapticity.

Theorizing Hapticity

Haptic perception is the “combination of tactile, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive functions, the way we experience touch both on the surface of and inside our bodies” (Marks, 2000, p. 162). Etymologically, haptic as a term stems from physiology and denotes fastening. Where social science protocols privilege optical visuality, which is indicative of separation between the subject and object of analysis, haptic looking works to “move over the surface of its object rather than to plunge into illusionistic depth, not distinguish form so much as to discern texture” (Marks, 2000, p. 162); not the representation of an object, but the material presence. Haptic visuality “implies a tension between viewer and image, making oneself vulnerable to the image, reversing the relation of mastery that characterizes optical viewing” (Marks, 2000, p. 185). Engaging Black living is to grapple with what militates against it, and, as this tension exists, a responsiveness insistent on actively inhabiting “a state ranging from disorientation and unease to implication and vulnerability” is required (Campt, 2021, p. 18). Hapticity relates to the labor of feeling. As a viewing practice, hapticity is “an effortful practice of exertion and an active form of struggle. It is the struggle to remain in relation to, contact or connection with another” (Campt, 2021, p. 103). Hapticity is different from what Harney and Moten (2013) referred to as hapticality:

The capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you…thrown together touching each other, we were denied all sentiment, family, nation, language, religion, place, home. Though forced to touch and be touched, to sense and be sensed in that space of no space, though refused sentiment, history, and home, we feel (for) each other. (pp. 98–99)

While there is some alignment, hapticity, as I use it here, is in developing the capacity to grapple with the “precarity of less valued or actively devalued individuals without guarantees, and working to sustain a relationship to those imperiled and precarious bodies nonetheless” (Campt, 2021, p. 104).

Haptic Limitations

For researchers, hapticity does not presuppose that a generous gaze will enable someone to see or feel what others see or feel. It is not a conduit to knowing or sharing the pain and precarity of Black people, and it is not an invitation to have viewers identify with those they are viewing; instead, hapticity is relational, dependent on mutuality, constituting one another, in order to work against Western research protocols that tend to prioritize Black people as data, dematerializing them to an object of analysis (Womack, 2022). To clarify the guiding principles of Black methodological intonations as methodological response-making, I deploy hapticity to sit with Jafa’s short film, Love is the Message, the Message is Death, and provide an analysis of the push, pulls, and turns that hapticity occasions.

Brief Review of “Love is the Message”

Love is the Message is a startling, compact, and visceral viewing that grapples with the delicacy, pain, joy, love, and complexity of Black living. Jafa curated the film by intricately piecing together still and moving images, archives, and popular culture video clips that beget a range of Black people’s experiences in the United States. It is a nonlinear arrangement of moments, a gathering undedicated to the strictures of time or sequence in how film productions follow an order of events and plot. As a rupture of Hollywood cinema, the film is most interested in considering the pedagogical possibilities of Black cinema, which is to say, what Black cinema does, more so than what it is. Jafa’s contention, as materialized in the film, is that the representations of Black life, as controlled and surveilled by Western epistemological frames, track into cinema, whereas Black cinema is, at best, a derivative of the dominant culture and, never understood as in possession of meaning-making and valuation.

More to the point, many cultural productions that involve Black people generally function to reify the notion that Blackness is the else/nowhere of whiteness. The film is not an act of opposition or a simple attempt to shift the gaze (see hooks, 1992), but a deliberate maneuver to view from below, from the place of alterity, outside of Western epistemological frames toward the question of what could be. Creating in and against the cultural and spatial continuities that have structured understandings of Blackness and Black people invokes a Wynterian ethic of return and, with it, the intentional valuation of Black aesthetics as simultaneously historicizing and future-oriented. Black aesthetics take Blackness seriously as an epistemological ideal with life-affirming, world-making capacities and analytics that reach across histories and what Black creatives have produced through riffs, improvisations, and pivots on these histories. In line with Wynter’s provocation, the turn to Black aesthetics is to recognize a sequencing of events that facilitated a cultural transformation that imagined Black people beyond the nonhuman sanction of Western Man.

The film is a meditation on viewing practices, as it reworks the racialized power structure of the white gaze to reflect on Black living historically, and in the contemporary moment, and it is also about the Black voice. In particular, Jafa used the core qualities of Black voice, which makes Black vocality powerful, as a heuristic for arranging images, described above as Black visual intonation. The film is helpful in thinking through Black method-making because it uniquely stages Black voices and experiences, where the only subject position that one can relate to or with is that of a Black person or community. While relatively brief, the viewer/listener confronts the question of what it means to be human for the entirety of the film. Said differently, Love is the Message constructs a space where the only possible relation is with Black people, which decidedly challenges constructions of the self, community, and collective we.

