2024 Theses Doctoral

Chaotic Blackness, Black Gesture, and Black Posthumanism in Afrofuturist Music

Bernard, Lauren P.

This dissertation examines the (chaotic) experiences and perspectives of Afro-diasporic peoples (particularly those living in the United States) through an Afrofuturist lens. In so doing, I neologize and situate the concept of “Chaotic Blackness”. To that end, I interrogate the ways in which the legacy of colonization, enslavement, and racial capitalism have collectively contributed to the experience of a racialized chaos for Afro-diasporic peoples and communities.

Consisting of a network of patterns, signals, and gestures that are meant to signify, represent, or articulate the experience racial chaos, I offer Chaotic Blackness as a framework for understanding and examining the influence of racialized chaos on Black identity and personhood within the context of Afrofuturist music. In this way, my research calls attention to the ways in which Afrofuturist practitioners articulate and negotiate experiences of a racialized chaos within their music in the endeavor to both communicate or express Black subjectivities or perspectives and to establish critical sites of meaning-making for the community.

Further, this dissertation examines the epistemological linkages between Afrofuturist and Black posthumanist strands of thought. I suggest that both frameworks offer new ways of conceptualizing or understanding the Black identity and the (Black) human within the contexts of technomodernity, racial capitalism, and contemporary issues such as climate change. Overall, this dissertation offers an analysis of the ways in which Black individuals navigate and express their experiences of chaos, suggesting that Afrofuturism and Black posthumanism are both key frames though which to understand and (re)define Black identity in the contemporary world.