Rory Fewer, “Cause Every Time We Touch: The Sickly-Sweet Affective Politics of
Asian American Eurodance”
In the early 2000s – and largely mediated through the Japanese video game Dance Dance Revolution
that had just arrived to the U.S. – Eurodance hits could be heard pumping from LED-outfitted rice rockets
and Asian American nightclubs in the Bay Area. Tracks like Darude’s Eurodance-inflected trance hit “Sandstorm,” with its famously cloying style, was derided by most American audiences for its excessively “emotive sound” (McCarthy 2019) but found a special place in Asian America alongside similarly cloying tracks like Smile.dk’s “Butterfly” and DJ Sammy’s “Heaven.” Eurodance and its subgenre bubblegum dance are also stylistically tied to tropes of “Asia,” with artists sporting anime-inspired clothing and music videos with Asian children cast as salary men (“Butterfly”) and geishas (“Heaven”) navigating futuristic worlds, or what scholars of techno-Orientalism have named the “technologized Asian subject” portrayed as “unfeeling, efficient, and inhuman” (Roh et al. 2015, 8, 11). Techno-Orientalism as an analytic, however, needs further augmentation in order to account for a seeming contradiction of Eurodance’s style: the unfeeling cyborg of a technologized "Asia” is also the repository of full-bodied, cloying emotion. My paper reads Eurodance's popularity in Asian America as a disidentificatory practice, whereby Eurodance’s cloying style responds to one’s “minor feelings,” or “non-cathartic states of emotion” that occur when “American optimism...contradicts your own racialized reality” (Hong 2020, 46). I argue that Eurodance’s saccharine style constitutes an affective-political intervention even as it negotiates representations of techno-Orientalism, aiding Asian America in feeling otherwise as, in Cascada’s words, we listen to “get this feeling” (“Everytime We Touch”).
Paul David Flood, “White and Black Blues: The 1990 Eurovision Song Contest and the Prospect of European (Racial) Integration”
The 1990 edition of the Eurovision Song Contest aired at a pivotal moment in European history, one that anticipated the establishment of the European Union through the 1993 signing of the Maastricht Treaty. While many songs in the 1990 edition gestured toward bright Europeanist futures, the show’s runner up sang of a different kind of unity: racial integration. The Guadeloupean singer Joëlle Ursull was France’s first Black representative in the Contest, with her song “White and Black Blues.” The song, written by the infamous French songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, addresses her desire to overcome racial prejudice and celebrate her Blackness in a white society, and features influences from the French Antillean genre zouk that became popular in France in the 1980s and 90s (Guilbault, 1993), as well as in Guadeloupe during its concurrent independence movement (Camal, 2019). Drawing from Muñoz’s theory of disidentification, I argue that Ursull and her song “White and Black Blues” imagined racial unity as a key component to the emerging prospect of European integration while resisting assimilationist techniques and politics that would seek to erase her Blackness, as well as demonstrating her allegiances to both her homeland Guadeloupe and to France.
According to interviews from the time, Ursull was motivated by Black internationalist rhetoric and interested in representing globally racialized (post)colonial communities through her participation in Eurovision. But her song’s musical aesthetic, ostensibly drawn from zouk music, is primarily characterized by the essentialist markings of Blacksound (Morrison, 2024) that evoke vague sonic depictions of a fixed ethnic somewhere else. By positioning Eurovision as an active force within Afro-diasporic cultural flows during a time of geopolitical instability in Europe, and interrogating how Eurovision has become a fraught benchmark for what Europeanness can look and sound like, we can more clearly understand the limits of belonging in Europe.
AJ Kluth, “Sartorial Signifyin(g) on Maroon Culture with Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah”
In the pulsing opening of the eponymous song of his 2023 Ropeadope release, Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning, Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah calls out: “Mau Mau, Maori, Egba, Igbo, Olmec, Aztec, Sioux…” invoking multiple nations connected by histories of self-determination in the face of imperial domination and diaspora. The fifteen-minute performance featuring Chief Adjuah’s voice and kora-like “Adjuah Bow” over Afro Indigenous drumming and droning bass is a recent manifestation of his ongoing genre-blind project, “Stretch Music.” Complementing his musical choices, the Chieftan of the Xodokan Nation of Maroons—a New Orleans Black Indians group—who is also recognized as Grand Griot of New Orleans, deploys a thoughtful self-presentation signifyin(g) on complex personhood. Perhaps best known as a “jazz” trumpeter (despite his opposition to the term) Chief Adjuah’s recent records and personal investments continue the creolizing project of New Orleans musics, drawing broadly from Afrodiasporic, American indigenous, and popular styles in a project of recovery and critical fabulation of ancestral memory. Beyond Stretch Music’s musical inclusivity, Chief Adjuah’s custom trumpet-related instruments and the newly created “Adjuah Bow” demonstrate an awareness of dramatic visual presentation in addition to the sonic. Moreover, his provocative jewelry and clothing that index West African and contemporary urban styles as much as New Orleans Black Indian ceremonial regalia further evince the superabundant hyper-signification of his plural identities. Developing ideas regarding diasporic identity from Stuart Hall and Thomas Turino, this paper investigates how, in the greater ecosystem of jazz musicians that either lean into the neo-classical jazz suit-and-tie or streetwear looks, Chief Adjuah’s sartorial signifyin(g) demonstrate his understanding of how self-presentation ties to his overall projects of self-determination, celebration of Maroon culture, and radical globalized connection.
Elena Razlogova, “The Politics of Race and Style on Freeform Radio in the Black Power Era”
When Black Panther Elaine Brown released her first album of political songs Seize the Time in 1969, its cover, by Panthers’ Minister of Culture Emory Douglas, featured a woman’s arm with nails painted purple gripping an AK-47. After stores refused to stock the record, Brown’s label Vault added a second “front” cover—a lyrical headshot of Brown—so clerks could display the LP with the militant image facing the wall. Brown’s vocal delivery aligned with classical and folk traditions—“someone accused me of not having a black sound,” she later remembered. The record was both too militant and not funky enough for the times. Neither Top 40 nor Black-oriented stations played it. But it got airplay on “underground” freeform stations, where underpaid and volunteer DJs (mostly white men) had autonomy to mix in music of any genre. Underground FM spurred enough sales to convince the Black Panther Party to continue its record producing ventures. Eventually, its “house band” the Lumpen broke into the Billboard charts.
This paper uses the Seize the Time story to examine the politics of race and style on majority-white underground freeform radio in the Black Power era. Drawing on the work of Nina Sun Eidsheim and others who link and critique racialized aural and visual expectations and fashions, the paper analyzes West Coast underground stations’ alliances with the Black Panther Party; the art of Black freeform DJs such as Roland Young, who was fired from for-profit KSAN but welcomed at nonprofit KPFA; and live free and benefit concerts organized by noncommercial freeform stations WBAI and WFMU in New York that included Black folk, blues, “psychedelic soul,” and free jazz musicians. Noncommercial freeform stations more consistently supported Black artists, bands, and DJs who did not fit into genres and forma