Embodied Response to “Love is the Message”

Remember to breathe. You haven’t taken a breath. Be present. Do not look away. Here it comes, turn away. Is it over? Please be over. This film is beautiful, elaborate, and complete. Please do not be over. Black people are never over. For as much as social, political, and economic assemblages have coiled together to squeeze, choke, constrict, and restrain Black living, Black people, and thus, Blackness, moves and coheres, spins, and pivots. Black people leap and bound. Blackness gathers, pools, spills out, and enunciates as Black people actively sound out their lives through movements and motion. Time closes in, boundaries shrink, and I am made to wonder. It is not the content; I have seen the content before, mourned, and celebrated these visceral and repetitive scenes with pleasure and, at times, against my will. It is not in the “what.” Black people are making art, culture, life, and history with the rhythms of their voices and manipulating their bodies in unthinkable ways. Rebellion was said to be unthinkable before it happened. I am witnessing the plot, planning, cunning, bravery, loophole, and retreat. How else have we managed to survive the assaults and curate such awe and inspiration?

This film is for me. It is a testimony—this little light of mine. We have and do and will let it shine. We dream and live and fall and rise. There is an expansiveness and depth in this film that indicates ingenuity, grace, and making with the available options. However, this is not just for me. I am wondering about empathy. What is empathy concerning Black people? How does one empathize with Black people without reducing them to inanimate objections that serve to fulfill affective curiosities? This viewing is personal; it resonates in that I am connected to the patterns of breathing and the sweat on brows as much as I am the fluidity of “the dougie” and synchronicity of “swag surfin”’. The background song, Kanye’s “Ultralight Beam,” echoes with familiarity–we are light and dream–we know the words, by the letter, and the pitch–how long to hold and when to release. When to climb and when to descend. Remember to breathe as you sit with us. The words coincide with rhythms. I cannot hear what the preacher, singer, or speakers say in every clip, but I know they speak. The body also speaks; it is not silent. It, too, rises and descends, scales, holds and exhales. With the ebb and flow of states, like solid, liquid, and gas, I am full of glee and sorrow. I am elated and undone. I get this sense that if I shudder and close my eyes for a molecular second, I will have missed the message and moment. So, I sit up, edge closer, and quiet my thoughts and the distractions while listening again, again, and again. I am thankful for the opportunity to enter again, to come back around and know the message more fully and intimately.

Black Methodological Intonations

What constitutes an ethical analytical response to Black living? Taking in various scenes, expressions, and performances of Black living is complex and too often oversimplified by analytically based responses devoid of closeness—relational and embodied intensities. Building on the central question of this manuscript, which asks what emerges in a bone-deep listening, looking, and feeling with and alongside a viewing of the Black quotidian, I trace lessons from my above response to Love is the Message to put forth insights for methodological response-making as it relates to Black living. Specifically, an analysis of Love is the Message using hapticity yielded insights for an approach to research that I discuss as Black methodological intonations. In the next section, I offer core considerations for taking up this response in one’s research. Specifically, I outline core themes: attunement, impressions, slowness and emanation.

Attunement

“Be present. Do not look away. Here it comes, turn away. Is it over? Please be over…Please do not be over. Black people are never over.” - Author

Attunement prioritizes adjustment and counterbalance as it acknowledges how the anti-Black social sphere, replete with racialized and colonized power, already structures research engagement. It is the decision, the commitment, to keep being present on the recognition that Black living has no choice in the matter. It recognizes the imposition of Western onto-epistemological power to delegitimize Black language and cultural production. In Western science and knowledge rituals, Black people are the inhabitants of what Fanon (1952) regarded as the zone of nonhumanity. As inhabitants, they are said to be nothing, where nothing denotes “Nothing [no human] of consequence. Nothing [no human] of weight. Nothing [no human] of materiality” (Crawley, 2017, p. 197). I understand “speaking” here as Black livingness’s elaborate and multimodal registers. Thinking with Sharpe (2016), what might it mean to inhabit, occupy, or dwell with this denial of Black humanity, where the limits of citizenship are constantly shifting along spatial, legal, psychic, and material lines? If, as Crawley (2017) noted, “something makes itself felt, known, from the zone of those of us said to be and have nothing, then the interrogation of what nothingness means is our urgent task” (p. 197). Black “something” as sounds, embodiments, and utterances are critiques of the normative world and sonic itineraries gesturing toward otherwise ways of being in the world.

