Visual Identity Politics and Remix Society
Afrofuturism

Blackbook

Pedro Bell on the importance of a visual concept as a band.

“If you have have group that has a concept that’s visual, people will buy the product,” [Pedro Bell] said. Groups like Mandrill and The Undisputed Truth were impressive, but didn’t have the longevity of Funkadelic because they lacked a coherent (literal) vision of themselves, and the world they were creating. “If you want to survive, you better have some visual concept, and if you really want to survive you better have more than that.”

[+]

Timeline of Huey Remixed

Huey Remixed 2018: Afrofuturistic Huey

I

Identity politics

Identity (construct of…)

“Now part of what”…“I see as the problem is the idea of anybody’s having to fight the fragmentation and multicultural diversity of the world, not to mention outright oppression, by constructing something so rigid as an identity, an identity in which there has to be a fixed and immobile core, a core that is structured to hold inviolate such a complete biological fantasy as race— whether white or black”  —Samuel R. Delany, interviewed by Mark Dery, 1994

[+]

Blackbook

Smithsonian acquires P-Funk Mothership – The Washington Post

The 1990s replica of the stage prop, a 1,200-pound aluminum spacecraft, will go to the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
— The Washington Post

[+]

A

Encyclopedia of —isms

Reading stuff

Afrofuturism (Black to the future)

Afrofuturism is a “Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture—and, more generally, African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prothetically enhanced future”.
— Mark Dery, 1994, p 180

[+]

1001 streams of blackness

Space is the Place — Sun Ra

The Music & Metaphysics Of Sun Ra - Space Is The Place (Part 1 of 6)

[+]

Timeline of Huey Remixed

Huey Remixed 1979: Uncle Jam

Uncle Jam Wants You, cover photo (by Diem M. Jones) and artwork (by Pedro Bell), 1979

[+]