“How I Got Over”…Or, Are We Talking about Getting Under?

• In Event: Global Decolonial Politics and Black Liberation

Abstract

This work puts forward the concept of “under-rhythm” as analytic for framing some of the freedom-seeking actions that have animated Black liberation efforts. It is underwritten by the premise that antiblack contexts are both organized around and, indeed, moved by an operant, and often violent rhythm, a rigidly patterned way of existence consisting of, among other things: discrete styles of speech, comportment, thought, values, aesthetics, geographical practices, epistemologies, etc. In general terms, to have a rhythm assumes a specific choreography of elements in order to maintain movement in accordance with a given end. The point of it is to gather, to pull toward the pattern, insisting that individuals huddle around the beat, and move oneself consonant with its lines to the point that they become impervious to other sounds that may threaten the rhythm’s inductive, mesmeric capacity. Drawing, then, on the works of Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Katherine McKittrick, and Sylvia Wynter, this essay presents an analysis of sites of racial domination from the standpoint of rhythm, highlighting how, in those such contexts, freedom-seeking labor can be construed as a praxis of going under, which is to say going beneath the harsh rhythms bearing down upon those for whom it was never meant, and locating instead an under-rhythm. This essay is a preliminary mapping out of those subterraneous movements and routes.

Author

• Desiree Melonas, University of California, Riversity