On the understanding that Black people and communities are never passive actors in socio-political activities or research, attunement is a way of arranging the self in relation to those with whom one is in community. It is an onto-epistemological effort in harmonics, attempting to hum with the chorus’s melody. In this way, attunement is an ongoing attempt at concurrence, holistically composing the self so that one might hear, feel, and intensely work to name the rich, polyphonic tonality of Black living as it occurs in any given time or place. Attunement is a departure from dominant methodological priorities that position people as objects of analysis and, instead, it labors to read the sonic and visual frequencies of Black living. Attunement is an expression of care work, the embodiment of feeling across differences, and “knowing ourselves as part and as the crowd” (Glissant, 1992, p. 9). Where research processes act as modes of capture, confining one to a site of investigation, time, and place, attunement resists the pull toward capture and stillness.

Attunement is an onto-epistemological practice of motion that might ask, how does one accurately and ethically account for the life that teethers between disposable, enslaved, and nonhuman? What can this moment or scene tell us about Black life? How might it bring awareness to multifaceted entanglements? Here, movement is shifting positions related to a fixed point in space, emphasizing the space; motion is a time marker. Attunement, as motion, is the permission for bodies to move, which is to say, Black living is dynamic and produces various entry points for encounters. Attunement enables one to be accessible to the offerings shared in and beyond the site of a research encounter.

Methodological Attunement

For researchers, methodological attunement works to address the inherent power dynamics in Western methodological traditions. In doing so, attunement calls for responses that acknowledge the ongoing insistence of anti-Blackness and coloniality, and yet are not confined by those realities. It positions Black people as subjects, actively creating meaning, making contributions, and being knowledge creators. Attunement demands that Black people be involved in the design, implementation, and interpretation of research. It emphasizes deep listening and observation that are sensitive to the multimodal frequencies of Black living. Regarding analysis, it calls for dynamic, non-static approaches that expect multiplicity and look to embodiments, sounds, and utterances for rich insights. Perhaps most importantly, attunement resists modes of capture, allowing the process to be informed by lived and shifting realities.

Impressions

“Remember to breathe as you sit with us. The words coincide with rhythms. I cannot hear what the preacher, singer, or speakers say in every clip, but I know they speak. The body also speaks; it is not silent.” - Author

Considering attunement as an onto-epistemological orientation steeped in care, Black methodological intonations as methodological praxes works against notions of acquisition as the basis for evidence and toward impressions. In this process, impressions symbolize something impressed on or into a surface. One might regard impressions as indentation, stamping, imprinting, or leaving a mark. Conceptually, impressions bring to the fore Brand’s (2001) gaze-shifting appeal regarding the door of no return as the putative mark of slavery’s afterlife on her retinas. The door of no return, in this reading, suggests that the past that is not past, and, as such, is an optic that shapes and colors decisions in the research process.

Impressions accent what Sharpe (2016) discussed as Black being in the wake. More pointedly, she contends that among the many definitions of the term wake, they are “a track left on the water’s surface by a ship, the disturbance caused by a body swimming, or one that is moved, in water…a region of disturbed flow” (p. 21). As the ship passes through the water, a region is changed, and so too, as one encounters Black living, they are bearing witness to worlds, claims to respiration and desire, remaking the meaning of what it has meant to be human.

Impressions are the labor of feeling for the otherwise and unsaid, translating, and refashioning lives deemed unworthy of recognition (Hartman, 2008), of noticing more than what is provided by dominant modes of documentation. Impressions is a mode of questioning that confounds classificatory practices on the belief that objective methods, particularly as they pertain to the study of Black people, pass as data collection, and often fall under the auspices of scientific observation (Dubois, 1898; Womack, 2022).

Alternatively, impressions are alive to what Black people do, specifically, Black people as capable of knowledge contribution, and it is the work of detailing the many ways those contributions take effect. Thus, impressions enter from a reflexive space, asking not just what it is but what I am feeling as I experience Black livingness. In what ways am I willing to be moved? What is the affective imprint made and left after the encounter? What am I being pressed to consider or affirm? What are the ethical demands of one’s presence? How and in what ways am I being pressed to refuse, and to whose benefit? Impressions constitute a close reading, the intent to carefully touch and follow the outline of an imprint, its depth, contours, variations, and volume; it is to imagine the force and weight that one carries and the many ways one is implicated in the precarity of Black living.

