Jessica L. Robinson, Porshe R. Garner, Ruth Nicole Brown, and Blair E. Smith of band We Levitate”Doing Digital Wrongly”: On music making praxis through Black Girlhood
Moderator: Michelle Habell-Pallan In the 21st century, hip-hop feminist researchers have been “working to bring the politics of African American girls front and center” (Brown, 2007) in scholarship and community activism (Pough et. al, 2007; Brown, 2009; Brown & Kwayke, 2012; Love, 2012). Black feminists scholars and activists have a long-standing history of utilizing language and literacy in scholarship and with community to develop individual and collective intellectual traditions that work towards disassembling systems of inequality, re-writing and re-imagining Black female experiences, political thought, art (Lorde, 1996; Jordan, 2000; Clifton) collective activism (Combahee River Collective, 1986; Collins, 2000) and self-recovery from daily attacks of racism and sexism (hooks, 1993) Black queer issues (Lorde, 1996; Harris, 1996; Smith, 2000) and transnational politics (Alexander, 2005). This roundtable, presented by members of the girl-band,
We Levitate (
https://soundcloud.com/solhot-next-level), aims to extend the legacy of Black feminist and/or womanist writers and artists whose ideas, provocations, and testimonies provided a solid foundation from which to theorize, practice, and make art and in the case of
We Levitate make music. This roundtable explores our concept of “doing digital wrongly” as a music making process rooted in Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), a collective space of organizing with Black girls to celebrate Black girlhood. Doing digital wrongly interrogates (1) the resources needed to make music in community with one another based on structural limitations and emotional necessity, (2) artistry as produced without a form and invested in embracing those sounds which are deemed as “alien” based on ideas of “good music”, as well as (3) a dedication to insist on and persist in making political sonics by intensely co-laboring and producing an collective emotive capacity unattached to binary gender schemas.
Guided by an investment in Black feminist and womanist theories and practices, we demonstrate the usefulness and nonuse of a sonic ritualized creative practice that allows us to critique ourselves and structural conditions as well as theorize concepts such as power, gender and form, in relation to doing collective work with Black girls, based on how sounds arrived to us and what we brought to it. To explore our work together, this roundtable will feature demonstrations of sonic creations by each member as well as a conversation with each member on artist-practice and political investment in sonic creativity as experienced through our practice of organizing through Black girlhood.
