Haptic Listening: Analyzing Black Women’s Witnessing, Fugitivity, and Refusal in the 1990s and Early 2000s

Abstract

The 90s through early 2000s was an era marked by vociferous noises. This noise included Black popular cultural expansions in art, sonic waves of resistance via protests against police brutality, the crackling of arson fire expressing the Black community’s rage in response to anti-Blackness, and calls for reproductive justice for poor Black women among other sounds. While this era maintained the loudness of both prosperity and protest, it also nurtured quiet resistances against the U.S. carceral State. Specifically, Black women’s and girls’ vociferous and less discernible practices of refusal situated within film, literature, and music videos also propelled narrative resistance against the atmospheric violence of the State.

What were the quiet and less discernible ways that Black women and girls challenged the U.S. carceral State during the 90s and in the early 2000s? What are the lenses or methodologies that make this resistance legible? What Black feminist scholars have already practiced the method of listening to that which is illegible or does not exist? What do Black girls and women gain when we can see their quiet refusal in this way? What is at stake if we cannot see this refusal? These are some of the questions that underscore this dissertation.

In my dissertation I argue Black women and girls vociferously and quietly challenge the 1990s and early 2000s U.S. carceral State in film, fiction, and music videos. I maintain that the excavation of their less discernible (or “quiet”) practices of refusal within these cultural texts require a focused attention to detail and a counterintuitive practice of listening to that which is illegible, indiscernible, or hidden. In this way, Black popular culture is a site for the emergence and existence of resistance that brings to the forefront the efforts of Black women and girls who are often marginalized in resistance discourses. Drawing from Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” and Tina Campt’s Listening to Images at the intersection of Haptic Media Studies, I use a framework—haptic listening—for discerning and excavating their practices of refusal that are illegible to cursory analyses.

Following my introduction chapter, in chapter two I center my analysis on Leslie Harris’ film Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. (1992) and F. Gary Gray’s film Set It Off (1996). Through haptic listening, I trace a cartography of witnessing informed by Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, Dwight McBride’s Impossible Witnesses, and Angela Ards’ Words of Witness. I argue that specific instances of witnessing that reify Black women’s and girls’ subjection, fracture Black kinship, and disrupt Black futures are the catalysts for their resistance to the carceral State.

In chapter three I examine protagonist Winter’s fugitive journey in Sister Souljah’s 1999 novel The Coldest Winter Ever. Drawing from Fred Moten’s Stolen Life, Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds, and Jennifer Nash’s “Black Maternal Aesthetics,” I argue that her fugitive journey begins and ends with her own vociferous haptic encounters—a process I call Circular Fugitivity. In the end, I trace a panoptic cartography that honors the emergence of her own political potential as she attempts to escape the grasp of the carceral State.

And finally in chapter four I analyze the music video performances of Charli Baltimore in “Down Ass Chick” (2002) and Meagan Good in “21 Questions” (2003). Drawing from the work of Tina Campt in Listening to Images at the convergence of haptic media studies, I argue that their transformative practices of refusal are legible within and imbued by their identificatory photographs in each music video. These aesthetic practices of refusal, made obvious through haptic listening, appear throughout the music videos signaling the movement toward freedom. In the end, my project honors the less discernible practices of resistance by Black women and girls during the 1990s and early 2000s.