Methodological Impressions

In research projects, methodological impressions call for continuous reflexivity. Researchers must take note of the emotional and psychological imprints that they leave and that are left on them as they encounter Black people and communities. These affective imprints are sources of meaning and insight that can otherwise be overlooked by methods that favor Western objectivity. Regarding methods, moving beyond detachment is an encouragement toward contextual, empathetic, and participatory practices. As such, researchers must turn to theoretical frameworks that bring these imprints into view and provide the tools to grapple with their complexity. Taken together, impressions curate nuance and model an ethics that honors the rich tapestries of Black living.

Slowness and Emanation

“Blackness gathers, pools, spills out, and enunciates as Black people actively sound out their lives through movements and motion. Time closes in, boundaries shrink, and I am made to wonder.” - Author

As a reflexive project, Black methodological intonations as methodological response is slow work or of slowness, “qualities that hinder rapid progress or action” (Campt, 2021, p. 110). “Wonder,” as I annotate above, denotes a concentration of intensities. Slowness assumes that there is more to narrative capture than what surfaces for public consumption in an anti-Black social sphere that so forcefully rejects the fullness of Black sociality. Slowness enables one to look with a more profound urgency and keener sense of awareness, carving out time for a praxis of rumination and presence that might allow one to thoughtfully work across temporalities and listen for the echoes of histories still vibrating. Echoes are reflections of sound ricocheting off a surface. To hear an echo is to keep listening; it is to linger, expecting more.

To linger, or tarry with Blackness is to enlarge the scope of possibilities for Black people to do/be/know. Black methodological intonations, as bone-deep engagement, demand that one slow down if they are to grapple with the entirety of one’s relationship to the subject matter–precarity, terror, refusals, hopes, rebellions, and dreams. If research is to be of use, it must be answerable, whereas answerability denotes the responsibilities of speakers and listeners to be ethical witnesses. In the quietude of slowness, one can listen (again and again) intently to the worlds of Black expression on multiple frequencies.

A labor of slowness creates space and time for feeling and sensing anew, opening one to new questions emanating from a Black sense of place (McKittrick, 2017). That is, as Black methodological intonations assume Black people are emitting already speaking subjects, the process of emanation is of mutuality. The general relationship between viewer and imagery/subject is mastery/ownership. In a master/owner relationship, the viewer is tasked with knowing the subject, as viewers are the ones who have comprehension capacities. As this occurs, the subject loses their ability to know. Conceptually, emanation asks, how might viewers lose themselves to the imagery/subject? How does one annotate the breadth of Black living and how that living is making claims on and about the world?

Methodological Slowness and Emanation

In research processes, slowness and emanation require patience. This posture calls for prolonged engagement with source material and communities on the assumption that there is no way toward depth without careful attention to the complexities of living. Regarding research responses, it is concerned with slow questions, which are inquiries that are responsive to quotidian, everyday, overlooked instantiations of Black living. In slowness, it works to understand the depth and complexity of a scene or performance and strives to think with them in ways that reflect long, meaningful engagement. Relatedly, analysis ought to be iterative, dialogic, and inconclusive in a manner that eschews resolution and, instead, is determined to remain engaged and responsive.

The Melodic Pronouncement of Black Life: A Provisional Conclusion

Black methodologies are more than cognitive projects, subject to the recursiveness of Western epistemological frames (Wynter, 1984, 2015); they have an affective quality, the potentiality for aliveness (Quashie, 2021), and the creative capacity to reformulate what it means to be human, by noticing differently the praxis of Black livingness (Wynter, 2006, 2015). Black methodology, thus, might be understood by the materiality– the texture, density, weight– of Black tonality or what I theorize as Black methodological intonations, the ungraspable enunciation and resonance of Black living.

Black methodology, on these terms, is a blooming before the blossom, the exercise of activity, escape, refusing to stay in one’s proper place; it is, too, performance, the cut, and compilation while in motion. There is, because of the constructed nature of Man as human, a distinguishable vibration and frequency in Black living that deserves embodied attendance. This sense of materiality is often flattened, unheard, unthought, and unfelt to fulfill the objective ethics of methodological constructivism. Black methodological intonations, as bone-deep engagement, characterized by attunement, impression, slowness and emanation, is one pathway forward for laboring with the ways Blackness can reorder society by shifting how we know and, ultimately, how we see.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Wilson Kwamogi Okello

Note

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